Open-Access Textbooks for Teaching Writing

By Ryan J. Dippre
Associate Professor of English / Director of College Composition
University of Maine
MCELA Executive Board

Building on the AI Repository materials I shared in the October newsletter, I want to highlight some more the WAC Clearinghouse’s open-access teaching resources—this time, in the form of the excellent textbook series Writing Spaces.  Writing Spaces is a set of textbooks (they are up to six volumes at this point) full of peer-reviewed chapters written by teachers of first-year writing in colleges and universities.    
 
Chapters have a wide variety of interests and themes.  In Volume 5, for instance, Erin E. Kelly discusses “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Peer Review,” Jason McIntosh explores assessment, and Danielle DeRise considers the role of bias in writing.  Teachers in search of accessible, thoughtful, and thorough material for different concepts, processes, and theories of writing can find much to work with.