Text Selection and Course Design: Faculty Perspectives on Critical Reading and Critical Thinking

Abstract

This study of sociology faculty in twelve private colleges and universities compares teaching with textbooks and textbook alternatives in undergraduate classes. Faculty explain that textbooks provide a breadth of material that is organized and streamlined in a way that promotes consistency across instructors, facilitates content delivery to students with a range of abilities, and reduces course preparation time. Despite these benefits, faculty have a strong preference for textbook alternatives. Faculty argue that readings, like monographs and journal articles, develop students' critical reading and thinking skills. Additionally, when instructors design courses with alternative readings they engage their own critical reading and thinking, as they critique and synthesize the literature in their discipline in order to curate texts for the syllabus. We argue that teaching courses with alternative readings creates course experiences where students and faculty engage with a discipline together.Texts are essential to course design. They shape how professors organize units, structure lectures, and assess learning. Despite the importance of choosing texts, systematic research concerned with why instructors choose textbooks or choose alternative readings is scarce. We surveyed thirty-six sociology professors at twelve small and medium private institutions to bring the pedagogy of choosing texts to the fore. This research asks, why do instructors choose textbooks, monographs, or other types of readings? How do instructors understand how the choice of one form of text or another shapes teaching and learning?Our inductive qualitative analysis of open-ended survey interview questions, revealed that faculty view textbooks and their alternatives as fundamentally different. Faculty noted that textbooks had particular strengths, like providing a breadth of material that is organized and streamlined in a way that promotes consistency across instructors, ensuring that departmental learning objectives are achieved with a variety of instructors. They explained that the books facilitate content delivery to students with a range of abilities, and that textbooks reduce course preparation time for faculty. Still, the faculty in our study had a strong preference for teaching without textbooks.Instructors saw alternatives to textbooks, like monographs and articles, as time-intensive to teach, but the best way to advance students' critical reading and thinking skills, a finding congruent with the academic literacy literature. In addition, instructors viewed the task of finding textbook alternatives as a way to engage their own critical reading and thinking skills in their teaching, a benefit rarely discussed in the literature. We argue that teaching courses with alternative readings creates a course experience where both students and faculty engage in evaluative reading and creative reasoning. Unfortunately, according to our participants, the conversations regarding course design around textbook alternatives are lacking on campus. The overwh...

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