Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

Reviewed is Teaching with Life Writing Texts, edited by Miriam Fuchs and Craig Howes.

As a field, creative writing must reject its traditional image of “uselessness” and realize its anticapitalist, antiprivatizing potential as a creator of public space. In part, this move would involve teaching students to question traditional notions of influence, as well as the modernist concept of the author as a lone,autonomous individual.

Defining Our Terms - Elizabeth Hodges: Reviewed are Keywords in Creative Writing, by Wendy Bishop and David Starkey, and Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom: The Authority Project, edited by Anna Leahy. The “Sticking” Problem: Locating Creative Writing at Home and Abroad - Sarah E. Harris: Reviewed are Creative Writing Studies: Practice, Research, and Pedagogy, edited by Graeme Harper and Jeri Kroll; Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, by Tom C. Hunley; and The Author Is Not Dead, Merely Somewhere Else: Creative Writing Reconceived by Michelene Wandor. Creative Writing for Everyone - Megan Fulwiler: Reviewed is The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students by Heather Sellers.

Author Sue Monk Kidd, who is white, employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of black writing in her novel “The Secret Life of Bees”. Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between whites and blacks in American literature and culture.

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical. In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.

Teaching postcolonial literature to American college students involves taking them through a dialectical process of thinking about identification. In the first stage, students are encouraged to note similarities between their own lives and those of the work’s characters. With the second step, students examine how the work’s cultural and historical context makes the characters different from them in key ways. Finally, students use the differences that they have found in order to reflect on aspects of their own situations from a new angle. The author demonstrates this process through a discussion of her experiences teaching Tsitsi Dangarembga’s 1988 novel Nervous Conditions.

Traditionally, we English faculty have warned our students against simply identifying with a literary work’s characters. For us, such attachments constitute “reading badly.” But we engage in identifications, too, including ones with the work’s author. A consideration of critical responses to “Benito Cereno” and Uncle Tom’s Cabin enables us to see how our own identifications often operate. In our teaching of reading, we should openly acknowledge our own commitments and help our students negotiate them.

The authors report their experiences teaching courses on food and food literature, arguing that these subjects have yet to be sufficiently appreciated as genuinely intellectual.

The author analyzes his experiences teaching literature courses in which he encourages students to research works by people from their hometowns. He argues that relating literature to concepts of “home” makes English classes more accessible to students while also helping them reflect on important issues in ecocriticism.

Undergraduate literature courses tend to neglect American fiction of the 1930s, especially the proletarian novel. Disregard of this particular genre is often based on the assumption that it emphasized a crude Marxist realism opposed to aesthetic modernism. Various examples of the genre are, in fact, worth teaching, especially because they do not fall simply into either camp. Such texts include John Dos Passos’s USA trilogy and Fielding Burke’s novel Call Home the Heart.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.

Reviewed are What the Best College Teachers Do by Ken Bain and Life on the Tenure Track: Lessons from the First Year by James M. Lang.

Many graduate creative writing programs depend on “star” faculty who have been hired more because of their professional reputation as writers than because of their commitment to teaching. As a result, such programs often fail to provide reflection on teaching that would truly serve their students. One step toward alleviating this problem is to offer undergraduate courses that enable creative writing graduate students to team-teach with regular faculty.

The undergraduate English curriculum should move well beyond study of the traditional Eurocentric literary canon. It should help students participate in society by teaching them how to communicate across various languages, discourses, and media.

The essays gathered in this special issue of College English participate in an emerging movement within composition studies representing, and responding to, changes in, and changing perceptions of, language(s), English(es), students, and the relations of all these to one another. This movement critiques the tacit policy of “English Only” dominating composition scholarship and pursues teaching and research that resist that policy. It draws attention to the fact that within much composition teaching and scholarship, both the context of writing and writing itself are imaged to be monolingual: the “norm” assumed, in other words, is a monolingual, native-English-speaking writer writing only in English to an audience of English-only readers (Horner and Trimbur). This tacit policy of monolingualism manifests itself in other ways as well: the institutional divides separating most composition programs and courses from ESL programs and courses, including courses in “ESL composition,” and separating composition courses from courses that involve students in writing in any language other than English; the nearly complete absence in composition textbook “readers” of writings by anyone other than North American and British writers whose first language is English (even translations of texts written in languages other than English are rare); the insistence in composition textbooks on standardizing students’ English, and their neglect of competing standards and definitions of English; and the neglect in histories of composition of writing in languages other than English. Such practices define composition as composing in, and only in, an English that has a fixed standard that students

Recognizing that many of us teach the medieval English women mystics Margery Kempe and Julian of Norwich in survey courses, this essay attempts to put these writers in context for teachers who may have only a passing familiarity with the period. Focusing on passages of their writings found in the Longman and Norton anthologies of British literature, the author shows how these women responded to and shaped sociopolitical issues of their day, particularly questions of heresy and disorder as threats to Catholic institutional stability, the role of Mendicant teachings for the laity of the church, and the rise of the cult of the Eucharist.

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Taking the 1969–74 classroom “dramedy” Room 222 as a case study, and setting it in the context of a range of portrayals of teachers and teaching from the period, the author raises the questions about the positive portrayals of committed teachers. These portrayals, along with positive views of community involvement and a multicultural environment, might have progressive aspects not allowed for by assumptions that such realist commercial productions inevitably co-opt any urge toward radical critique. She argues that such a rethinking might also offer teachers a way to reconsider and communicate with our students about current popular culture.

Tracing the literature on writing conferences during four tension points in higher-education enrollments--the 1890s, the 1930s, the 1950s, and the 1970s--the author suggests that conferences have been championed primarily at those moments when students were both more numerous and more diverse, an urge countered, however, by faculty working conditions. Looking at the present, then, he argues that the need for conferencing and the pressures that preclude extensive one-to-one work seem an amalgam of these earlier eras and continue to threaten the teaching-learning ideal that conferences represent.

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The author describes the issues raised for him by team-teaching a course on the Shoah that aimed to incorporate familial, historical, and rhetorical perspectives. Considering firsthand testimonies, songs written by camp inmates, renderings of others’ stories such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and works of fiction and poetry by writers without firsthand experience of the Shoah, he is ultimately led to wonder whether the stories of those who underwent such experiences stand utterly outside critique and appropriation and may demand of us instead only that we never forget.

Reviewed are Eloquent Images: Word and Image in the Age of New Media, edited by Mary E. Hocks and Michelle R. Kendrick; Defining Visual Rhetorics, edited by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers; The Terministic Screen: Rhetorical Perspectives on Film, edited by David Blakesley; and Tuned In: Television and the Teaching of Writing, by Bronwyn T. Williams.

Reviewed are Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian A. Huot, and Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder.

The author explores his vexation with David Bartholomae’s “Inventing the University” in terms of its assumptions about class. He suggests that it both negates his own experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy he employs as a teacher of writing with middle-class students, given its insistence on mimicry of a dominant discourse that involves a betrayal of self for both working-class and middle-class learners of academic discourse.

m ecently reprinted in Cross-Talk in Comp Theory, David Bartholomae's the University is now a recognized classic in the field of composition theory. I admired the article, when I first read it over twenty years ago, as a telling criticism of writing as process. I also found it vexing, and still do. I use my vexation with Inventing as a catalyst for rumination on my social trajectory. My vexation is intimately related my passage from the working the middle class. I read Inventing as the negation both of my own educational experience as a member of the working class and of the pedagogy I employ as a teacher of writing with middle-class students. It is a tribute the power of Inventing, now seen as an early example of social constructionism, that I am not the only person more recently vexed by it. Thomas Newkirk and Nancy Welch are also. I use their particular responses Inventing as a way define my own. Newkirk points more my problem with the implications of Inventing for my view of education: making the move into university discourse is not simply a matter of inventing but also of uprooting. Welch points more my problem with Inventing as implying a narrative of academic socialization distinctly different from the socializing process I underwent. At the core of Inventing is Bartholomae's analysis of the function of the commonplace in student writing. He illustrates his claims through reference short student writings produced in response a prompt on creativity. One student writes, Creativity me, means being free express yourself in a way that is unique you (148). Bartholomae comments that with his use of to me the student appropriates a commonplace as his own. Further, this act of appropriation constitutes his as a writer (149). Bartholomae argues that one's authority as an academic

The author argues that constructions of literacy that suppress or omit nonverbal elements such as the visual and the tactile are limiting students’ potential. She traces the way the historical relationship between image and word has consistently privileged language, and offers instances from her experience with students and with her own children to argue for a more reciprocal dynamic and a polymorphic literacy that can increase the scope and power of our literacy and our literacy teaching.

The author suggests that attending to the publishing history of Larsen’s novel and the resulting indeterminacy of its ending(s) offers a concrete example of a materially oriented pedagogy that can illuminate the racial politics behind textual production and its relation to particular historical and cultural moments. He suggests that such a pedagogy offers both another way of understanding the textual contingency emphasized in contemporary theory and a way of further opening up questions of textuality and meaning for students.

Taking the reader on a stroll through the woods to look for the elusive and unclassifiable mushroom, this essay suggests that avant-gardes can present a challenge to our familiar modes of communication in the classroom. The author argues that a truly radical pedagogic practice, corresponding to the theoretical critiques offered by recent trends in the study of rhetoric and teaching, might forestall the real danger represented by teaching the avant-garde, namely that it be domesticated and its radical potential neutralized.

ella Larsen's Passing has become one of the most widely read New Negro Renaissance novels in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends. By this I do not mean critics have not determined how much guilt to assign Irene Redfield in Clare Kendry's fatal fall, or to what extent the narrative is actually a lesbian story as a racial one. I mean the ending is actually unknowable, because the original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition's third printing, and no extant evidence can explain this change. There is no conclusive answer to the question of presenting this textual crux correctly-despite assumptions to the contrary by Larsen's editors-but I argue this textual problem itself bears an important lesson: the best response to a gap in textual knowledge is to acknowledge the absence and its causes, not to produce editions and teach classes gloss over such gaps, thereby passing on the social and cultural elements of these textual histories. More generally, I argue students and teachers can always benefit from attention to textual scholarship, and minority texts particularly need such study for what it reveals of the social and cultural interactions between minority writers and predominantly white, male publishers. The unbalanced power dynamics of this relationship produce what Gilles Deleuze terms a literature: that which a minority constructs within a major language (152). By focusing on the production history of the texts themselves, we can study the material evidence of this minor language.

Reviewed are:Public Works: Student Writing as Public Text, edited by Emily J. Isaacs and Phoebe Jackson; Re(Articulating) Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning, by Brian Huot; and What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing, by Bob Broad.

N n September of 2001, I had just begun teaching an undergraduate course entitled Writing (and) the Holocaust. When my students and I arrived in class on the eleventh, we'd each heard that something was terribly wrong in New York and Washington. By the next class, we all knew, and had seen, the worst: images of the explosions near the top of the World Trade Center towers, images of firefighters and office workers covered in debris from their collapse, and the repeated images of tangled steel while construction workers, police, and firefighters searched for the dead. We didn't directly confront the event the first couple of weeks of the semester; we didn't have to. In trying to understand how to build a knowledge of the events of the Shoah, it was impossible to hold at bay the profoundly disturbing questions about the narratives we build to explain such events, whether of 9/11 or of the Shoah. Those narratives and their alternatives-the narra-

Reviewed are: Teaching Literature. Elaine Showalter; Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind, by Gerald Graff; and Arts of Living: Reinventing the Humanities for the Twenty-first Century, by Kurt Spellmeyer.

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Suggests that there is a real chance right now for letting the possibilities of creative nonfiction infuse, improve, and invigorate the teaching of composition. Concludes that when allowed to explore literary nonfiction, writing students will develop a substantial set of strengths from which to undertake other disciplinary writing challenges as they explore past and present with an eye to the future.

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

Considers how in the contemporary world, queer theory mediates in culture between normative ideologies and material practices, between intellectual inquiry and social activism, between text and context, between teaching and learning. Presents an introduction for this special issue, noting that the essays collected represent pedagogical interventions that are theoretically informed by queer scholarship.

gnes Varda's recent documentary Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse explores the modern parallels to the ancient practice of gleaning leftover produce from the fields in the wake of the harvesters. Among the most fascinating individuals Varda comes upon is a young man rescuing spilled fruit and vegetables after a farmers' market in Paris. The man is extremely knowledgeable about the nutritional content of each item; has, in fact, a master's degree in chemistry; makes his living distributing free papers and advertising flyers outside train stations; and as his avocation teaches French to the Senegalese immigrants who share the housing project he lives in. Varda shows one of his classes. He is in love with teaching, has drawn charts with a vast number of careful illustrations of words, has an enchanting rapport with his students. But he does not get paid for his teaching: he has organized his classes for free. He is a gleaner, a rescuer of those who have nothing wrong with them but have been passed over by the system. Varda admires him. Traveling across France like a migrant agricultural worker, making a documentary with a hand-held digital video camera, she is la glaneuse of the film's title. For all the usefulness of their work and the joy they have in it, undoubtedly these gleaners-Varda, the French teacher, and others in the film-exist at the margins of their professions and their society. But for all the marginality of their financial existence, the film makes clear that they have chosen their paths thoughtfully and are happy doing what they do. Ghosts in the Classroom, a recent book of essays by adjunct instructors, makes clear that there are many college teachers in the United States who glean the developmental and introductory classes, lead a marginal financial existence, and are not at J a me s Pa p p is associate director of MLA English Programs and the Association of Departments of English. Most of his writing focuses on issues of university teaching and administration, but he has also published on literature, folklore, and translation and has an article forthcoming on Hungarian revival architecture in communities inside and outside Hungary. He is currently editing a collection of papers on the research of teaching in language, literature, and rhetoric.

Argues that Vida Dutton Scudder’s pedagogy predicted a college–community connection increasingly popular one hundred years later: service learning. Outlines Scudder’s teaching, settlement work, and the ideologies underlying both; critiques her work with the benefit of 21st–century hindsight; and concludes by reaffirming that in the context of her times she was a remarkable figure.

Review of the following books: (1) Collision Course: Conflict, Negotiation, and Learning in College Composition by Russel K. Durst, (2) Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom by David Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald, and (3) Teaching Composition as a Social Process by Bruce McComiskey.

Addresses an underlying assumption that teaching is a skill that can be acquired by the proper training, rather than intellectual work deserving of study. Suggests an alternative basis for teacher development by promoting and demonstrating a process of pedagogical inquiry.

reative writers exist as a group both inside and outside the academic community. Inside academia, the pursuit of creative writing as a graduate degree specialization is typically associated with the M.FA. However, another option, the Ph.D., also exists. I am the recipient of a Ph.D. in English with emphasis in creative writing, alternatively called the Ph.D. in English with creative dissertation. Like many of my colleagues who hold this degree, I also have an M.FA. in creative writing. I entered graduate school as a master's student to become a better writer, and a better scholar. While I was there, I also developed the desire to become a teacher. Told that the M.EA. was not sufficient for a university teaching position (without the all-important multiple books that many positions require), and without significant training or opportunity from my M.EA. program in teaching, let alone in the teaching of creative writing, I entered into a Ph.D. program in English/creative writing with hopes that this program would teach me how to teach in my field. But as a graduate student who did not know which way she might turn (teacher or writer? could I be both?), I was puzzled by the lack of attention on the part of my university to the pedagogy of my field. I took seminars, completed language and oral and written comprehensive examinations, and defended my dissertation-a booklength collection of poems-but heard little about what it might mean to enter a university teaching position, or what teaching creative writing as a professional writer/ teacher might involve. I consider myself to be one of the lucky ones: I took a graduate course in the teaching of composition and then taught composition, feeling well-prepared; I then taught creative writing, feeling less prepared, as a graduate student and postgraduate lecturer. This valuable experience allowed me to recently secure a tenure-track position teaching composition and co-directing a composition

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the creative writing or composition teacher.

Notes that university teaching is, for better as well as worse, what many American literary writers do for a living. Notes the author was determined from the beginning to be a full time writer, but now faces declining income. Describes his reluctance for university teaching. Proposes four “alternative” writing courses he would be willing to teach.