Background
In recent years, teachers and reading researchers have sounded the alarm about declining reading skills among students in higher education, and especially the decline in undisturbed long reading.
Since 2018, lecturers at the Department of of Social Anthropology have sought to improve students' concentration and reading by developing a method of "deep reading", a type of reading that is undisturbed, concentrated and meditative. Deep reading is the counterpart to the everyday scanning of text that most people do at the grocery store or on the phone, known as hyper reading. Hyper reading is fast and piecemeal. Deep reading is slow and patient.
Because deep reading requires a type of cognitive patience that is difficult to muster alone, lecturers at the Department of Social Anthropology have organized collective sessions where students read together. Students and teachers commit to reading longer syllabus texts together in silence for uninterrupted periods of between four and six hours without digital aids.
In 2022, Department of Social Anthropology was awarded funds to study the effects of the deep reading seminar. The project is financed by Eliert's learning network EILIN.