Textbooks in the classroom: a few thoughts.
One might look, for example, at Ken Macrorie's books, or Elbow's Writing with Power or Brannon, Knight, and Neverow-Turk's Writers Writing. Here, in more intimate, self-conscious personas, the monolith of correctness is recast in a less important form, and attention shifts to the act of writing. But of course the result is no less propaganda. The only difference is that an alternative set of political values is at work. To frame it in somewhat oversimplified terms, the "traditional" texts present writing as a matter of learning to conform, with an emphasis on decorum as a means of identify- ing individual with group; whereas the "non-traditional" books present it as a liberating activity, a means of defining individual as separate from group. The point here is that writing is necessarily more complex, and more variable, than either position can depict-encompasses both of them, and more. In either case, then, the users of such books are presented with proselytizers who differ only in their particular doctrinal allegiance: in short, with propaganda. (31)
--Stephen North in The Making of Knowledge in Composition
* Writing manuals and how-to textbooks devalue the role and integrity of the composition instructor. They follow in a long and storied tradition of seeing the act of teaching as a non-academic or non-intellectual activity. In short, it turns the instructor from a practicing academic into a mere clerk or technician that carries out predetermined activities and routines. A writing manual allows instructors to think less about teaching and consequently prevents them from engaging in self-reflexive pedagogy.
* Textbooks remove the most important element of learning from the equation: the student. It relegates authority to entities external to the localized, specific classroom (e.g., publishing companies, textbook authors, etc).
* The yearly cost of tuition at the University of Minnesota is now over five figures. For many students, it is much more once living expenses are added in. The average student debt upon leaving the University of Minnesota is in excess of $20,000; one of the highest figures in the mid-west for a public university. Government funded aid is lessening and state support is drying up. A 60 dollar textbook represents a small fraction of the total expense of going to college. Yet, a lot of 60 dollar textbooks add up over the course of 4 years.
* Most (if not all) writing manuals are geared towards writing correctly to fill out mythical standard forms of writing with out considering that these forms are constantly changing as they are composed. Research of professional and technical writers has time and time again noted that "correctness" in writing is one small part of many factors that go into being able to "write well."
* The prevalence of writing manuals is a reflection of the state of the discipline and not a reason to use such texts in the classroom. Educators who specialize in composition are actually a tiny minority of people who actually teach composition. The majority of composition instructors are specialists in other areas or graduate students from other fields. For these instructors, the belief is that writing manuals and text books are necessary as the information and knowledge contained within them is too important to let a non-specialist handle on their own. Simply put, it "teacher-proofs" a classroom.
* Textbooks introduce corporations and their marketing into the classroom, whereby decisions of how to teach are guided by successful marketing of publishing company representatives and not necessarily academic or scholarly research/theory. Consequently, the available set of "teaching methods" becomes constrained by what the market makes available to instructors. Further, new theories of writing are constrained by what could be used in a textbook.
* Textbook publishers are typically for-profit endeavors who make a profit from first year writing classes, creating troublesome conflicts of interest for both instructors as well as departments.
* It is unavoidable that textbooks create an environment where students "discover" or "locate" the correct answers, principles, or theories instead of creating them.
* Local, community, individual, and inter-generational forms of knowledge are devalued while institutional, non-localized forms of knowledge via experts contained within writing guides are privileged.
* Writing manuals and textbooks perpetuate a specific ideology of what the classroom should look like and how it should operate. Reliance on textbooks makes it difficult (if not impossible) to envision other, alternative, and potentially viable/valuable ways of understanding the mechanics of the classroom space. An inability to even conceive of how a class might work with out a textbook at the center of it demonstrates how narrow our conceptions of how learning happens really are.
* Textbooks and writing manuals run the risk of being the educational equivalent of setting a child down in front of a TV in order to socialize it.
* When we select a textbook, not only are we supporting the ideologies contained within the book, but we are also perpetuating the system and the network (in all of its socio-political facets) that created and consequently ensure the hegemony of the textbook as the primary source of instruction. In short, the purpose of the textbook ideology is the preservation of the textbook ideology, especially when we consider that much of the information contained within various writing guides and manuals can be found for free in other places (e.g., the internet, libraries, and most importantly, communicative communities).