The Texas A&M Galveston campus Common Reader Program launched in the Fall 2018 with the inaugural selection for 2018-2019 of J.D. Vance’s memoir Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis.
The Common Reader Program utilizes a single text across disciplines to reinforce the core curriculum’s goals and to provide students with multiple, scaffolded opportunities to hone transferable skills or so-called “soft skills.” These skills include, but are not limited to creatively solving problems, conveying information clearly and concisely in multiple modes, collecting, organizing and evaluating ideas, and critically analyzing and accessing concepts.
Consequently, enrollment in Common Reader courses afford students a transformational learning experience and an opportunity to reflect on enduring questions we face as a society from differing disciplinary perspectives and to synthesize the text’s multiple meanings from that broad range of positions.
The program also seeks to strengthen the campus community by providing transformational learning opportunities that enable intellectual engagement and critical thinking; facilitates deep learning through metacognitive reflection on the common reader experience; and provides both formal and informal opportunities for discussion of the selected text.
The Common Reader also offers Aggie Experience activities that offer a range of curricular and co-curricular encounters related to the text’s content to stimulate transformational learning. Finally, the Common Reader program emphasizes campus civility in its discussions by remaining mindful of TAMUG’s core values of Loyalty, Excellence, Respect, Leadership, Integrity and Selfless Service and employing those values in discussion of the text.
The Department of Liberal Studies Head and Professor of Political Science, Dr. JoAnn DiGeorgio-Lutz initiated the idea for the program in April 2017. In December 2017, Dr. DiGeorgio-Lutz, and Dr. Carol Bunch Davis, LIST Associate Professor of English and Assistant Department Head, were awarded a Diversity Matters Seed Grant for their research proposal in support of The Common Reader Program from the TAMU Office of Diversity. The grant helps support a Common Reader Student Ambassadors Program which enlists students in Common Reader courses to help promote the program to their peers and the campus community.
