Preface

As writing teachers, the broader movement toward adopting and creating open educational resources has become central to our pedagogy. This volume extends the work we did creating a previous resource, The Culture of Science, which was intended specifically for students at our institution, the University of Oregon. Supported by a digital scholarship award from the UO Libraries and working in collaboration with OER librarians Rayne Vieger and Allia Service, this new project is intended for a wider educational audience of students teachers in a range of disciplines interested in exploring the impact of science and its history on modern life. We have intentionally selected materials from a wide range of genres, modalities, and creators in an effort to expand the ways we all think about and engage with science.

Recently, the state of Oregon has adopted common learning outcomes for the first-year writing sequence that inspired the development of this resource. Every student who completes the university-level writing requirement should be able to achieve the following goals:

• Apply rhetorical concepts to achieve writing goals within a given discourse community.
• Engage in research and writing as recursive and inquiry-based processes, participating in the communal and conversational nature of academic discourses.
• Develop strategies for generating, drafting, revising, and editing texts based on feedback and reflection.
• Reflect on knowledge and skills developed in this and other courses and potential transfer to future contexts.

We have made every effort to cultivate themes and select articles, videos, and other media that will help students meet these goals with instructional support.

In addition, we have selected texts based on several specific aims:

• Provide a balance of gender, racial, and geographical representation among authors, creators, and topics.
• Offer accessibility, both physical accessibility and accessibility of content.
• Cultivate a blend of engaging genres and modes building on a central concept and blending rhetorical tools (appeals, voice, style, etc.) to effectively communicate with and about science for various audiences.
• Inspire effective discussions, assignments, essays and other learning activities designed to help instructors guide students toward proficiency (and mastery) of university-level writing sequence outcomes.

While we have made every effort to select resources that are freely available via the Internet, in some cases we have chosen materials that are only available through library databases due to the quality of their scholarship. Such selections are indicative that further advances are needed to make all such high-quality materials open and available to the public.

While using this resource, if you notice that a link is no longer working or identify any other issues with the material, please reach out and let us know: srust[at]uoregon.edu or jenee[at]uoregon.edu. We’d also love to hear about how you’re using it.

Special thanks to our Assistant Editor Sofia Caradonna, a senior majoring in Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon who provided exceptional research support.

—Stephen Rust, Senior Instructor of English, and Jenée Wilde, Senior Instructor of English, University of Oregon

Media Attribution

Cover image is licensed under University of Oregon’s Adobe Stock Education License.