The U.S. political system suffers from endemic design flaws and is notable for the way that a small subset of Americans—whose interests often don’t align with those of the vast majority of the population—wields disproportionate power. Absent organized and persistent action on the part of ordinary Americans, the system tends to serve the already powerful. That’s why this text is called Attenuated Democracy. To attenuate something is to make it weak or thin. Democracy in America has been thin from the beginning and continues to be so despite some notable progress in voting rights. As political scientists Benjamin Page and Martin Gilens wrote, “The essence of democracy is not just having reasonably satisfactory policies; the essence of democracy is popular control of government, with each citizen having an equal voice.” (1) Since this is likely to be your only college-level course on the American political system, it is important to point out the structural weaknesses of our system and the thin nature of our democracy. Whenever you get the chance—in the voting booth, in your job, perhaps if you hold elected office—I encourage you to do something about America’s attenuated democracy.

This multimedia reader examines how people use a humanities lens to make sense of what they experience, as well as share their experiences with the rest of the world. The information is presented using a pedagogical approach called reverse teaching, which introduces artifacts in their historical, social, political, personal, and other contexts. Along with the narrative, questions for creative and critical thinking prompt the reader to practice self-exploration.

Open English @ SLCC is an evolving digital book created and maintained by English Department faculty at Salt Lake Community College. It exists to provide our faculty–over one hundred full- and part-time instructors–with robust, flexible, and locally produced open educational resources (OER) that can be used for teaching a variety of courses across our composition sequence.

This book is evolving and adaptive, offering a range of texts on rhetoric, writing and reading, all written by SLCC faculty with specific attention to the needs of SLCC students and the local conditions of our work and study at a large, multi-campus, increasingly diverse community college in Salt Lake City, Utah. Unlike a traditional textbook, the writing in this book invites remix, adaptation, and repurposing to match the specific needs of its users–SLCC writing students and instructors primarily–but also faculty and students at other schools, course designers, WPAS, and anyone else interested in open texts about writing, language and literacy.

Open English @ SLCC is a community-authored, community-focused text, one that invites conversation, change, addition, and repurposing over time in the interests of attuning itself to the needs of those who use it. To this end the book invites public digital annotation through Hypothesis, allowing readers to add notes, questions, observations and resources directly to the texts. This ethos of shared knowledge, creative reuse, and ongoing conversation is at the heart of the Open English @ SLCC project.