EDSURGE -- David Peña-Guzmán starts off his Friday class at San Francisco State University like any other professor might: students file in and pull out their note-taking materials, and he opens his laptop to begin lecture.
But stay in Peña-Guzmán’s class a little longer — maybe five hours longer — and things start to look a little different. For starters, it’s long. The course, titled “The Reading Experiment: The Power of the Book,” takes place every other Friday beginning at 9:30 a.m. and wraps up at 2:30 p.m. There is also a snack table in the room that students contribute to and share, and a low ambient buzz emits from a white noise machine at the front.
For most of the course, there’s no lecture happening at all. Students put away their technology and read for four hours.
“It’s a rediscovery of uninterrupted reading,” Peña-Guzmán said last Friday while pulling up slides about the assigned readings.