ACTIVATE: 
One Book, One Campus

Enlist a representative committee of educators from across the disciplines who are interested in selecting one text to be implemented throughout the campus to varying degrees.

Committee members gather a list of texts that they feel would capture students’ attention and are versatile enough to be used in a variety of disciplines.

Make copies of Educator Resource: Assessing a Text, which can be used to determine if the text addresses factors that students say motivate them to read.

Schedule meeting dates for the committee to review and evaluate the predetermined list of recommended texts.

Assemble committee members and provide copies of Educator Resource: Assessing a Text and the compiled list of recommended texts.

Using the educator resource, walk through an assessment of each recommended text to see how it matches up with the factors identified by students as being motivations for reading.

Use the results to sift through the recommended texts and determine the ones that best meet the interests of students.

Ideally, the committee would settle on a list of three to five possible all-campus reads, and a survey with brief storylines could be sent to all instructors for a vote.

Once an all-campus text is selected, ideas for how to plan for reading and implement discipline-specific approaches need to be investigated.

Start small and work with the willing. Teaming up with another department or discipline and determining a text that could be used across the two (or more) disciplines is a wonderful starting point. 

Cross-curricular departments can collaborate on possible instructional activities or projects based on the selected campus text.

A task force of interested faculty can work to identify and select key passages or excerpts that touch on the overall message as well as key events in the text and could be used in classes where teaching the whole text is not possible.