Joe Drape’s Our Boys: A Perfect Season on the Plains with the Smith Center Redmen is the 2012 iRead book at Washburn University.
The Washburn campus in Topeka is about 200 miles from Smith Center, Kansas, where New York Times sportswriter Joe Drape moved with his family to get a community perspective on the small town football team with the nation’s longest high-school winning streak. The author is slated to speak at Washburn in September 2012.
The iRead common reading program is one component of Washburn’s First Year Experience curriculum. First-year students will read the book in IS 110: The Washburn Experience, a student success course that focuses on focuses upon information literacy, effective communication, academic integrity, and the transition into the college experience.
The broader goals of the iRead program are to:
- Enhance the campus community
- Uphold the university mission of “learning for a lifetime”
- Advocate the goals of the Washburn Transformational Experience
- Create a common experience for students
- Foster involvement and inclusivity as early as possible
- Enrich and expand the minds of students
Previous iRead books at Washburn include A Long Way Gone, Nickel and Dimed, and This I Believe. Click here to see the other schools that have adopted these books and other Popular Picks from Macmillan!
Our Boys • St. Martin’s Griffin • 320 pages
Filed under: 2012, A Long Way Gone, Nickel and Dimed, Our Boys, This I Believe & This I Believe II | Leave a Comment
Iraq veteran Rye Barcott’s memoir, It Happened On the Way to War, is the 2011 Common Reading book at the State University of New York, Potsdam. In August, the university’s Student Success Center distributed copies of the book to incoming students enrolling in the First-Year Success Seminar (FYSS).
The book will be assigned reading in all sections of FYSS, a college transition course that most new students take in the fall semester. Though sections of the course are based on an array of interdisciplinary topics, appealing to a student body with broad academic interests, the book will be the common thread that links the whole class together.
Students will be asked to consider what lessons might be learned from these two “worlds” of service [military and humanitarian], as well as how they can make an impact on the world as college students.
The First Year Experience (FYE) program also has a Residential Life component; students enrolled in the same FYSS will live together on the same floor in one of two dorms. This way, freshman students making the transition to university life and academics can “go through it all together” with their peers. Students will also have the support of upperclassmen who live on each FYE floor and serve both as Academic Peer Mentors, providing general academic guidance, and as FYSS Teaching Assistants.
Rye Barcott will visit campus to speak on October 12.
Previously, P.M. Forni’s Choosing Civility was the common book at SUNY, Potsdam. Click here to see all the schools that have adopted these titles and other Popular Picks for first-year reading from Macmillan.
It Happened On the Way to War • Bloomsbury • 352 pages
Filed under: 2011, Choosing Civility, It Happened On the Way to War | Leave a Comment
For the second year in a row, Daniel Black’s Perfect Peace is the common reading assignment for incoming first-year students at Clark Atlanta University!
Members of Class of 2015 are reading the novel before they arrive on campus for CAU Experience, the new student orientation program, which begins on August 17. The author will facilitate several discussion sessions about this year’s book on campus during CAU Experience.
Throughout the school year, students will continue to discuss and write about Perfect Peace in the two-semester First Year Seminar, which is a required course for all new students. The First Year Seminar at CAU “assist[s] students with the transition to the University . . . It also focuses on academic, personal and social issues relevant to college life.”
In previous years, the university has assigned other works by Daniel Black, including They Tell Me of a Home and The Sacred Place for the First-Year Seminar required reading. Dr. Black is an Associate Professor of African and African American Studies and Africana Women’s Studies at CAU, where he studied English as an undergraduate himself.
Perfect Peace • St. Martin’s Press • 352 pages
Filed under: 2010, 2011, Fiction | Leave a Comment
For its first-ever common reading program, Bryn Mawr College has chosen Class Matters, from the highly-acclaimed New York Times series of the same title. In July, the school sent a copy to every member of the Class of 2015, so they’ll be getting a jump-start on their first college reading assignments!
Class Matters was selected by Bryn Mawr’s Diversity Leadership Group, writes Michele A. Rasmussen, Dean of the Undergraduate College. The Diversity Leadership Group is “a committee of senior administrators and faculty [who] devise campus-wide diversity programming. Members of the committee were familiar with the book and thought it would be a particularly good choice for our students.”
The college purchased copies of Class Matters for the first-year class with a gift from Bryn Mawr’s Alumnae Association, which is also spreading the word about the book and encouraging its members to participate.
In fact, Bryn Mawr aims to involve as much of the college community as possible in this inaugural shared reading experience by “ask[ing] members of the campus community to suggest activities focused on the reading.” The college’s goal is to sustain an interdisciplinary conversation about socioeconomic class and its influences on individuals and society on campus throughout the 2011-2012 academic year.
That ongoing conversation and other related programming will evolve alongside the Diversity Leadership Group and Diversity Council’s year-long Class Dismissed? initiative. With a film series, collaborative community projects, on-campus speakers, and the common reading of Class Matters, Class Dismissed? will serve as a platform for community engagement, awareness, and action related to the topic of socioeconomic class.
Class Matters • Times Books • 288 pages
Filed under: 2011, Class Matters | Leave a Comment
Colin Beavan’s No Impact Man is the 2011 selection for the One Book, One Community all-campus common reading program at the University of Arkansas!
First-year students will read, discuss, and write about the book in Freshman Composition; adoptions are also anticipated in other courses, especially those emphasizing rhetoric and composition, environmental studies, and sustainability (the university approved an interdisciplinary undergraduate Minor in Sustainability in April).
“[No Impact Man] has a rich personal narrative that is driven by conflict, both internal—within the author’s mind—and external—with his immediate and extended families and with consumer-driven society at large—making it a compelling read.”
Colin Beavan will visit in October to speak with students and faculty and deliver a public lecture on campus, and also meet with local book club members at the Fayetteville Public Library, which will be collaborating with the university on the OBOC program for the third year.
“The One Book committee wanted [a book] that could tap into students’ concern about the environment [and] the university’s and community’s sustainability efforts . . . We received a number of really excellent suggestions from the campus and the community, and I think we’ve found a book that will educate, entertain and stimulate some lively discussion.”
Already a leader in campus sustainability practices and principles, the University of Arkansas has established a mission to reduce its environmental impact:
—through education of students and citizens about environmental stewardship and sustainability
—through research to develop knowledge and technologies that facilitate sustainability and improved environmental stewardship
—by committing to become a carbon neutral institution as soon as it is practical
—by committing to become a zero-waste institution as soon as it is practical
—by serving as an exemplar of environmental stewardship for our community, Arkansas, and the world
With support from university departments and services like the Quality Writing Center, the Sustainability Council, the Applied Sustainability Center, and Facilities Management, the OBOC committee is planning a variety of interdisciplinary and interactive events that relate to No Impact Man and the 2011 OBOC theme: Creating and Living in a Sustainable World. Plans include a September screening of the “No Impact Man” documentary, faculty panels, visual art and design exhibitions (like Master of Fine Arts candidate Szilvia Kadas’s showcase, Small Footprint) and student action projects that promote sustainable practices on campus and in the local communities.
Read about other schools that have selected No Impact Man for common reading initiatives and their No Impact Weeks and sustainability efforts here!
No Impact Man • Picador • 288 pages
Filed under: 2011, Green, No Impact Man | Leave a Comment
Macmillan Speakers Bureau
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