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ISBN 9781119705406 (paperback) ISBN 9781119705413 (ePDF) ISBN 9781119705383 (epub)
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THIRD EDITION
Preface
An important new feature of the third edition of Engaging Ideas is its coauthor team of Bean and Melzer. We'll begin by explaining how this coauthorship emerged.
John's Introduction of Coauthor Dan Melzer
The impetus for the third edition was an out‐of‐the‐blue email I received on the day before my seventy‐sixth birthday. It came from two Writing Across the Curriculum leaders at Sam Houston State University (Todd Primm and Carroll Nardone):
We use your superb 2nd ed Engaging Ideas workbook in our annual WID workshop for faculty on our campus. We are interested if there will be a third edition. It is such a powerful resource. Our faculty rave about it every year (this is our 19th year of the workshop).
I was buoyed by this email and happy to have confirmation of the usefulness of the second edition; however, I hadn't planned on a third edition. I retired from the classroom in 2013 (after forty‐five years of teaching), and although I continued with some of my scholarship, I felt I no longer had the currency I needed. But I was deeply grateful to Todd and Carroll for their gracious inquiry and for the subsequent helpful commentary from their Sam Houston colleagues about what needed to be updated.
Shortly thereafter, Riley Harding, my editor at Wiley, also began inquiring about a third edition and suggested that perhaps I could take on a coauthor—a younger scholar in writing across the curriculum with whom I could collaborate for the third edition and to whom I could pass on the book's legacy for a new generation. The idea intrigued me. After an extensive search, I am happy to announce my partnership with Dan Melzer from the University of California, Davis. (You can see his credentials and read his professional biography in the “About the Authors” section.) A deciding factor in my reaching out to Dan was his well‐reviewed book Assignments across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing (2014), which helped establish his reputation as a rising scholar in writing across the curriculum. I was grateful when he accepted my invitation to become a coauthor. Through telephone calls, Zoom meetings, and endless emails, Dan and I have established a mutual friendship and a collegial process of collaboration that has been more successful than I could have imagined or hoped for. (Dan and I have not been able to meet personally because of the COVID‐19 lockdown.) Dan's path toward scholarship in writing across the curriculum (which is different from mine) and his teaching experiences at large state universities give a richness to the third edition that would not have been possible if I had undertaken the revision by myself.
Dan's Perspective on the Third Edition of Engaging Ideas
My experiences with Engaging Ideas began long before John invited me to be his coauthor. In my first academic position after graduate school I was hired by California State University, Sacramento to develop a Writing Across the Curriculum program. One of my first goals was to move beyond the occasional professional development workshop and get teachers across disciplines involved in deep and sustained conversations that would have a transformative effect on their pedagogy—and I hoped, in the long run, on the campus culture of writing. I was already aware of the legendary Engaging Ideas—everyone involved in WAC knew of John's book, and every time someone posted a message to the Writing Program Administration or WAC listservs asking for a recommendation for help for leading a faculty development workshop, Engaging Ideas was always the first resource mentioned.
In my WAC seminars, I quickly learned why John's book was so popular. It had a transformative effect on the faculty I was working with. I saw their pedagogies moving toward more critical thinking and extended disciplinary research projects. They began developing a broad array of writing‐to‐learn activities. They began to teach critical reading and not just assign readings. They testified that their response to student writing was becoming more effective, and they created rubrics that clarified their assessment criteria. I've heard similar stories from other campuses. More than any other faculty development book, Engaging Ideas has played a central role in an educational movement that I'm proud to be a part of—Writing Across the Curriculum. I was honored when John invited me to collaborate with him on a third edition.
One final word about the opportunity to work with John. Although I had never worked with John before Engaging Ideas, his reputation as a warm, good‐humored, and collaborative scholar and teacher proceeded him. It was a delight to work with him, and we found that we were able to write with a single voice and a singular sense of purpose. Where our approaches do differ, you'll find that we describe our different pedagogies in detail in our own voices and we hope provide readers with a more multivocal book and an even richer menu of pedagogical options than those provided in the second edition.
Recent Developments Influencing the Third Edition
Before describing what's new in the third edition, we should summarize what has
