{"id":25,"date":"2017-05-10T15:18:36","date_gmt":"2017-05-10T15:18:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/gauntos\/chapter\/case-study-expanding-open-anthology-of-earlier-american-literature\/"},"modified":"2021-08-26T12:55:58","modified_gmt":"2021-08-26T12:55:58","slug":"case-study-expanding-open-anthology-of-earlier-american-literature","status":"publish","type":"chapter","link":"https:\/\/integrations.pressbooks.network\/gauntos\/chapter\/case-study-expanding-open-anthology-of-earlier-american-literature\/","title":{"raw":"Case Study: Expanding the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature","rendered":"Case Study: Expanding the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature"},"content":{"raw":"

OER, Open Pedagogy, and the Early American Literature Survey<\/h2>\r\nAt the start of each semester, I write a simple maxim on the board for discussion: \u201cAll people are equally intelligent.\u201d The underlying claim, in a paraphrased line from radical philosopher Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, is that any measurable differences in \u201cintelligence\u201d have more to do with access than with intellect. So, before course themes, content, objectives, or outcomes, I insist upon equality as a first principle and a constant practice. Then, as a group, we deliberate: what does \u201cequal\u201d mean in this context? How about \u201cintelligent\u201d? Is the claim true? How does it call upon us to relate to one another? Before the hour is up, we find ourselves in a thick of pedagogical inquiry, from which students tend to reach a fragile but thoughtful consensus: There really exists no one-size-fits-all measure for intelligence. Furthermore, the acquisition of knowledge assumed to be the epitome of individual intelligence--the \u201cJeopardy contestant\u201d theory of smarts, as one student called it--is a tragic misconception. Learning, instead, is a collaborative enterprise: it\u2019s dialogic, responsive and revisable according to new information, and applicable to our everyday experience. So, yes, all people are in fact equally intelligent once we define \u201cintelligence\u201d more aptly as lived experimentation, rather than the highest grades and test scores.\r\n\r\nI\u2019m very clear with my students from the start: I wholeheartedly believe and affirm this principle. It's that very faith which prompted me to take up the ambitious Open Anthology project described below. And now I hope to build on that text and the pedagogical practices it demands for the rest of my scholarly career.\r\n

Teaching a survey of \u201cEarly American Literature\u201d<\/h2>\r\nTwo years ago, I was fortunate to be hired out right of graduate school and onto the tenure track as an \u201cEarly Americanist.\u201d All that means, effectively, is that, every year for the foreseeable future, I\u2019ll be teaching the English Department survey course titled \u201cAmerican Literature to 1900.\u201d That covers the period ranging from colonial contact with the \u201cNew World\u201d (the world \u201cnew\u201d to Europeans, that is) to the United States\u2019 industrial era, i.e., the beginnings of America\u2019s ascension to a global power.\r\n\r\nI\u2019ll go on the record and say it\u2019s impossible to adequately cover any four centuries of literary history. But the truth is, I\u2014newbie I was\u2014made the task all the more impossible. For here I was, freshly trained in literary studies, newly recovering from the discipline\u2019s foundational urge to \u201ccover\u201d everything. My students, of course, would read deeply within and widely across the tradition\u2019s most celebrated authors. At the same time, it was my sacred duty to introduce the significant works of literature recovered since the explosion of \"canon\" in the last four to five decades. That includes the ever-growing roster of prose, poetry, and drama written by women, indigenous peoples, Africans and African-Americans, South American and Latinx authors, and ethnic immigrants.\r\n\r\nSo I went to work composing a reading list that could combine (or in the very least mediate) these opposing impulses. As a student of social movements, I like to adopt social history as a methodology, and so I saw \u201cAmerican Literature to 1900\u201d as an opportunity to chart the various and contentious stories of the culture\u2019s movements towards emancipation and equality. As \u201cAmerica\u201d was made into European colonies and eventually a liberal (white, patriarchal, landowner) democracy, from a country of farms and frontiers into an industrialized economic and military power, its literature played an important role in expanding the reading public and creating the definition of a nation. The course tracked roughly chronologically and featured the representative authors and texts. Indigenous creation stories confronted European colonial documents; the early texts of New England\u2019s Puritan pulpits were met and challenged by the voices and pens of native peoples, African slaves, and women writers. The American Revolution gave way to an explosion of social movements and an expansion of the canon stretching from Thomas Paine\u2019s republican propaganda to the birth of African-American letters in Phillis Wheatley. The selections from the early nineteenth century included the familiar names of the \u201cAmerican Renaissance\u201d \u2014 Emerson, Poe, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville \u2014 in tandem with the literature of women\u2019s rights and abolitionism. The final post-Civil War push balanced the social writings of the Gilded Age and Reconstruction with the co-emergence of realist fiction.\r\n\r\nThis literary historical narrative will seem familiar to Early American scholars, as will the course structure and the palpable tension it produced between content covered and time allowed. What was never at issue, for me, was locating a textbook. See, the literature survey course sports its own special media, the anthology; nearly exhaustive, this master text\u2019s pedagogical significance is matched only by its physical mass. The leading Early American anthologies on the academic market, \u2014 Wiley\u2019s The Literatures of Colonial America<\/em>[footnote]Susan Castillo, and Ivy Schweitzer, eds.\u00a0The Literatures of Colonial America<\/em>, (Wiley: 2001),\u00a0http:\/\/www.wiley.com\/WileyCDA\/WileyTitle\/productCd-063121125X.html.[\/footnote]<\/a> and Norton\u2019s Anthology of American Literature<\/em>[footnote]Nina Baym, et al., The Norton Anthology of American Literature<\/em>, (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.: 2011),\u00a0http:\/\/books.wwnorton.com\/books\/detail.aspx?ID=23664.[\/footnote]<\/a> \u2014 are the size of small encyclopedias, coming in at 602 and 1845 pages, respectively. These truly impressive scholarly books, which introduced me and the current crop of Early American scholars to the field, have done a great deal in shaping our syllabuses and lesson plans, and, as a consequence, our conception of the era\u2019s literary output. That\u2019s not necessarily a bad thing. Again, these anthologies are excellent, compiled and edited by leading scholars in the field--all acquainted and attentive to the concerns of teaching the literature survey course.\r\n\r\nThat first fall semester, I decided to assign the Norton edition, chiefly because it contains Mark Twain\u2019s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in its entirety. I figured a classic piece of fiction, one that allowed us to approach\u00a0the fault lines between race, slavery, Reconstruction, and national identity, would make for a brilliant capstone. Yet for all of its helpful background material, framed by the anthology\u2019s wonderfully generative thematic groupings, our class never truly used the book. Admittedly, that\u2019s due in part to the sizable number of students who never even laid hands on it. The latest edition of the Norton American literature anthology retails at $81.25 to purchase and between $16 to $25 for a six-month rental. For many working-class, first-generation students, the costs of the text--or, the means to access it, a credit card, for example--are simply prohibitive. As a result, just two or three students bought the latest edition outright\u2014though, they were all generous enough to share with friends. Some purchased older, used versions from online booksellers; still more relied on the web versions of assigned readings that I\u2019d linked to on the course site.\r\n\r\nThe ensuing scramble and unevenness of our discussions proved a semester-long irritant. The medium was always\u00a0the message. The few students who purchased\u00a0the text had access to all the introductory material and paratextual supplements Norton offered. The rest had different editions with different page numbers, or online texts without page numbers; all seemed to be missing crucial excerpts at some point in the term. While a handful of students read along in physical texts during class discussion, others multitasked on laptops or squinted through smartphone screen readings; still others, lacking any portable device, simply stared at the front of the room. It was a logistical nightmare of my own doing because, let\u2019s face it, the college anthology has one real utility and aim: to centralize all course content in an edited and professional manner ready to be taught. That is its appeal. The problem here was that, at the same time, the anthology was making some assumptions about our students, not just in its hefty price tag, but in its very centralizing and authoritative structure.\r\n\r\nAll the anthology had done for us at this point, where half the class hadn\u2019t adopted it, was allow me to dictate the content of \u201cAmerican Literature to 1900,\u201d raising \u201ccoverage\u201d of authors and texts to supreme importance. To \u201clearn\u201d the period\u2019s literature, then, was to consume a whole bunch of texts, be they found in a fresh, glossy, weighty anthology or retrieved as HTML code on one\u2019s screen of choice.\r\n

Open Educational Resources and the Literature Anthology<\/h2>\r\nRight away, I decided I would scrap the paperback anthology the following fall, but I wavered on an alternative outside of simply posting a syllabus of hyperlinks on the site and providing introductory context through mini-lectures. Wasn\u2019t that just \u201cbanking education\u201d for the digital age?\r\n\r\nIn the waning months of graduate school, -- when I should have been writing -- I began reading up on the burgeoning discussion around Open Educational Resources (OER), materials made free and available on the web to be accessed, downloaded, revised, and recirculated. The conversations of OER had already evolved beyond advocacy for their adoption as learning content, moving instead to sketch the larger contours of Open Education as a pedagogical principle. Recent studies--like the Florida Virtual Campus\u2019s annual surveys[footnote]\"2016 Student Textbook and Course Materials Survey,\" Florida Virtual Campus<\/em>, October 7, 2016, http:\/\/www.openaccesstextbooks.org\/pdf\/2016_Florida_Student_Textbook_Survey.pdf.[\/footnote]<\/a> --underscore that the integration of free and open textbooks cut costs, increase access, and improve student learning. Still, over and above replacing expensive industry textbooks, OER proponents contemplate how the virtues inherent to open materials necessitate new kinds of teaching and learning, methods that embrace the open ethos to reuse, remix, revise, and redistribute in content and practice. David Wiley, for example, has challenged[footnote]David Wiley, \"What is Open Pedagogy,\" iterating toward openness<\/em>, October 21, 2013,\u00a0https:\/\/opencontent.org\/blog\/archives\/2975.[\/footnote]<\/a> instructors to discard the \u201cdisposable\u201d individual assignment in favor of collaborative and \u201crenewable\u201d open projects. Gardner Campbell recently called[footnote]Gardner Campbell, \"2017: Quarks, Love and Insight,\" Gardner Campbell's professional website, January 1, 2017, http:\/\/www.gardnercampbell.net\/blog1\/?p=2603[\/footnote]<\/a> for an Open Pedagogy centered on producing insight, where educators turn design over to students, encouraging them to take responsibility for their own learning. The discourse spoke to me.\r\n\r\nIn line with its disciplinary history, literary studies found itself at the forefront of open initiatives. Thus, after just a few weeks spent revisiting conversations around #openped<\/a>, I discovered Robin DeRosa\u2019s rather heroic \u201copen anthology,\u201d a text she created together with her Early American Literature students at Plymouth State. The project entailed that students read widely through the Early American syllabus and decide collectively which authors to excerpt and provide contextual materials for, before polishing and collecting their works in an online anthology to be read and revised by the following crop of students. Drawing on the legacy of Paulo Freire, DeRosa described[footnote]Robin DeRosa, \"My Open Textbook: Pedagogy and Practice,\" Robin DeRosa's professional website, May 18, 2016, http:\/\/robinderosa.net\/uncategorized\/my-open-textbook-pedagogy-and-practice\/.[\/footnote]<\/a> the project in more detail:\r\n\r\nThe open textbook allowed for student contribution to the \u201cmaster text\u201d of the course, which seemed to change the whole dynamic of the course from a banking model (I download info from the textbook into their brains) to an inquiry-based model (they converse with me and with the text, altering both my thinking and the text itself with their contributions).\r\n\r\nThe more I learned of the project, the more I liked it; and so, in true Open Pedagogy fashion, I stole it to redesign\u00a0my own course.\r\n\r\nAdopting the user-friendly Pressbooks[footnote]Pressbooks, https:\/\/pressbooks.com\/.[\/footnote]<\/a> software, DeRosa and her students had managed to put together a promising framework for the \u201cmaster text\u201d in just a semester\u2019s time, what became the Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature.<\/em>[footnote]Robin DeRosa, The Open Anthology of Earlier American Literature<\/em> (Public Commons Publishing: 2015). https:\/\/openamlit.pressbooks.com\/.[\/footnote]<\/a>\u00a0As I reimagined the survey, following their lead and content, I saw that my inclination towards social history would be easy enough to retain. So, in the first half of our most recent iteration of \u201cAmerican Literature to 1900,\u201d we read through the texts published in the extant Pressbooks anthology--which included a potpourri of canonical and \u201cminor\u201d writers--interspersed with selections from some of the more conspicuously absent names, including Roger Williams, James Fenimore Cooper, William Apess, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Margaret Fuller. Throughout the term, students agreed to complete short reading engagement worksheets, designed to both guide our in-class discussion and provide \u201ctraining\u201d in the editing skills needed to build out the anthology. In the latter half, we shifted focus to the hands-on project of remaking the anthology. We dedicated the final months to reading and discussing Open Education and Creative Commons licensing, learning the software, and practicing plenty on putting together materials for the various elements of the anthology\u2014editing texts, locating and annotating biographical and secondary research, writing introductions, developing supplementary materials, and deliberating on how to make the texts \u201cteachable.\u201d Teams of three built entries for authors and texts not yet represented, and, in the final weeks of the term, led a classroom lesson based on their newly designed anthology chapter.\r\n\r\nTruth be told, the analytical skills on display above are the same honed in any upper-level literature course, and they\u2019re assessed through similar assignments: regular reading and discussion, oral presentations, secondary research, critical source annotation, literature reviews, etc. The core difference came in the final product, and here there is, I think, a significant distinction. The traditional boss-level challenge in an English course is the literary critical essay, i.e., it is the peer-reviewed journal article in miniature\u2014only in a\u00a0version read and peer-reviewed by just one expert, the professor. Don\u2019t get me wrong, I still assign essays and I believe there\u2019s much to be gained from the craft, especially in terms of sharpening argumentation. But I think most literature instructors will confess to the assignment\u2019s utter \u201cdisposability,\u201d which is to say, while the skills developed and assessed in essay writing should endure over the course of a student\u2019s college career--and hopefully throughout their life--the actual assignment almost certainly will not. For her, the essay dies mercifully at the professor\u2019s desk, resurrected momentarily only as a final grade is uploaded to the registrar\u2019s website. That abrupt conclusion couldn\u2019t be more at odds with the intellectual afterlife of the professional essay, where publication at least aspires to respond and further instigate critical dialogue.\r\n\r\nAt its best, then, an \u201copen\u201d project like the student-designed anthology should simulate those aspects of intellectual collaboration and growth. Nowhere is that\u00a0connection more apparent than in the project\u2019s demand\u00a0for assessment. In our course, each group met with me to negotiate a grading contract that addressed the entire scope of their chapter, complete with an outline of group members\u2019 roles and workload and criteria for evaluation and grading. The practice forced students to take a kind of critical ownership of the project by thinking both proactively and reflectively on their own learning and engagement.\r\n

Some Practical Advice<\/h2>\r\nDear reader, if by now you count yourself among the Open Anthology-converted, perhaps you\u2019re curious still about the finer details that go into re-organizing a survey course around an OER project. I leave you with a few tidbits of wisdom from my experience--including a sample syllabus and assignments, all of which you are welcome to steal (I mean, retain, reuse, revise, remix, and redistribute<\/a>)[footnote]\"Defining the 'Open' in Open Content and Open Educational Resources,\" Opencontent.org<\/em>, http:\/\/www.opencontent.org\/definition\/.[\/footnote] for your own course.\r\n

\u201cSyllabus Day\u201d<\/h2>\r\n