Choosing a Textbook for Your Course
This is the first part of a series of posts on how to choose a textbook for a course, from an article I wrote last spring: EVALUATING COLLEGE TEXTBOOKS FOR COURSE ADOPTION© Mary Ellen Lepionka, March 30, 2006. All rights reserved.
As you know, choosing the right texts for your courses is often not as clear and straightforward as you hoped or assumed. Depending on your or your students’ degree of reliance on the textbook to acquire course content, the wrong one can confound learning, eat away class time, skew information, pauperize students (or provide inadequate return on investment), and even sabotage your instructional goals. What to do, then?
Perennial discontent with commercial textbooks has led some instructors to favor primary source material instead, or customized compilations, or interactive text web delivery of course content. The future is here in the form of modularized digitized text, learning objects, and images, delivered online. Distance learning without necessarily the distance. In some colleges across the country, institutions license textbooks that students access chapter by chapter via the intranet. It’s easy to go wrong with electronically delivered content too, but for now I will talk about print textbooks, which remain the norm.
In retrospect, as a college instructor in anthropology, sociology, and world history, I often chose the wrong textbooks. For a time the introductory cultural anthropology students were forced to construct an understanding of that field entirely through ethnographies alone. The physical anthropology students had to buy a lab manual in lieu of labs. The sociology students got a text that the department head later pointed out to me was written by a wellknown Marxist (I had simply liked the flowing “maninthestreet” narrative). And the undergraduate world history students got 2,400 pages of heavily documented text in two volumes and had to buy an atlas besides. I even taught a semester or two using a text I created with what today would be regarded as illegal photocopies. (Fair use definitions for academe were more liberal in the past, mainly through ignorance of copyright law.)
My subsequent career in higher education publishing gave me another perspective on textbook selection. I became enlightened on matters high and low regarding textbook acquisition, development, marketing, and sales. Much of what I have to say here reflects my twin backgrounds as textbook adopter and textbook developer, augmented by memories of textbooks I used as a student in the now distant past. I still remember my Magruder, Dobzhansky, and Harris, for example. What ones do you remember, and what made them stick with you? I keep a shelf of what I call heirloom textbooks, once great titles long out of print. My guidelines for choosing a textbook for your course refer also to these heirlooms. I also will have something to say about when to consider not using a textbook.
Labels: choosing a textbook, evaluating textbooks, textbook adoption, textbooks
posted by Mary Ellen Lepionka @ 9:55 PM
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