Welcome back from break, all! The Oklahoma State First-Year Writing Department has an exciting new opportunity for students enrolled in English 1213 courses—a new OER textbook! Open Educational Resources (OER) is an amazing initiative that offers students their course textbooks for free, and also shares with students materials, articles, and authors that they might not have encountered in commercial textbooks.

At Oklahoma State, our FYC team is committed to both creating accessible classrooms and to fostering an innovative community that celebrates, studies, and creates new opportunities for writing scholarship, research, and teaching. Who Teaches Writing, the English 1113 OER textbook created by Kathy Essmiller and Joshua Daniel, has already made a tremendous impact on OkState's campus—a recent feature in STATE details just how invaluable Who Teaches Writing is to both students enrolled in English 1113, but to the campus culture as a whole. Read the article here! 

In addition to Who Teaches Writing, Dr. Daniel and Dr. Essmiller have collaborated once again to bring our campus Writing Spaces at Oklahoma State University, the OER texbook for Composition 1213 courses. Alongside Dr. Daniel and Dr. Essmiller, Mark DiFrusio, Natasha Tinsley, Josiah Meints, Courtney Lund, Dane Howard, and Roseanna Recchia, instructors and professors who have all attended or currently work at OkState, worked to design, edit, and write sections of this textbook.

Both Who Teaches Writing and Writing Spaces at Oklahoma State University were inspired by Writing Spaces, a fantastic book series containing peer-reviewed collections of essays exploring writing practices. The book series features essays by both students and instructors, and is an open educational resource accessible to all. The first-year writing OER textbooks are not only modeled on this structure, but also feature scholarship from several Writing Spaces series. Just as Writing Spaces texts and Who Teaches Writing feature wide-ranging essays on writing instruction through multiple genres, Writing Spaces at Oklahoma State University introduces students to core classroom concepts through a vast series of topics.

First-year writing instructors at Oklahoma State University are committed to our students and their writerly successes—our courses are centered in supporting and celebrating their personal writerly development and goals. Utilizing OER textbooks like Who Teaches Writing and Writing Spaces at Oklahoma State University is a continuation of this commitment to our students. We are proud to be a part of a writing community that is consistently working to develop new teaching initiatives and research, and are excited for you to check out Writing Spacesat Oklahoma State University! More information about the textbook is accessible on both our website and over at Open OkState, and we will be featuring scholars and writers from the textbook throughout the next few months on our FYC Writing Community page. Stay tuned!