The Next Course: The Slow Textbook

Response to "The World is Not Flat, So Why are Our Textbooks?"

Piano, piano…

—Farmer Giuseppe Siragusa

"The World is Not Flat, So Why are Our Textbooks?" reflects the tension of looking forward and looking back that both underlies and impedes progress in curriculum design. While it is indisputable that "the time has come for the next generation of language teaching materials" (Rossomondo and Lord 252), as Bill VanPatten and others have noted, innovation in the world of textbook design moves at a pace that can best be described as "glacial." In addition to the ideas mentioned in the accompanying article, one further way to transform the focus, design, and medium of "flat textbooks" is, ironically, for instructors to just slow down by adopting the principles of the Slow Movement and authoring "well-rounded" digital teaching materials either individually or, ideally, by teaming up with their language departments.

The Slow Movement is about achieving balance in life by eschewing modernity's "cult of speed" with its inevitable shortcuts of quality, thought, and empathy for under-represented groups. Slow embraces local, seasonal, organic, and sustainable practices for a life that privileges quality over quantity. Carlo Petrini's Slow Food Movement arose, in part, as a reaction to globalization and situations in which multinational capitalist ventures (embodied by the American fast food "restaurant") impose foreign definitions of time, relevance, and productivity on countries with deep cultural traditions. Such situations create unwelcomed outcomes in the commercial, cultural, and public health spheres of economically marginalized individuals. As recent debates about GMOs have shown, corporations make decisions at a distance from consumers and clearly have competing sets of interests.

Fast culture manifests itself in many areas of university life, especially, for our purposes, in the co-dependent relationship between language instructors and "Super-Sized" corporate textbook programs. (In a provocative quip, VanPatten (2015) bemoans the possibility that many university language instructors may in reality be nothing more than "skilled as textbook users"[7]). The uniformity, sequencing, and scaffolding that textbooks provide to large, lower-level language programs staffed by novice TAs has its place, but do we really want to train university instructors with teaching materials shaped by editorial teams at publishing houses? We are all familiar with the shortcomings of mainstream texts which, despite the good intentions of their authors and editors, are necessarily constrained by formatting, budget, copyright, design, and market pressures that instructors or graduate programs working together outside the parameters of profit simply do not have.

When individuals write their own Spanish programs, the resulting materials can be tailored to their local audience and academic calendar. Collaboration between "language experts" and colleagues (particularly native speakers) will strengthen and enrich instructional approaches and deepen cultural activities. Furthermore, when instructors share the burden of quality control over what they teach, decisions over relevant contexts, scope, and sequencing can be made for purely pedagogical, rather than market-based reasons. Teachers, after all, understand the needs of their students better than sales reps or focus groups. Self-authored slow-textbooks can also reflect the heritage and realities of local (rather than imagined) Hispanic communities and thus facilitate opportunities for outreach and service. Sustainable, digital materials can contain innumerable images and texts organic to a department's study away options and thus help feed a program's upper level offerings and major. Finally, these new "books" can truly be seasonal by focusing on holidays in context while helping keep student costs low, strengthening language departments, and improving communication with local Hispanic communities.

In their 2016 book The Slow Professor, Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber argue that "adopting the principles of Slow into our professional practice is an effective way to alleviate work stress, preserve humanistic education, and resist the corporate university" (ix). As Martha Nussbaum and others have proven, motives of profit change the fundamental democratic nature of higher education. Slow-textbooks, on the other hand, send a strong message of self-reliance, lifelong learning, and a healthy skepticism of the influence of corporations to students that may...