Faculty in the humanities are grappling with a changing educational landscape asdebates arise regarding student preparation and nationwide headlines question students’ abilities to read longer texts.
Some faculty across the humanities report cutting down the amount of reading they assign to students, though others have found that students are keeping up with a standard workload the same way they would have years ago.
Carlos Noreña, a UC Berkeley history professor specializing in ancient history,said the amount of reading he could comfortably assign while expecting students to read a “substantial” portion of it has dropped over the past 20 years at UC Berkeley.
“We are now reaching a crisis point where if the number (of pages) goes down further, it’s unclear to me whether my discipline of history can really be taught,” Noreña said.
Noreña said while lectures are an important component of class, he assigns primary sources and critical writing to his students because the goal is to push them to read the material and develop their own views. When he first came to UC Berkeley in 2005, he would assign 100 pages per week for an upper division course, with the expectation that students would read 75 to 80 pages.
For the course he plans to teach in the fall, Noreña said he plans to assign about 35 pages per week.
English professor Grace Lavery, said while she noticed some students struggling with denser Charles Dickens novels, these issues weren’t new or necessarily problematic.