Image by StartupStockPhotos from Pixabay
Many educators would agree on the value of close, careful reading, engaged discussions, and writing that thoughtfully incorporates primary sources, but it can be challenging to support students in achieving these goals. This is especially true with dense primary texts, and the short three-week summer term. As co-chair of the Power, Identity, and Resistance sequence in the undergraduate Core, which features dense and difficult texts by authors like Hobbes, Locke, Marx, and Durkheim, Jennifer Spruill emphasizes the need to support readers who are new to these kinds of texts: “We’re doing these big original texts, and with texts like that, it’s important for students to feel like they have some purchase, some kind of grasp on these really difficult huge texts.”
In support of this goal, Spruill uses “commonplace books” as a prominent and recurring feature of her classes. We sat down to discuss this and other strategies, which we’ll share in a series of blog posts highlighting both the pedagogical approaches and the technology that can support them.
Commonplace Books – What and Why
Image shared with permission of Jennifer Spruill
Keeping a commonplace book, or “commonplacing,” is a practice of selecting, copying, and organizing interesting passages into a notebook for later use. It’s a reading practice that dates back to Erasmus, and was practiced by the likes of Francis Bacon, John Milton, and John Locke. Students can do this by hand or using a variety of online tools, annotating the passages they’ve selected with definitions, commentary, and questions they have. This, along with the intellectual work of organizing passages in an index, supports more thorough processing and synthesis of their reading.
It’s particularly useful when students have been trained to engage with texts primarily by offering a critical response, which can sometimes be a focus of high school coursework. Crediting her colleague from the Divinity School, Erin G. Walsh, for sharing this practice at a recent Forum on Teaching in the Core, Professor Spruill uses this practice to help students acclimate themselves to new habits of close reading that forestall critical response in order to more thoroughly consider the text:
“Commonplacing focuses their attention on the text and on the kind of reading that we now expect of them. And it’s easy because it’s such a close focus: ‘choose an interesting passage.’ It’s really about creating a habit of deeply interacting with the text, which is so important.”
Applications of Commonplacing
Much like the annotation activities that have been highlighted in this blog, commonplacing can help students make the knowledge in reading their own. As Sarah E. Parker explains in Using Commonplace Books to Enrich Medieval and Renaissance Courses, students and instructors can use this centuries-old scholarly practice in a variety of ways:
- Students can use their commonplace entries to brainstorm ideas and gather documentation for research papers.
- Instructors can encourage discussion of themes and analysis based on students’ observations.
- If desired, instructors can even develop test questions based on text selections students have shared.
Spruill uses the reflective work of organizing students’ selections in an index to help them assess larger themes across texts at the end of the term. Spruill explains, “It’s a form of review, an exercise in abstraction. They notice the big themes for the class, like how Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Burke are talking about liberty. Students focus on themes that they’re interested in, so this might also point them to something they’ve noticed throughout the whole quarter.”
How to Incorporate Commonplacing
While there are multiple ways to use commonplacing, Spruill begins by providing John Bird’s article on good scholarly reading habits “How to Read Critically” and then asks students to choose just one passage from the day’s reading that they found
Image shared with permission of Jennifer Spruill
interesting, analyze it, and bring it to discuss in class. If possible, the students copy their selected passage by hand, making annotations with comments and questions, and then bring it to class to share. It starts out as a small, manageable exercise that infuses an analytical and collaborative element into her classes and contributes to long-term habits in scholarly reading:
“It asks students to pose one or two questions about the passage and to then offer a few just general observations about it, and it’s a practice of what they should be doing all the time. Hopefully as they’re reading, they’re looking for something, asking ‘Oh, what am I going to include in my commonplace?’ And I think that it’s preferable to when I used to have students just do a discussion post.”
As Spruill also notes, discussion posts have become somewhat more vulnerable to completion using generative AI tools. While even reading response activities like commonplacing have their vulnerabilities, activities like this offer lower stakes and high learning impact in a way that aligns with AI-resistant assignment design. Part of that design philosophy looks to redesign activities that may be perceived as “busy work” and make sure that students see the connection between an activity and the larger goals of the class. For example, in Spruill’s application, students’ commonplace entries serve as a centerpiece in synchronous sessions.
“I open class with a five-minute discussion of their commonplace entries. Half the class does an entry for Tuesday, and half the class does an entry for Thursday. I pair someone who’s done one for the day with someone who hasn’t done one, and they talk about that to open class. Everyone feels really confident in their passage because they’ve totally taken it apart. It primes them, and they’re totally ready to talk for class, and it makes their reading more careful overall.”
In a combination of the analog and digital designed to support learning, Spruill has students share an image of their handwritten notes in Canvas for their classmates to review, which is useful for building connection in online summer courses that are concentrated and isolated. Whether you choose to encourage analog practices, digital tools, or some combination of the two, the key is to have students slow down and process a piece of the reading with extra thoroughness. Below you’ll find an overview of several tools you can use to help students collect commonplace entries, organize them, and share them with classmates.
Tools that Can Support Commonplacing
While commonplacing may be centuries old, UChicago faculty and instructors have access to a variety of modern-day tools through ATS that can make this process both simple and collaborative. A few tools you may find useful include:
- Canvas Pages
- Professor Spruill uses student-created Canvas Pages so that students can take a picture of a handwritten commonplace entry from their notebook and upload it to the Page, bringing together the analog reflection process with digital shareability. In this way, students can review others’ thoughts as they study. Check out the documentation on Canvas Groups and Canvas Pages to learn how you can set these up.
- Ed Discussion
- As an alternative means of sharing photos or typed excerpts and observations, students can use the chat-based platform Ed Discussion, which is fully integrated into Canvas and easy for instructors to enable. It offers searchability, tagging, and other features that can help organize and navigate posts if desired.
- Google Keep
- A more private option, Google Keep uses a sticky note format to allow users to type and organize notes using different tags, similar to the work of compiling an index, but done both as they’re writing and later when they look back at entries looking for patterns. (In fact, this post and many others on the ATS blog were written with the aid of a well-populated Google Keep full of scholarly sources!)
- Virtual Whiteboards
- A combination of the sticky note format of Google Keep and the collaborative nature of Ed Discussion, virtual whiteboards are a great option for synchronous sharing and browsing of commonplace entries among classmates. The Zoom Whiteboards tool provides a large canvas on which to share images and text, and even draw connections between ideas using arrows and lines. It also has commenting features like the ones many users are familiar with from Google Docs. These boards can also be accessed after a meeting is closed, or even used asynchronously, as a standalone tool independent of a Zoom meeting.
In Closing
Please keep watching our blog for more insights from our interview with Jennifer Spruill, including approaches like concept mapping and object-based learning. If you’re a UChicago instructor interested in sharing your innovative pedagogical approaches using technology, we’re interested in hearing about it! Email michaelhernandez@uchicago.edu.
For individual assistance, you can visit our office hours, book a consultation with an instructional designer, or email academictech@uchicago.edu. For a list of our upcoming ATS workshops, please visit our workshop schedule for events that fit your schedule.
