Accelerated Composition and Rhetoric

Purpose: to help other instructors teaching the same course

Common Course ID: English 104C

CSU Instructor Open Textbook Adoption Portrait

Abstract: This open textbook is being utilized in an English course for undergraduate or graduate students by Kerry Marsden, M.A. at Humboldt State University. The open textbook provides an accessible introduction to modern concepts in writing practices. The main motivation to adopt an open textbook was to because the textbook worked so well with the class’s new focus on writing studies. Most student access the open textbook in Canvas.

ENGL 104. Accelerated Composition and Rhetoric 
This course has no prerequisites. It counts for the Lower Division GE Area A requirement. Course catalog.
Brief Description of course highlights: 

Student population:  English 104 is for students from all majors, and it’s designed for people with limited experience in the field.
Learning or student outcomes: 

1. Develop and articulate a writing researcher identity.
2. Develop and apply flexible composing processes and practices.
3. Develop and apply knowledge of multiliteracies and discourse communities.
4. Develop and apply knowledge of discourse, genre, rhetoric and identity. 

Syllabus and/or Sample assignment from the course or the adoption: To illustrates how the open textbook is used in the course.
Share any curricular or pedagogical changes that you made: In Marsden’s case, the pedagogical shift came first. Their use of OER has more to do with a radical shift in their pedagogical practices--with the move to a focus on writing studies comes new textbooks to use that speak to those ideas, which they happened to find in the OER texts they’re using.

Textbook or OER/Low cost Title: Bad ideas about Writing - ENGL 104. Accelerated Composition and Rhetoric has no prerequisites. It counts for the Lower Division GE Area A requirement. Course catalog.
Brief Description: Taken from their reader synopsis: “Bad Ideas About Writing counters major myths about writing instruction…. The collection offers opinionated, research-based statements intended to spark debate and to offer a better way of teaching writing. Contributors, as scholars of rhetoric and composition, provide a snapshot of and antidotes to major myths in writing instruction.” The text is also designed for college students, so it’s writing is clear and accessible.

Authors:  Cheryl E. Ball, Drew M. Loewe (editors)
 
Student access:  Marsden will make each chapter available as a .pdf while also linking to the full text.

Supplemental resources: The instructor will supplement their textbooks with stuff from Writing Spaces, another OER material

Cost Savings: The instructor still also asks their students to buy a $60 copy of Writing About Writing. Using Bad Ideas About Writing and Writing Spaces, however, keeps the class from spending money on a second textbook that would potentially double the cost of the class.

License: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 International License.

OER/Low Cost Adoption Process

Provide an explanation or what motivated you to use this textbook or OER/Low Cost option. Marsden is keyed into the conversation around how expensive textbooks are, choosing to include some OER resources in their classroom because of an awareness of students’ economic situations. They recognize that, for some students, the decision to attend Humboldt State is a financial one--they don’t want to burden their students with too many unnecessary purchases.

How did you find and select the open textbook for this course? Bad Ideas About Writing thanks to another member of the English department’s glowing recommendation. Something similar happened when they found Writing Practices. Someone suggested an article from there, and when they checked the source, they found out it was OER.

Sharing Best Practices: Humboldt State University’s OER research guides make finding OER much easier because they’re organized by discipline.

Kerry Marsden 
Humboldt University
 

Our English Composition and Rhetoric course here at HSU will likely be very different from other English courses you've ever taken. In this course, we will study writing as a discipline—that is, writing as an academic subject like biology or history.  We will read and discuss exciting ideas about writing—like how genres help writers and readers, how writing is always situational, and how the genres that groups use both reflect and shape their values. As a writing researcher, you will not just read writing about writing written by scholars in the field, but also collect, analyze, and interpret texts in order to develop your own understanding of what writing is and how it works. We will, of course, also write—in multiple genres and for multiple purposes.