As of January 2026, I’ve been teaching at Saint Paul University’s Élisabeth-Bruyère School of Social Innovation for ten years. This experience has led me to create programs at all university levels, teach courses, and supervise graduate and postgraduate student research. The students at our school have diverse academic, professional and migration backgrounds. They have rarely followed a “traditional” path in the humanities and social sciences. This brought me to reflect on my own background and my approach to teaching.[i]
Pedagogy is not my field of specialization, but teaching has become my profession. Like most university professors who teach outside of education departments and who studied in Quebec and Canada, I unfortunately received no training in how to teach. I learned on the job, based on how I had been taught, sometimes imitating and sometimes challenging various pedagogical strategies. This post aims to highlight what I consider a central aspect of the humanities: how we engage with complex texts. I want to share reflections from the past decade that I hope are useful, especially regarding my educational goals and expectations for students at different levels of study.
First, I will explain why I think this issue is crucial and how I will approach it. Then, I will propose a classification of the skills that I believe students in the humanities should possess to analyze texts at each step of their academic journey.
Why focus on text comprehension?
Let’s put it simply: in many ways, the humanities are primarily about reading and writing texts (not just any texts, of course, but academic, scientific, theoretical texts… call them what you will). So, what we do as professors, from the BA to the doctoral level, is, among other things, teach students to read better. We don’t do this the same way our colleagues in elementary, middle, and high schools do. Sometimes our teaching aligns with theirs; sometimes it diverges from it, but it is still reading instruction we offer. We develop their critical approach to the text. By critical, I mean, for the sake of this entry, an approach that aims to read the text with particular attention, so as not to take it “at face value,” but to receive it with intellectual tools that allow us both to distance ourselves from it and to deepen our understanding of it.
However, developing this critical eye for texts requires a whole new learning process for students. Such an approach is not common in our society; it cannot, therefore, be developed passively, by simply immersing oneself in the usual ways of doing things. It is a craft to be perfected, a practice to be developed, a skill to be refined. Thus, the best way to improve one’s ability to understand texts critically is through careful and repeated practice of reading. This is one reason why, as students progress in their humanities studies, the amount of text to be read per class tends to increase. The aim is not only to adapt to the initial reading abilities of the different audiences attending our classes, but also to gradually build both reading skills and knowledge of the field being studied: we want students’ reading experience to become richer as they progress. A doctoral student in the humanities is first and foremost someone who has read extensively (but not just anything and in any way, of course; this person must be able to master a set of concepts in order to tackle these readings).
Consequently, one of our important tasks as professors, particularly when evaluating students, is to determine whether this person “knows how to read” as we understand it in the humanities. This ability to analyze texts, which we attempt to measure, is crucial for students’ progress in their studies and thesis projects. Let’s be clear: it will not be possible for them to complete a master’s or doctoral program without having reached a certain level of reading, whether in their field of specialization or more broadly.
However, such an assessment is not so easy to carry out, and the task becomes more complicated as one progresses through university. From my early years of teaching, I could determine whether a student had reached the reading level required to complete a bachelor’s degree. I already had teaching tools adapted to this assessment, reusing those that my professors had used with me. However, at the graduate level, the situation seemed more complex to me; the format of the courses, which increasingly leans toward peer seminars, does not always allow for highlighting students’ text-analysis problems. Furthermore, it was not easy for me to create a clear grading rubric outlining the level of analysis required for these levels of study. As I was grappling with this last year, I decided to write this entry to help students deepen their reading and analytical skills.
Proposed classification of reading skills in the humanities
Let us first assume that each study cycle in the humanities focuses on developing a particular relationship with the text. Of course, this is not a fixed typology. Over time, we learn some of these skills at all levels. However, I believe the classification presented here accurately reflects what was emphasized at each university level when I was taught reading but also what I expect as reading skills from students in the humanities.
Undergraduate level: intratextuality
I use the term intratextuality to refer to the internal logic of a given text, rather than that of an author’s complete works. At the undergraduate level, the main challenge is to develop students’ ability to identify and extract the fundamental elements: the purpose, the issue, the thesis, the arguments, and the concepts. In this regard, a simple exercise where student identify each of those elements on a sheet of paper is a fundamental and extremely useful tool[ii].
At this stage of their journey, students need to identify strategies to go beyond the narrative the author presents. They need to step back and adopt a less direct, more sensitive approach to the text to take an analytical view. This analysis represents a departure from the way most people approach and comment on a text from the humanities, which is generally based on three dichotomies: either “I like/I don’t like,” “I agree/I disagree,” or “I recognize myself/I don’t recognize myself.” This detachment from their preferences and opinions is the first step in critical analysis. The text becomes something to be observed, rather than a narrative that spontaneously elicits emotions or opinions that we approve or disapprove of.
The challenge is distinguishing between what is essential and what is incidental. Students must understand that all texts in the humanities contain key elements and that they must develop the ability to identify them: a goal, an issue, a thesis, arguments, etc. They must be encouraged to break down and categorize each piece of writing to analyze it thoroughly. This raw analysis first focuses on the links among these elements, particularly between the thesis and the arguments, helping the student understand the text’s internal consistency and logic. It also teaches students to identify the text’s structure, mechanisms, and functioning, which are not always apparent when one simply lets oneself be carried away by the narrative.
Thus, when a humanities student has completed their bachelor’s degree, I expect them to be able to read and understand a scientific article published in a peer-reviewed journal, in the sense that they can summarize the thesis, main concepts, and arguments without following the sequence proposed by the text. Of course, no text is an island; it always has intertextual links to others, and the intratextual learning process highlights the relationships that a publication has with others, if only through its subject matter, multiple references, and the presence of a bibliography. While we inevitably begin to work on this aspect at the end of undergraduate studies, it is mainly at the master’s level that we explore it in greater depth.
Master’s level: intertextuality
In the humanities, it seems to me that the most common way of talking about intertextuality is the idea of the “inscription in academic debates.” This ability to understand a text as part of an existing discussion, rather than as an isolated phenomenon, is crucial. Intertextuality operates on at least two levels: the text’s place in the author’s previous work and publications, and its relationship to texts produced by others in the field and beyond.
It is generally by integrating this new learning that students become aware of the surprising scope of what it means to “know how to read” in the humanities. Knowing how to read means reading something other than the text itself. You have to know how to read “between the lines” and beyond the words printed on paper or on the screen. It is crucial to pay attention to paratextual clues, such as the title, publisher, back cover, bibliography, notes, and reviews. You need to do additional research by reading encyclopedia articles or specialized dictionaries, looking at the various materials available on the Internet, interviews in different media, exploring secondary literature and the main commentaries on the text, or even skimming through other publications by the same author to grasp the main points.
Julie Chateauvert, also a professor at our school, uses the metaphor of a world map to situate a text within the complex networks of intertextuality. Imagine that the world map represents all the sciences. Each country represents a discipline, each region a field, each city a school of thought, and each neighbourhood a specific ongoing debate. When writing a text, the author invites you to share a meal in their home. Going there and finding their home in the labyrinth of the city immediately places you in the conversation’s theme and the perspective through which the subject will be approached. By entering the premises, meeting the other inhabitants of the house, the guests are invited to the discussion and a meal, you can see the layout of the space and the portraits that adorn its walls. You can then situate the host’s conceptual relationships and current concerns. All these elements are as important as the discussion itself for fully understanding what is going on.
This metaphor introduces the first elements of hermeneutic generosity necessary for seminar work. When you are invited to a meal, and the discussion is already underway, it is appropriate to take an interest in the context before intervening. It would be rude to proclaim from the outset that everyone is wrong and that the host should have decorated their home and cooked differently. We must first pay close attention to the text and what the author wants to do (much more than what the text provokes in us) to develop a valid analysis and critique.
The classic tool in graduate studies for helping students grasp intertextuality is the seminar. By moving away from a lecture-style approach and giving students more space in organizing the course, facilitating sessions, and providing opportunities to present their interpretation of the texts, we give them the chance to see how texts fit into debates. By building a course plan that brings together texts addressing the same subject from different perspectives, and by having a student lead the session in which these texts are presented and discussed, the spotlight is placed on the intertextual relationship.
Over the past ten years, I have observed that many students’ reflex is to present descriptions of each text side by side, without revealing the links between them or analyzing or interpreting the texts. The simplest exercise to move beyond mere description, which was used with me and which I now use myself, is the game of similarities and differences. As a presentation framework, require the person leading the session to specify how the texts are similar or different. Then use this presentation to ask the question that inevitably opens the door to analysis and interpretation: “Why?” What explains these differences? What opposing positions and distinct experiences are those differences the product of?
Once the analytical result has been obtained, it is necessary to remove the crutch of this game of similarities and differences and move directly to interpretation. It is then that the ability to place the text within debates becomes apparent. The student then reaches a new milestone. The text becomes part of a broader discussion whose ins and outs become more tangible and obvious. For example, the thesis of a given book responds to a discourse circulating in the public sphere or to arguments put forward in articles written by intellectual opponents. Placing the text within debates helps us understand its causes and effects, its scope, and its intentions.
What I expect from graduate students is the ability to engage in second-order intellectual gymnastics, as opposed to the kind that allows us to identify the thesis, arguments, and central concepts of a text. This requires asking questions whose answers are not all directly in the text; they can be found elsewhere or deduced logically and conceptually from the text itself. This ability opens the door to the question of dialogue, which, in my opinion, is the central focus of doctoral-level reading instruction.
Doctoral level: dialogue
It is a well-known trope in humanities courses that authors must be brought into “dialogue” with one another. But what exactly does that mean? Is a comparative analysis of certain texts on a given subject enough to engage in a real conversation? There is no unanimous answer to this question, nor is there a precise definition of what is meant by this metaphor of dialogue in the humanities. At first, I found it difficult to help students understand the state of an intellectual debate, but I eventually figured out how to do it. On the other hand, teaching the practice of dialogue between texts still seems hazardous or elusive. Here, I will propose my way of explaining the notion of dialogue between texts in class. My goal is to make the idea more precise and, above all, to reveal an intellectual capacity necessary for writing a doctoral thesis.
Let us suppose that I must bring two authors of contemporary political thought into dialogue: Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas. Although both wrote some of their works in the second half of the 20th century, it is clear that Habermas, who is still alive at the time of writing this entry, has addressed some topics that are contemporary with us, while Arendt, who died in 1975, has not. Let us suppose that I read a recent work by Habermas in which he discusses the effect of social media on the public sphere (for example, A New Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere and Deliberative Politics, published in English in 2023). I know that Arendt did not write about this issue, but I can nevertheless conceive or infer, based on the conceptual framework she developed, what an Arendtian analysis of social media might look like. By carefully studying some of her works and looking at her use of specific concepts such as the “common world,” I could formulate this analysis and “respond” to Habermas through the lens of Arendt’s framework. I can then highlight the advances and limitations of Habermas’s thinking on this issue from the perspective of Arendt’s thinking.
In return, I could look at what Habermas wrote about Arendt, or about some of the concepts that form the framework I have extracted from her work, to imagine a Habermasian response to this Arendtian challenge. This is how, for me, the metaphor of dialogue in the humanities comes to life. Bringing such a dialogue to life (which may well involve authors who are still alive) requires a more advanced intellectual capacity than simply understanding the debates in which the texts under study are engaged. To achieve a true “dialogue,” one must read what is written on and between the lines, but also (re)formulate a thought based on a given framework and justify it through a careful reading of that framework. Here is a simple question I ask to simplify the exercise: “What would So-and-so say if they wanted to respond to this text?” The exercise is successful when students understand that it is not a matter of inventing an imaginary answer to this question, but rather of drawing on the texts to reveal the author’s theoretical framework by using precise quotations or complex notions that demonstrate a correct understanding of the concepts involved.
How is this skill useful for writing a doctoral thesis? It seems to me that without it, one cannot fully understand the notion of a “theoretical framework.” This requires being able to extract specific concepts, understand their use, and apply them in other contexts. For more complex theoretical frameworks, one must even be able to combine them with concepts from other schools of thought or even other disciplines. Dialogue requires maintaining a delicate balance between avoiding obvious or banal statements, simply repeating what the author has already said, and not distorting their concepts or saying anything without real support in the original text.
Conclusion
I have attempted to present three reading skills that we seek to develop in our students when teaching the humanities. Of course, my categories linked to the different academic levels may give an impression of rigidity that needs to be overcome; learning to read is a continuum that begins well before university. We learn these skills to some extent in high school, but I believe we deepen and develop them further in university, depending on the level of study we are at.
What I am certain of, based on repeated experience, is that students who have not developed the ability to identify the central elements of a text in their undergraduate studies will have great difficulty in their graduate studies. The same is true for those starting a PhD who do not yet know how to situate texts within an intellectual debate. The question, then, is not so much when exactly these skills are developed but rather recognizing the stage at which they are essential to accomplishing the intellectual task at hand.
In this entry, I have also referred to the idea of developing the ability to read complex texts. This formulation has its limitations. These skills are also developed through the ability to write, listen, and express oneself clearly. To test reading ability, we must demonstrate our understanding of what we have read, which necessarily implies that we must produce other texts and be able to do so well.
At a time when our students are offered a variety of ways to save time by having computers write summaries of the texts they have to read, or by replacing them altogether in their thinking and writing tasks[iii], taking the time to develop their autonomy when faced with a complex text becomes all the more crucial. This is because what generative artificial intelligence (AI) produces is, inevitably, also text.
However, these AI-generated texts are particularly likely to be accepted by our students as “objective” and “true” because they come from a machine that, in the public imagination, produces “truth” precisely because it is not human. The intellectual tools that enable us to read better are essential for evaluating and critiquing the output of these machines, as well as that of other humans. Without them, our ability to judge the world around us will quietly fade away, without us even noticing.
[i] I would like to thank all my colleagues (past and present) at the École d’innovation sociales Élisabeth-Bruyère for helping me on my journey of learning to teach. Special thanks to Julie Chateauvert and Jonathan Durand Folco, whose proofreading, suggestions, and comments greatly improved this text. An immense thanks to Krys Maki for the (rather complex) translation of that logbook entry.
[ii] Unfortunately, the widespread access to artificial intelligence forces us to rethink the use of this tool. Asking students to produce a such a report at home on their computers will lead many of them to ask generative artificial intelligence to do it for them. The abbreviated and telegraphic format of this tool makes it particularly easy for AI to imitate. This does not mean that all reports produced by artificial intelligence will earn a good grade, but one thing is certain: they will not help students improve their reading skills. We must therefore resign ourselves to using this tool in class, sacrificing rare and precious teaching time and inevitably reducing the number of reports that can be completed in a single session.
[iii] This poses a series of significant problems for us humanities professors who must assess their ability to think critically. How can we know if a person has truly acquired the skills of intratextuality, intertextuality, and dialogue if they have delegated this task to a machine?