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Common Reading Program

To help support student learning through the development of critical reading, thinking, and writing, the Common Reading Program offers students a common text that is used across all courses in the common first-year program. Texts are usually timely and tap into an issue of social, cultural, and political importance. The text acts as a touchstone, a way of connecting first-year courses through ideas about social justice and social change.  

Benefits of the Common Reading Program:

  • Creates a sense of community between incoming students, as well as between students and their faculty.
  • Helps develop students' awareness of social issues as well as the relationships between public and academic conversations. 
  • One piece of the larger goal of improving students' writing and critical thinking skills, as these are intimately tied to reading practices. 

Past texts

  • Program postponed
    In 2020-21, we put our Common Reading Program on hold. We focused this year on the development of the online Beyond the Walls lecture series with the Oshawa Library to encourage community dialogue. The Common Reading Program is planned to continue in 2021-22.