Creative writing workshops typically feature a gag rule and emphasize purported flaws. This structure limits students’ meaningful engagement with each other’s work; positions the author as inherently flawed; and positions other participants as authority figures, passing judgment without articulating their aesthetic standards. I propose an alternative structure in which authors lead discussion; the work is treated not as inherently flawed but as “in process”; and discussants articulate their expectations about “good” writing rather than allowing them to function as unspoken norms.

Writing the Successful Thesis and Dissertation: Entering the Conversation by Irene L. Clark; Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts by Joseph Harris; The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals by Elizabeth Rankin

This essay explores the challenges facing students and teachers in the interdisciplinary classroom. Based on observations of a team-taught interdisciplinary class and drawing on cultural historical activity theory, I argue that the psychological double binds that result from the clash of different disciplinary activity systems constitute both the greatest challenge and richest potential of interdisciplinary classrooms.

Like other seemingly ordinary materials (cookbooks, street art, scrapbooks, etc.) the subject of our investigation “holy cards or (in Italian) immaginette” often function as rich repositories of personal and cultural memory as well as indicators of popular literacy practices. But to relegate them to the category of ephemera, as is customary with materials of this sort, diverts attention from their significant cultural and pedagogical value.

This article examines Yale’s “Awkward Squad” of basic writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, “pre-Shaughnessy” site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of basic in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic standards of correctness applied uniformly to all colleges and universities.

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for “high-risk” African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within present-day writing programs.

This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the “pedagogical imperative,” the “theory-practice split,” and the increasingly complicated relationship between “rhetoric” and “composition” as our field’s titular terms.

Delivering the Goods: How Writing Instruction Really Works by Howard Tinberg; A review of “Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts” by Joseph Harris and of “Delivering College Composition: The Fifth Canon,” edited by Kathleen Blake Yancey.

In this essay, I present three case studies of immigrant, first-year students, as they negotiate their identities as second language writers in mainstream composition classrooms. I argue that such terms as “ESL” and “Generation 1.5” are often problematic for students and mask a wide range of student experiences and expectations.

By reflecting on Japanese internment camps executed by the U.S. government in World War II, this article examines camp schools’ curricula and writing assignments and an English teacher’s response to student essays to show how racially profiled students and their Caucasian teacher negotiated the political meanings of civil rights and freedom.

In portfolio assessment, WAC helps other disciplines increase programmatic integrity and accountability. This analysis of a portfolio partnership also shows composition faculty how a dynamic culture of assessment helps us protect what we do well, improve what we need to do better, and solve problems as writing instruction keeps pace with programmatic change.

This article challenges current assumptions about the teaching and assessment of critical thinking in the composition classroom, particularly the practice of measuring critical thinking through individual written texts. Drawing on a case study of a class that incorporated disability studies discourse, and applying discourse analysis to student work, “Accessing Disability” argues that critical thinking can be taught more effectively through multi-modal methods and a de-emphasis on the linear progress narrative.

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In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

This essay reports on a university-school oral history project at an elementary school in Brooklyn, New York. It theorizes the dialectic of place and history as expressed in the voices of the school community and goes on to suggest some tenets for a public sphere pedagogy rooted in material rhetoric and economic geography.

The spaces in which public deliberation most often takes place are institutionally, technologically, and scientifically complex. In this article, we argue that in order to participate, citizens must be able to invent valued knowledge. This invention requires using complex information technologies to access, assemble, and analyze information in order to produce the professional and technical performances expected in contemporary civic forums. We argue for a civic rhetoric that expands to research the complicated nature of interface technologies, the inventional practices of citizens as they use these technologies, and the pedagogical approaches to encourage the type of collaborative and coordinated work these invention strategies require.

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not only that reliance on the legibility associated with familiar subject positions motivates student resistance in the composition classroom but, moreover, that our interest in securing self-presentations as teachers may motivate everyday interactions that work to maintain the status quo.

Often, composition teachers present public debate as if it occurs on a rhetorically level playing field, with victory going to the person who argues most logically. Real-world contestants are seldom so equal in power. We can enrich our pedagogy by studying such encounters; example: the 1263 disputation at Barcelona between Rabbi Nachmanides and Friar Paul Christian.

The Technology, Education, and Copyright Harmonization (TEACH) Act of 2002 was developed to update copyright law to accommodate the uses of copyrighted materials in distance-education environments. This article presents an analysis of the TEACH Act and its implications for teaching writing, with an aim toward building awareness among faculty and administrators so that they can become part of the critical conversation about copyright law as it affects teaching and learning with technology.

“Guidelines for the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies” signals our increased awareness of the ethical obligations that attend our scholarship and research. Our adoption of research methods from other fields, particularly the social sciences, has heightened that concern. We must now consider the ethical obligations we assume when we teach those methods to students at the beginning of their academic careers.

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Russel Durst has written a commentary on “Understanding Problems in Critical Classrooms” by William Thelin, published in September 2005; I have invited William Thelin to respond. The full text of the original article is also available at http://inventio.us/ccc.

Contesting the monolingualist assumptions in composition, this article identifies textual and pedagogical spaces for World Englishes in academic writing. It presents code meshing as a strategy for merging local varieties with Standard Written English in a move toward gradually pluralizing academic writing and developing multilingual competence for transnational relationships.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College–based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday practices and politics of the composition classroom.

Despite the widespread acceptance of many kinds of nonliterary texts for first-year writing courses, primary scientific communication (PSC) remains largely absent. Objections to including PSC, especially that it is not rhetorically appropriate or sufficiently rich, do not hold. We argue for including PSC and give some practical suggestions for developing courses and designing assignments using PSC

The implications of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution on classroom teaching and practices point to a continual need to reevaluate how communicative actions—linguistic diversities—of students are central aspects of the work within composition courses. This article revisits the historical significance and pedagogical value of the resolution in its critique of student-teacher exchanges, in its advancement of strategies that invite language variations into composition courses, and in its proposal to support the expressive rights of students.

This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.

Some scholarship suggests that critical pedagogy should be abandoned for more pragmatic goals. While the democratic and political sensibilities of critical pedagogy require more from the instructor, classrooms that on the surface do not appear to work in teaching students should not be seen as signs that the pedagogy is not worth the extra effort. The classroom experience recounted in this piece suggests that blundered implementation can function as an opportunity to advance knowledge and to understand the ongoing project of critical pedagogy, strengthening it even as we realize that critical pedagogy cannot look and feel like status quo teaching and still enact progressive goals.

New-media writing exerts pressure in ways that writing instruction typically has not. In this article, we map the infrastructural dynamics that support—or disrupt—newmedia writing instruction, drawing from a multimedia writing course taught at our institution. An infrastructural framework provides a robust tool for writing teachers to navigate and negotiate the institutional complexities that shape new-media writing and offers composers a path through which to navigate the systems within and across which they work. Further, an infrastructural framework focused on the when of newmedia composing creates space for reflection and change within institutional structures and networks.

Xiaoye You is a Ph.D. student in the English as a Second Language (ESL) programat Purdue University. He isinterested in comparative rhetoric and issues of Englishwriting instruction in international contexts. Currently he is working on his dissertation, exploring the intersections of Anglo-American and Chinese rhetorical traditions in the historical evolution of English writing instruction in Chinese colleges.

I argue that examining two collections of essays designed for the preparation of new writing teachers and published twenty years apart provides some important clues to what has occurred to composition studies in the interval. Building on the framework I established in two previous CCC articles, I argue that composition studies has become a less unified and more contentious discipline early in the twenty-first century than it had appeared to be around 1990. The present article specifically addresses the rise of what I call critical/cultural studies, the quiet expansion of expressive approaches to teaching writing, and the split of rhetorical approaches into three: argumentation, genre analysis, and preparation for “the” academic discourse community.

This essay offers a historical explanation for the place of reader-response theory in English studies. Reader-response was a part of two movements: the (elitist) theory boom of the 1970s and the (populist) political movements of the 1960s and 1970s. If the theory boom was to remain elitist, it had to deauthorize reader-response. If reader-response was to remain populist, it had to consent to and participate in that deauthorization. In the 1980s reader-response was popular among compositionists, even as it began to lose currency among theorists. Later, however, compositionists professionalized themselves by deemphasizing, or even ignoring, reading. Now, as the profession again considers including explicit instruction in reading in the introductory writing course, the thinkers who could help us most have faded from the discussion.

In this essay, I analyze Kenneth Burke’s Cold War pedagogy and explore the ways it connects to (and complicates) Paulo Freire’s conception of praxis. I argue that Burke’s theory and practice adds a rhetorical nuance to critical reflection and then envision how his 1955 educational concerns gain significance for teachers and scholars today who, like Burke, live in a time “when war is always threatening.”

It s no secret that, in most American classrooms, students are expected to master standardized American English and the conventions of Edited American English if they wish to succeed. Language Diversity in the Classroom: From Intention to Practice works to realign these conceptions through a series of provocative yet evenhanded essays that explore the ways we have enacted and continue to enact our beliefs in the integrity of the many languages and Englishes that arise both in the classroom and in professional communities.Edited by Geneva Smitherman and Victor Villanueva, the collection was motivated by a survey project on language awareness commissioned by the National Council of Teachers of English and the Conference on College Composition and Communication.All actively involved in supporting diversity in education, the contributors address the major issues inherent in linguistically diverse classrooms: language and racism, language and nationalism, and the challenges in teaching writing while respecting and celebrating students own languages. Offering historical and pedagogical perspectives on language awareness and language diversity, the essays reveal the nationalism implicit in the concept of a standard English, advocate alternative training and teaching practices for instructors at all levels, and promote the respect and importance of the country s diverse dialects, languages, and literatures. Contributors include Geneva Smitherman, Victor Villanueva, Elaine Richardson, Victoria Cliett, Arnetha F. Ball, Rashidah Jammi Muhammad, Kim Brian Lovejoy, Gail Y. Okawa, Jan Swearingen, and Dave Pruett.The volume also includes a foreword by Suresh Canagarajah and a substantial bibliography of resources about bilingualism and language diversity.

Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today. Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instructiona field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other disposable teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience. Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

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In this essay, I analyze Kenneth Burke's Cold War pedagogy and explore the ways it connects to (and complicates) Paulo Freire's conception of praxis. I argue that Burke's theory and practice adds a rhetorical nuance to critical reflection and then envision how his 1955 educational concerns gain significance for teachers and scholars today who, like Burke, live in a time when war is always threatening.:'

Using a “historical case study” of Edwin M. Hopkins, this article explores what Bruce Horner calls the “material social conditions” of teaching writing early in the twentieth century. It shows how Hopkins’s own attitude and response to the demands of being a writing teacher serve as a backdrop for understanding his local and national crusade to improve labor conditions for faculty.

This essay turns to feminist ethnography and postcolonial theory to address how the figure of “the stranger” haunts the project of community service learning. By explicating the immediate and broader relations of power that structure these “strange(r) encounters,” we are more likely to produce the kind of agitated pedagogy that creates opportunities for progressive practices and effects.

In this article, I argue that critical discourse analysis (CDA) can complement and extend existing critical and radical writing pedagogies; CDA provides the theoretical and methodological context that can articulate explicitly the relationship between language practices and politics. I use CDA to analyze texts that circulated on the campus of Miami University, Ohio, surrounding a conflict that exacerbated ongoing disputes about diversity, access, and standards, and I discuss how CDA might inform composition pedagogy.

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Community service learning in college-level composition has been widely proclaimed as a microrevolution in higher education. Advocates enthusiastically assert that both faculty and student participants report radical transformations of their experiences and understanding of education and its relation to communities outside the campus (Adler-Kassner et al. 1). This pedagogy, they argue, addresses writing as a situated, social act and points us toward a curriculum of textual studies based on [rhetorical] inquiry into variation in discourse (Bacon 53). Students write about the community in journals and rhetorical analyses of mission statements, or with the community in an urban

This article links failed reform to failed education through a case study of an annual collaborative revision of a program textbook in the Composition Program at the University of California at Irvine. Review of successive editions of the program’s Student Guide to Writing at UCI reveals a progressive retreat from the program’s pedagogical commitments and the reappearance of product-oriented instruction.

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of academic and personal writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey's views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer brief historical development of sophistic and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic contributes to rhetoric of possibility by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from logos privileged in Western philosophy to mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters (66).

Although the Bartholomae/Elbow debate is often framed as a modern conflict between the advocates of “academic” and “personal” writing, it is more appropriately viewed as the most recent manifestation of the historical clash between expressivism and constructivism. However, both sides of this conflict, which split over whether to see writing as a product of the mind or of an external discourse, rest upon a dualist assumption that the primary task of language is to provide linguistic representations of a transcendental ego. This essay first draws from the work of Richard Rorty and John Dewey in order to critique the dualist legacy of the expressivist/constructivist debate and then explicates Dewey’s views on mind, language, and experience in order to reconstruct a pragmatic philosophy of communication and a progressive composition pedagogy.

This essay examines the pedagogical practices of the poet, civil rights activist, andteacher Melvin B. Tolson who taught at Wiley College from 1923 to 1947. Tolson’s complex classroom style, which mixed elements of classical, African American, and current-traditional rhetoric, produced a pedagogy that was at once conservative, progressive, and radical, inspiring his students to academic achievement and social action. Tolson demonstrates that it is possible to instruct students in the norms of the academy without sacrificing their home voices or identities.

In this ethnographic study of the teaching of writing, Karen Surman Paley reveals the social significance of first-person writing and the limitations of a popular taxonomy of composition studies. Paley looks critically at the way social constructionists have created an Other in the field of composition studies and named it expressivist. Paley demonstrates the complexity of approaches to teaching writing through an ethnographic study of two composition faculty at Boston College, a program that some would say is expressivist. She prompts her colleagues to consider how family experiences shape the way students feel about and treat people of races, religions, genders, and sexual preferences other than their own. Finally, she suggests to the field of composition that practitioners spend less time shoring up taxonomies of the field and more time sharing pedagogies.