TIPSters-- I hope that sounded like "Doctors without Borders." Once the Glorious Canadian Invasion happens, we can be "Professeurs sans Cahiers," which sounds even cooler.
I experimented this year with teaching a course (adult development) without a textbook, and I *highly* recommend it. I used Dan McAdams' *Stories that We Live by* as the primary text, and assigned a few other readings during the class. Students responded very well to being asked to pay $19 rather than $100 for a textbook, and I was perceived from the outset as being friendly, on their side, and respectful of their situation. This is priceless. They also *read* the book, because it was genuinely interesting and well-written. I know they read it, because even though I didn't administer any tests, they often referred to examples from the book in their writing assignments and class discussions. Knowing that they were doing the reading freed me up in lectures not to simply repeat the material, but to engage it critically, and spend more time lecturing on topics that weren't covered in McAdams. Material that is dry by nature (the cognitive and physical effects of aging, for example) is more pleasant to receive, and more easily understandable, when you can listen to someone explain it. Ask yourself--when you are trying to learn a new computer system, do you prefer to read the manual, or have a techie friend come over and walk you through it? The main objections to not using a textbook seem to me to be based on false premises. One is that non-textbooks are less objective, and tend to come from a certain point of view, as opposed to the neutrality of textbooks. I don't believe this is a bad thing. Objectivity and neutrality are illusory. It is better to make your perspective explicit than to pretend not to have one. Perhaps neutrality is possible in the hard sciences, but not in the social sciences. We are always operating from a set of premises, implicit in the very way we choose to define and operationalize our topics of research. It's more intellectually honest, and also more thematically coherent, to choose a point of view and explore it thoroughly. In my class, for example, I made it clear that we were going to explore issues of adult development through the lens of narrative psychology. Even when I lectured on outside topics, I kept bringing it back to the issues of narrative: how do people interpret the various aspects of aging? Are there some ways of interpretation that are more adaptive than others? Do certain populations tend to tell different types of stories about life events, and why? These statements relate to the second criticism of non-textbooks, which is that they do not cover enough information. Again, this is factually true, but I think it misses the point. I don't believe that we're trying to fill the students up with a bunch of psychological facts; we're trying to teach them to *think psychologically*. This is, of course, a philosophical point of view, but I think it can be borne out pragmatically as well: they don't *remember* the facts, so there's little point emphasizing them. How many facts do you remember from any particular class you took in graduate school? I would probably do worse on the GRE psychology subject test today than I did prior to grad school, but there is no doubt that my understanding of psychology is deeper, seven years later, than it was when I got that (97% percentile--sorry, I had to boast) score. I now have a context to put information into, and a way of thinking that enables me to analyze and evaluate the raw data of everyday life, that doesn't always come packaged neatly as a textbook fact. I don't think it's at all unreasonable to believe that we can teach undergraduates this way as well. I hope this has been clear--I'm writing it rather on the fly, as I'm trying to articulate ideas that I've not put into words before. Robin ********************** Robin Pearce Abrahams Boston University [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
