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
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Secret Path - 2019
Secret Path, a graphic novel by the late The Tragically Hip frontman Gord Downie and artist and author, tells the story of Chanie Wenjack, a 12-year-old boy who died trying to escape the Cecilia Jeffrey Residential School near Kenora, Ontario back in October 1966.
