Dear Colleagues,
Please consider submitting a chapter proposal for The Well-Equipped Traveler: Disciplinary Maps to Guide Your College Journey, an open educational resource (OER) published by Iowa State University Digital Press. We are seeking engaging faculty who excel at connecting their discipline to students’ everyday lives—particularly those whose teaching resonates strongly in introductory or first-year courses. The goal of this project is to feature short, accessible chapters that translate disciplinary insights into meaningful, real-world relevance for college students.
Imagine a first-year student arriving on campus with immediate, practical questions: Do I need shower shoes? How do I make friends? Can I handle the coursework? Too often, the answers they receive are anecdotal, oversimplified, or misaligned with academic realities. This volume takes a different approach. It bridges the gap between traditional academic success textbooks and more advice-driven “survival guides” by asking what disciplines can contribute to the questions students already care about. Our goal is to replace guesswork with inquiry and advice with evidence—equipping students with ways of thinking that help them navigate college with greater clarity.
Below is an abbreviated summary of the call. For full details about the project scope and proposal process, we invite you to visit the complete call website: https://iastate-proposals.pubpub.org/well-equipped-traveler?access=s9wa9q0v
We would be grateful if you could also forward this call to colleagues—especially those “go-to” instructors whose teaching consistently helps students see why their field matters. Thank you for helping us reach educators whose work deeply engages students.
This collection will be available in Spring 2027 for Fall course adoption, with the aim of becoming a widely used, openly accessible entry point into disciplinary thinking for first-year students.