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New term inspiration for your reading list

By Hazel M Ingrey, on 13 January 2025

New year greetings from the ReadingLists@UCL team! Three things to get us back in the swing of term.

  1. Applications are open again for Student Curriculum Partners nominations.  This is a wonderful scheme pairing students with modules, to review them through the lens of inclusivity.  The academic receives recommendations on their module, and an insight into how students view their curriculum.  A key aim of the project is to reduce awarding gaps for marginalised student groups at UCL.  As an academic all you need to do is nominate your module to initiate the process. Did you know you can use your online reading list as a starting point to examining the diversity in a module?  Take this further with our ReadingLists@UCL’s Guide, Liberating the Curriculum page.
  2. During Disability History month 2024 the UCL Community contributed book suggestions on the national theme ‘Disability, livelihood and employment’. Read more in the UCL article ‘Disability History Month 2024’.  The call out is from the Library Liberating the Collections group, and if you wish to find the recommended books in UCL Libraries then online reading lists are created for all the History and Celebration months.
  3. Finally, our ReadingLists@UCL Guide for academic and support staff has had a significant update, with additional resources.  Do take a look for support in linking your list to Moodle, getting started and more.  You can book a 1:1 with the team any time, to learn how to add and manage readings, ask questions or troubleshoot issues.  We look forward to hearing from you!

Liberating your Reading List

By Hazel M Ingrey, on 13 January 2023

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.

 

A varied reading diet: Liberating your list

By Hazel M Ingrey, on 8 September 2022

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.

Licensed under CC BY 2.0 https://www.flickr.com/photos/44176993@N03/8567619056 ; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/?ref=openverse

“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?