Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 50, Issue 2, 2022

Antiracist education practices have gained increasing attention. Oftentimes, however, descriptions of this work fail to explicate the role of reading skills in students’ critical engagement with diverse texts. I explore the potential of metacognitive reading strategy instruction as a form of foundational literacy skills development for engaging in antiracist reading. Drawing from my experiences as a female of color and a coordinator and instructor of integrated reading and writing, I expand upon the concept of raciolinguistically just reading instruction, describing how students can document their application of multiple foundational reading strategies through the meta-strategy of annotation and other metacognitive practices. In particular, I focus on how students’ annotations can reflect their work in making text-based connections. Such annotation practice enacts a culturally sustaining pedagogy that amplifies student voices and their role as knowledge producers. I conclude by considering the larger role of decentering the instructor to foster students’ antiracist reading.

This article synthesizes the literature on writing transfer and findings from several key studies of reading in two-year colleges to outline a set of pedagogical practices that instructors can use to promote reading transfer through explicit attention to “strategic reading.”

Although a good deal of writing has been done about reading, many articles, both in professional journals and in public media, bemoan a lack of reading skills. There is often a discourse around what students can’t do. In this article, we argue that adapting an assetbased, experiential framework around reading could be one of the most foundational and crucial steps in transforming our structures to respect, and therefore retain and engage, returning students.

This article explores the Reading Apprenticeship framework as a support for instructors to orchestrate dynamic, contextualized literacy instruction that supports both student engagement and deeper learning about the discipline of writing studies.