Required Reading

As a teacher, I've been interested in finding alternatives to big heavy text books for a long time. When I was a student, I always admired the professors who arranged their classes with course readers drawn from media sources and relevant excerpts from various books. This seemed to suggest a higher level of specificity about a class - as if its materials were too timely for the slow-moving textbook publishing industry. So when I started putting together classes, I started making readers. First came Xerox packets, then CD-ROMS and websites. Now I podcast parts of lectures and run a handful of course-specific blogs. I do all this because I think it will help - but I'm sure the textbook publishers think they're helping by concentrating info in one volume, too.

All this comes up because of two things that came across the radar recently - one is an article by Stuart Silverstein in today's Los Angeles Times (Panel Studies the High Cost of College Texts) about hearings into "inflated" book prices. The other is the announcement of a call for papers for a panel being organized by William Ganis of Wells College at the next CAA. "Beatified but not Canonized" proposes scholars look to the last pages of out-of-date art history books to see who the smart money was on at the time of publication. The panel plans to consider how the history of once-acclaimed/ now-obscure artists reflects larger political and aesthetic values. Hmm. Interesting.

What makes these things interesting to me is the combination of two things - first, the assumption that text books are overpriced in the present and, second, that their value might actually increase when they are out of date. I have a small shelf on my bookcase dedicated to wacky art histories that never made it -- books that try to explain abstraction to readers in the 40s, things like that. When students complain that textbooks cost too much and lawmakers start advocating for internet sources, we should pause and think what we'll lose when we trade in the text for the surging tide of internet communication. Information - they say - wants to be free. And it is...if you go to the library where it's usually on reserve. Online, nothing will ever go out of date because revisions will erase the bad information...along with any sense that history is a constant argument over whose story makes the most sense of the facts.

When I think about all the effort I put into learning how to teach when I was a student, I think I might cry. I realize now that teaching is (at best) a partial project for anyone. All one can do is try to coverone's beat adn hope everyone else your students see is doing his or her job, too. But students don't expect that kind of scattershot approach, and they have a right to expect more. Not more accurate or relevant information, but more about how to learn in the first place.