Choosing a Textbook for Your Course--Part 10
This is the 10th and last blog entry from my article on EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION. © Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.When to Consider Not Using a Textbook
Courses without textbooks are a mixed bag. For example, courses bent onindoctrination tend to rely on doctrinal literature rather than a textbook, andinstructors bent on epistemological control may seek to serve as the sole providerof course content. Knowledge is power, and all that. On the other hand, coursesintended to stimulate critical thinking, creative problem solving, and intellectual resynthesis may well rely on primary sources and critical material rather thanstandard textbook fare. Many upper-tier and graduate courses are prime candidates for not using a textbook, especially with motivated, independentlearners with good attendance, and especially in interactive seminar courses with small enrollments that rely heavily on discussion.
Some instructors go for definitive works by “dead great white men,” controversialpopularizations by celebrities, or works of notoriously original thinkers. Imagine,teaching sociology with Georg Simmel or C. Wright Mills, for example, or anthropology with Claude LevyStrauss or Richard Dawkins, or history with Jared Diamond or Howard Zinn. If your purpose is to inculcate, to shake up student mindset, or to promote critical thinking, and if your class relies on free discussion or structured discourse, then you probably should use original texts rather than a textbook. Just include more women and minorities in your selections (if you know what’s good for you), and make sure your students understand why a given contributor is regarded as “great,” controversial,” “original,” or “notorious.”
But know your limits. I once tried to teach world history through primary source excerpts alone. By the 14 th century, just when things were really getting interesting, I could no longer afford photocopies, and the students were becoming mentally exhausted from my “thing of shreds and patches.” My experiment ended with the bewildering (even to me) and hardly representative combination of Al Bakri’s observations of Ghana, Pope Urban’s call to arms for the First Crusade, Marco Polo’s description of the Mongol invasion of Japan, a translation of the “Song of Quetzalcoatl,” Boccaccio’s description of the plague, and a slaver’s ship manifest. Did I order a textbook for the second semester? You bet.
Labels: choosing a textbook, Criteria for textbook selection, custom textbooks
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