'I Came in Thinking There Was One Right Practice': Exploring How to Help Graduate Students Learn to Read Academic Research

In the fall of 2017, an engineering educator with many years of experience offered a course to incoming doctoral students. The course was focused on helping the students explore approaches to reading published scholarship and develop their own scholarly reading practice. The course was taken by a student who documented her experiences in a reflection journal. Against this backdrop, this paper uses intertwined autobiographical perspective of the student and the educator in relation to the course to shed light broadly on learning and instructional design in the context of scholarly reading. This paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the learning trajectories associated with emerging scholars becoming capable, critical, and generous readers of published disciplinary scholarship. For example, the student is shown to have experienced a realization of accumulated knowledge and skill, confronted questions of the self, identity, and belonging, and discovered personal reading strategies as she navigated learning how to read academic research. In addition, this paper provides insight into the considerations involved in designing learning experiences that help emerging scholars become capable, critical, and generous readers of published disciplinary scholarship. Specifically, we note the potential importance of considering the synergy between individual and group contributions, the balance between seriousness and lightheartedness, and the need for both opportunities to learn and opportunities to be aware of learning.