Editorial| April 01 2013 A Note from the Editors Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 203–204. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1963195 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; A Note from the Editors. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 203–204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1963195 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Article| April 01 2013 Re-forming Our Early English Curricula Form and Reform: Reading across the Fifteenth Century. Edited by Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Katherine Steele Brokaw Katherine Steele Brokaw Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 371–373. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958503 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Katherine Steele Brokaw; Re-forming Our Early English Curricula. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 371–373. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958503 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Moving beyond the literary, this lesson on Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica touches on science, social studies, history, religion, music, and art to foster an imaginative and practical experience that encourages students to initiate productive conversations across several disciplines and to contribute to newly emerging fields such as the medical humanities.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the multilingualism of the medieval British Isles, but this has yet to translate into a fully integrated teaching practice free of anachronisms or stereotypes, particularly in the treatment of Irish and Welsh literature. This article suggests both theoretical and practical responses to this situation. Appendices offer specific guidance for teaching the Celtic-language texts now in the major anthologies of English and British literature.

Introduction| January 01 2013 Introduction Kirilka Stavreva; Kirilka Stavreva guest editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Christopher Kleinhenz Christopher Kleinhenz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (1): 43–47. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814161 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Kirilka Stavreva, Christopher Kleinhenz; Introduction. Pedagogy 1 January 2013; 13 (1): 43–47. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814161 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay discusses five main topoi in the Divine Comedy through which teachers might encourage students to explore the question of the Divine Comedy’s treatment of philosophy: (1) the Divine Comedy’s representations in Inferno of noble pagans who are allegorically or historically associated with philosophy or natural reason; (2) its treatment of the relationship between faith and reason and that relationship’s consequences for the text’s understanding of the respective authoritativeness of theology and philosophy; (3) representations in the Divine Comedy that relate to the question of the practical value of philosophical (not to mention theological) speculation; (4) the text’s treatment of the respective merits of practical and contemplative activities; and (5) its implicit defense of philosophy’s authority with respect to ethical and political questions.

This article examines how Dante used history and suggests approaches to incorporate his texts into undergraduate history teaching. Examples of successful assignments are offered that encourage students to compare Dante’s historical figures in a work like the Commedia with “real” history. Such exercises introduce students to some of the creative ways that Dante shaped many historical figures to meet his purposes — personal, political, or spiritual. An extended case study of Dante’s inclusion of southern Italian historical actors is used to illustrate some of the more complex ways that Dante revised or reinvented historical events. It is argued that Dante’s use of history can be a valuable tool to teach the skills of critical analysis and close reading.

This article applies several concepts from psychology to the interpretation of Dante Alighieri’s literary masterpiece Inferno and describes elements of pedagogy for this kind of interdisciplinary approach. A premise is that sinners in Hell experience emotional suffering. Core psychological concepts are outlined. A methodological distinction is drawn between “what is said” and “what is shown” in Dante’s text. Aspects of the psychologies of the glutton Ciacco, the blasphemer Capaneus, and the sinful lover Francesca are analyzed. Three broad patterns of emotional experience are identified. (1) Each class of sinners suffers its own peculiar complex of negative emotions. The article provides close analysis of one such local complex, the emotions that the pusillanimous suffer at the edge of Hell. (2) Sinners do not suffer remorse. The article discusses a paradoxical implication of remorselessness. (3) Damned souls engage in resistance against an imperative to despair. The article also identifies a tension between infernal justice and human psychology. It concludes with brief discussion of how literature, history, and psychology are complementary resources.

English programs like mine face a particular challenge: implementing a manageable assessment process in an institutional context featuring scarce resources, staff reductions, and heavy teaching loads. We believe our portfolio-based process enables us to assess our program’s effectiveness without reducing our students’ performance to a set of abstract, statistical data.

How to engage students in the Commedia and involve them in the pleasure of decoding the rich density of Dante’s allusions to historical, literary, and Biblical characters? This article suggests that a class on the Inferno can be enriched by creating a wiki that encourages and facilitates individualized research, peer evaluation, and frequent teacher feedback.

This project employs a student-generated geographic database that links the Commedia to relevant passages from Dino Compagni’s Cronica and visual records at appropriate locations in Florence. The database records evidence for social structure, physical infrastructure, and historic events, as well as the civic/religious ritual of the city, in order to consider the broader meanings of the built environment. This database is displayed on satellite images of the city using the open-source SIMILE widget Exhibit. The student can then analyze this evidence and consider how Dante constructed his allegorical societies, infernal, purgative, and paradisiacal, from the life of his contemporary Florence. It is suggested that this permits more rapid immersion into the dynamic of the poem and enables more effectively focused student research.

This article argues that prevailing approaches to research instruction in introductory composition courses, as represented in print and digital instructional materials, reflect outdated theoretical views and may damage students’ researcher identity. Teaching research as a closed, linear, universal process prevents students from leaving the liminal space of the composition classroom.

This article outlines a twenty-minute introduction to medieval manuscripts in the age of Dante, using a combination of Internet resources for the study of medieval manuscripts and actual medieval manuscripts. The goal of the lecture is to introduce students to the basics of manuscript production, focusing upon the kinds of manuscripts that played such a crucial role in Dante’s intellectual formation. By the end of the lecture, students should have a clear understanding of how laborious and costly book production was, as well as how scarce access to books was among laypersons in Dante’s lifetime. The larger goal is to give students an appreciation of Dante’s remarkable erudition, evident in the hundreds of biblical, mythological, literary, philosophical, and historical allusions in the Divine Comedy. The lecture ends with the distribution of a table of works to which Dante alludes in the Inferno, with links to digital copies of manuscripts available on several websites, including Digital Scriptorium, the British Library’s Catalogue of Illuminated Manuscripts, and the Catalogue of Digitized Medieval Manuscripts.

Much of Renaissance art reflects a Dantesque worldview. Addressed here is Dante’s link to early trecento art; to burgeoning pious art patronage resulting from Purgatorio’s salvific promise; to rising individualism resulting in growing civic identity, the cult of artistic fame, the art of portraiture, and biography as an early art historical methodology; and to an enduring fascination with antiquity, all made palatable and patriotic for later generations by glosses widely known in Commedia incunabula.

In this article, the author explains the habits that she brought to teaching English from the field of second-language acquisition. She began teaching in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where graduate teaching assistants were trained to use the communicative language teaching method, especially as it is developed by Lee and VanPatten in Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1995). When the author switched to teaching world literature survey courses in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, she found that many of the techniques she had used in beginner language courses applied beautifully to what she was trying to do in her new field. After briefly explaining the characteristics of communicative language teaching, this article highlights the three main strategies that she found most useful: minimizing “teacher talk” and maximizing the work the students do in the classroom, emphasizing the process of learning to encourage the students’ metacognitive thinking about their own education, and making negotiation a key activity to engage their critical thinking skills. As universities and colleges increasingly decide to make critical thinking and student engagement key factors in their brand, it can be very useful to reexamine the habits that we adopt and to consider some of the best practices of our colleagues in other departments.

Review Article| January 01 2013 Notes from Post–9/11 Classrooms: Parsing Representation and Reality Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East. Allen Webb, David Alvarez, Blain H. Auer, Monica Mona Eraqi, Jeffrey A. Patterson, Vivan Steemers. New York: Routledge, 2012. Beth Stickney Beth Stickney Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (1): 189–197. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814449 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Beth Stickney; Notes from Post–9/11 Classrooms: Parsing Representation and Reality. Pedagogy 1 January 2013; 13 (1): 189–197. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814449 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

Introduction| January 01 2013 Editors’ Introduction Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (1): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814143 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Editors’ Introduction. Pedagogy 1 January 2013; 13 (1): 1–2. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814143 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Introducing Dante in a course on medieval visuality positioned the Commedia in relation to medieval women’s visionary and mystical literature. This article suggests how a comparison of the Commedia with this literature, particularly the works of Hildegard of Bingen, can illuminate the visionary mode of writing that Dante employed.

Review Article| January 01 2013 Everything Old Is New Again The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. Miller, Thomas P.. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011. Yvonne Bruce Yvonne Bruce Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (1): 179–187. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814440 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Yvonne Bruce; Everything Old Is New Again. Pedagogy 1 January 2013; 13 (1): 179–187. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814440 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

The essay describes a pedagogical approach to the rich poetic ground of the Commedia through a sustained artistic effort on the part of the students. In daily class preparation, students craft small-book “reflectories” that combine analytical interpretation with artwork and Danteinspired poetry, whether the students’ own or authored by others. Joining a tradition of “conversations with Dante” that began, in English literature, with Chaucer, students develop creative abilities and attitudes through reflection upon and disciplined participation in the creative process. Course assignments and discussion methods foreground the mutually reinforcing integration of creativity and analytical precision.

Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

This article argues for a more complex understanding of interdisciplinary pedagogy in English studies. Drawing on the authors’ experience designing and coteaching a graduate-level interdisciplinary course in “statistical literacy,” the article forwards a view of interdisciplinary pedagogy as a complex relational process of faculty and student learning.

This article makes a case for using Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice as a tool for skill-based writing instruction in the composition classroom. The novel employs prose strategies such as commonplaces and amplification that become springboards for class conversation about prose style and student writing. Additionally, the novel’s characters admit to difficulties with composition, such as language usage and organization in letter writing, that seem eerily familiar to those voiced by novice writers in a freshman writing course. Mangiavellano contends that students eagerly seek out ways the novel reminds them of their own lives, and he argues that Pride and Prejudice in the composition classroom can reflect back to students versions of their academic selves just as much as it does their personal selves.

Rather than considering (or dismissing) classroom anthologies according to their author/text selection alone, this article underscores the anthology editorial apparatus as a key, tactical part of anthologies and their pedagogical use. The author outlines a pedagogical approach that asks students to analyze anthology apparatus texts and ultimately create their own, challenging students to consider the implications of constructing an American canon as well as the rhetorical challenge of defining and justifying it. The final part of the article includes example assignments, as well as student responses that show critical engagement with canon re/construction.

This article on digital writing identifies a range of genres that are employed by gamers, many of which evince dialogic rhetoric. Such discourse offers potential to decenter group power relations and thus suggests an opportunity to promote a democratic classroom.

After establishing how and why managerialism has simplified and thus corrupted the concept of “best practices,” this essay draws on a literary critical theory to explore ways professors and administrators alike might engage in complex, scholarly discussions about the learning that occurs in and out of classrooms on college campuses.

This article examines the applicability of controversial course themes in the first-year writing classroom. It narrates examples of student resistance to readings and discussions that led to intellectual and personal discomfort, and then assesses the benefits (improved critical thinking skills, opportunities for lessons in rhetoric and audience awareness) and drawbacks (self-imposed silence, fear of writing beyond clichéd responses to difficult questions) that controversial material can bring to the writing seminar. After comparing the results of student writing in two course themes built on varied degrees of explicitly ideological content, Sponenberg concludes that a less politicized theme allows students more room to explore controversial subjects on their own terms because they feel less anxiety about “saying the wrong thing” than they experienced when responding to overt political arguments.

This article describes a graduate seminar titled “Interfaces and Infrastructures” that took place at Wayne State University. The course engaged with new media scholarship while also taking a piece of software, Google Wave, as its central artifact. The seminar demonstrates a pedagogical approach in which new media objects act as both tools and objects of study in the English studies classroom.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

This article presents the curricular and service-learning realities of a program that launches middle school debate teams in New Orleans public schools. By leaning on classical rhetoric in the writing classroom, McBride’s classes learn fundamentals of debate and rhetoric that prepare undergraduates to coach debate teams in middle schools where more than 95 percent of the students qualify for free or assisted lunches. Class conversations about Quintilian, Plato, and Aristotle prepare undergraduates to meet the middle school debaters “where they are” in the sense that they can evaluate where they are as orators and push them to greater heights. This service-learning course gives his Tulane students a new reason to care about what they read and write about, while simultaneously advancing Tulane’s dedication to service-learning and community outreach.

This article argues that popular sports media (such as websites, TV shows, and tweets) can be used in the freshman composition classroom to introduce students to academic argument and to encourage them to reimagine their own writing styles. Because sportswriters, broadcasters, and analysts frequently try to persuade someone of something, the intellectual operations that take place in many types of sports writing make them vibrant examples of academic argument. Asking students to read—and ultimately learn—from sports writing, which is often written in a personal, humorous, and experimental style, inspires students to revisit their own writing style and can teach them about the relationship between form and content. Specifically, Gubernatis Dannen uses David Foster Wallace’s essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” to demonstrate relationships between content and prose style strategies. For many students, thinking about sports and sports writing opens up larger possibilities of thinking and writing in college.

This article explores findings from a multiyear, multisite study of new college writing instructors. First, the authors describe the principles that guide new instructors’ teaching and reveal the number of resources that new instructors draw on beyond the pedagogy seminar. Second, they delineate how the kinds of classroom narratives these instructors choose to tell points to a range of understandings about what it means to teach writing. Finally, they argue that learning to teach writing is a complex process requiring sustained mentoring and support throughout the early years of teaching.

Review Article| October 01 2012 Integrating Writing, Thinking, and Learning: A New Edition of a Faculty Development Treasure Engaging Ideas: The Professor’s Guide to Integrating Writing, Critical Thinking, and Active Learning in the Classroom, 2nd ed.Bean, John. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011. Larry M. Lake Larry M. Lake Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (3): 579–584. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625343 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Larry M. Lake; Integrating Writing, Thinking, and Learning: A New Edition of a Faculty Development Treasure. Pedagogy 1 October 2012; 12 (3): 579–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625343 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Article| October 01 2012 Class Considerations: An Exploration of Literacy, Social Class, and Family A Taste for Language: Literacy, Class, and English Studies. Watkins, James RayJr. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2009. Sheri Rysdam Sheri Rysdam Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (3): 585–590. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625352 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sheri Rysdam; Class Considerations: An Exploration of Literacy, Social Class, and Family. Pedagogy 1 October 2012; 12 (3): 585–590. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625352 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Introduction| October 01 2012 Introduction: Meeting Students Where They Are Ashlie K. Sponenberg Ashlie K. Sponenberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (3): 541–543. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625289 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Ashlie K. Sponenberg; Introduction: Meeting Students Where They Are. Pedagogy 1 October 2012; 12 (3): 541–543. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1625289 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

In response to the need for additional teacher-research on African American students, this article offers a case study of how one African American student-writer successfully produces expository writing in an Afrocentric first-year writing course at Michigan State University, a large land-grant midwestern research institution.

This article describes how contemporary psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories inform my teaching of writing. It suggests that the psychological and academic challenges confronting freshmen recently placed in a new social/academic environment may be abated by a pedagogy that highlights a poststructuralist understanding of identity as multiple and performative.

This article discusses how teaching students to recognize the contemporary American Indian theoretical concepts of “rhetorical sovereignty” and “rhetorical alliance” in Native texts can help deepen understanding of American Indian voices and histories in an appropriate context, while also developing students' understandings of multiple and cross-cultural rhetorical frameworks.

This article interrogates the commonly used creative writing workshop model, calling for a higher degree of process-oriented work in the classroom and bringing to light process-oriented models already in place in universities across the country. This discussion can serve as a springboard for classroom development of alternative teaching models.

This scholarship of teaching and learning project explores how students read in a first-year general education class on critical writing and reading. In this article, I offer observations about which reading strategies seem most popular regardless of efficacy, which elements seem to foster student learning, and which obstacles remain.

Poster sessions aren't just for professional conferences. They are popular in a variety of academic disciplines, where they have been shown to boost motivation, foster alternative assessment, and promote peer interaction. They are gaining popularity as a classroom teaching strategy, because they promote the development of student research skills and foster positive attitudes toward research. They encourage collaboration and peer interaction. Visual presentation strategies provide opportunities for students to display their ideas and knowledge in several multimedia formats. Poster sessions also promote alternative assessment strategies such as peer and self-assessment. We report here on the ways that we have used this assignment format in our basic linguistics class, titled “The Nature of Language.” We conclude with tips on incorporating poster assignments into teacher education classes regardless of the content matter.