Outstanding Books in an Academic Setting
Judith Walker
Imagine it’s a beautiful fall day during the first week of the semester on a university campus. New freshmen, transfer students, and returning upperclassmen are scurrying between classes. There in the quad are some folks hawking the services of the library as the masses rush by. It’s the Week of Welcome, a time when all the departments and services across campus vie for the attention of students, to let them know they are there to support students in their academic endeavors. The library’s theme is A Personal Librarian for Every Student. One librarian approaches a couple of students looking at the display and offers them some “smart pills” (Skittles) courtesy of the library. She begins to tell them about the library when one of the students says, “We’re both math majors and don’t really need the library.”
The undaunted librarian reminds them many of the most famous mathematicians were lovers of literature and there is a very strong correlation between mathematics, literature, and language. Then she asks them if they have read any good math books lately. This puzzles them. They indicate they both like to read, but the only math books they are familiar with are their textbooks.
“You mean to tell me you haven’t read Super Crunchers, Numerati, or the Story of Phi yet?” asks the librarian, who then launches into a brief booktalk about the three titles.1 By the time the students move on to their next class, they have learned about a number of other titles as well as the services the library has to offer them.
Does this sound like a pipe dream? Well, it’s not. This exchange actually occurred, and I was the librarian. Although I am the education librarian at a sprawling campus of more than 25,000 students, I was able to engage these two math students with some literary gems because I was one of three representatives from the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) on the Outstanding Books for the College Bound committee sponsored by the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA), which selected the titles for the list published in 2009. Prior to this appointment I was familiar with the list but had not really paid much attention to it. I did recommend it periodically to high school librarians and tried to make sure we had most of the titles, but it was not a high priority. After all, the mission of an academic library is to support the university’s curriculum, not to purchase recreational reading material.
After serving on the committee I have an entirely different approach to the list, and that’s not just because I spent two years reading books, discussing them, and then agonizing over which ones should go on the list. True, I invested a lot of time and energy in the process. But what I realized was that these books could have a positive impact on college students and become an integral part of the university curriculum. I have a background as a school librarian and have taught courses on integrating children’s literature (fiction and nonfiction) across the curriculum. While working with these books it dawned on me that the same principles I used in those circumstances apply to trade books in the college curriculum.
Over the past few decades there have been numerous reports about the decline in reading among college students. Among the most recent are two by the National Endowment for the Arts: “Reading at Risk” and “To Read or Not to Read.”2 However, there hasn’t been much research into why exactly this is occurring. A small study by Jolliffe and Harl at the University of Arkansas tried to determine if indeed their students were reading less and why. Their findings indicated students were actually very engaged with their own reading but not with reading related to their classes. For them, course-related reading was uninspiring and dull.3 A study by Jensen and Moore of the use of trade books in a freshman biology course came to a similar conclusion. In short, students see their textbooks as very expensive volumes of facts that do not relate to their real life.4 This should sound familiar; K–12 students and teachers have been making this same complaint for decades now. So one possible conclusion is it’s not the students but the textbooks that are causing the decline. And that’s where the Outstanding Books for the College Bound titles can support the university curriculum so effectively. The rest of this chapter will discuss some ways I have used the list with my students and faculty, and also will propose other ways the list might be used in an academic setting. Since I was on the subcommittee to choose the titles for the 2009 science and technology section of the list, I will tend to use those titles as examples, but most of what I will suggest can be applied to any of the titles.
First and foremost, I encourage academic librarians to read as many titles on the list as possible, especially those in their specialty area. It is difficult to get anyone else (faculty or students) interested in using the list if you aren’t familiar with the books. Although the list is targeted to high school students, most of the titles would fit into the category I call “adult books for young adults.” Many of the titles may have already found their way onto college and university library shelves through traditional collection development channels. When reviewing the titles from earlier lists, I discovered that our institution had approximately 65 percent of the titles—with most of them in our general collection, not our children’s/young adult collection. It’s also a good possibility you have read many of the titles already.
As the education librarian, I work closely with the faculty, teaching methods classes. During my sessions with the middle and secondary science teachers, we have had discussions about what science books the students are reading and how they can encourage their middle and high school students to read books other than the textbooks. I start off booktalking several titles from the list. Two of my favorites (because of their enticing titles) are Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers and Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice to All Creation: The Definitive Guide to the Evolutionary Biology of Sex. Stiff includes a great deal of information on anatomy as well as historical background. It’s not for the squeamish, though. The “Dear Abby” format of Dr. Tatiana’s Sex Advice makes reading the book entertaining as well as informative. I also like to booktalk The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring because it follows some pretty ordinary people on a quest to find the tallest redwood trees, and on the way they discover an entirely new and unknown ecosystem. It proves you don’t have to be genius to be a good scientist. After I’ve booktalked a few titles, the students usually begin to share titles they have discovered. The discussion has gotten pretty animated at times.
Because our college of education stresses inquiry-based learning, students and teachers are not married to the textbook. That allows more opportunities to incorporate trade books into the curriculum. Several faculty members require students to read trade books in addition to their texts. I have made a concentrated effort to make those faculty members aware of the titles on the OBCB list. A number of them are using it as a supplementary reading list for their courses.
Another course where I highlight the OBCB titles is the reading in the content areas course for middle and secondary preservice teachers. These students are familiar with some middle-grade titles like Louis Sachar’s Holes and Lois Lowry’s Number the Stars because they had to read them when they were in middle and high school. But they don’t have a clue about where to find books to incorporate into the content areas they plan to teach. The OBCB list is the perfect place to start since it doesn’t have an overwhelming number of titles and is organized by broad content areas.
Moving away from my immediate subject area, OBCB titles can be very useful in other undergraduate courses. Many of our general education courses are interdisciplinary courses such as Arts and Society; Global and Intercultural Connections; Literature and Culture; Science, Technology, and Society; and Issues in Health and Quality of Life. These courses are designed to encourage critical thinking skills and help students understand the complex issues in our society. Titles such as The Annotated Mona Lisa: A Crash Course in Art History from Prehistoric to Post-Modern and This Land Was Made for You and Me: The Life and Songs of Woody Guthrie would certainly make the arts come alive. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed will provide more information and insight into today’s world than any dry textbook. And to really understand how science and politics interact, students can try Bill Bryson’s A Short History of Nearly Everything, although it’s not nearly as short as the title suggests.
One could go on and on with great suggestions from the OBCB list, but picking the books is easy. Getting faculty to incorporate these books into their curriculum is the tricky part. Because general education courses are more or less experimental in nature—meaning the faculty are encouraged to use more nontraditional methods of teaching these courses—they are ideal for integrating the OBCB titles, but meeting with all the diverse faculty has been a monumental endeavor. Working together, several other librarians and I have made some inroads into the classes. As more faculty become aware of the list, its use should begin to take hold.
What holds true for the general education courses is also true for the First-Year Experience courses, also known as freshman learning communities at some institutions. We have found that since many of these sections are designed to help students develop positive learning strategies, the faculty teaching these courses are more open to incorporating new activities. Another avenue still to be explored is the common reading experience, which is the college or university equivalent to One Book, One Community reading campaigns used to unite cities across the country. For example, all incoming freshmen are assigned to read a particular book, in order to create common ground before they arrive on campus in the fall. Many of the OBCB titles would be excellent choices, and in fact several of them have already been used purely by accident.
There are two additional ways to promote the OBCB titles that are worth discussing. Both are borrowed from other areas of librarianship: literature circles and readers’ advisory. Both of these ideas have great potential.
Howrey and Rachelson of DeVry University–South Florida discussed a project they helped create based on the literature circle concept. Small groups of students, faculty, and librarians come together to discuss in depth a popular title, such as Tuesdays with Morrie. Participation is voluntary, although some faculty bestow extra credit for attendance. Students are expected to read the book so they can discuss it; however, the program also incorporates other formats, such as audio and video. It includes speaker events, where the students can discuss the title personally with the author. In addition to the face-to-face discussions, students are encouraged to participate in an online discussion via the program’s blog (http://readdevry.blogspot.com).5
This program draws on the best practices of First-Year Experience courses, freshman learning communities, and the common reading experience. It is a collaborative effort between the library and the college of liberal arts and sciences. Many of the titles used over the past six years of the project are titles from the OBCB list. A top-down program like this would take a lot of planning and coordination, to say the least. But once the faculty buys into it, the program could have a tremendous impact on student reading and critical thinking skills.
In the past many college and university libraries included some type of readers’ advisory service. Institutions created browsing collections of popular books for recreational reading. Today, most mid-sized and large college and university libraries have moved away from this service in favor of acquiring only scholarly material. Our library still maintains a small browsing collection, which is donated by our local newspaper after they have printed reviews of the books. But the idea of readers’ advisory is not dead. It has just been transformed. Or perhaps resurrected would be a better metaphor—resurrected in cyberspace. Many academic librarians are using a variety of digital tools to create annotated bibliographies for specific or interdisciplinary subject areas. Some are being attached to course content; others are appearing in blogs or as news items on home pages. Considering the students now entering our institutions are digital natives, this may be the best way to spread the word about OBCB titles. We could even set up virtual book clubs where students could comment on and discuss the titles in depth.
I have presented just a few ways that the OBCB titles could be used within the academic setting. Like most every other service academic librarians provide to students and faculty, it needs to be promoted. Displays, newsletters, blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter, and so on are all well and good. But the truth is the most effective way to promote these titles is face-to-face. Talk to faculty about the list. Booktalk the titles whenever and wherever possible. Smaller institutions will have the advantage because of their more closely knit community, but if you can get folks reading the books, the OBCB list will sell itself.
Notes
1. Ian Ayres, Super Crunchers (Bantam, 2007), OBCB 2009; Stephen Baker, The Numerati (Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi (Broadway Books, 2002), OBCB 2004.
2. National Endowment for the Arts, “Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America,” Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2004; ibid., “To Read or Not To Read: A Question of National Consequence,” Washington, DC: National Endowment for the Arts, 2007.
3. David A. Jolliffe and Allison Harl, “Texts of Our Institutional Lives: Studying the ‘Reading Transition’ from High School to College—What Are Our Students Reading and Why?” College English 70, no. 6 (2008): 599–617. See also Jude D. Gallik, “Do They Read for Pleasure? Recreational Reading Habits of College Students,” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 42, no. 6 (1999): 480–88.
4. Murray Jensen and Randy Moore, “Reading Trade Books in a Freshman Biology Course,” American Biology Teacher 70, no. 4 (2008): 206–7, 209–10.
5. Mary M. Howrey and Esther S. Rachelson, “Toward a ‘Lifetime of Literacies’: Library Reading Circles for College Students,” August 2009. Miramar, Fla.: DeVry University South Florida. www.eric.ed.gov/contentdelivery/servlet/ERICServlet?accno=ED506075.