Why I Don’t Use Textbooks Anymore

A friend and I were recently talking about college teaching, and we agreed that, when we have the choice (and professors don’t always have the choice), we don’t use textbooks anymore. Why would we, when there are so many excellent trade books from which to choose?

Not that there aren’t some good textbooks, but they aren’t the best option for every class. Take my current Creative Thinking course, for example. Why would I have my students buy an expensive, bloated, heavy, often poorly written textbook from which we might have time to cover a handful of chapters in depth (our term is ten weeks long) when I can assign Dan Pink’s A Whole New Mind and supplement it with different perspectives, up-to-the-moment electronic articles, high-quality video content, and examples from current culture and local events?

Advantages for me?

• Being able to choose the author(s) and content that best fit my students’ needs
• Having the flexibility to adapt course materials and assign newly published database resources
• Offering a greater range of perspectives
• Choosing from a richer variety and, in the subjects I teach, higher quality of titles

Advantages for the students?

• Less expense
• Less back strain (one student recently told me that his Tuesday backpack load is 40 pounds)
• Less waste (few or no unassigned chapters)
• Greater ease of book re-sale (or, from my point of view, more of a chance that the students will find the book useful enough not to re-sell)

This week in class we watched the delightfully creative RSA Animate Ken Robinson video about changing education paradigms (scroll to the bottom of this post to watch it) and discussed how higher education can change to meet the need for creative thinking and production. The students surprised me by being more positive than I’d expected (and more positive than many adults I talk to) about how their classrooms are adapting to 21st century learning. They said that many of their professors understand that students today need to learn more about how to find and sort through information, rather than simply being lectured about content that they can look up in a matter of seconds. They also understand that changing the paradigm isn’t easy, that the magnitude of the change that is needed can’t happen overnight.

Yes, a lot still needs to change, but could it be that we are making greater progress than we realize?

In her Fast Company article, “Why Education Without Creativity Isn’t Enough,” Anya Kamenetz writes of how, in some aspects, anyway, we might just be getting things right:

“Our education system has plenty of critics; I’ve been one of them. But when facing the mercurial demands of today’s job market, it seems there’s still a profound need for the social, discursive, American liberal-arts model at its best.” Read More

The liberal arts model at its best is, itself, changing. While we have much about which to complain and that still needs to be done, I, for one, feel privileged to be teaching in such a transformative, exciting, creative time, when there is always something new to learn and to try.