Looks at two representative examples of the impact of multiculturalism on higher education in order to get a concrete sense of how different perspectives can affect understanding of the multicultural transformation of the college curriculum in general and English studies in particular. Notes that the emphasis on educational access should be on “geography of education.”

Considers how teachers might re-create, rather than import, Paulo Freire into North American contexts—and so not lose the power of his ideas. Takes the method of pragmatism and connects it to Freire’s concept of praxis to argue for pragmatic theory and practice in the work of teaching literacy.

Considers how in the classroom, dealing with conservative Christian belief, progressive writing instructors confront “problems of meaning” just as perplexing and urgent as those that trouble evangelical students. Offers some stories that show how the author analyzed her own recurring “problems of meaning,” some theoretical (and theological) ways of working through perceived impasses between academic interpretation and biblical precept.

Argues that Kenneth Burke used “The Interpretation of Dreams,” as well as other works by Sigmund Freud, as a lesson on reading, taking over the central tropes of dreamwork and making them broadly dialectical rather than strictly psychoanalytic terms. Suggests that Freud’s “tropology” of dreaming is crucial for reading Burke.

hen in 1968 Ellis Page and Dieter Paulus published The Analysis of Essays by Computer, they saw a promising future for programs that could evaluate both the aesthetic traits of essays and their substantive content (191). Now, more than thirty years later, the future that Page and Paulus envisaged seems to have arrived: computer power has increased exponentially, textand content-analysis programs have become more plausible as replacements for human readers, and our administrators are now the targets of heavy marketing from companies that offer to read and evaluate student writing quickly and cheaply. E-rater, developed by Educational Testing Service (ETS), is today used as one reader for evaluating the essay portion of the Graduate Management Admissions Test-a human is still the other reader. Intellimetric, developed by Vantage Technologies, is used for evaluating writing in a range of applications, K through college. WritePlacer Plus, developed by Vantage for the College Board, is being marketed as a cheap and reliable placement instrument. The Intelligent Essay Assessor, developed by Landauer, Laham, and Foltz at the University of Colorado, is now being marketed through their company, Knowledge Analysis Technologies, to evaluate essay exams for college courses across disciplines. The firms that are marketing the machine scoring of student writing all explicitly or implicitly define the task of reading, evaluating, and responding to student writing not as a complex, demanding, and rewarding aspect of our teaching, but as a burden that should be lifted from our shoulders. The current scene in American postsecondary

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Focuses on D. H. Lawrence and his being taken seriously as an original thinker. Notes that Lawrence is thought of primarily as a novelist. Suggests that readers should acknowledge Lawrence as an original thinker in an evolving history of the dialogical principle and in a continuing attempt to understand the dialogical and its political and ethical importance.

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Addresses the hundreds of web sites devoted to the memory of Diana. Provides a thick description of the way in which people are writing and using the Internet in everyday life, with a special emphasis on the way in which this writing brings them into a public sphere. Concludes that hypermedia offers the immediate sense of audience and community.

Maps out two simultaneous and mutually reinforcing phenomena: (1) the material conditions that have given rise to hierarchically arranged writing programs; and (2) the attendant cultural values that have made possible the feminization as well as the racialization of composition teaching. Argues that writing programs have emerged by way of divisions in labor, separating mental labor from mechanical labor.

Begins with a quick history of the English profession’s response to the prospect/specter of the computer as reader of student writing. Describes two programs that are now being heavily marketed and publicized nationally. Sketches out some of the implications of these programs for members of the profession of English in America.

Considers the inclusion of literature in a college curriculum. Presents the author’s opinion of the university’s approach to literature and its incorporation into the English program. Considers several other opinions on the issues of literature in college English education.

ssessment is a peculiar field within college English studies. In one sense, every faculty member is engaged directly in it, assigning, responding to, and grading student papers; many members of English departments also participate in one way or another in placement testing for entering students or in mid-career or exit writing assessments for more advanced students. In another sense, external assessment of our work is always there in subtle and unacknowledged ways, defining what we do and how well we do it, how much power we can exert in controlling our curriculum, and how our scholarly work is valued. In this second sense, even more than in the first, assessment affects the way our work is perceived by others inside and outside the academy and hence helps determine the resources we receive for everything from duplicating to new faculty positions. The common misperceptions of our fieldthat as writing teachers we are picky grammarians and value flowery prose or as literature teachers we are irresponsible revolutionaries, for instance-are damaging cliches that arise in large part from assessment gone awry. Once we are evaluated as unable to fulfill our roles, no one in a position of power need take seriously our claims, and our discipline becomes easy to dismiss as an expensive frill. We will defend our private world of assessment as a matter between our students and us, at most a matter to be shared with our colleagues. But that public world of external assessment seems beyond our reach, if-not our ken, and our instincts are always to withdraw, to claim professional privilege. Yet with so much at stake, no English faculty member can avoid involvement in assessment, although many of us would prefer to see our work in other terms. In yet another sense, writing assessment has become an important specialty

Explores the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. Searches to find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of the educational concerns and at the center of assessment models. Suggests that faculty should devote themselves to teaching the first-year course.

Notes that writing assessment has become an important specialty within composition studies with links to such “suspicious partners” as educational research, statistics, and politics and with profound effects on public policy and educational funding. Discusses the modern era of writing assessment beginning during the fall of 1971 an its implications. Considers assessment as a site of conflict.

Considers the wide variation of first-year composition programs and if they do indeed vary so widely. Considers what the programs have in common. Asks if it would be possible to articulate a general curricular framework for first-year composition, regardless of institutional home, student demographics, and instructor characteristics. Presents a list of outcomes approved by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

Considers if American Ebonics is a different language from English or if it is a dialect of English. Discusses how American Ebonics relates to the larger Ebonics picture Focuses on the grammatical patterns of Ebonics that diverge the most from standard English. Addresses pedagogical implications.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

Kath leen Blak e Ya nce y is Pearce Professor of English at Clemson University, where she directs the Roy and Marnie Pearce Center for Professional Communication and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication. Editor or author of six books and numerous articles and chapters, she chairs the College Section of NCTE and is vice-president of WPA. Her current interests include reflection as a means of enhancing learning; the design and uses of electronic portfolios; and ways of assessing digital texts.

The principal idea of this essay is that the study of verbal art can and must overcome the divorce between an abstract 'formal approach and an equally abstract ideological approach. Form and content in discourse are one, once we understand that verbal discourse is a social phenomenonsocial throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning. -M. M. Bakhtin, Discourse in the Novel (259)

Suggests that William Gibson offers a way to negotiate the conventional discursive elements used within online communication. Notes that cyberspace discourse appears to be at its best not when it tries to minimize the effects of the conventional narratives from which it is built, but instead when it exploits those discourses most fully to reveal their sources and conflicts.

Questions the rhetoric of reproof and asserts the authors’ belief that the practice of scholarly critique is generally salutary. Hopes to stand as a testimony to the firm belief in the importance of critique in the ongoing scholarly conversation. Considers ethical problems with (and use of) the rhetoric of reproof, and ethical awareness and the scholarly conversation.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvesting some very general insights from two decades of cultural critique, English departments can develop curricula that will resolve a good deal of the conflict between literature and composition and improve instruction in both.

Argues that both composition and literary studies have a common pedagogical vocation and that by harvIndicates how current stylistic criticism might engage ideological issues by more fully developing M. Bakhtin’s ideas through an approach called cultural stylistics. Notes that Bakhtin’s own work was very much concerned with the divorce between ideological and formalist analysis, and his “sociological stylistics” was intended to synthesize the two.

Questions the rhetoric of reproof and asserts the authors’ belief that the practice of scholarly critique is generally salutary. Hopes to stand as a testimony to the firm belief in the importance of critique in the ongoing scholarly conversation. Considers ethical problems with (and use of) the rhetoric of reproof, and ethical awareness and the scholarly conversation.