Welcome to the Common Reading Program Reading and Teaching Guide
Welcome to the Reading and Teaching Guide for the Common Reading! Whether you’re a professor wondering what activities you could use to incorporate the text in your class or a student looking for more information on a piece, we have the information you’re looking for. Find sample discussion questions, activities, related resources, and bios for all our contributors. You can also find a full, online version of the text.
2022-23 Theme: Renewal
Read the Anthology
What does it mean to begin again? To embark on a path already treaded, to look back on experiences with a fresh pair of eyes, to reexamine life in an exciting new way. Renewal is a process that many of us will undergo in our lifetimes, and whether it be by choice or not, we must learn how to begin again.
Every time we start a new school year, a new job, or move to a new location, we begin again. We renew ourselves and the people and things around us in new, unfamiliar beginnings. We reinvent, restore, and revitalize. Sometimes we renew our identities so that we are more comfortable in our own skin, and other times we change to fully mature as human beings. Each year we renew, but what matters is how we change and grow over the course of each renewal.
This year’s theme of Renewal was nominated by Stephanie Thompson, Class of 2021.
Anthologies will be mailed to students in late June. Digital copies of readings are available on Canvas. Click here to access the Common Reading Canvas site.
Common Reading Lecture: Allison Carr
Dr. Allison Carr
Thursday, September 22, 2022, at 7:30 p.m. in Weber Chapel
Allison Carr, associate professor of rhetoric and director of writing across the curriculum at Coe College (IA), teaches courses in rhetoric, theory, composition, and creative nonfiction writing. As a researcher, she is interested in the emotional/affective dimensions of teaching & learning writing – especially the role failure plays in this work. Her writing on this subject has appeared most recently in the introduction to her collection with Laura Micciche, Failure Pedagogies: Learning and Unlearning What It Means to Fail (2020). She enjoys outdoor activities of all kinds but especially catching her toddler at the bottom of the slide.
This event is required for first-year students.
Renewal Lecture Recording
Anthology Cover Art
