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.

Describes the author’s personal family struggle with entering the field of English. Notes how it is becoming increasingly difficult for today’s students to be able to make choices among instrumentalist and intellectual paradigms of education and work. Concludes by voicing a hope that educators can invent new rules for "academic" writing in this new century.

Explores a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection not as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. Looks at two considerations that help render more salient the cultural and historical connections. Discusses how the sophists emphasized the materiality of learning, the corporeal acquisition of rhetorical movements through rhythm, repetition, and response.

ommunity outreach brings idealism and social consciousness into the academy. It brings a human face and complex lives into the discussion of issues and ideas. But it can also plunge teachers and students into contradictory and sometimes profoundly conflicted social and literate practices. Guerrilla service (as Joe Mertz calls those short forays into soup kitchens, nursing homes, and Lisa's neighborhood) reinforces the distance between the giver and receiver, especially if the contact is superficial and the junket uncomplicated by preparation or reflection. Many current approaches to service-learning avoid this dilemma by embedding personal and social consciousness in academic work-in professional performance for a nonprofit client and/or broad critical analysis (Adler-Kassner, Crooks, and Watters; Waterman). But a fundamental conflict remains, I believe, unresolved, when students (fired up with confidence in social change) confront the suddenly

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”;

or rhetoric and composition, the last decade of the twentieth century might be deemed Return of the Ancients. In many ways, contemporary scholars have taken up an earlier resurgence of the ancients, one that began decades earlier with what have since become standard historical treatments of the ancients (Kennedy, Kerferd, and Guthrie), and, perhaps most notably, in 1972, when Rosamond Kent Sprague's volume The Older Sophists made available the sophistic fragments in translation for the first time. But recent work aims to be more connective: rather than writing history for the sake of history, scholars such as Janet Atwill, Richard Enos, Susan Jarratt, John Poulakos, Takis Poulakos, Kathleen Welch, Victor Vitanza, and most recently Jeffrey Walker (Rhetoric) have reclaimed, refigured, and reread Aristotle, Isocrates, and the sophists, delineating ways in which these ancient figures might help us reframe or reconsider contemporary debates about pedagogy. The connections to feminism (arratt), cultural studies (T. Poulakos and Welch), postmodernism (Vitanza and Atwill) and the liberal arts (Atwill and Walker) have been convincing enough to spark renewed and broadened interest in how the ancients conceptualized rhetoric, how they taught, what they did. In many ways what follows is also a return to the ancients, but rather than attempt to connect the ancients to discourse already in circulation-an important task, to be sure-I want to instead explore a connection that inhered in ancient practices, a connection that isn't as apparently relevant to contemporary pedagogy, but as I will suggest just might be: that between rhetorical training and athletic training. It is important to note at the outset, as many writers have pointed out (for

Argues that the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach (such as service learning) call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings, but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice. Presents a case study in which students use the practice of intercultural inquiry to go beyond a contact zone into confronting contradictions, inviting rivals, and constructing and negotiating meaning through the eyes of difference.

Incites inquiry as to how modern American literature reflects on the problem of identity. Spotlights the contribution to modern American writing by Wallace Thurman’s "Harlem" fiction. Endeavors to link a racial imperative to a sexual imperative by means of a current theoretical discourse surrounding notions of city and community life.

Explores some queer and performative objections, challenges, and counterproposals to the identity-based pedagogies still dominating composition studies and closely related fields, bringing to the foreground pedagogies that take the instability of identity as a starting point and move toward even greater deconstruction. Proposes a tentative theoretical (re)solution that dis/integrates the binary underlying these “two” approaches to praxis.

David R. Jarraway, Tales of the City: Marginality, Community, and the Problem of (Gay) Identity in Wallace Thurman's "Harlem" Fiction, College English, Vol. 65, No. 1, Special Issue: Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Pedagogies (Sep., 2002), pp. 36-52

Focuses on the way sexual excesses inscribed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Oriental discourses served to open up "queer" spaces in Romantic literature, while analyzing the degree to which the master narrative of British colonial domination was in part dependent on narratives of the sexual degeneracy of the Other. Focuses on Byron’s "The Giaour" to illustrate the workings of "homotextuality."

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.

Analyzes Grendel ("Beowulf"), the Green Knight ("Sir Gawain and the Green Knight"), and the Pardoner ("The Canterbury Tales"). Notes that they are all "queer" characters in that they are not typical men of the time and they all pose a challenge or threat to normative homosocial desire. Suggests that traditional readings of these characters have obscured their disruptive queerness.

Jeffrey L. Schneider, Secret Sins of the Orient: Creating a (Homo)Textual Context for Reading Byron's "The Giaour", College English, Vol. 65, No. 1, Special Issue: Lesbian and Gay Studies/Queer Pedagogies (Sep., 2002), pp. 81-95

Provides a mini-autoethnography of three institutional moments in which the author saw a set of conditions that invited him to speak or write as a gay academic to make political interventions in dominant culture. Explores three important issues that are often unacknowledged in everyday discussions of homosexuality: exposing heteronormativity as heterosexism, moving beyond invisibility, and the trap of "double consciousness."

ver ten years have now passed since Judith Butler's Gender Trouble began making trouble with its challenges to the systems of gender and sexuality. The book has been translated into nine languages; anniversary editions have been released, and Butler has revisited and revised its central claims in subsequent articles, interviews, and book-length works. In short, Gender Trouble, and, most particularly, the theory of performativity delineated within this book, has remained on postmodern theory's center stage since its 1990 appearance. Butler asserts that the incredible life of this text has far exceeded her original and more modest intentions for it, and she credits the continually changing context of its reception for Gender Trouble's endurance (Preface vii). While Butler's humility and attribution to audiences here are refreshing, Gender Trouble's central claims did constitute theoretical interventions of the first order, disrupting feminism as many of us knew it, and helping to found queer theory in the process. Subverting common-sense beliefs that gender and sexuality are fundamental truths of the self, Gender Trouble (in what are now statements of their own commonplace familiarity) tells us instead that both are always acts, expressions, behaviors, which, like performative speech acts, bring into existence that which they name, and, through their repetition, come to constitute the identities they are purported to be. In other

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Discusses how adding a greater technological element into the composing and distribution of dissertations forces educators to consider multiple issues, some new and some that are only brought to the forefront because this electronically assisted or integrated process will make previously tacit behaviors on the part of both students and faculty explicit.

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Argues that the situation of adjunct instructors, particularly those who piece full-time employment from part-time appointments, is appalling and that there is responsibility to be meted out to all the various interests connected to the academy that benefit from it. Explores how adjunct instructors and graduate student can make decisions about their careers based on the prevailing conditions of employment.

Elizabeth Vander Lei, Donald R. Hettinga, A Comment on "'A Radical Conversion of the Mind': Fundamentalism, Hermeneutics, and the Metanoic Classroom", College English, Vol. 64, No. 6 (Jul., 2002), pp. 720-723

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Notes that educators must think about the possibilities for using autobiographical narrative ethically and effectively in academic writing and research, and they need to ask how the personal affects writing that is less personal. Considers how regardless of the stance toward the personal, no one can be an informed writer or reader without considering how subjectivity informs ways of knowing.

Investigates how disability is discovered, constructed, and performed in a certain type of cultural practice, that is, in a postmodern, undergraduate college classroom. Argues that the implementation of an autobiographical pedagogy must extend beyond the dimensions of race, gender, and sexuality and must include disabled persons in these discussions as well.

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.

Presents a debate between traditionalist ideas from Xin Lin Gale and postmodern ideas from Cheryl Glenn and Susan Jarratt. Quotes Gale who says that you cannot have it both ways, foundational and antifoundational: using the historical evidence to champion Aspasia while at the same time "reclaiming" her from the biases of those very documents. Notes Jarratt’s response to the contrary.

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.

quoted her as saying, "I wrote about what I saw and heard in the street.[...] I lived in a small second-floor apartment at the corner, and I could look first on one side and then the other.There was my material" (Watkins).Consider Brooks's last sentence: "There was my material."Such a simple sentence.Such complex resonances.How may we read Brooks's use of the term material?As the ideas that she wrote about?As the physical and spatial matter in her apartment and on the streets of Bronzeville (South Chicago)?As evidence (as in law) important enough to influence the outcome of a case ... or a life ... or a poem?As the language or terms that make up her poetry?As the competing ideologies that informed her life?Or perhaps the term material signifies a combination of all of the above?If we take this combination

Hopes to promote recognition of the importance of the intersections between discourse, place, and environment through theoretical examinations and pedagogical approaches. Offers some preliminary working definitions for ecocomposition and examines the evolution of ecocomposition; distinguishes between ecocomposition and ecocriticism; and offers some perspectives on ecocomposition pedagogy.

Considers how the history of relations between composition and literature has involved a vexed tangle of misunderstanding and hurt. Suggests that both fields would benefit from thinking through some of the vexations. Argues for maintaining the marriage between composition and literature. Admires the situation in schools where there is no tension between literature and composition.

he history of relations between composition and literature has involved a vexed tangle of misunderstanding and hurt.Both fields would benefit if we could think through some of the vexations.That's what I'm trying to do here.But I won't talk about the most obvious problems: political and material issues of power, money, and prestige.These matters cannot be ignored, but I will mention them quickly and pass on.Composition has been the weak spouse, the new kid, the cash cow, the oppressed majority.When writing programs are housed in English departments, as they so often are, teachers of writing are usually paid less to teach more under poorer working conditions-in order to help support literature professors to be paid more to teach less under better working conditions.I'm hoping that these material vexations might be starting to recede just a bit now-as composition gets stronger and more secure, as writing programs find they can prosper outside English departments, and as literature itself struggles because of weak support for the humanities (not to mention frequent attacks on "professors" and all of higher education).Even the virus of relying on part-timers and adjuncts is increasing in mainstream literature, too.I ask only that we not forget how hard it will be to get past the deep legacy of anger, hurt, and guilt.I won't even address the much-discussed question of whether writing and literature should marry, stay married, or divorce.

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.

Discusses the short introductions by literary scholars that more often than not precede Shakespeare's plays. Considers the importance and lack of importance that readers put on these introductions. Describes the use and creation, over time, of these introductions to many different plays by Shakespeare.

Discusses two recent novels that employ techniques more familiar to science fiction than to historical fiction to probe questions of history and authenticity. Considers how these novels expose the way that those who attempt to bear witness to the history of slavery are ostracized, pathologized, and even institutionalized.

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frican American writers are still writing slave narratives. One hundred thirtynine years after emancipation, more than four decades after the Civil Rights movement, the experience of slavery, the costs of escape, and the pain of remembering still compel attention. Yet even as the racial realities of modern America press literary scholars, historians, filmmakers, and others to keep our dark national history fresh in our collective consciousness, the march of time makes our peculiar institution seem reassuringly distant to some, and less recoverable than ever. As we began the twentieth century, thousands of ex-slaves were still alive, many testifying to their experiences (albeit often in compromised ways) through public forums such as the Work Projects Administration interviews. As we enter the twentyfirst century, no survivors remain, and very few who have actually beheld or spoken to a former slave. An experiential and bodily connection to slavery has been lost. No one alive bears the physical scars of African American enslavement, those visible

Children growing up in Hawaii, coming as they do in their plasticyears under the influence of the public school, preparing themfor the assumption of the responsibilities which life in Hawaii demands, should come tofeel that, in cutting cane on the plantation, in driving a tractor in the fields, in swinging a sledge in a blacksmith shop, in wielding a brush on building or fence or bridge, as well as in sitting at a doctors or merchants or manager' or banker' desk, there is opportunity for rendering a necessary as well as intelligent, worthy, and creative service. -United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Education, 1920 (4)