Some inspiration for a few ways to elevate your resource list in order to engage your students.

1. Consider adding some of the many film, documentary and TV programmes available through UCL subscriptions.  Add links to rich resources from the BFI Player, Kanopy, BoB and more; some platforms allow you to create your own playlists or clips of AV material for targeted teaching.  Ask your Subject Liaison Librarian for further platform recommendations, specific to your subject.
2. In the first few weeks of teaching, set a task which requires interaction with your reading list.  Visiting the list early can encourage students to remember where it is and revisit it more often.  Integrating your list into Moodle can also help remind students where resources are kept.
3. Use your list to develop your students’ information literacy, search skills and research skills, by inviting them to analyse your reading list for diversity. You will benefit from your students’ different perspectives and backgrounds and may be able to incorporate their recommendations into your curriculum. See the ‘Activity: Student analysis of reading lists’ (right hand column) on the Liberating the Curriculum page of the ReadingLists@UCL Guide for more notes on this suggestion.

We are happy to announce that our ReadingLists@UCL Guide now has an additional page on ‘Liberating the Curriculum’.

It is aimed at staff looking to diversify or review their curriculum.  There are many approaches to diversifying or decolonising your course, but as representative of a module’s recommended resources, a reading list can be a natural starting point.

Perhaps you need some inspiration to find a way into diversifying your readings? Or your project may be easier for knowing how to extract data from your online reading list for analysis. This page has a concise selection of resources, activities and case studies to get started or engage your students in the process.

This resource is a work in progress and we would be delighted to have your feedback on it, or hear about any resources or new projects you think would be useful additions.  You can email feedback to the ReadingLists@UCL team.

In nutrition, one school of thought prefers to add variety into one’s diet, for example eating ‘a rainbow’ of fruit and vegetables, rather than demonising ‘bad’ foods by recommending a decrease in fat / sugar consumption.  This approach balances out the less nutritious ingredients without the need to exclude any food groups.

“Muffin Tin Monday – rainbow of food for St. Patrick’s Day” by anotherlunch.com

As in good nutrition, so with a varied reading diet.  If you are reading a little more literature by African authors, or texts taking a social model of disability approach, you may have less room for Eurocentric, male-dominated or white-biased views.

Recent newspaper articles show that what one person thinks a varied diet, another considers censorship or blacklisting of literature.  As a profession librarians are ethically opposed to censorship and UK HEIs have not banned any books.  There has however been a student-led movement in Liberating, Decolonising, broadening or diversifying curriculum and institutions, that teaching departments and libraries have engaged with to varying degrees.  Reading lists are a small part of this, but can be a key, tangible window on course content, so is often an accessible first step in reviewing a module.

In the news articles, trigger or content warnings are conflated with discouraging reading, or even censorship of texts.  If you use content warnings on your reading lists you may not agree that this is a logical conclusion.  Content warnings can look like metadata: that is, data about data.  Keywords to help the reader navigate a list of resources, rather than limiting access to them. Indeed adding notes is something we encourage as best practice when setting readings, to set context and expectation.

We will shortly be publishing some suggestions on how you might use your reading list to evaluate module content through through a liberated lens [edit: now available in the blog post Liberating your Reading List‘]. Involving student collaborators in this work can develop their information literacy skills as they assist in evaluating readings, and also add variety to your module readings, benefitting from the multiple backgrounds and experiences of the student body.

The canon is still there, in both reading lists and library: nobody has lost any literature.  But an outcome of learning how to evaluate their reading diet is that students develop better critical appraisal skills in their research and reading.  An environment of polarised opinion only hinders this progress.  Now isn’t that headline news?

One argument against providing core readings, or a reading list, has been the anxiety of ‘spoon feeding’. That is, coddling your students by providing everything they need, so they are too comfortable to step forward into their own research or wider reading.

Spoonfeeding

Naturally, you can instead use the reading list to your advantage and find the optimal balance of ensuring access for essential set texts or resources, whilst also encouraging students into independent reading.

This is sometimes referred to as ‘scaffolding’, where you structure readings and commentary to help familiarise students with a subject (or databases, or libraries).  You can then guide them to related tasks or research questions where they need to use these resources.  You could even teach some core information literacy skills along the way.

The imaginative go further. Some years ago an academic told us how she used her reading list in the first face-to-face class of the year, setting tasks that required using the list. Not only were the lists used as a pedagogic tool, but it also created familiarity and engagement so students continued to use their reading lists, and with confidence, throughout the year.

Ultimately your reading list is a flexible tool, to be utilised in any way you like, to help your students understand how to read and research online.