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Printer-Friendly ModeProfessors needing new approach write own course textbooks
October 26, 2009 —
Imagine craving the macaroni and cheese your mom used to make from scratch. You go to the store for the ingredients and find they don’t have the right cheese.
Or imagine you need a certain kind of textbook to teach a special kind of class. What if that’s not on the shelf either?
You settle for imperfection or you craft something all your own.
At least that’s what professors Beth Jorgensen and Elson Boles seem to think.
“When you can’t find one, you have to do one,” Jorgensen said.
Jorgensen, a professor of professional and technical writing, had trouble finding a text for her Environmental Rhetoric class. The course is designed to teach students how to analyze the symbolic relationship and actions of humans with the environment.
“What we rhetoricians do,” she explained, “is speak and write about how people speak and write.”
The problem with the books she could find is that they usually presented a biased approach.
So far, Jorgensen has produced three chapters of her textbook, which will collect her scholarly work along with selected public texts by other authors in the field.
“I’ve got quite a ways to go,” Jorgensen said, “but it’s functional for this fall.”
Keeping with “the spirit of environmentalism,” Jorgensen hopes to keep her text in an electronic format. The costs of printing a textbook are paid through paper and fossil fuels at the expense of the environment, she said.
She plans to market the text through a publisher and promote its use at other institutions, but she wants to continue to offer it to her students for free.
“I think that it is wrong for professors to ask students to buy textbooks they have written,” Jorgensen said. “It presents a conflict of interest.”
Boles, professor of sociology, found himself in a similar situation. His classes focus on the analysis of human societies, and he said that accurate textbooks are nonexistent.
“I have to constantly create my own materials because the texts are outdated,” Boles said.
The new perspective, he explained, sees only one society: a global one, connected through capitalism.
He deems most current textbooks obsolete because they refer to each country as a society, each with a distinct economy and political system. To Boles, the interdependence of today’s world renders such distinctions impossible.
The new perspective also refutes the segregation of social sciences into fields — economics, politics, sociology. Old lines drawn so sharply ignore the relationships between each part.
Like Jorgensen, Boles intends to present his text as an electronic version. But he said he has different reasons.
The first is to create a completely free text for students.
“I’m not doing it to make money,” said Boles, who believes that modern publishers have been geared toward supplying labor for companies rather than toward bolstering students’ education.
With his electronic text, Boles hopes to be a counter-force to this problem by modernizing views of society and inspiring others to follow the same course.
Boles cites another advantage of an electronic resource: the ability to incorporate multimedia directly into the text. He wants students to be able to see video, hear audio and interact with historical maps and images, saying this is extremely important for understanding society’s multiple dimensions.