Teaching Tuesday: More on the Practicum

Like most of America, I’m up and at my keyboard with the Naoya Inoue-Marlon Tapales super undisputed bantam weight bout from Japan, but I’m starting to fret about my spring semester classes. The man class that I’m worried about is the Practicum in Editing and Publishing. I’ve taught this class in the past, but only to a handful of students at a time. Next semester, I’ll have a full class of a dozen students. It feels like I’ll have a bit less flexibility in terms of what I can do with the class and will require a bit more of a plan.

Since there are two major projects (and two minor projects) that require attention next semester, it makes sense to divide the class into two groups. One group will focus on the next issue of NDQ and one group will focus on the Grand Forks 150th project.

 The question is how do I get these groups started on these projects. It seems to me that there  are three ways to learn about editing and publishing. You can write books and get them published and learn about how different publishers and editors do their work first hadn’t. You can read books and pay attention to how they work and how they look. Finally, you can edit and publish as many books as possible and learn on the job. For me, getting published and publishing books has informed my ability to look at books as artifacts of the publishing process in a critical way. 

The tricky thing about this is that we don’t have a lot of time to get up to speed in that both of the major projects have March 1 deadlines. This means that the teams have to not only get up to speed quickly on the content of their projects, but also come to understand something of our “house style.” 

My current plan is to offer three quick assignments at the start of the semester:

Assignment One

Explore the NDQ archive with particular attention to issues published since 2018. Think about structure and content. What kind of content appears in these issues? How is it organized?

Explore The Digital Press catalogue. What kind of books does The Digital Press publish? What are key elements of the “house style”? 

Assignment Two

Identify three of NDQ’s “peer publications.” What are their common features? How do they differ?

Using the library collection, identify some books that might offer some ideas for the Grand Forks 150th project? 

Assignment Three

Working as a team, apply what you’ve learned from NDQ’s archive and peer publications to the current group of contributions to the Quarterly. Identify themes in the work and propose a way to organize the volume.

Working as a team, establish some recommendations and some priorities for the editing and design of the Grand Forks 150th project.

These three assignments should get the students starting to think about both publishing and how publishing (and editing) applies directly to their projects. It should also only occupies the first month of the semester leaving them time to work on their projects in February. 

Next week, I’ll work on how I’ll approach the class after the March 1 deadline!