Common Text Program

The Common Reading Program is an essential piece of your First Year Experience at Wright State University. It was developed:

• To expose you to our academic atmosphere from the time you arrive on campus for Orientation
• To provide a common academic experience for all first-year students by giving you the opportunity to engage with your peers in intellectual discussions both inside and outside the classroom.
• To communicate the expectation that you will begin to read actively and critically, make judgments about the validity of what you read and be able to discuss challenging, sometimes conflicting, ideas.

You will also be provided with a series of interconnected academic and beyond-the-classroom activities that will challenge your critical thinking and evaluation of the text through your Learning Community and in many of your General Education courses.

We ask you to become an active member of the Raider community from the start by participating in this shared reading experience, discussing a controversial book, considering the issues it raises, formulating your own views, and sharing them with your teachers and classmates.

Common Text 2010

A Long Way Gone

Memoirs of a Boy Soldier

by Ishmael Beah

In A LONG WAY GONE, Beah, now twenty-six years old, tells a riveting story. At the age of twelve, he fled attacking rebels and wandered a land rendered unrecognizable by violence. By thirteen, he’d been picked up by the government army, and Beah, at heart a gentle boy, found that he was capable of truly terrible acts. Eventually released by the army and sent to a UNICEF rehabilitation center, he struggled to regain his humanity and to reenter the world of civilians, who viewed him with fear and suspicion. This is, at last, a story of redemption and hope.

Learn more →about A Long Way Gone Memoirs of a Boy Soldier