Recently, I began migrating my OER reference guide from Rice's Open Stax (originally Project Connexions) to PressBooks. PressBooks has become the platform for all HCC faculty producing OER. I am what Rice calls a "legacy author," which means I am still able to create content for Open Stax. I know the University of Maryland's online school and a few other instructors and many individual students/people use my reference guide from Open Stax, so I need to keep the edition there updated.
I am taking the opportunity of HCC migrating all OER to PressBooks to write the 2nd edition of my OER, which I renamed A Road Less Traveled: One Historian's Reference Guide to Our Story. As I complete rewriting each chapter of the 2nd draft in PressBooks, I then upload that new chapter to the 2nd edition in OpenStax.
A Road Less Traveled: One Historian's Reference Guide to Our Story
The Tetons and the Snake River -Ansel Adams (1942)
The link will take you to what I have so far. Our students participated in the research and translation aspects of the Magnolia Park monograph (Pearson, 2011). Starting this semester, students in my US history survey classes will be researching and writing biographies of people not found in traditional textbooks. I will edit what they come up with and use those bios in this OER book, thus making Our Story truly our story. I am excited about this faculty-student collaboration and I look forward to what my students come up with. As of now, I am writing the context, the linear narrative and some analysis. Students will pepper the narrative with people, their words and deeds.
My goal, besides the collaboration and final production, is the increase of student success and retention due to increased student enjoyment because they are more closely tied to the course objectives. The major objective being each student adding the voice and experience of lesser known (or better yet unknown) people to the history of this country. They get to pick the people. They will research those involved in various events, movements, activities. Students will decide who will make the cut, who we will give agency to. Students will have the choice over who this textbook talks about, the direction, even just for a page or two. Students will interview family members who participated in combat from WWII to the present, participated in civil rights activities, or their feelings when Kennedy was shot, when Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, or 9/11. And this being Houston, there will be some stories on immigration (legal and illegal), family disruptions, living in the shadows, and DACA.
Each student who participates will be properly recognized in the list of contributors. They may also include a brief, 100 word bio if they chose to do so. And, students may opt out of having their work added to the OER. I have a history major who is my student editor. She will critique student submissions (in the blind) and suggest using or not using them in the OER. She will also be contributing to Our Story as well by researching and writing more detailed stories. She took the second part of the US history survey from me in the Fall of 2018. Her writing and analytic skills are leap years beyond her classification of a sophomore. And, she's an international student. This is exciting stuff!
