Reading University
IPL RESEARCH GROUP: READING UNIVERSITY
READING UNIVERSITY
READING UNIVERSITY
Reading practices are shaped and negotiated in contemporary students’ everyday lives, yet higher educational structures and practices are generally blind to reading as embodied, biographical, social and cultural practices. The Reading University research group integrates theoretical, methodological and empirical approaches from Pedagogikk, Didaktik, Literary studies, Sociology, Phenomenololgy and Rhythmanalysis to explore and create pedagogical interventions for higher educational reading practices.
Our methodological explorations of university reading include reading’s spatio-temporal, rhythmic and embodied articulations in everyday practices, habits and rituals. Our work theorises the integration of reading-thinking-listening-writing-knowing, and the pedagogical implications for higher education.
The Reading University research group work is focused around question on what valuable reading practices that we need to (re-)discover, protect and develop, and what educational understanding is necessary to create institutional room for vital reading practices in the contemporary university.
The research group is well-connected nationally and internationally with established and newly developed interdisciplinary network collaborations.
ONGOING AND COMPLETED PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
ONGOING AND COMPLETED PROJECTS AND ACTIVITIES
Reading time
Reading Time was a BA/Leverhulme Small Research Grant project conducted by Fadia Dakka, PI, (BCU, UK), and Dagrun Astrid Aarø Engen, Co-I, (NTNU, Norway) and Marit Honerød Hoveid (NTNU, Norway), Feb 2024-Nov 2025.
The project shed light on the under-researched area of reading habits, practices and rhythms among a group of doctoral students based in the Education departments of a teaching-intensive (UK) and a research-intensive (Norway) university. Reading time in contemporary universities was captured in its nuanced spatio-temporal articulation through a rhythmic analysis of participants’ everyday practices, habits, rituals and affective responses, and the project revealed that doctoral reading is a deeply affective and embodied practice.
The project also confirmed that university reading is predominantly an individual practice and explored in depth how this practice is shaped and negotiated in contemporary students’ everyday lives. Through a layered and original methodological design, we demonstrated that there is potential for deeper understanding, engagement, collective learning and enjoyment in doctoral education when reading is foregrounded and approached as an embodied, social and cultural practice throughout doctoral studies.
A concluding report is submitted to British Academcy, two journal articles are under development for publication, and a book proposal is planned.
Reading and Teaching in Higher Education («Lesing og undervisning i høyere utdanning»)
Martha Torgeirdatter Dahl have studied reading practices among BA students. The project explored academic reading based on a pedagogical development project related to reading practices in bachelor's education in Pedagogy.
At reading seminars in the bachelor's program in pedagogy at NTNU, students are invited to explore aspects of themselves as becoming professionals in meetings with fellow students, learning assistants and teachers. The students sit in small groups or in a larger group around a long table, where they listen together to the text, to each other, and make eye contact. The seminars arouse interest and curiosity about the subject content by facilitating educational processes for all that participate in the course: students, learning assistants and teachers together.
The project is a contribution to the ongoing dialogue and research on good reading, teaching and study practices in higher education. The research work challenges the understanding of reading as an individual process and explores reading as a fundamentally collective process.
UNIPED Module: Reading in Teaching and Supervision in Higher Education («Lesing i undervisning og veiledning i høyere utdanning»)
The ongoing research and explorative pedagogical interventions are integrated in a module on higher educational reading practices as part of NTNU’s program for educational basic competence: https://kurspaamelding.no/ntnu/lesing-i-undervisning-og-veiledning-i-hyere-utdanning
Course responsible: Marit Honerød Hoveid, Martha Torgeirdatter Dahl, Dagrun Astrid Aarø Engen.
Reading in Teacher Education
Tatjana Kielland Samoilow integrates the work in the project network «Ung lesekultur» (financed by Kulturrådet) into research and pedagogical innovation on reading in teacher education. She has applied for funding for establishing a «school library laboratory» at NTNU and involves the research group Reading University in the experimental pedagogical research on the higher educational practices in the laboratory.
Nordic Exploratory Network
Dagrun Astrid Aarø Engen is project leader on an application for establishing a NordForsk-funded Nordic Exploratory Network on reading in and the Nordic University. The overall aim of the Reading the Nordic University network is to explore and inquire into the complexity of human reading as a sensory and embodied practice in the contemporary Nordic university. For that purpose, we need to form a strong, wide and sustainable community for collective, creative processes of intervention, investigation and implementation of a reading university. Universities and researchers from Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark and Sweden are participants in the application – with funding decision autumn 2026.
PHD PROJECTS
PHD PROJECTS
Martha Torgeirdatter Dahl: [sett inn ny tittel på prosjektet]
The doctoral project aims to contribute to the work of establishing a didactic theoretical foundation for university pedagogy. It is a theoretical, historical and conceptual project that, through close reading of pedagogical texts, explores the pedagogical foundation of university pedagogy. The work aims to form a pedagogically grounded theoretical foundation to understand and accommodate the university's core activities; teaching and research. The theoretical work will be based on university pedagogy knowledge rooted in continental didactics, humanities and educational theory didactic thinking.
The project: 1. Examines the relationship between didactics and curriculum theory in university pedagogy, 2. Theorizes a humanistic didactic starting point for university pedagogy.
Keywords: didactics, teaching, content, purpose, reading and assessment
Members in the research group
Martha Torgeirdatter Dahl
Assistant Professor and PhD Candidate in University Pedagogy, Department for education and lifelong learning, NTNU
My research examines didactic practices and understandings related to teaching and learning in higher education. I have a particular interest in pedagogical foundational thinking and how fundamental thinking for university pedagogy is developed through our reading. I consider reading to be at the core of the academic life of both students and teachers. In research I question the space allocated to reading in our teaching and research practices and how we as teachers facilitate students to develop their scholarly reading practices.
Fadia Dakka
Associate Professor in Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education and Academic Lead for Research (Education), School of Law & Social Sciences, Birmingham City University
My research examines the intersection of rhythmanalysis, Critical University Studies, and doctoral education. Adopting a critical humanist perspective, I explore how rhythms shape and structure academic life, with particular attention to reading practices as patterned, embodied, and culturally mediated activities. Drawing on interdisciplinary theory, I investigate how rituals in doctoral education—such as supervision, writing, and scholarly engagement—function as forms of normative orchestration, shaping possibilities for knowledge production and subject formation. My work positions rhythm as both an analytical lens (aesthetic and temporal-diagnostic) and an ontological condition (rhuthmos as form-in-motion), offering new insights into power, temporality, and transformation in contemporary higher education.
Dagrun Astrid Aarø Engen
Associate Professor in University Pedagogy, Department for education and lifelong learning, NTNU
My research integrates theoretical investigations of educative processes and empirical explorations of how educative processes are brought to life in educational processes in the University. Since 2024 I have had a special attention to research on reading in Norwegian and British doctoral education and supervision through the Reading Time project, and in particular I work on exploring how reading is culitivated in contemporary higher education as every day practices, in spatio-temporal and biographical nuances. My current work is an investigation on how reading, interpretation, thinking and writing is integrated in human knowing and “knowledging” (kunnskaping).
Marit Honerød Hoveid
Tatjana Kielland Samoilow
As a literary scholar I am mainly concerned with young people’s literary reading. In a current research project – “Ung lesekultur”, I investigate young people’s reading practices , their participations in a multitude of reading cultures and in what ways reading is integrated in their identity formations. Theoretically I draw on relational theories (Rita Felski, Hartmund Rosa).
Head of research group
Members of research group
