Ken Steele wrote: If some fairy [a good or bad fairy, depending on your druthers] were to make your current intro psych textbook disappear, how much impact would this have on your course? How difficult would it be to continue with your course? I think of how many more interesting books students could buy to read with the $75 they saved from buying an intro textbook. ________________ Ken-- Have you done this? With intro? Anyone? I'm very interested in the idea. I know that several members of our Sociology dept have student read other books--not textbooks-- for their Intro to Soc course. I use the narrative technique to teach many of my upper-level courses. For example, in Adolescent, I rarely require a textbook (although I might make one optional). Instead, I assign 6-10 narrative books (fiction for young adults or case studies). For Adult Development, I make a text optional and require about 6 narrative books. The problems that I have encountered with this are: - I end up feeling boxed in to lecturing during class time, instead of leading discussions, doing demos, etc. - Students sometimes complain that they don't have anywhere to go if they miss notes for some reason -- either b/c they miss class or b/c they just didn't get everything down. (I used to put my notes up on the web to get around this problem, but that takes a lot of work too.) - I wasn't sure that I was "covering" enough. This becomes a recurrent dilemma for me, as I have many other goals for my students beyond learning certain facts (e.g., critical thinking, etc), but I also don't want students to advance to other courses without requisite knowledge to do well and learn from them. I have toyed with the idea of doing the same kind of thing in Intro, but the "coverage" issue always dissuades me. I would love to hear from anyone else who has done anything similar. Marcia Marcia J. McKinley Mt St Mary's
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