Welcome to Open English
What We Are
Open English is an evolving digital book created and by English Department faculty at Salt Lake Community College and adapted here.
This book is evolving and adaptive, offering a range of texts on rhetoric, writing, and reading, all written by SLCC faculty with specific attention to the needs of SLCC students and the local conditions of our work and study at a large, multi-campus, increasingly diverse community college in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike a traditional textbook, the writing in this book invites remix, adaptation, and repurposing to match the specific needs of its users―SLCC writing students and instructors primarily, but also faculty and students at other schools, course designers, WPAS, and anyone else interested in open texts about writing, language and literacy.
Open English is a community-authored, community-focused text, one that invites conversation, change, addition, and repurposing over time in the interests of attuning itself to the needs of those who use it. To this end the book invites public digital annotation through Hypothesis, allowing readers to add notes, questions, observations and resources directly to the texts. This ethos of shared knowledge, creative reuse, and ongoing conversation is at the heart of the Open English project.
Where We’re Coming From
The book is organized around a set of six locally responsive threshold concepts that form the conceptual backbone of how our department approaches the work of teaching reading, writing, and rhetoric. These threshold concepts―transformative, integrative and troubling ideas that we feel are essential for any kind of mastery in writing and literate practices―build on foundational work in thresholds by Eric Meyer and Ray Land, in addition to more recent work on threshold concepts in writing by Linda Adler-Kassler, Elizabeth Wardle and many others.
In our department, these concepts have served as an agreed-upon starting point, a collection of fundamental arguments about writing that remain open to adaptation, addition and revision. They provide a shared vocabulary and a simplified framework for teaching writing to our students―a framework that is both unifying, in that it makes explicit our currently shared values about writing, but also flexible and expansive, in that courses and instructors across our curriculum can teach with these concepts in individualized ways, according to their strengths and interests.
Threshold Concepts in Writing at SLCC
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Writing is a resource people use to do things, be things, and make things in the world.
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Rhetoric provides a method for studying the work that language and writing do.
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Writing is a form of action. Through writing people respond to problems and can create change in the world.
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Writing is a process of deliberation. It involves identifying and enacting choices, strategies, and moves.
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Meaningful writing is achieved through sustained engagement in literate practices (e.g., thinking, researching, reading, interpreting, conversing) and through revision.
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The meanings and the effects of writing are contingent on situation, on readers, and on a text’s purposes/uses.
Our department’s uptake of threshold concepts as a flexible and collaborative approach to course design coincides with a growing college-wide push towards more equitable learning conditions, including the shift away from expensive, general textbooks and towards OERs that reduce learning costs for students and allow faculty to play a more dynamic role in selecting readings, resources, and projects tailored to our students’ specific needs.
Glynis Cousin has argued that a focus on threshold concepts helps “teachers to make refined decisions about what is fundamental to a grasp of the subject they are teaching.” Teaching with OERs invites the same kind of refined decision making. This growing collection of faculty-authored, open texts is intended to serve as an evolving record of how our department brings our most valued ideas about writing into our teaching practices―how we use these ideas, develop our knowledge about them, and create methodologies for sharing them with students.
Voices from Open English @ SLCC: Faculty Reflect on Working with OER
Faculty point to collaboration, creativity, interconnectedness, knowledge building, deep engagement, flexibility, and a sense of “walking the walk” with our students as some of the rewards of creating OERs and using them in their teaching at SLCC. The selection of faculty voices below speak directly to this expanding sense of what is possible when writing teachers take up the generative practice of teaching with OERs.
Open English @ SLCC invites all SLCC faculty to consider submitting texts related to writing in their own disciplines. For details, email your queries and ideas to openenglish@slcc.edu.
