Finishing an OER textbook

One of the things I’m doing this semester is writing an Open Educational Resource (OER) textbook for my US History II course. This is the “Reconstruction to the present” half of the survey series, which I teach every other semester. I’m adapting an existing OER for the first time with this project. It’s a big production out of Stanford University called The American Yawp. Along with the Openstax US History I think it’s the most-used open text available at present. I found it far from perfect, but very useful. Especially as a template and a guide to what other US History teachers think is important.

Previously when I’ve taught US History as a teaching assistant or an early-career instructor, I’ve worked with a commercially-published textbook. Over the years I’ve used many, so I’ve been able to watch the formatting or textbooks and also their coverage evolve. Like everything else, textbooks change over time – just ask Jim Loewen! In addition to acknowledging topics that wouldn’t have been included a generation or two ago, textbooks often differ based on the historical tradition or sub-discipline the authors come from. Some take a more data-driven, social history approach, while others attracted to cultural history include literature in an almost “American Studies” way. Some focus on political and military events and motives, while others try to capture the concerns and life experiences of regular people. These are all perfectly legitimate and accurate ways to approach the American past, but I think most people would agree that none of them alone tell the whole story.

Often in the past, a teacher would choose a textbook that did a particular thing (say, names-dates-battles-elections) very well, and then add lectures, supplemental readings, discussion, and media to expand the student’s understanding of life in the past. That’s what I’ve done for years. I also added some additional factual content for my students: as an environmental historian I always want to expand on issues like the Columbian Exchange, while my “revisionist” interest in class conflict has led me to add lectures on the Gilded Age, the labor movement, and similar issues that are covered in less detail than I like in most textbooks.

Rewriting a textbook also allows me to tone down some of the topics I think get a bit more coverage than I want to give them. This can be a tricky negotiation: how do I decide what’s too much coverage in a topic like Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement that has been ignored or papered-over for generations? One of the ways I do that is by comparing many texts and seeing how they’ve changed over time. Another, actually, is by imagining I’m negotiating with the authors and editors of the original text. I try to understand how a team of writers and editors made the decision to include each item. Sometimes I agree a paragraph is vital; other times it feels like one too many examples or like slightly too much enthusiasm for the minute details of something that may be dear to a historical author’s heart, but that students may not really need to know.

There have been paragraphs and whole sections I’ve excised because they felt like rehashes of someone’s dissertation. And there have been sections I’ve added because I just couldn’t believe the authors had forgotten to cover or had chosen to pass over something I consider vital. As I said, this is the first time I’ve used the capability afforded by the Creative Commons license to reuse and “remix” openly-licensed content. It has been an interesting experience of almost being in conversation with the original authors. I haven’t had any actual conversations with them yet. Perhaps that will happen when I publish my version into the Open Textbook Library this summer. I make it very clear throughout my text that I’m adapting the Yawp and adding original content, and I credit all the authors and editors at the end of each chapter I remix. As I reuse my own text, I’ll continue comparing it to other open and closed texts, incorporating new topics and content I think should be included, and improving the form and content of the text. Over time, it will begin to look less like a Yawp-remix and more like a unique thing. I like to think it already looks pretty original, but that will be for readers to judge.

This has been a fairly big project this semester. Each week I’ve written a chapter, based on one or more of the Yawp chapters (my unit “periodization” didn’t exactly match theirs). After the semester ends, I’ll be going through it a final time to clean it up and then this summer it will find its way onto the OTL. I’ll probably make a big announcement: even though nobody makes any money on these projects, we still like them to be seen. That’s probably why we do it.

(image: a draft of one of my chapters in the authoring application Pressbooks)