Beth Shook

In ANTH 116: Power and Scarcity, a general education cultural anthropology course, Dr. Beth Shook was able to replace two previously used textbooks with an older edition general cultural anthropology textbook and a series of readings made available on Blackboard to registered students.

The course previously used two texts:  John Bodley’s Anthropology and Contemporary Human Problems, 6th edition ($48 used, $80 new) and David Elliot Cohen’s photojournalism book What Matters ($20 used) for a total of  $100 per student, in addition to $10 for field trips for the course. The first book, while excellent, is aimed at upper division undergraduate students and graduate students, and is challenging for general education students. The second text ended up going out of print and is no longer available from the publisher (and there are  limited used copies available).  

In an effort to reduce costs to  students, the two assigned textbooks were replaced with an older edition (2012) of Nanda and Warms’ Culture Counts – A Concise introduction to Cultural Anthropology ($20). In addition, articles and book chapters were posted on Blackboard for registered students. The course was reworked so that weekly assignments, which consisted of reading questions and/or reflections to activities students were doing, were assigned and submitted via Blackboard, so access to the readings at that location was convenient for students. The overall savings for students was approximately $80 each, and for the Spring semester we had 45 students for a total savings of $3600.

As a result of involvement in the TAP 3 cohort, changes are also being made to other classes as well. Some texts are being replaced by older editions (e.g. that for ANTH 301:  Physical Anthropology), and for another course (ANTH 485: Formal Methods) an open education text (that from OpenStax) is being considered.