ARC: Teaching: Tips: On Teaching without a Textbook
Walking the Tightrope without a TextBook
Deborah K. Skinner, Butler University
At the risk of cutting off my supply of complimentary textbooks, I’d like to suggest something radical. Try teaching a marketing class without a text. Don’t require your students to buy the newest edition of that slick-covered, pretty-pictured, latest-example-filled book. Let’s face it. Students buy most textbooks at the beginning of the semester for $80-100. They take it home and put it on the shelf. At the end of the semester, they take it back to the bookstore to collect their $10 used book reimbursement fee. Not a bad deal for the publisher or the bookstore but an inefficient use of resources – both the shelf space and the money.
Did you ever think about what might happen if you didn’t use the text for a class? How would you teach? How would they learn? What would you test them over? Make up your own multiple-choice tests? What about the already created power point slides and the colorful transparencies? What videos would you show on that infrequent day you show up at class unprepared? Aren’t the instructor supplements alone worth requiring the students to purchase the book? And have you seen the student supplements lately – a CD on marketing careers, a subscription to the Wall Street Journal, an interactive online study guide.
What student wouldn’t want to make that purchase!
In a leap of faith, (faith in my dean that he will support innovative teaching practices even when they fail!) I made the text a “recommended option” for both my graduate and undergraduate sections of Advertising and Promotions Management. You can guess how many jumped on the option to buy the text – not many, as $100 still buys a lot of things in their world. So I began the semester, hesitant. I was about to teach a class without a text. It couldn’t be near as life threatening as walking a tightrope without a net, could it?
Actually the tightrope walker and the net is a good analogy for the teacher and the text. How many times do we rely on the text to explain things better? Or clearer? Or for the kid in the back that never seems to understand anything during lecture? How many times have we said, “Read that chapter on your own,” when we haven’t had time to cover a topic completely (or at all)? Or when we wanted to cover topics of more interest to ourselves? Or when we wanted to expose students to everything in marketing because it’s ALL so important. We have come to rely on the text to catch us when we perform inefficiently or to fill in the gaps when we want to leap from topic to topic.
But they aren’t necessary, the texts, I mean. With all that’s going on in our world today a subscription to the Wall Street Journal or a business publication would serve as sufficient basis for teaching marketing. Pick up the B-section of WSJ any day of the week. I’d challenge you to find a handful of stories that aren’t related to marketing. Think of the discussion that you might facilitate on important products with an article on McDonald’s, Oldsmobile or Amazon! What better way to discuss pricing issues than to explore the strategies used by pharmaceutical companies to market their AIDS drugs in the U.S. compared to say, Africa? Try a new approach to distribution, review an article on Napster. Is there a week that goes by that we don’t read of changes in the recording industry? For advertising and promotion topics, the Journal provides the real world articles (i.e., an exclusive “Advertising” section) AND real world examples, now in living color.
So, what’s the catch? You, as an instructor, have to work harder in preparation for class. You have to give up the safety of those hand-scribed, yellowed-page notes you hold so dear. You have to stay current. That means reading and listening and watching constantly. All those things that “learning” is about. You have to be the model for your students. And while you are demonstrating the importance of seizing the day’s topics to apply the relevant marketing terms, don’t forget to point out another valuable lesson. Change is good. Risk can be appropriate. Traditions can be altered, even in academia.
If all else fails, there’s always that net (i.e., text) to fall back on next semester.