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Originally Posted by Alexander Turcic
Good question. I found this article on open-source textbooks and how supply is still rather small. |
Interesting read.
Not every discipline has a propensity towards textbooks. In cultural anthropology, we often do not use textbooks at the college level. There are a few universities where for cultural anthropology introductory classes do use textbooks and of course many 2-year colleges do too. But for the most part, we don't assign textbooks and instead we assign course readers which are our own compilation of various articles, book chapters, and so forth, along with actual books. The textbook portion of the course comes in the lectures given. That is, the lectures provide the framework and narrative for tying the course together which essentially a textbook does.
I've always found using textbooks in certain disciplines such as history and cultural anthropology very odd and often inappropriate--although I do want to qualify that in some situations it does demand it such as when you have many EFL (English as a Foreign Language) students where textbooks are easier to follow and takes much less work for the student to tie the course together.
In general though, I think it's more appropriate in fields such as say physical anthropology, maths, and so forth where a bulk of the learning comes from actually having to regurgitate some "hard facts" and information. In cultural anthropology, that often is not the case. Instead, our production of knowledge comes through examining theories, frameworks and putting ideas into conversation with each other rather than having to remember some hard facts.
If I were to teach about the Black Atlantic (black diaspora) there is no reason for a random student taking the class to have to remember details about the history, but what's more important is to understand the theoretical approach, frameworks, assumptions, and claims used in envisioning and creating a Black Atlantic. Those kinds of approaches do not lend itself to traditional textbooks and perhaps textbooks would be very dampening in those arenas of learning.
Perhaps more common for cultural anthropology is what we call readers. These are pre-assembled published compilation of articles for a particular subject in the field. These are no different than the readers that are compiled by the instructor themselves except that the former is published and distributed widely and the latter is only printed for the course being taught.