WASTE

"It's extremely frustrating to spend $500 on books that will barely be used."--Anonymous FYW Student

It's easy to quickly become jaded at a campus bookstore. While costs can be discouraging to students, there are also less immediate consequences of textbook purchasing which are equally frustrating. It turns out that besides the initial out-of-pocket cost, which as the above quote suggest can be quite expensive, students the sheer lack of use they derive from the many expensive textbooks that instructors require they buy.
Before we pile on professors for being too unfeeling toward students' wallets in their course text selection, and before we take an anonymous student's word as gospel on how often a textbook is used (or supposed to be used) in a given class, perhaps we should first take a moment to map out potential streams of waste in the classroom. Though a few studies have discussed the rising cost of college textbooks and have speculated about what incentives have prompted these trends, it is clear from the student's statement above that the main gripe has to do with the potential for financial waste that textbooks can create. But are there other more insidious ways that the college textbook market produces waste?
As is also suggested in the statement above, which resulted from a survey taken by first year writing students in their final semester of a two-component FYW curriculum, course texts not only signify out-of-pocket expenditure, they can also symbolize unfulfilled or under-fulfilled intellectual and material investment. The answers to these questions begin with a discussion about the aims of such a course, and how those aims might relate to the chosen material.

Within the FYW community, a lot is made of instructional design. How well are lessons reverse engineered? What activities best exhibit and ingratiate aspects of the writing process. Much is made--especially at my university--of meeting the "learning outcomes" for a given course. This is generally a good instructional principle to follow; courses should aim to accomplish something, both for the student and the instructor. But course learning outcomes, also produce certain restraints. Chief amongst them is the issue with assessment; if you are supposed to evaluate a student's familiarity with process, and reading, how do you write an outcome that is measurable. With the introduction of literature into a writing class, the question of useful learning outcomes only grows more complex While most of the learning outcomes within First Year Writing at the University where we conducted our study focus on the acquisition of what has been uncritically regarded as general writing and rhetorical knowledge, the second phase in the year-long curriculum, UCOR 102 (this University's FYW Literature Component) supplements these 
outcomes with an additional intention to foster “a knowledge of literature.” 

Monroe's literary appreciation puts everyone else to shame

Though the impact literary knowledge might have upon learning the writing process remains unclarified in these outcomes, within the liberal arts tradition education should seek to encourage an appreciation of the arts beyond the walls of the classroom. Regardless of whether or not you feel that a liberal arts education, where literary appreciation and interest are highly valued, is of larger social and cultural importance, the designing assessment and instruction for the very general knowledge of literature learning outcome presents a problem because of it vagueness. What constitutes literature? Where are the boundaries drawn? Does Breaking Bad count or not? What constitutes "knowledge"? Is it reading comprehension? familiarity with creative form and style? I hope this begins clarify how the ambiguity of this outcome creates a lack of consensus in what is taught across sections of the course. 
Responding to this overwhelming expectation of providing a diverse and broad knowledge of literature presents a few challenges not only to course design, but to text selection as well. In an attempt to provide students the broadest access to literature, many instructors have resorted to assigning a literature anthology as the main course material for the class. In our study of 47 syllabi (all syllabi for a single semester) 23 syllabi assigned at least one literature anthology to the class. Another instructor had the class purchase two. So why is this such a popular option for instructors? The appeal of a literary anthology for an instructor comes from its affordance of scope, and its reduction in the number of required texts. These anthologies usually include the three major canonized genres of literature (poetry, prose, drama). However these texts present two major constraints; 1) They tend to be expensive. Literature anthologies have a relatively high cost not only because they tend to participate in the textbook market which is stigmatized by high cost, but because they are a bunch of separate works by separate authors, they represent a host of royalties to be paid. If you throw in the fact that these textbooks often get republished as newer editions every 4-5 years--thus reinitiating the royalty debts--it is relatively easy to understand how the cost passed on to the student can escalate rather quickly. This is just a guess, but judging from the epigraph above cost can stigmatize the text's content. 2) They often resemble textbooks. 

Needless to say, there are more than a few options available

The textbook design template for the cover creates a narrative about how readers should regard the material contained inside. While it is true that literature serves an academic and explicitly rhetorical purpose within the FYW classroom, an anthologies aesthetic design marks its use as thoroughly compartmentalized within the boundaries of the course for which it is purchased. During the convenient survey we conducted, many of the 80 students, from which we solicited responses, suggested these same attitudes about the unlikelihood for a course-selected text to retain their interest.

Student responses about their post-course intentions for their texts

As the chart of our research above indicates, the students we surveyed do not prefer to keep the books they buy. None of them believed that they would keep all of them. Over a quarter of them--by hook or by crook--plan to dispose of all of their texts, even when there is no financial incentive for them to do so. These responses suggest that even when initiatives aimed at material reuse like textbook rental and buy-back aren't available, many students prefer to discard what they have--by their own anecdotal accounts--paid way too much for. While not unsurprising, this data suggests that the production of such materials for classes in turn contributes to a growing material waste concern. Additionally, less than 1/3 of the syllabi we surveyed use any digital submission platform for student work. 13 use our University-subscribed Course/Learning Management System, Blackboard. This trend within the FYW classroom, not only prioritizes material production over intellectual process because it insists on a material incarnation of the student's work, but through printing, massive amounts of additional waste are produced. Digitizing the classroom may prove to be a successful to cut down on material and financial waste associated with the printed page, yet that solution also creates new and perhaps more complex questions with regard to the growing concern for electronic waste. However there are other perhaps more intellectually insidious avenues of waste being produced within places like the FYW classroom as well.
In its evolving relationship with the academy and popular culture, literature as a field of study has experienced multiple perspectival shifts over the course of scholastic history-- The cultural influence of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn eventually gave way to Tina Fey's Mean Girls. While many Language Arts professionals may lament the cultural decline of the traditional literary genres within popular culture, this decline should by no means be recognized as a decline in reading. Tastes and interests have merely changed—primarily through the assistance of technologically based reading platforms. As N. Katherine Hayles and others have suggested, reading practices have shifted, but so have the texts they read. Rather than attempting to foster appreciation in genres and texts which students find unwieldy to read and uninteresting to follow, perhaps instructors might find more pedagogical utility in refashioning curriculum around texts and textual platforms with which students already have an established and intimate familiarity.
As we point out in our other post on engagement, the attention economy encouraged within digital spaces places new and different emphases around time consumption. The established narrative around "usefulness" or lack thereof by which digital natives judge their course texts suggest a newer emerging narrative around waste with regard to attention as a commodity. Within the intellectual climate of the academic classroom, specifically the FYW classroom, it will become steadily more and more incumbent to design curricula and choose course texts that not only appeal to the student through low material waste but also through low attention waste--what this will look like is anyone's guess.

COST

“I think everyone agrees with me when I say that texts are ridiculously expensive especially for the rare times they are used. Even when I do use a book in class, it has never been everyday. I get that they are sometimes very useful, but when you do not have much money to begin with, it's extremely frustrating to spend $500 on books that will barely be used.”  --Anonymous First-Year Student

“...my Spanish book was $300 and has almost no resale value.” --Anonymous First-Year Student

A few weeks into my last semester in a Literature M.A. program, I had the small misfortune of having my car broken into, my textbooks stolen.  My laptop was stolen too, but thanks to the fact that I use cloud storage with some consistency and only lost my most recent days of work, the initial trauma of the need to do work over again after the laptop theivery was overshadowed by the loss of the textbooks.  The textbooks that were stolen for one class were worth over $70, and now I had to purchase them again!

Having to purchase these texts twice put the cost of this class in course materials at the same price I paid for the replacement laptop.  I bemoaned the fact that I would have to repurchase material I had once had, needed these texts as quickly as possible, and that only 2 of the 3 texts I need to repurchase had e-books available.

These annoyances were allayed by the facts that I actually wanted to  possess the information in the lost textbooks: Jones and Hafner’s Understanding Digital Literacies: A Practical Introduction, Digital Writing Research: Technologies, Methodologies, and Ethical Issues, and The Digital Divide: Arguments for and against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Networking. These texts are relevant to my work and my research beyond the classroom and I have kind colleagues in my large shared office that are studying in the same courses and willing to share (thanks Allison, Will, and Mav!)--all in all, I would expect I had a better relationship to these textbooks than many other students.  

Following a survey, performed by the three contributors to this blog, of a sample of 80 of the 1,275 member class of 2018 regarding their practices with course materials and other kinds of texts (like digital streaming services), the idea that my relationship to textbooks was better than many students might seems like an understatement.

This survey, the methods of which are extensively described here, produced some particularly interesting results when viewed through the lens of costs.  First, the results of the some of the survey questions in the pure--then, I will offer some analysis through the framework of cost.  

When asked about their practices of reviewing course texts beyond the semester and returning course texts at the end of the semester, students reported low likelihood of returning to their course texts for information (or other use) and high likelihood of returning them to the store (or elsewhere) for some cash.  Figures 1 and 2 summarize the student responses to these questions.

Figure 1: Students’ predicted likelihood of returning to course texts beyond the semester and predicted practices of textbook return

Figure 2: Students' predictions regarding the number of texts they will reuse following the semester

Finding it likely that you will review or reuse your course texts in any way appears to be a fairly rare--less than 20% of students reported that they anticipate it as likely that they will do so. In fact, the number of students that anticipate getting rid of all texts without consideration of whether or not they will get money for them is higher (26.3% of respondents) than the number of students who anticipate using their books again (16.3%)!  

Our finding that just over a quarter of students surveyed anticipate getting rid of all of their texts at the end of the semester without concern for recuperating cost bears discussion.  It is especially significant because these students are in their second semester and have some ideas about and reflections on their practices in and after their first college semester.

 This desire to rid themselves of texts may be an expression of a lack of financial need on the part of this fourth of the student population, but it’s likely that something more complex is going on here.  We may be seeing a disengagement with traditional course methods on the terms of students’ “digital nativism” to work with Marc Prensky’s language in his piece, “Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants.”

This disengagement from course texts is something that will be explored more in our post on “Engagement”--but it is worth considering that it is happening on the terms of cost and beyond the terms of cost.  Prensky makes a wide argument about watershed changes in students attitudes that goes beyond the terms of cost, but we might gain something by bringing digital practices of payment into consideration.  Prensky argues of digital natives, a category that his 2001 piece places students into and we might place our students in now: “Students have not just changed incrementally from those of the past, nor simply changed their slang, clothes, body adornments, or styles, as has happened between generations previously. A really big discontinuity has taken place. One might even call it a ‘singularity’ – an event which changes things so fundamentally that there is absolutely no going back. This so-called ‘singularity’ is the arrival and rapid dissemination of digital technology in the last decades of the 20th century.”

We might read students practices with their course materials as a “really big discontinuity” from the standpoint of the print native or the digital immigrant.  This becomes especially significant when viewed through the lens of cost.  After reviewing the cost of materials for all of the sections of the second-semester composition course at our university, a class that is required of all freshman and combines literary study with writing instruction, we might begin to quantify exactly how significant this discontinuity is.  Even though this course runs for a relatively low average cost, we are seeing an overwhelming student attitude toward texts that demonstrates disengagement from the value of texts.

The rationale and methodology of this study and its full results are available.  But one of its most significant findings is that, assuming full enrollment in each of the 47 sections (a fair assumption, because in accounting for 22 students a class that total comes in at 1,034, which is less than the total freshman class size) the total cost of books for these courses is HUGE.  We are talking higher than a year’s tuition huge.  The total course of course materials, when calculated at the list price of purchase (as described in the linked methodology) is a whopping $59,062.74!  This is significant when we consider students are not returning to these texts after the semester and one of the main course objectives of this course is to get students to engage with literary texts.

This number seems like small change, when compared to the total cost of the two required texts for the first semester composition class, Everything’s an Argument and Quick Access Brief. The costs of those texts when multiplied by the number of incoming freshman puts the total cost of course texts for the Fall semester at $130,050.  And that is the price when considering the list price of the abridged edition of Everything’s an Argument!

With such high costs, the average individual text in these composition and literature classes weighs in at $20.14 and the average total materials cost is $57.14. Sure, composition and literature classes are likely cheaper overall than science classes or other courses with truly expensive textbooks. But seeing that most students find it unlikely or somewhat unlikely that they will return to books, we might think students are looking to recuperate monetary value from their texts after the semester more than they are looking to find educational value in them beyond the semester. From there, we might wonder what students’ sense of the value in these texts during the semester.

From the student reflection quoted at the beginning at this blog that puts forth their sense that usage is “rare” and certainly not “everyday,” we might wonder how this is possible that students are rarely using their texts and if there are ways to help students value course materials.

Here, as instructors, we might hear a call to reconsider our material practices in the first year writing classroom.  We would like to use what we have learned from the syllabus study to make a few suggestions.  

1. Engage in conversations about students’ practices with course texts and instructor expectations. Recent research, performed by Sung Wook Ji, Sherri Michaels, and David Waterman in their study “Print vs. Electronic Readings: Cost Efficiency and Perceived Learning” found significant cost advantages in electronic readings, as well as a student preference for electronic readings. At the same time, these researchers did find that students (about ⅔ of them) did choose to incur costs by printing electronic readings.  What is clear is that students practices with course materials are complex--complex enough to make us wonder about their status as digital natives--as teachers, we should figure out how to account for their practices.
2. Include clear course policies about reading practices in syllabi. In our syllabus study, we identified very few sections of the course that engaged a conversation about editions and formats of course texts.  While many syllabi list course texts by ISBN, very few discussed whether these editions were required or if other editions were allowable.  Only one single section directly and explicitly had a policy on e-books.
3. Consider allowing students to use editions of texts in the public domain. Many sections of the courses studied are using texts old enough to be in the public domain.  No sections’ syllabi contain a reference to the fact that their texts are or may be available online for free.  It seems that this is a significant missed opportunity for fostering potential engagement with literature beyond the semester, for “online for free” is a material practice that pulls digital natives in.

These suggestions work to respond to and intervene what we have learned from students’ reported practices and bring them to accord with the practices we encourage as instructors.

ENGAGEMENT

"Streaming video actually helps me do work, though I'm not really paying attention to the video it makes homework less tedious."--Anonymous FYW Student

"Requiring streamed video services as compared to course texts would be much more engaging/ a cheaper options for students." --Anonymous FYW Student

Many things compete for college students’ attention. Full-time students take 4 to 6 classes. Between these classes, these students are dealing with dozens of learning objectives.  The class we (the blog contributors) teach in the Fall semester has 13 discrete learning objectives in four different categories (Critical Thinking, Rhetorical Knowledge, Processes and Conventions, and Research and Ethics). The class we teach in the Spring has the incrementally more manageable 12 learning objectives in three different categories (Knowledge of Literature, Processes and Convention, and Research Writing Skills). Between working toward fulfilling these objectives and working to complete more tangible assignments and sit exams, students have their academic attention pulled in many directions.  

And that is as if students only have coursework to consider as they engage with the world as young adults, between staking out a life in relation to others, their communities, and the world, students have their plates full. It is a popular and academic commonplace that we moderns, and particularly the contemporary student, have filled our plates with information and technology.  

Jones and Hafner put it well in their second chapter of Understanding Digital Literacies, "Information Everywhere," when they challenge this assumption that our contemporary world suffers from "information overload" (19) by clarifying the difference between information and data. Data is the "facts" of reality, including sensory input, and information is usable data, when information becomes usable, applicable, and actionable, it is knowledge (20).  

Thus, technologies and pedagogies should enable us to sift through and use data, giving rise to information and knowledge. One means for sifting through the massive amount of data that we present in class, through lectures, PowerPoints, and the like, and that students generate together in class, through things like groupwork and writing activities, is offering clear course learning outcomes. 

We hope that we achieve these learning outcomes and they become knowledge, and the syllabus is our way of making clear and supporting these objectives and the classroom practices we believe will best move students toward being able to use the information they discover and skills they achieve as knowledge.

Sifting through syllabi to gain a better understanding of cost and material practices in the classroom to aid us in thinking about using digital texts as the main literary texts in the composition classroom, we noticed that course policies were far more likely to regulate the "attention economy" of the classroom, to borrow Jones and Hafner's term from their sixth chapter ("Attention Structures"), than they are to regulate the material economy of the classroom for its own sake.  

Many syllabi do not make explicit whether the course requires print or web submission of papers, the vast majority of syllabi do not contain thorough technology policies. We found that it was extremely infrequent that course materials policies discussed the use of digital technology in the classroom for reading course texts (while all classes required significant reading), only two syllabi mention reading practices and digital technology. Many more syllabi mandated student printing of course readings, so print technologies of reading were more frequently mentioned and regulated.  Several syllabi explicitly state that students must bring their course texts everyday and offer specific sanctions, but where the texts are purchased rather than printed from the course website, the course policies to not specify what forms of texts are acceptable (i.e. e-book policies are not made direct). When the course policies did mention digital technologies, it was to either permit their use for writing and note-taking, or as one syllabus referred to it as "educational use" of digital technologies, or to expressedly ban or regulate their use.

The most frequent technology policy was to ban cellphone use in the classroom. Only two instructors mention cellphones to permit them for "educational use" while many expressly mention them to ban them. These statements are frequently accompanied with grade penalties, attention grabbing formatting, and possibilities like getting ejected from the classroom. It is clear that when policies are regulating cell phone use in the classroom with such fervor, they overgo material concerns and move into attempting to regulate student attention and where it is paid. Some policies mention practices that are banned (and we might ask ourselves after Foucault's repressive hypothesis if this is a good idea), like "browsing the Web" and "checking Facebook" and most often the dreaded "texting."

More than the concern that these restrictions might actually engender the behavior they attempt to repress, these policies show a marked preference for deep- over hyper-attentive methods. This is likely no surprise when we think about the training of most FYW teachers in humanistic methods and methodologies. N. Katherine Hayles notes in her piece "How We Read: Close, Hyper, Machine" this focus on deep attention in literary studies is one of the factors and problems behind her observation that literary scholars have not been able to address our contemporary decline in reading skills. She writes "While literary studies continues to teach close reading to students, it does less well in exploiting the trend toward the digital. Students read incessantly in digital media and write in it as well, but only infrequently are they encouraged to do so in literature classes or in environments that encourage the transfer of print reading abilities to digital and vice versa. The two tracks, print and digital, run side by side, but messages from either track do not leap across to the other side" (63). 

It seems that if we are to address what has been read as a contemporary decline in reading skills, one way that we might do so is by having candid conversations with our students about their reading practices. We can initiate these in our own course policies by justifying our choices of certain editions of texts and modes of reading or expressly allowing digital editions and modes of reading. We can have conversations about how we read and what students get out of close reading and deep attention.  

Taking about what deep attention does and what we can get out of cultivating this kind of attention and our close reading skills appears to be a way that may help students understand the value of these course policies that centralize attention in course texts (implicitly print ones) and maybe even branch into conversations about negotiating and moving between deep and hyper attention, between close and hyper reading. These conversations should start with the syllabus.

Initiating these conversations may be a first step in moving students toward a place where they can use their hyper attentive skills to make deep reading more fun, or as the student quoted at the beginning of this piece might say, "less tedious." Clay Shirki (in his How Cognitive Surplus Will Change the World) believes that capitalizing on the cognitive surplus, for social and individual advancement, requires these generative activities to be fun. As teachers, we might ask ourselves how we can help our students thing about the cognitive activities required for our courses in this way.

RELEVANCE

"I think that our course texts are very helpful, but they are really expensive, even to rent from an outside source. Some of my teachers provided us with blackboard links and handouts (pdfs) which were really nice to have because I could access them on my laptop. I know you can't do that with everything, but I think online reading is helpful and easy. Also the library should have more of the novels that the English classes read in stock so that students can take them out instead of buying/renting from Duquesne bookstore, Amazon, or the Pgh library. I like netflix, but I would NOT want it to become suddenly related to my school work!" 

"Requiring streamed video services as compared to course texts would be much more engaging/ a cheaper options for students."

--FYW Students' opinions about digital media as a means of teaching composition and literature

While this is not only of material and financial concern, the textual situation within FYW and other classrooms, becomes a bit more fraught if you consider the sheer saturation of digital technology within the college environment. While there is no institutional rule that prohibits submissions that are not word-processed, in all of the FYW syllabi in our study, whether assignments were to be submitted in hard-copy or digital the invisible requirement of access to and literacy of certain digital platforms was implicit. Students are expected to own a computer, and in the rare case that they don't, make alternative arrangements through one of the many university computers available to them. Digital saturation has displaced digital instruction as the pedagogical priority within the University. Cynics might regard this move as purely an administrative attempt designed to market the institution and attract students--though this criticism is not entirely unmerited, it does overlook a key reason why digital saturation has become such a prominent position within universities. Much is made of the current generations starting colleges. The majority of my recent class was born in the year 1996 (the exception being one student born in 1995) which means the following two things: 1) They are younger than this. 2) The have not lived in a time where digital technologies experience heavy and ubiquitous use. This generation--often called, "Digital Natives"--who came of age while digital sacraments were still in the formative stages, has never known a history in which digital connectivity and mediation was not privileged. While this might seem to many who do not share this historical heritage an unsympathetic position, this historical identifier has produced its own invisible prescriptions about these students.

How digital natives have been accused of socializing

In his landmark piece on digital technology and its place not only in the classroom, but in culture, Dennis Baron maps the progress of different technologies, and how they reflexively hack and revise themselves over time as they progress. This projection is not wrong as anyone who has been a member of a social media site for more than a year can attest. What Baron never accounts for is the way in which digital technologies become so divergent that mastery is contingent upon participation in specific microcosms that offer very little in the way of digital literacy cross-pollination. Rather than broader digital literacy. What does this have to do with digital natives? Much of the cultural criticism heaped on them has also contributed to a misrepresentation of their collective computing knowledge. Because there is a cultural proficiency attached to certain technologies (like the smartphone), and digital applications (like social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter), specific digital literacies which are increasingly mobile in nature have become conflated with broader computing literacy. This misrepresentation results in what some regard as a deficit in digital citizenship skills, training, and education. Providing digital resources for students who presumed to already be proficient in digital citizenship is disingenuous and puts the cart before the horse by prioritizing platform over function. Many educators might role their eyes, as they imagine this to be an argument for replacing an upper level specialization class with yet another mandatory Gen ed course. Not so! As Loewy and others suggests in the article linked directly above, it is precisely the segregation of computing rather than its broader participation in all courses that has so far hindered the development of digital citizenship.

Can the deluge of digital resources be effective for instruction?

It is quite curious then that teaching these computing proficiencies have no explicit place within FYW curricula. Despite the prolific drafting of Student Learning Outcomes for the FYW syllabi we studied, digital proficiency was neither a part of the outcomes nor a part of any instructors general aims for the course. If FYW is supposed to equip a student be an effective college writer, why doesn't that curriculum include teaching the actual material processes by which students will produce college writing? These invisible expectations are precariously insidious if we consider the politics of who is provided the educational infrastructure to navigate these platforms, technologies, and interfaces. What is more; students who lack this undisclosed prerequisite knowledge have this same illiteracy invisibly held against them within the practices of assessment. Because they never took (or were never offered) "computer class" there digital illiteracies somehow remain their own fault. If FYW wishes to teach not only technique but rhetorical awareness, it must in some way exhibit this same self-awareness with regard to the very tools it requires students to use for composition. The first epigraph above demonstrates quite clearly what a deficit of digital citizenship instruction creates within a writer. Producing resources does not, in turn produce writers. The very means by which writing is produced must be made visible before a student can learn to appreciate them or innovate them.
Rhetoric is not territorial in the sense that there are situations which can successfully be compartmentalized outside of the scope of someone's identity. In the broader aims of our survey, we asked students to consider their practices with regard to video streaming services, principally Netflix. While that epigraph suggests a reluctance to integrate Netflix practices into the activities and discussions of the FYW class, other responses suggested this might strengthen the relevance of the class. Yet the epigraph which supports separation of class and pleasure highlights just how vital it is for digital citizenship to teach digital form and content together. Breaking down this separation between design and use not only highlights how literary appreciation and knowledge already permeate a student's life, it also underscores the dual function of teaching not only rhetorical position when writing, but how to practice recognizing, interrogating, and learning about the systems of power and discourses in which a student already participates. Teaching the technology not only teaches it can be used and appreciated, it also teaches how it is already used and appreciated.

ACCESS

We want to use this final post to put forth a small archive of resources that might help students and instructors access ways to move beyond current problems of materiality in the classroom. We summarize our sense of the pedagogical imperatives that arise from our study here and provide some resources that have aided us in accessing how we might take a more intentional approach to materiality in our own classrooms.

Pedagogical Imperatives

1. Syllabi should put forth clear policies about the material (e.g. digital or print) nature of paper submission. This is a ready way for instructors to demonstrate their intentional approach toward creating course policies and a way to reduce paper waste that might be brought about from a lack of clarity about submission guidelines. This is also a way to initiate conversations about the conventions of academic reading and writing (why 12 point Times New Roman, for example?) and discuss the purposes of regulations on materiality in the classroom.

2. Instructors should engage students in earnest conversations addressing reading practices and the attention economy in the classroom, by engaging in justifications of e-reader and cell phone policies and do so by thinking about course policies’ utility as student engagement. We have seen many syllabi policies that work to regulate the attention economy of the classroom by restricting the use of technology in the classroom in this study. It seems that it would serve students well to expressly permit those technological reading practices that the instructor believes are acceptable or instructive for the course. This might mitigate concerns about cost by allowing for the use of (usually cheaper) e-books

3. Instructors should carefully consider engaging students in digital practices where available. Considering what the material form of instructional design and delivery does might create exciting new ideas for the classroom and bring out new relevance to our contemporary world in the classroom.

4. Instructors should think about the out-of-pocket costs that students incur taking their courses and approach text selection with the same intentionality they approach the rest of their work. We learned that many of the texts taught in the classrooms we studied were available in the public domain, but this goes unmentioned in most syllabi and students are asked to purchase particular editions of these texts that are freely available. Teaching students that the public domain exists or teaching texts from the public domain seems like a valuable life skill that might facilitate student access to literature and writing more widely beyond the conclusion of the class.

The following video send-up of restrictions on the use of texts,“A Fair(y) Use Tale” is a way to engage students in a conversation about their access to texts:

In keeping with the desire for accessibility, below we have listed a number of resources that might assist anyone looking to create a more digitally-conscious FYW class. The following are resources that address the public domain and archive public domain materials.

Teaching Resources

Duke Law's Center for The Study of the Public Domain--a great site for facilitating classroom discussions around the affordances and constraints of the Public Domain, especially this article.
Fair Use Tube.Org--A site devoted to discussion about controversy over intellectual property and copyrights on massive digital platforms like Youtube
Project Gutenberg--An archive of digital publications of texts already in the public domain.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare--MIT's archive of digital copies of Shakespeare's works. While it says "Complete" the archive does not include many of the Sonnets.
Public Domain Sherpa--This site catalogs places where you can find Public Domain texts online. It's useful if you find Project Gutenberg's collection inadequate.
Complete Results--Here are the results of the survey we conducted about FYW course material habits and video streaming practices with 80 FYW students in their second semester.