Pumpkin Spice, GSOLE, and Fall Renewal.

Over the past fifteen years, research has shown that social annotation (SA) supports student learning (e.g. Johnson et al. 2010; Zhu et al. 2020). Specifically, it is the collaborative, student-centered quality of SA that creates deeper engagement with reading, where students co-create knowledge through threaded conversations in the margins. Most recently, researchers have connected the active and representational qualities of SA to social justice, where students express power through dialoguing with the text to share knowledge that may historically have been marginalized (Clinton-Lisell 2023).

But even though SA may present opportunities for deeper learning as well as social and representational justice, it can also become a space that “exacerbates inequalities” (Clinton-Lisell 2023). As Maha Bali has observed, annotation isn’t neutral: “It is always fraught with presence, authority, relevance—and time” (Bali et al. 2022). These concerns connected to something that some of the presenters had noted in their previous research, namely that the conversations in the margins differed across campuses and institution types. We published on the successful learning outcomes we had observed, but simultaneously expressed the hope that we might one day invite our students to read together cross-institutionally to create a more diverse academic community for peer-to-peer learning (Traester et al. 2021, 347).

This webinar presents the results of that project, which we brought to life in Fall 2024. The pilot included 226 students at three types of institutions in the U.S.: a community college, a state college, as well as one private university in the U.A.E. We will discuss how bringing readers from across diverse educational, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds together can expand students’ understanding of both texts and of themselves as readers. For example, we have all heard a student say: “I’m not a good reader,” or avoid deep reading engagement by “deferent” reading, which reproduces the author’s ideas in paraphrase. But we found that most of our student annotations shed the deferent stance by supplying their own knowledge, perspectives, and experiences, showing students inhabiting active authorial identities by questioning the author’s argument and evidence.

The webinar concludes with discussion of limitations of our project that may make it difficult to scale or replicate by other researchers. For instance, finding other instructors to collaborate with cross-institutionally, choosing readings to assign, and coordinating due dates across different time zones and academic calendars could pose challenges. We suggest potential benefits to annotating with other instructors at one’s home institution.

In the interactive closing of our webinar, we invite participants to troubleshoot the potential benefits and limitations of this approach. Could a project like this be feasible at your campus? What might that look like?