College English

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June 2025

  1. Listening as Social Action and the Messy Middle of Writing and Rhetoric Pedagogy
    doi:10.58680/ce2025874409

November 2023

  1. Human-Centered Design for Inclusive Peer Mentoring of Graduate Teaching Assistants
    Abstract

    Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

    doi:10.58680/ce202332760

July 2023

  1. And Gladly Teach: Cultivating Learning Community in an Asynchronous Online Advanced Writing Course for Multilingual International Students
    Abstract

    Preview this article: And Gladly Teach: Cultivating Learning Community in an Asynchronous Online Advanced Writing Course for Multilingual International Students, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/6/collegeenglish32619-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202332619

May 2023

  1. Apples and Oranges: Toward a Comparative Rhetoric of Writing Instruction and Research in the United States
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Apples and Oranges: Toward a Comparative Rhetoric of Writing Instruction and Research in the United States, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/5/collegeenglish32559-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202332559

March 2023

  1. “Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!” Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures
    Abstract

    Preview this article: "Oh No She Did NOT Bring Her Ass Up in Here with That!" Racial Memory, Radical Reparative Justice, and Black Feminist Pedagogical Futures, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/4/collegeenglish32458-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202332458

January 2023

  1. The Drama with Madonna: A Hidden Archive Glimpse at bell hooks in the Composition Classroom
    Abstract

    Preview this article: The Drama with Madonna: A Hidden Archive Glimpse at bell hooks in the Composition Classroom, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/3/collegeenglish32380-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202332380

September 2021

  1. Teaching Racial Literacy through Language, Health, and the Body: Introducing Bio-racial Rhetorics in the Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Teaching Racial Literacy through Language, Health, and the Body: Introducing Bio-racial Rhetorics in the Writing Classroom, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/84/1/collegeenglish31452-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202131452

July 2021

  1. Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Diversity of Raciolinguistic Experiences in the Writing Classroom: An Argument for a Transnational Black Language Pedagogy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/83/6/collegeenglish31357-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ce202131357

September 2018

  1. “Share Your Awesome Time with Others”: Interrogating Privilege and Identification in the Study-Abroad Blog
    Abstract

    The genre of the study-abroad blog prompts students who are studying abroad to identify with marginalized populations they encounter during the travel experience, a practice that is particularly exigent amid the increasing commercialization of the studyabroad industry. To understand the conventions and ethical implications of the genre, the author examines an advice column on blogging abroad and students' reflections on their own writing from a recent studyabroad course. The blog conventions show that students are encouraged to use the misfortune of others to affirm their own privilege, while the interviews suggest that students need more support in responding to the complex cultural conditions of study abroad. To challenge the conventions of the studyabroad blog and ultimately the ideologies that contribute to the genre, faculty members leading students abroad should undertake pedagogical practices that encourage “empathic unsettlement. Copyright © 2018 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

    doi:10.58680/ce201829791

November 2017

  1. And Gladly Teach: The Archival Turn’s Pedagogical Turn
    Abstract

    This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729373
  2. “Engaging Race”: Teaching Critical Race Inquiry and Community-Engaged Projects
    Abstract

    This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729372

September 2017

  1. Freshman Composition as a Precariat Enterprise
    Abstract

    Drawing from recent work in the areas of economics and sociology, this article applies theories of precarity and the precariat, terms that denote the marginalized status of contingent workers, to the composition classroom. Reviewing the economic and social conditions precipitating workforce casualization, the article argues that theories of precarity support the efforts of scholars in composition studies thinking beyond the concept of social class and toward models of solidarity. Building upon the work of these scholars, the article advocates attention to the shared precarity of students and proposes methods of enhancing solidarity at the university.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729261
  2. “Raising Hell”: Literacy Instruction in Jim Crow America
    Abstract

    Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729260
  3. A Pedagogy of Rhetorical Looking: Atrocity Images at the Intersection of Vision and Violence
    Abstract

    At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.

    doi:10.58680/ce201729259

January 2017

  1. Mediating Discursive Worlds: When Academic Norms and Religious Belief Conflict
    Abstract

    This article presents data collected from forty writing instructors in order to explore the ways in which Christian students’ discourses seem to violate certain academic norms and to argue for the intentional engagement of these discourses. Such engagement encourages a move away from entrenched “us vs. them” narratives and toward productive mediation of competing discourses. The article concludes by offering specific pedagogical strategies that instructors might use to address academic norms with devout students.

    doi:10.58680/ce201728894
  2. The Good Writer: Virtue Ethics and the Teaching of Writing
    Abstract

    The author proposes a concept of ethics for the writing course, one derived from a moral theory that is both old and new and one that engages us when we teach such practices as making claims, providing evidence, and choosing metaphors in corollary discussions of honesty, accountability, generosity, intellectual courage, and other qualities. These and similar qualities are what Aristotle called “virtues,” and they are the subject of that branch of moral philosophy known as “virtue ethics” today. While the word virtue may sound strange to us today, Duffy argues that the tradition of the virtues has much to offer teachers and students and can clarify what it means, in an ethical sense, to be a “good writer” in a skeptical, postmodern moment.

    doi:10.58680/ce201728892
  3. Reimagining Rhetorical Education: Fostering Writers’ Civic Capacities through Engagement with Religious Rhetorics
    Abstract

    The author proposes three ways that engagement with religious rhetorics in undergraduate writing courses might enable teachers of rhetoric to cultivate writers’ civic capacities. To give readers a sense of what courses on religious rhetorics that aim to improve writers’ civic capacities look like in practice, DePalma discusses three undergraduate writing courses recently taught in different kinds of institutional settings and the kinds of learning that occurred as a result of students’ engagement with religious rhetorics in those courses.

    doi:10.58680/ce201728893

September 2016

  1. “Keep the Appalachian, Drop the Redneck”: Tellable Student Narratives of Appalachian Identity
    Abstract

    This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628690
  2. “The video was what did it for me”: Developing Meta-Awareness about Composition across Media
    Abstract

    In this article, I draw from a qualitative case study supported by theoretical framing from John Dewey and Gregory Schraw to explore how and why video composition could be a particularly useful site for the development of meta-awareness about composition within a writing course. Specifically, video opened space for rhetorically layered actions, metacognitive articulations, and interest, which led students to consider, plan for, or recount the transfer of compositional knowledge across media

    doi:10.58680/ce201628692

July 2016

  1. Writing and Rhetoric and/as Posthuman Practice
    Abstract

    This article examines the role of reflective practice in rhetoric and composition scholarship and argues for reconsidering practice through posthumanism. It (re)introduces posthumanism as a productive frame for considering rhetorical training in a networked age. In place of reflective practice, the article develops the concept of "posthuman practice" as a serial and material activity for rhetorical training. The article concludes by reconsidering metacognition and how reframing rhetoric as a posthuman practice could affect rhetorical pedagogy and ethics.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628626
  2. Review: Beyond the Tipping Point: Creative Writing Comes of Age
    Abstract

    The publication of the three works reviewed here relating to creative writing theory and pedagogy mark a point of critical mass for the field of creative writing studies that has been building for decades. This review looks at those books and discusses how they help point the way forward for the discipline.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628629

March 2016

  1. Review: Teaching Writing in the 21st Century: Composition Methodologies,Reading, and Transfer
    Abstract

    What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628219
  2. Emerging Voices: Shared Frequency: Expressivism, Social Constructionism, and the Linked Creative Writing-Composition Class
    Abstract

    This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

    doi:10.58680/ce201628216

January 2016

  1. Cultivating a Rhetorical Sensibility in the Translingual Writing Classroom
    Abstract

    This essay argues that students must call on their rhetorical sensibilities each time they sit down to write instead of automatically assuming that engaging in code-meshing is the appropriate response to every writing situation. It also encourages pedagogical efforts among teachers that invite students to locate translingualism in its larger contextual relationship with monolingualism and multlingualism, two other approaches to language difference that inform the teaching of writing. In the end, the essay suggests, students must take into consideration how each of these approaches to language difference influences the various decisions they are required to make in the writing classroom.

    doi:10.58680/ce201627653
  2. Translingual Writing and Teacher Development in Composition
    Abstract

    Teacher preparation for translingual writing differs from dominant forms of professional development wherein teachers are armed with predefined norms, materials, and knowledge for classroom purposes. Describing the principles that guide a teacher training course, this essay argues that teacher preparation for translingual writing should focus on encouraging teachers to construct their pedagogies with sensitivity to student, writing, and course diversity, thus continuing to develop their pedagogical knowledge and practice for changing contexts of writing. The essay outlines the principles (practice-based, dialogical, and ecological) that shape the course, describes its main features, and assesses its outcomes.

    doi:10.58680/ce201627658

September 2015

  1. Emerging Voices: Upvoting the Exordium: Literacy Practices of the Digital Interface
    Abstract

    This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

    doi:10.58680/ce201527435
  2. New Pedagogical Engagements with Archives: Student Inquiry and Composing in Digital Spaces
    Abstract

    This essay advances a new pedagogical approach to engaging with archives in undergraduate courses. Through this approach, students not only examine traditional archival materials from the past, but also create new online archives of present-day sources they identify as related. Rather than training undergraduate students to become archival specialists, this pedagogy invites them to inquire into the relevance of archival materials to their own everyday lives and composing practices in digital spaces.

    doi:10.58680/ce201527436

July 2015

  1. “Know thy work and do it”: The Rhetorical-Pedagogical Work of Employment and Workplace Guides for Adults with “High-Functioning” Autism
    Abstract

    This article examines the rhetoric and pedagogies of employment and workplace guidebooks for adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) to demonstrate how the texts reflect and reinvent cultural desires or fantasies about contemporary employees and also work to norm real autistic employees to be closer to a neurotypical ideal. This norming is achieved in large part through the guidebooks’ surprising appropriations of and appeals to rhetorical training.

    doi:10.58680/ce201527374

March 2015

  1. Clarifying the Relationship between L2 Writing and Translingual Writing: An Open Letter to Writing Studies Editors and Organization Leaders
    Abstract

    A concerned group of L2 professionals write an open letter to express their concern that the terms “L2 writing” and “translingual writing” have become almost interchangeable in—writing studies publications and conferences and further argue that much will be lost if “translingual writing” replaces “L2 writing.” Each are distinct areas of research and—pedagogy: L2 writing is a more technical description applied to writing in a language acquired later in life, while translingual writing describes an orientation to language—difference. Without attention to the distinct contributions made by each field, L2 scholarship becomes marginalized in publications, conferences, and hiring practices. The letter—authors and endorsers encourage writing studies editors and organization leaders to recognize and understand the difference between the fields so as to ensure a strong and—enduring future for L2 scholarship.—

    doi:10.58680/ce201526924

November 2014

  1. Review: We Have Always Already Been Multimodal: Histories of Engagement with Multimodal and Experimental Composition
    Abstract

    Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.

    doi:10.58680/ce201426148
  2. (Re)Educating the Senses: Multimodal Listening, Bodily Learning, and the Composition of Sonic Experiences
    Abstract

    This essay reimagines the way that listening is taught in the multimodal composition classroom. In contrast to listening to sonic content for meaning, the listening pedagogy I introduce is based on my concept of multimodal listening—a practice that involves attending to the sensory, material, and contextual aspects that comprise and shape a sonic event. I argue that cultivating multimodal listening practices will enable students to become more savvy consumers and producers of sound in the composition classroom and in their everyday lives.

    doi:10.58680/ce201426145

September 2014

  1. Review: “English Only” and Multilingualism in Composition Studies: Policy, Philosophy, and Practice
    Abstract

    Ferris looks at three books—Cross-Language Relations in Composition; Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies; and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China—as they address the question of adherence to a monolingual or “standard” set of language and writing norms in composition, and consider how the answer to this question impacts our teaching.

    doi:10.58680/ce201426074

July 2014

  1. Rhetorical Education and Student Activism
    Abstract

    On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”

    doi:10.58680/ce201425461
  2. One Train Can Hide Another: Critical Materialism for Public Composition
    Abstract

    The viral video Kony 2012 is the point of departure for our argument that composition’s public turn is marked by a concern with discursive features and digitized forms at the expense of attention to historical context and human consequences. The alternative we propose, critical materialist pedagogy, reconnects discursive and digitized arguments to the extradiscursive interests they serve. By urging teachers and students to “think through the body,” this critical materialist pedagogy tests fetishized appearances against lived reality—and reconnects public rhetoric to embodied examples of struggle and material potential for creative action.

    doi:10.58680/ce201425463

November 2013

  1. From Location(s) to Locatability: Mapping Feminist Recovery and Archival Activity through Metadata
    Abstract

    This article describes the author’s development of a digital historical tool that collects and visualizes metadata on women’s pedagogical activities from the Progressive Era through the present. The tool, Metadata Mapping Project, offers a new take on historical mapping by focusing on the locatability of documents, subjects, and events, and by making it possible for users to trace activities that would otherwise occur as references in archival ephemera. Using one pedagogue as an example of how the database can work, this article also considers the implications of this and other tools for feminist rhetorical historiography, especially for constructing rhetorical ecologies that are not artifact based.

    doi:10.58680/ce201324272

May 2013

  1. College Writing, Identification, and the Production of Intellectual Property: Voices from the Stanford Study of Writing
    Abstract

    When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

    doi:10.58680/ce201323563

January 2013

  1. Emerging Voices: Unpredictable Encounters: Religious Discourse, Sexuality, and the Free Exercise of Rhetoric
    Abstract

    In this essay, I develop a pedagogical stance called the “free exercise of rhetoric” as a way to approach teaching and student writing at the intersection of LGBT and religious discourses. Through this stance, I work with students’ personal commitments and build their rhetorical competence using a process that involves encountering uncommon arguments, valuing misreading, and embracing unpredictability. I suggest the free exercise of rhetoric as a pedagogical option for taking religion seriously as a topic and identity in writing classrooms, but one that does not start from students’ personal experience with religion.

    doi:10.58680/ce201322112

November 2012

  1. Cultivating Critical Emotional Literacy: Cognitive and Contemplative Approaches to Engaging Difference
    Abstract

    Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

    doi:10.58680/ce201221641

September 2012

  1. Emerging Voices: The Shifting Rhetorics of Style: Writing in Action in Modern Rhetoric
    Abstract

    This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

    doi:10.58680/ce201220676
  2. Review: Looking Locally, Seeing Nationally in the History of Composition
    Abstract

    Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

    doi:10.58680/ce201220680

May 2012

  1. Composition’s New Thing: Bruno Latour and the Apocalyptic Turn
    Abstract

    Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour’s theories help expose such pedagogy’s limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work toward allaying potential disaster.

    doi:10.58680/ce201219332
  2. Review: The Matter of Assignments in Writing Classes and Beyond
    Abstract

    Works Reviewed: Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines. Mary Soliday. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2011. 146 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8093-3019-9.$32.00. Toward a Composition Made Whole. Jody Shipka. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2011. 173 pp. Print. ISBN 0-8229-6150-4. $24.95.

    doi:10.58680/ce201219333

January 2012

  1. “What the College Has Done for Me”: Anzia Yezierska and the Problem of Progressive Education
    Abstract

    The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

    doi:10.58680/ce201218408
  2. Texts of Our Institutional Lives: Translucency, Coursepacks, and the Post-historical University: An Investigation into Pedagogical Things
    Abstract

    The contemporary university’s reliance on coursepacks, whether they take print or digital form, is illuminated by Bruno Latour’s theories and by consideration of a nineteenth-century copyright case involving noted textbook author William McGuffey. In particular, these contexts remind us that coursepacks are situated within shifting constellations of material things.

    doi:10.58680/ce201218410

September 2011

  1. In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship
    Abstract

    Rather than simply invoke citizenship as an ideal for their students to achieve, writing instructors should address the various possible meanings of the term, which represent divergent traditions of political thought.

    doi:10.58680/ce201117164

July 2011

  1. What Good Is World Literature?: World Literature Pedagogy and the Rhetoric of Moral Crisis
    Abstract

    We should make the case that literary study has traditionally been, and continues to be, an effective gateway into the cross-cultural awareness that a truly global campus needs. At the same time, we should draw upon our own pedagogical history to ensure that our institutions of learning do not reinforce the neo-imperialism of cultural globalization. In fact, since World War II, calls for teaching world literature have been tied to shifting moral imperatives.

    doi:10.58680/ce201116272

January 2011

  1. Review: Basic Writing and the Future of Higher Education
    Abstract

    Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

    doi:10.58680/ce201113404
  2. Opinion: Language Difference in Writing: Toward a Translingual Approach
    Abstract

    Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a resource for producing meaning in writing, speaking, reading, and listening.

    doi:10.58680/ce201113403
  3. “We’re Here, and We’re Not Going Anywhere”: Why Working-Class Rhetorical Traditions Still Matter
    Abstract

    Today’s composition courses should consider rhetorical strategies historically used by working-class movements, especially because this class still exists despite popular misconceptions that the world has fully entered a post-Fordist era.

    doi:10.58680/ce201113399
  4. Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write: Passive Resistance and Technology’s Place in the Composition Classroom
    Abstract

    Drawing on the case of a student of his who, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, simply preferred not to write, the author argues that current celebration of technology encourages passive resistance. He emphasizes that authentic, productive classroom experiences derive from in-person interactions that directly connect in relevant ways to students’ lives.

    doi:10.58680/ce201113402