Edinburgh Napier University

  As part of a shared reading scheme – the #NapierBigRead – the Publishing staff and Postgraduate students at Edinburgh Napier University are working together to encourage a sense of community and belonging that transcends disciplines and year groups. The scheme was revolutionised by direct relationships with Student Reps and campus-wide participation. The reading scheme, which involves the entire University, has also reached out to some of the most vulnerable readers in the city and sought to provide a link back into the community through the shared experience of reading. This paper provides for genuine insight into the rationale for an inclusive approach, which underpins the need to find better methods to reach students on their own terms.

The different actors in this process (including established authors and emerging writers), as well as publishers, charitable organisations and government bodies, contribute to build an insightful and comprehensive picture of a collaborative venture which embraces a new phase of dissemination. A critical change in approach to other shared reading schemes is the student-centred focus. In this paper the processes and outcomes of the collaboration are reported, the monitoring of which include a variety of project-specific and institutional metrics, alongside the intricacies of the project’s implementation.