Summer, for me, means more than swapping teaching duties for camping, hiking and swimming; instead, I associate the sunny season with reading. For other instructors — as well as for autodidacts — the obvious question is, what to read? But perhaps a more important question is, how should we read it?

Credit: K. SIMPSON

Two recent articles, one in The Chronicle of Higher Education (http://tinyurl.com/pqgb2w) and another in Times Higher Education (http://tinyurl.com/o2cnw7), suggest that the way we read — as well as the ways in which we interact with other readers — could influence higher education as well as our careers and those of our students.

In the Chronicle article, author Rachel Toor talks about the typical graduate seminar student's knee-jerk tendency, when reviewing books, to try to slaughter sacred cows. She warns other instructors not to simply ask their students what they think of a particular author or article. “That generally leads to posturing, self-aggrandizing put-downs, and useless bluster,” Toor writes. Instead, she asks students what they have learned from a particular writer, how the work fits in with or goes against recent trends and whether they can adapt a writing style, structure or strategy for their own work.

Instructors using this approach could buck the notion that personal pedagogical style in Britain is being threatened by bigger class sizes and larger teaching loads, which Rebecca Attwood writes about in the Times Higher Education piece. Creating a summer reading list with and for graduate and undergraduate students is one step towards closing that pedagogical gap. Asking students to answer questions about style, structure and argument — rather than about whether they agree or disagree with the writer — improves education.

Applying this approach to our own reading can also improve our research and writing. Rather than simply agreeing or disagreeing with a journal article's argument, we can look for how the writer builds his or her case. Reading outside our discipline can also help our writing. Can we understand the thesis, even if we aren't familiar with the subject? Why, or why not?

Sometimes when we are too familiar with our areas of expertise, we assume all readers are on the same level. Writing a good journal article or grant application means spelling things out that the experts might know but that the larger audience we ultimately want to reach may not.

Finally, reading outside our discipline or speciality allows us to find connections that we might not make if we stay with more comfortable material. Adding a bit of literature or news to the mix can make summer reading less like work and more like a day at the beach.