Tim Lougheed
The best university textbooks have a magical quality about them. To most students, they simply appear on reading lists and bookstore shelves, evoking little interest in how such works came to be written or published. Researchers and instructors may be more appreciative of the value of this material, but they, too, tend to treat textbooks as found treasures, rather than something they might want to produce for themselves.
And no wonder. In technical fields such as science, medicine, and engineering, the creation of a textbook poses a daunting challenge. It demands that the writer be authoritative, while distilling the current state of knowledge on a given topic in the most comprehensive possible way. Years of effort may result in producing pages that are, for many people, either dense and difficult to read or, perhaps, the key to helping them understand a complex subject.
Yet sometimes these books emerge from an overwhelming sense of need, as in the case of Dr. Walter Hendelman, adjunct professor in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Medicine.
“It was my frustration as a teacher not having something which I thought would help the students,” he says, referring to his own inspiration to create a textbook outlining the most intricate details of brain anatomy. “I found the books available were beyond the student trying to grasp a difficult and conceptual subject matter—the human brain—for the first time.”
That was in the late 1980s. More recently, he has spent the last two years revising the third edition of his work, Atlas of Functional Neuroanatomy. The book sells for about $80, and he knows there are only a handful of them that have been purchased by the students in the Faculty of Medicine.
Nevertheless, Hendelman’s book does serve a useful purpose for more than 130 students, who are expected to take a course in this subject. His work pairs hundreds of detailed images and textual descriptions, with an accompanying CD-ROM to view the content in a more interactive way. Occasionally, he hears from students thanking him for making the subject matter accessible to them.
“Sometimes I’ll get an appreciative e-mail that comes from goodness knows where,” he says, noting that most of the feedback stops there. Textbooks like his are generally published with little or no fanfare, finding their way in small numbers into courses across North America and beyond, with few people ever realizing how far the book has traveled or the scholarly recognition it affords the University.
“In the university millstream, people who write textbooks may receive scant credit or exposure for what they’ve accomplished,” says Hendelman.
Nor, he adds, are textbooks written only for this goal. But, like other aspects of the teaching process, they require time that could be spent on other aspects of one’s academic career, such as conducting research and producing peer-reviewed papers.
He suggests it would be worth finding a way to promote this scholarly activity that yields a concrete product with a valuable educational role. Hendelman applauds the University medical bookstore for establishing a shelf to showcase works by faculty members, for example, and he suggests that various buildings on campus could readily accommodate similar displays for everyone on campus to see.
His view is echoed by Aline Germain-Rutherford, director of the Centre for University Teaching. She points out that a senatorial subcommittee has been restructured in order to examine precisely this kind of issue.
“We are looking at the complete products of teaching, and one of those products is a textbook,” she says.
According to Germain-Rutherford, just as Hendelman’s textbook now employs information technology that has emerged since he first began writing in the late 1980s, such evolution is bound to continue. Future generations of course textbooks may have more in common with today’s interactive video games than they do with traditional books.
“It’s paradoxical,” she concludes. “Textbooks are more and more recognized in the career of a teacher, because we do value teaching more in our universities. But at the same time, the textbook has to change its form, has to change its role in the classroom, and should not be the main resource.”
