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.