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Another FaCTS Mellon Project

Book Club 1020

by Ms. Katheryn Krotzer Laborde

Many students feel that they have to read, but how many truly enjoy it? The purpose of Book Club 1020 is to transform two sections of the traditional freshman comp-and-lit class into something more in line with a book club, the sort one finds any given night of the week in coffee houses and other comfortable gathering spots.

The book club setting goes beyond the notion of making reading more fun; as Margaret Atwood noted in 1995, "Book Groups are to late twentieth-century America what salons were to eighteenth-century Paris, and what Improvement Societies were to the Victorians." The book club approach encourages textual engagement and stirs intellectual curiosity.

We tend to associate positive feelings with pleasurable activities. The objective of this course is to turn "class discussion" into a true discussion, the kind that encourages active reading and fosters a love for the written word.

Start date: Monday, May 10, 2010
Finish date: Tuesday, May 10, 2011