1. Don’t Throw the Book at Them
Phoebe Reeves Associate Professor of English
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

2. 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?

3. Textbook Costs Over Time

4. Other Current Text Choices
$80 new
$70 new

5. My Recent Text Choices

6. 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

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

8. Advantages
Creates depth of critical thought

9. Advantages
Opportunity for carefully tiered essay tasks

10. Advantages
Develops confidence and more sophisticated reading skills

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

12. Advantages
Provides deeper context for their own writing

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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. 

16. 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.

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

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

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