Texts encountered on screen, printed off, or bound in books can only ever be confronted one or two pages at a time, a situation which Dave Middlebrook contends is detrimental to a complete understanding of the whole text. His solution is to take the pages of the text apart and bring them together into a single continuous scroll, allowing its entirety to be comprehended in a single look. However, a single look is by no means the extent of this action, but only the beginning. The text can be mapped, dissected, demarcated and understood, by an individual or by a group, opening up the printed word to a more discursive treatment, and providing a means for active engagement with reading by making it a physical process as much as a mental one.

In a first for the podcast, we are delighted to share a video resource of Dave demonstrating the text mapping technique, hosted on LearnHigher. Take a look and let us know how it works for you!

The resources we mentioned

http://www.textmapping.org/index.html

And the paper we talked about

Abegglen, S., Burns, T., Middlebrook, D. and Sinfield, S. (2019) ‘Unrolling the text: Using scrolls to facilitate academic reading’, Journal of Learning Development in Higher Education, (14). doi: 10.47408/jldhe.v0i14.467.