Text, Textbooks, and Teaching

As I work away on preparing my History 101 class for the University of North Dakota’s new Scale-up class room, I’ve had to start to think about textbooks more seriously. This is particularly pertinent for this class as the goal of the course is to not only digest a range of different textbooks, but also to produce a textbook.

So it was very helpful that Richard Rothaus pointed me in the direction of the 2005 SAA Record which featured a number of articles on comics in archaeology. The most interesting of these came from Mitch Allen who talked about the value of using comic books in the introduction to archaeology classroom. He noted that comic books required a re-examination of how we teach because the shift from the standard “dry-as-dust” textbook prose to illustration and dialogue forces authors to reflect carefully the relationship between the medium and the message. A comic book that simply inscribes traditional textbook language into the dialogue of illustrated figures fails as completely as a comic book that allows plots, story, or the structure of comic cells to obscure the presentation of the expected content.

This short article got me to think about how using different media in my History 101 class might stimulate the students to reflect critically both on what and how information is communicated. I’ve envisioned the main medium for communication in my Scale-up class to be individual or collaborative text. For quite some time, I have held the philosophy that our students are text-deprived. They live in a world where it is all too easy to avoid the hard work of reading, analyzing, and producing critical information in formal texts. So despite my disciplinary predilections toward material and visual culture, I’ve grounded my introductory level courses in the culture of text as a tool to get students to confront reading and writing as vital parts of our intellectual heritage. Of course, the growing emphasis on critical thinking skills have challenged the primacy of texts as the quintessential medium for critical communication (although, to be fair, a growing body of popular literature that has recognized writing as vital tool in the critical thinkers toolbox.)

So on the eve of teaching a course that centers on the critical analysis and production of texts, I have stopped to consider whether pushing the students to work in a different medium could help them think more carefully about the delivery of content, analysis, and interpretation. While producing comic books is probably a bit too much for a 100 level class, I am thinking that I will shift some part of my text producing time to work on maps, timelines, and other graphic forms of communicating the content and analysis of their work. Perhaps, as Richard Rothaus has tried, I’ll get my students to do some writing by hand with the idea that the change in format can encourage students to think through a problem in a different way. I might also suggest that the students experiment with concept mapping as advocated by my buddy Bret Weber.