So my name is Billy Middleton. I've been with at Stephens Institute of technology since twenty eleven. And I've been teaching in what was formerly known as the freshman experience program for the twelve years that I've been there. We recently changed our name to foundations of writing in critical inquiry, and we're excited to have this custom reader that we've worked on with Zanadu to help us sort of inaugurate this new program title and identity that we are launching in the next academic year. So a brief overview of the course where we use the Zanadu custom reader The Cal one zero three writing communications course is designed to empower students with the written and oral communication skills, that they'll need for academic success, for success in the professional world beyond that as well. We asked them to apply these skills by writing and speaking about contemporary issues in today's global society. And we also teach them important components of the writing process such as revision, peer review, and scholarly research, and we were able working with Zenadu, we were able to design a custom reader that addresses all of the skills that we want to impart on our students. A lot of students come to Stephens with ideas about what writing is supposed to be, what reading is supposed to be, there's a lot of students because we teach at an engineering school there are a lot of students who are hesitant about academic writing and reading, having a custom reader that allows us to engage them with texts that are interesting to them, that speak to the theme that we're trying to use in the class room. We generally try to pick a theme that's interesting to students, and so having this custom rear where we can put together a wide variety of techs with a wide variety of voices that will speak to any student helps to get them engaged in that process. And then the fact that we can also have a section of the reader devoted chiefly just a composition helps them learn the skills that they might not have fully internalized in high school, And it also helps them to combine those skills with the course theme that we are talking about in the other section of the reader. Having this shared experience among all of the first year students creates something that's kind of safe and comforting to them. Again, it goes back to that idea of the fact that it's a common ground that they can all share with each other and discuss with each other. So here's what's going on in my writing class, and then talking to their friends, hearing what's going on in their writing class, and finding out that There is some sort of shared experience that they can bond with their new colleagues over. So our previous course theme was education. We're transitioning to the course theme of community this coming academic year. And I had been using education is a course thing for a couple of years prior to the shift to the custom radar. So It was an opportunity for me to talk a little bit about some of the texts I'd already been using and share those texts with my colleagues. And to encounter new texts from them as well. I think one of the things I did wanna talk about is not just how the reader has to the students, but also how it's beneficial to the faculty as well because it does allow us to exchange ideas and approaches on whatever course theme we're using. So that ultimately in the end, we come up with a custom reader that reflects all of our perspectives and approaches to that theme And then the fact that the sort of unified perspective among faculty The fact that we have this unified perspective among faculty allows us to impart it upon the students much more effectively. That we can all be on the same page when discussing these themes and just writing a communication in general. So One of the things that I think is useful and valuable about this diversity in voices that we've tried to incorporate into this most recent reader is the fact that whether they are relatively recent readings, and we do have some, they're fairly recent within the past ten years or so. Whether they're relatively recent readings or whether they're older readings, I think that what we've chosen reflects issues that are still current and present and resonant today. And I'll go ahead and add that the composition readings that we've included. Also, reflect issues of how socioeconomic can affect a a student's ownership of their own reading and writing and how it can shape their feelings about their ability to communicate with others. And so having these in addition to the community theme tech having these composition texts that will reflect concerns that students currently have. I think really helps make connections with between how writing regarding how writing and communication are so important to being able to address a lot of the social issues that we're dealing with today. I think if you ask students what they appreciate about the reader. That would be in their top four or five things that they mentioned because the reader is definitely much more affordable than a lot of their textbooks for other courses, you know, particularly the engineering and science courses. They may have textbooks costs three hundred dollars. And so being able to make the work with this custom made reader, allows us to keep the costs low for this particular text, which students definitely appreciate, and also having worked with non custom made readers, you know, textbooks by the big textbook companies, I can say from experience that those are also usually about twice the cost of what students are paying for our custom made readers. So, yeah, they definitely appreciate afford affordability of the text, and so do we, because we want them to buy the reader and be willing to use it in the classroom. One of the things that we appreciate is that the does just We haven't really talked much about the actual artifact of the textbook, and I think one of the elements of that that I appreciate is that it's designed in such a way that encourages students to annotate the text. You know, there are spaces in the margins specifically for students to make notes. And so we can encourage that in the classroom. We can encourage students to bring their textbooks with them to the classroom or if they have the ebook version, which a lot of students appreciate that as well, being able to have access to it is a is a PDF document, or if they have that version, you know, they can still bring it to a classroom with them and make notes on separate paper. But the fact that the very design of the textbook encourages students to make notes in the margins to annotate as they read is something that I think is valuable and useful about the design. Because it stresses for students the importance of active reading particularly when they are reading academically. One trend I've noticed is that students do tend to get more engaged with the readings with its readings that the faculty are more passionate about as well. So I guess passionate passion would be another keyword that we might think about. When these are all texts that are chosen by faculty. So they're texts that faculty have worked with in the past, their texts that faculty are very familiar with and care deeply about, think are valuable and useful for students. And so when we bring those texts into the classroom, naturally we're going to present them in a way that's more engaging and more passionate. And so students are a lot more likely to buy into the readings that we're presenting to them than if we're using some textbook by a big textbook company and we just have to choose the four readings we like best, out of a bunch that we may not even be familiar with. So the familiarity and the passion about the text that we're using is something that we can translate to students as well. One thing that I will make note of is that we have our course outcome and program outcome questions in mind as we're designing the some reader, which I think is a huge advantage of custom readers in general. You know, we can create that stronger connection between the texts we're using. And what we're trying to teach our students to accomplish. So for example, one of the one of our course outcomes focuses specifically on issues of global importance. And when we talk about global importance, we mean global both in the sense that we wanna deal with issues that extend beyond just, you know, what we have traditionally labeled Western civilization or whatever. But it also deals with issues of global importance in that these are issues that matter to everybody, students, faculty, people out on the street across the world. So right? So we can choose texts that speak to whatever theme we've chosen specifically, and then also text that can connect that theme to a lot of the issues of global importance that we're seeing in the world today. So going back to the discussion of how many of our diverse techs deal with issues of socioeconomics or equal rights, issues that are still ongoing and pressing today, not just in America, but across the globe. We can choose text that specifically help us speak speak to, that issues of global importance course outcome, as well as others that we want students to learn as well. Challenges that we face with first year students that the reader has helped solve, I would say I would go back to one of the things I was saying earlier is the idea that we have this dive student body that comes to Stevens that is diverse, not just in identity, but also in perspectives about writing the communication and their importance to them. You know, sometimes we have students who are very excited to have these first year courses where they can talk about something other than math and science all day, where they can talk about humanistic issues, dealing with those students who don't have that particular mindset, dealing with those students who are very career driven, who are very focused on return on investment, which is a big buzzword that gets kicked around among Stephen's students a lot. Dealing with those students who are more business oriented or professionally oriented. I think the custom reader has helped a lot with reaching those students who might have those guards up against a class like this to begin with, simply because, as I said earlier, if we are passionate about the type we're using, and we obviously are because we chose to include them. It's going to make even those students who are skeptical about this course or about these readings, it's going to make them more engaged with the readings as well. So I think that's the biggest thing that the custom reader has helped us with. The last thing I would wanna talk about that we haven't touched on yet, really, is just the ease of this process of creating the custom reader. You know, we met as a faculty, we put together a reader committee that met several times over the past academic year to brainstorm on what readings we wanted to include and everything else. And then when we took the final completed list to Mandy at Zanadu. You know, we had concern there are always minor concerns about will the rights be available, how much will it how much will it cost to put together this reader. Mandy was so easy to work with. It really just boiled down to uploading the lists of text that we wanted included in the reader, and then she did all that behind the scenes work to check all of that stuff, and it all worked out completely smoothly. This time around. There were no issues with any of that, and the cost is about comparable to what the custom reader has been in the past. There were no real hiccups anywhere in the process, and that's that's something that's very rare to say about just about anything in academia these days.
