Textbook Authorship

Topical Development in Textbook Writing

I talked with someone recently who was developing an online textbook. A competition analysis based on online course syllabi had left him fairly baffled about what the course should cover, so he and his colleague had mapped frequency distributions of all the topics expressed in the course syllabi. They then chose the 12 topics with the highest frequencies of use and built the 12-week course around them. Problems arose in marketing the course, however. I said that the problems probably resulted from difficulty of use in teaching the course, caused mainly by the random ordering of a finite number of topics as discrete units of information and by the lack of pedagogy.

I explained that unlike encyclopedias, textbooks are not arbitrary compilations of topics of equal value. Rather, textbooks teach, and learning is constructed from a scope and sequence of interrelated topics nested in an expository structure. The author pointed out that the course was intended for upper-level undergraduates (majors) and grad students. I said that regardless of level, there needed to be a core narrative with learning objectives, a system of headings, and pedagogical devices to engage and guide or aid students in the course. Pedagogical devices include, for example, unit opening and closing elements, figures and tables, glosses for terminology, question sets, and features such as real-world examples, research briefs, news items, or case studies.

The author said that instructors in his field have no background or training in how to teach, and I said, "Aha, the truth is out!" The sad and sorry truth! There's the rub, and why is that? Why (and how) is it that people can get PhDs and teaching appointments in their fields with no training in or even exposure to learning theory, instructional methods, and general pedagogy?

I know this issue has been addressed in the rapid spread of campus-based faculty development centers during the past decade, also in the growing popularization of the idea in intellectual circles that college teaching can be a form of scholarship. The word obviously has not spread far enough, though, and the new era of online exposition surely requires the same kind of background and training. In any case, I am now helping to revise that online textbook (and am glad of it).

Labels: pedagogy, teaching, textbook headings, textbook writing, topical development, writing a textbook

posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 12:52 PM