Session date: November 15 2022
Dan D’Agostino has been a librarian at the University of Toronto since 1989. He’s also a meditation teacher, certified to teach Compassion Cultivation Training, an eight week program developed at Stanford University in 2006. Mindful Reading brings together both his long-standing interest in how reading on screens has impacted our ability to read deeply and the vital role that attention and focus play in human flourishing. He’s been teaching Mindful Reading at the University of Toronto since 2021.
Session Overview: Our immersion in online life has made reading more difficult. Our shortened attention span means that we are less likely to be able to focus on an online reading or even print literature without feeling distraction. This frequent distracted state makes developing the sustained focus needed for deep reading hard to achieve. In this session we’ll explore the importance of deep reading in our lives, and the various ways that reading on screens threatens this vital human activity. We will combine focused attention practice with reading to help us function at a higher level as readers in a digital age.