Acknowledgements

This open educational resource began its life as an in-house textbook–Key Concepts in Writing and Rhetoric–conceived and written by a committee of writing professors from the English Department at Columbia College Chicago. Pegeen Reichert Powell led the first group of writers and editors who produced the book’s earliest print form and four subsequent print editions. The original Key Concepts production committee included Pegeen Reichert Powell, Jennie Fauls, Jennifer Ailles, Kenneth Daley, Matthew McCurrie, Nita Meola, Jonn Salovaara, Hilary Sarat-St. Peter, Ryan Trauman, and Jennifer Loeb. Key Concepts became so successful with teachers and students that another group of writing teachers at Columbia decided to share an updated edition with a much wider audience. Since many members of that first authorial team have moved on to serve other institutions, we assembled a new writing team with one writer from the original team, Hilary Sarat-St. Peter, joined by a new crew of writers, librarians and media makers. In addition to Hilary, the fifth-wave Key Concepts team at Columbia College College, led by Terence Brunk and Brendan Riley, includes Karl El Sokhn, Kim Galovich, Ames Hawkins, Deborah Holdstein, Katrina Kemble, Marc Meierkort, Svetlana Mitric, Hillary Ostermiller, Delia Pless, Devon Polderman, Doug Reichert Powell, Austin St. Peter, and Alexis Sarkisian. A team of librarians, media makers, instructional technologists, accessibility coordinators, and intellectual property specialists joined these experienced writing teachers to give Key Concepts new life and wider reach as an Open Educational Resource, funded by a generous grant from the U.S. Department of Education, in conjunction with the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries of Illinois (CARLI). These information science, media, technology, and accessibility specialists include Kim Hale, Arlie Sims, Heidi Marshall, Dennis McGuire, Hilary Ostermiller, Lauren Noel, Jen Sauzer, Jeanne Kelly, David Morton, and Katie Kosinski. Alejandro Bottia-Forero and Alex Riseman designed the cover.

This fifth iteration of Key Concepts has a new name: Authoring Culture: The Foundations of Twenty-First Century Writing. We derived the new title from a cherished phrase in Columbia College Chicago’s mission statement, which envisions teaching students to “author the culture of their time.” Authoring culture involves a wide range of skills and concepts, which the original Key Concepts cultivated effectively. Keeping the modular, concept-based design of the original textbook, the new authorial collective has, where necessary, updated the examples in every chapter. We have also added some chapters, compressed or combined others, added coverage of AI, and created media ancillaries to accompany each concept, expanding the book’s inclusivity by addressing visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learners with videos and podcasts. We have integrated a number of 3-D printing assignments into the book, to expand the range of textual products students might develop. Due to copyright issues, we have eliminated the essays collected in earlier versions of the textbook. Writing teachers can select and integrate contemporary essays, articles, social media conversations, and other texts into their courses as appropriate. At Columbia, we offer all instructors digitized course blueprints that they can adopt or adapt, selecting new texts to include annually. Another strength of Columbia's particular institutional context is the presence in our English and Creative Writing Department of fiction writers, poets, essayists, and memoirists who offer their particular forms of expertise in the teaching of writing to our first-year writing students as well as to our creative writing students. Don DeGrazia, Lisa Fishman, Eric May, Joe Meno, and Tony Trigilio inspired the new chapters on Story and Craft: we look forward to benefiting from their continued leadership as we begin the Authoring Culture OER adventure at Columbia this Fall 2024. Special thanks goes to Ames Hawkins for leading the initiative with Brendan Riley to engage all our writing teachers in conversation about how to use this resource in their courses.          

The videos and podcasts that accompany this text involved transdisciplinary collaborations across the college. Without the leadership and expertise of our colleague Matthew Cunningham from the Communication Department at Columbia, our podcasts could not have become a reality. Peg Murphy, Chair of Communication, graciously welcomed us to use Communication Department facilities for recording. Without the leadership and expertise of our colleague Jeff Spitz in Cinema and Television Arts, our videos would not have been made. Our video-makers include Jonah Hall, Jonathan Connolly, and Brennan Pozzi. Max Hatlem did our podcast editing. A team of student reviewers–Zora Dunlap and Yulian Leshuk from Columbia College and Cassidy Tillman from Aurora University–enabled us to strengthen the text’s user-friendliness. We offer special thanks to Professor Daniel Hipp and Dean Pegeen Reichert Powell from Aurora for their interest in and support of this project. A team of industry experts and peer reviewers–Dr. Josephine Walwema, Name, and Name–pushed us to produce our very best work.

Senior administrators serve institutions in innumerable, often invisible ways. Dean Steven Corey, Associate Dean Robin Whatley, Library Director Jo Cates, Associate Provost Nate Bakkum, and Provost Marcella David provided critical institutional support for this project. Christie Dal Corrobo, Leigh Plunkett, and David Weiner provided essential administrative support. Michele Leigh, the senior coordinator at the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries, taught us all to use the OER platform LibreTexts, and guided us through every step of the grant process and textbook build-out. Kim Hale, Columbia’s lead librarian on this project, deserves a huge shout-out for inviting us into this textual adventure, propelling us forward whenever our progress slowed. Thanks, Kim.

Together, we are the Authoring Culture Collective.