Overview

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?

Participants will gain...

• A novel approach to help students engage in deep reading
• A deepened awareness of how SA can foster equitable and accessible literacy practices through peer-to-peer learning
• An understanding of the potential benefits and limitations of cross-institutional annotation
• How to adapt the project for success on their own campus

Facilitator Biographies

Noël Holton Brathwaite is an Associate Professor of English at SUNY Farmingdale College in Farmingdale, New York. Her research examines how reframing reading as a highly visible social practice through social annotation might afford agency to students writing and thinking in the digital age, and how this might in turn lead to successful writing outcomes. She is currently the Faculty Advisor of the student newspaper at SUNY Farmingdale, The Dale News.

Chris Kervina is an administrator at Northern Virginia Community College's Loudoun campus. She taught composition at NVCC for 11 years. Her research interests include reading and writing in disciplinary courses and in access-oriented institutions, Writing Across the Curriculum, and social annotation.

Sana Sayed is a Lecturer in the Warren College Writing Program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD). Before joining UCSD, she taught for 16 years in the English Department at the American University of Sharjah (AUS) in the United Arab Emirates. Her research interests include assessment, digital literacies, and equitable pedagogical practices for multilingual learners in higher education. Her work has appeared in Composition Forum, the Second Language Writing Newsletter, Cogent Education, Writing Spaces, and an edited collection published by NYU Press.

Mary Traester is an Associate Professor (Teaching) of Writing at the University of Southern California. Her research examines digital literacy pedagogy and social annotation. Her research has appeared in the peer-reviewed journal Pedagogy. Since 2002, she has served as a Co-Chair of a Special Interest Group dedicated to Reading, “The Role of Reading in Composition Studies,” affiliated with the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC).

Overview

Born from a well-attended Engaged Experience session at the 2026 CCCC, this webinar responds to the increasing need to teach students across all levels and modalities how to engage with texts, both in general and as artifacts of their disciplinary conversations. While there is a long history of reading instruction in writing studies (Haas; Sullivan, et al.; Lamb and Parrott; Carillo, and Horning), the increased literacy load in online writing courses suggests a need for teaching reading specifically in digital modalities; one way to do this is by leveraging the affordances of social annotation applications (e.g., Perusall, Google Docs).

This webinar will focus on social annotation activities facilitators have used with Google Docs and Perusall for literacy instruction in face-to-face, hybrid, and fully online courses. Social annotation practices have encouraged students to engage in Haas’ rhetorical reading–or going beyond just reading and deciphering the words contained in the text and understanding how text works to impact the context from which it was created. Moreover, social annotation activities can productively disrupt traditional discussion board or reading response pedagogies in which discussion prompts feel removed from the text or the ways that students have engaged with the text. Rather than searching for “the correct reading,” social annotations can encourage authentic, dynamic reading practices and foster collaboration and social presence in online courses, contributing to a community of practice.

The webinar will begin with a brief discussion of participants’ experiences assigning readings and annotations in their classes. Then, facilitators will provide participants with a comparative introduction of popular social annotation applications (focusing on Perusall and Google Docs) with a focus on how their affordances enhance literacy learning in online contexts.

Following this overview, the second half of the webinar will provide participants with different strategies that the presenters have used in their own classes. Topics covered in these brief pedagogical showcases, include...

1. Getting started with social annotation;
2. Making reading practices visible;
3. Fostering community;
4. Disrupting discussion boards.

Guided by the facilitators, participants will have an opportunity to socially annotate a document in a chosen platform to experience what their students will do when using this tool. After using one of the tools, the participants will be given the opportunity to reflect on what they have learned and experienced in the webinar about social annotation tools and how they would specifically adopt them for the media in their courses. The webinar will end with participants sharing out their reflections and asking questions of the facilitators.

Participants will gain...

• A comparative introduction to the affordances and limitations of various social annotation platforms, including accessibility and multimodal features;
• Ideas for innovating the way reading is included in their online writing courses;
• Connections with other instructors using similar technologies;
• Practical assignments and activities that they can include in their own courses;
• A sketch of how they will adopt social annotation tools to their courses.

Facilitator Biographies

Logan Bearden is an associate professor of writing and the Assistant Director of the College Composition Program at Nova Southeastern University. His research explores writing program administration, curricular revision, multimodal composition, and programmatic cultures.

Kevin DePew is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at Old Dominion University (southeast Virginia). He identifies as a writing pedagogy scholar; his research and teaching interests–which are completely inseparable–occupy the axes of literacy, online writing instruction, linguistic justice, social justice pedagogies, and digital writing.

Janine Morris is an associate professor of writing and a writing center administrator at Nova Southeastern University in Fort Lauderdale, FL. Her research focuses on writing centers; graduate student mentorship, writing, and professional development; and digital reading; and online writing instruction professionalization.

Meghan Velez is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Central Florida, where she teaches courses in professional writing, AI rhetorics and literacies, and research methods in rhetoric and composition. Her research focuses on technologies of writing, digital rhetorics, and online writing instruction.

Overview

In online courses, we have several ways to tell whether students have completed an assigned reading. They may annotate a text, respond to a discussion question, or submit a written response. These activities give us something to see. What they do not always reveal is how students made sense of the text or how they drew on it in the thinking that followed.

This webinar explores the relationship between reading and judgment. Research on disciplinary literacy has shown that experts read texts in ways that reflect how knowledge is developed and used within their fields. That raises an important question for online instruction: How do we help learners read professional and disciplinary texts in ways that support the judgments they will eventually need to make?

Teacher education provides one example. Teacher candidates spend considerable time reading curriculum materials, standards, lesson plans, and other professional texts. They may annotate a lesson or identify an instructional move. That work is valuable, especially for novices who are learning what to notice. But identifying something in a lesson is not the same as understanding why it is there or what it suggests about instruction. Candidates also need opportunities to consider what matters in a text and how their interpretation might shape an instructional decision.

During the webinar, participants will examine examples of common online reading activities and consider what those activities actually allow instructors to see about student thinking. We will look at how a familiar reading assignment can be revised so that students are asked not only to respond to a text, but to interpret it and use it in the thinking that follows. Participants will also have an opportunity to consider one reading activity from their own teaching and identify what they need students to be able to do because they read the text.

Generative AI makes these questions even more pressing. Emerging research has begun examining what students do when they use GenAI while reading, including how they monitor understanding, evaluate information, and compare AI-generated responses with original sources. We will use GenAI as one example for thinking about what happens when a tool can produce the kind of response an assignment once asked students to produce.

If a tool can summarize a text or generate a response, what intellectual work did we intend for the student to do?

Participants will...

• Examine how reading supports disciplinary and professional judgment.
  
• Distinguish between completing a reading activity and using a text to inform reasoning or decision-making.
• Consider what their current online reading activities actually ask students to do with a text.
• Revise an existing reading activity to better connect reading with subsequent thinking or decision-making.
• Consider how generative AI changes what instructors may need students to demonstrate about their reading.

Facilitator Biography

Judy Schaffer, Ph.D., is Assistant Professor of Curriculum and Instruction and B.S.Ed. Program Coordinator at Texas A&M University-Central Texas. Her teaching and research focus on the development of instructional judgment in teacher education. Her current work examines how teacher candidates learn to read curriculum and other professional texts in ways that help them understand the reasoning behind instructional choices and make informed decisions of their own.

Overview

Reading in online and hybrid learning environments often happens privately. Students may complete an assigned article, chapter, or digital text without instructors being able to see how they approached the reading, where comprehension became difficult, what connections they made, or how their thinking changed. For multilingual learners, the reading process can involve additional layers of linguistic, cultural, and academic meaning-making that may remain equally invisible.

This interactive webinar explores durable reading practices that can help instructors, tutors, and other educators make students’ reading processes more visible while supporting deeper engagement with texts. Rather than centering instruction on a particular platform or application, the session focuses on reading practices that can transfer across technologies, courses, languages, and learning environments. The emphasis remains on reading itself: how readers enter a text, monitor understanding, make connections, interpret evidence, and leave a visible trace of their thinking.

Participants will examine a practical visible-reading routine that invites students to notice, question, connect, infer, locate evidence, and respond while engaging with a text. The routine can be adapted for learning-management systems, shared documents, digital annotation platforms, discussion boards, synchronous online meetings, tutoring sessions, or print-based reading. Participants will briefly experience the routine themselves and consider how its prompts could be revised for a text they already assign.

The webinar will also explore multilingual meaning-making as an academic resource. Multilingual readers may draw upon prior linguistic knowledge, cognates, disciplinary vocabulary, cultural knowledge, and cross-language connections while interpreting unfamiliar or complex texts. Participants will consider ways instructors can acknowledge and strategically incorporate these resources without reducing multilingual students to perceived language deficits. The goal is not to create a separate reading curriculum for multilingual students, but to design reading opportunities that recognize the knowledge and language resources students already bring.

A third focus will examine the relationship between reading and writing. Short written responses, annotations, evidence-based reflections, and synthesis statements can provide instructors with meaningful traces of students’ reading while helping students prepare for more complex academic writing. Writing, in this context, serves the central purpose of making reading and meaning-making visible rather than replacing reading as the focus of the session.

Participants will also consider collaborative reading practices for online environments, including structured peer response, guided discussion, and social annotation. Accessibility will remain integrated throughout the webinar, with attention to flexible participation, clear instructional structures, multiple ways of engaging with texts, and practices that recognize the varied linguistic, technological, and educational backgrounds students bring to online learning. These choices also support inclusive dialogue by providing more than one way for participants and students to contribute.

Grounded in scholarship from postsecondary reading, multilingual education, writing studies, online literacy instruction, and accessible course design, the webinar combines theory with practical application. Participants will respond to brief questions in the chat, analyze a sample reading task, experience one durable routine, and discuss applications to college courses, tutoring, writing centers, and other online or hybrid learning spaces. They will leave with a simple implementation framework: one text, one reading routine, and one visible trace of student thinking..

Participants will gain...

• A transferable framework for making students’ reading processes visible in online and hybrid environments.
• Practical strategies for supporting multilingual readers as they engage with complex academic texts.
• Approaches for using brief writing and annotation to reveal reading comprehension and meaning-making.
• Ideas for creating collaborative and accessible reading experiences without depending on one particular technology.
• A practical plan for adapting one durable reading routine to a text, course, tutoring session, or learning environment they already use.

Facilitator Biography

Yoimar Falcon is a multilingual educator, instructional leader, and literacy practitioner with more than two decades of experience in education across Canada and the United States. Fluent in Spanish, English, and French, she currently teaches dual-language Reading Language Arts and serves in a grade-level leadership role at International Leadership of Texas. Her professional work focuses on multilingual learners, reading development, student voice, culturally responsive instruction, and the transfer of effective learning practices across educational contexts.

Falcon is the founder of Building Literacy Bridges, an educational initiative focused on literacy, multilingual learning, student voice, and community engagement. Her professional contributions include educational writing, international collaboration, mentoring, professional presentations, and initiatives designed to amplify student voice and strengthen connections among language, learning, and community. Her work is grounded in the belief that students’ linguistic and cultural resources can serve as powerful foundations for meaning-making and academic growth.