Teaching perspectives and expectations on the reading practices of students of the first year of Psychology

Reading in the university in the social sciences area involves working with multiple textual and discursive sources. Many times teachers can expect students to behave as autonomous readers and to know in advance how to read in a specific area. In this sense, this paper addresses teacher's perspectives and expectations about student's reading practices in Psychology at a state-run university. For this, a qualitative study is carried out in which 30 teachers of the first year of the Psychology degree are interviewed. The interviews are analyzed in light of categories that emerge from the theoretical framework and the emerging ones are considered. Results show that the great majority of teacher ' s perspectives on students reading focus on the difficulties and that a few teacher ' s perspectives focus on strengths and on self-critical view of teaching practices. In addition, these perspectives are related to the reading practices expected by teachers. Those teachers, who highlight difficulties, declare to encourage monological reading practices and expect students to read in this way. Those who recognize potentialities and difficulties in their students as readers declare possible dialogical practices and hope that students can read together with them. Reading perspectives lead teachers to deploy reading practices that may tend to remedy the difficulties or become spaces of construction of shared meanings on what is read.