Don’t Throw the Book at Them Phoebe Reeves Associate Professor of English phoebe.reeves@uc.edu The University of Cincinnati, Clermont College Don’t Throw the Book at Them Get Rid of Your Textbook and Embrace a More Dynamic Classroom TASS 2017

What’s Your Experience? Take a minute to reflect in writing on your experiences with textbooks, as a teacher or as a student What books had a big impact on you as a student? What books have you used as a teacher? Why? What factors do you think about when choosing a book?

Textbook Costs Over Time

Other Current Text Choices $80 new $70 new

My Recent Text Choices

Cross-Genre Readings Had students read book by visiting poet Met with poet and attended reading Discussion of “real world” writers and their processes Discussion of flexibility of rhetorical purpose and situation

Advantages May be first book a struggling reader has read all the way through in a long while

Advantages Creates depth of critical thought

Advantages Opportunity for carefully tiered essay tasks

Advantages Develops confidence and more sophisticated reading skills

Advantages Prepares them for college-level reading beyond the comp classroom

Advantages Provides deeper context for their own writing

Other Resources to Supplement the Text On-line resources are plentiful Purdue OWL is a good substitute for rhetorical materials Blackboard and other LMS platforms make posting addition material very easy

Essay Assignments Designing a developmental composition course “requires that instructors think about texts, techniques, and assignments, not so much as a hierarchy, but rather as strands in a recursive webbing of support and extension for students who are learning the conventions and content of academic literacy.” Wendy Hall Maloney “Connecting the texts of their lives to academic literacy: Creating Success for at-risk first-year college students,” Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, May 2003

Essay Assignments Essay One: Narration Students tell their own story, using one of the personal narrative chapters as a model  Essay Two: Close Reading and Response Students write a rhetorical analysis of a research-based chapter, which grows out of their work on double-entry notebooks and annotations. 

Essay Assignments Essay Three: In Class Essay Focus on local elections, but with close connections between their work and the work of the text. Essay Four: Making an Argument Finally, students were asked to consider the argument of the whole book and to respond with their own position on the issue, using evidence from the text and from up to two outside sources.

Course Outcomes By the end of this course, students will be able to • identify and describe the elements of rhetorical situations • analyze and describe relationships among writers, texts, and audiences • create increasingly complex, analytical writing projects that are purpose-driven • demonstrate a recursive writing process that includes generating ideas, drafting, revising, and editing and apply this writing process to produce successive drafts of increasing quality • provide constructive feedback on the writing of others and use such feedback to improve their own writing • reflect on and describe their rhetorical choices and writing processes • organize, paragraph, and format writing projects effectively • adopt a voice, tone, and level of formality appropriate to task, purpose, and audience • demonstrate sentence-level control, including syntax, grammar, punctuation, and spelling    • use technology to support the writing process and to share texts

Challenges You can get tired of teaching the same book Context determines interpretation How a problem is presented triggers different attitudes Example—“10% chance to win” versus “90% chance to lose” Exercise: examples will show on screen—shout out immediate impressions, potential grade, stuff like that

Challenges Requires more up-front preparation Context determines interpretation How a problem is presented triggers different attitudes Example—“10% chance to win” versus “90% chance to lose” Exercise: examples will show on screen—shout out immediate impressions, potential grade, stuff like that

Challenges Some students not interested in subject matter Context determines interpretation How a problem is presented triggers different attitudes Example—“10% chance to win” versus “90% chance to lose” Exercise: examples will show on screen—shout out immediate impressions, potential grade, stuff like that

Discussion Have any of you tried this yourself? What would scare you about trying this? What would be exciting or freeing?

Don’t Throw the Book at Them Phoebe Reeves Associate Professor of English phoebe.reeves@uc.edu The University of Cincinnati, Clermont College Don’t Throw the Book at Them Materials available at phoebereeves.com TASS 2017