Читать книгу Engaging Ideas - John C. Bean - Страница 10

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 2^nd 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 19^th 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.