Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document that Changes Everything: By William Germano and Kit Nicholls

BOOK REVIEW

In the eyes of students and professors alike, the course syllabus has become a throwaway text synonymous with the mundane part of a course curriculum. Often, both instructors and students treat the syllabus as an uninteresting contract, with little regard for its creation or its nominal value for a class. In Syllabus: The Remarkable, Unremarkable Document That Changes Everything, Dr. William Germano, professor of English Literature at The Cooper Union, and Dr. Kit Nicholls, director of the Writing Center at The Cooper Union, set out to inspire instructors to put to words the intentions and life of the “coursetime” within the pages of the syllabus by creating a living, breathing document (p. 53). Germano and Nicholls (2020), like Seitz (2019), campaign for “syllabi that imagine education not as a system of inputs and outcomes but as a dialogic encounter” (p. 459).