Review Article| April 01 2011 The Divine Error Dead Letters: Error in Composition, 1873 – 2004. By Tracy Santa. Creskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2008. Andrea Olinger Andrea Olinger Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (2): 417–424. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1218139 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Andrea Olinger; The Divine Error. Pedagogy 1 April 2011; 11 (2): 417–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1218139 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. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Emerson's neglected engagement with education, in particular in evidence in an address he gave at a secondary school in June 1837 amidst an economic panic and two months before his more famous “American Scholar” address. His analysis offers insight into our current educational crisis and the foundational cracks that run deeper than economic recession.

Review Article| January 01 2011 Introducing Students to College Writing: Moving Beyond Humanities-Centered Practices Cary Moskovitz Cary Moskovitz Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (1): 211–218. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-025 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Cary Moskovitz; Introducing Students to College Writing: Moving Beyond Humanities-Centered Practices. Pedagogy 1 January 2011; 11 (1): 211–218. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-025 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. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Adopting a critical approach to identification in literature pedagogy, this article examines the dynamics of identification in the text, critical history, performance history, and teaching of Othello. The author theorizes a pedagogical approach that interrogates the play's systems of identification while foregrounding ethical responsibility.

The report “Education in the Balance” represents a significant new acknowledgment of the centrality of teaching faculty to the academic project on the part of professional organizations in English studies. David Bartholomae is right to worry that the emergence of positions for teaching faculty may “enact an argument about the separation of teaching and research” that should be resisted, and healthy models of the academic workplace should make sure that teaching and research remain meaningfully responsive to one another. Recent developments in higher education, which promise an ever finer fragmentation of the academic labor force—along with new possibilities for labor abuses—make this especially urgent.

John Boe responds to David Bartholomae's “Teaching On and Off the Tenure Track: Highlights from the ADE Survey of Staffing Patterns in English.” Using his experience in a thirty-year career as a nontenured lecturer, the author addresses the discrimination lecturers face even in the most generous and democratic of institutions. It discusses the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for nontenured faculty, the unlikelihood of untenured faculty ever having full participation in the lives of their departments and institutions, the inequity of support given to the tenured for research and of support continuing to be given even when the tenured stop producing valuable (or any) research, the financial benefits that accrue to institutions through exploitation of the nontenured, the culpability of those in power for the flaws in the tenure system, and the solution to the aforesaid problems: eliminating tenure.

This article describes a service-learning program for undergraduate Shakespeare courses and the project's learning outcomes. The project enables significant ownership of Shakespeare, demonstration and engagement of students' multiple intelligences, and a re-valuation of the useful role of literature in everyday life.

David Bartholomae warns against a growing reliance on MAs as instructors in English departments. I suggest in response that one way to reconnect research and teaching is to invite PhDs from other disciplines to join us in teaching academic writing.

This article presents highlights from “Education in the Balance: A Report on the Academic Workforce in English,” the 2008 ADE/MLA survey of staffing patterns in English departments. It raises questions about the increased institutional separation of research and teaching.

In teaching a course on death in modern theater to fifteen undergraduates, I had to engage with a real-life death “drama” (the death of a peer of my students) that impinged on my class, presenting me with an uncomfortable pedagogical conundrum. I had to re-think my objectives as an instructor and my conception of the classroom as a safe space. In this article, I rehearse this complicated and potentially fractious class scenario and scrutinize my approach to it. I investigate the potential merits of thinking, feeling, and working through crisis in a classroom situation, thereby fashioning a type of pedagogical “third space” in which ideational and circumstantial crossover is allowed. Some of the issues that arise are the ways in which we can situate pedagogy in praxis with “real life” and what challenges are provided?

In a 2002 article in College English, Peter Elbow argued that writing pedagogy would benefit by “[m]ore honoring of style, playfulness, fun, pleasure, humor” (543). Although Elbow was referring specifically to the need for cross-fertilization between the disciplines of literature and composition, his call for attention to playfulness in writing pedagogy is equally relevant to the teaching of creative nonfiction. The question he fails to consider is how playfulness can become an essential part of writing pedagogy without undermining the seriousness of the endeavor. My experience teaching an upper-level creative nonfiction class devoted to humor writing suggests that while incorporating playfulness into nonfiction-writing pedagogy poses serious challenges, it also provides significant rewards and develops skills transferable to other writing tasks.

Review Article| January 01 2011 Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations Paula Comeau Paula Comeau Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (1): 233–240. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-028 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 Paula Comeau; Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations. Pedagogy 1 January 2011; 11 (1): 233–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-028 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. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Many students in American universities are unable to absorb information from a Shakespeare text in the lecture-discussion format. Consumption of electronic media has both absorbed increasing amounts of their time and encouraged passive modes of learning. My response is to seek a pedagogy that produces, on the one hand, in active interpreters of complex language, and, on the other, a participatory, collegial classroom through a pedagogy fusing traditional modes of literary criticism with active modes of learning.

This article examines how working-class bodies perform physically, affectively, and discursively in academic spaces. Through its conversation between a tenured professor and graduate student, the article employs performance theory to highlight how disruptive working-class teacher-bodies can be and the potential they offer for understanding the ideological work of academic social space.

“Teaching Native Autobiographies as Acts of Narrative Resistance” is written for non-specialists in Native literature who include a Native-authored work in their classes. This article offers strategies to increase our understanding and appreciation of Native literature by opening up classroom discussions to critical issues in the study of Native literary texts.

In research-intensive universities, a complex web of inter-relations between mandates for research productivity and for general education teaching perpetuates the division into a two-tiered faculty described in the ADE survey of staffing patterns in departments of English. Other published and planned MLA and ADE reports—specifically, on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the master's degree—further illuminate the inter-relations between graduate education and general education staffing practices. MLA (in its “Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit”) and the Coalition for the Academic Workforce (in its issue brief entitled “On Faculty Serving All Students”) provide leadership for productive workforce changes.

This article describes the culture of some English departments and the value system often attached to various forms of media in them. Because English studies so often values the letter, texts, and the consumption of these, it's been caught in its own hierarchy of signs. English studies has been slow to create new media scholarship and train future teachers to understand multiple media despite challenges from within and outside of the discipline to do so. Samples of new media scholarship are offered to demonstrate the plurality of scholarship and teaching practices possible with new media.

Stephen Nachmanovitch's Free Play: Improvisation in Life and Art offers a compelling view of creativity as playful practice, a model that engaged and motivated my initially apprehensive experimental writing class. Nachmanovitch's erudition, provocative examples, and narratives of personal experience make his book a good choice for university students. Especially useful are his chapters addressing the nature of inspiration, the nature of play, the importance of practice (of continually and playfully doing), and the cultural tendency to associate play with childhood. In particular, the “Childhood's End” chapter, which discusses how some aspects of schooling and the media block our inherent creativity, resonated among my students. After sharing their tragicomic experiences of institutional obstacles, they welcomed the course's strange readings and even stranger writing exercises as invitations to recover some “raw creativity.” And I found their enthusiasm contagious.

Narrative medicine, designed to develop empathic listening skills in healthcare professionals, also helps literature teachers discuss ethics without sacrificing critical rigor. Reading the distasteful narrator of Dostoevsky's challenging story as the notorious “hated patient/unreliable historian” of clinical practice, we demonstrate how students can practice reading empathically as a fundamentally ethical act.

This essay explores how the “heat of composition” is inexorably linked to ethos and also how writers, student or otherwise, might seek to create and intensify pleasure through a sustained textual becoming. I consider how this ethics of affect is an unfolding, an exteriorization of the intensities and forces of becoming writers, student or otherwise, who engage with the movements of desire.

Analysis of required reading lists sheds light on the factors that underlie admission to pedagogical canons. These variables can serve as a springboard for collaborative faculty development of pedagogical literary canons. By constructing and enacting criteria-based pedagogical canons, professors will be better able to maintain their authority over curricular content.

At many levels of the educational system, teachers use Sojourner Truth's speech “Ain't I a Woman” as a powerful example of women's rhetoric. This article examines the politics of privileging one version of the speech. The author makes a call to teachers to teach multiple versions and talk about the politics of transcription, gender, and race.

Research Article| October 01 2010 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 (2010) 10 (3): 455–456. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Editors' Introduction. Pedagogy 1 October 2010; 10 (3): 455–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-001 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. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

This essay describes a project in a first-year writing course in which students created video Public Service Announcements. The project resulted from a university-sponsored contest to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus on campus. Illustrating the process of creating such video compositions allows an examination of the potential for multimedia projects in writing courses, especially projects that respond to a public call or exigence. This project pushes students not only technologically but also rhetorically.

This article describes an assignment that involves students in an exploration of the rhetorical practices common in Facebook, making use of rhetorical savvy that they have—but generally are not aware of—to teach the often-challenging skill of rhetorical analysis. The class discusses articles about Facebook use and redefines traditional Aristotelian rhetorical concepts in the context of the visually rich and collage-like texts that are Facebook profiles. Students take their cues from an anthropologist's analysis of identity representation on dorm doors to explore rhetorical practices of exaggeration also discernable in Facebook profiles. Students and teacher note features from Facebook pages that suggest tendencies to be popular versus being an individual or signs of addiction to the networking tool. This assignment that brings academic analysis to bear on non-academic literacy practices like the construction of Facebook profiles encourages students to reflect critically on daily activities that involve more complex rhetorical skills than they might otherwise notice. In addition to making students' often-tacit rhetorical knowledge explicit, breaking down the usual division between school and non-school rhetorics in this exploration of Facebook helps to educate teachers about their students' digital literacy practices.

This essay explores the challenges of teaching a large introductory lecture class in the humanities.

This article argues small departments are ideal laboratories for innovative structures of collaboration. Beginning with the smallest nit—an individual teacher “collaborating with herself” to mine good ideas from one course to another, and graduating to larger and more ambitious structures of collaboration—team- teaching, service- learning, performance and interdisciplinary syllabi, and courses taught between campuses and across the globe—Moffat shows how deliberate collaboration can yield more from less. Using examples from colleagues' work in small departments at Dickinson College, Moffat suggests how creative collaboration can expand pedagogical methods, increase student diversity and demand for a range of courses, establish interdisciplinary communities, and widen the curriculum.

In Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate (1990), Ernest L. Boyer challenged the prevailing belief that the most significant work of higher education involved research and publication. Calling for new categories of scholarship—including the activities of discovery, integration, application, and teaching—Boyer emphasized the need for a more complete and pluralistic understanding of the academy, one curiously consistent with the aims of a Christian liberal arts college. As one who teaches English at such a place, I possess a composite of beliefs regarding my profession and my institution—beliefs not perceived as compatible by some. This essay is an examination of these beliefs and how they, in fact, interface. In the English department at Wheaton, our primary educational aim proves to be different from that of a public university: the formation of whole and effective human beings through imitatio Christi, the pedagogic integration of Christian faith and humanistic learning. Eschewing indoctrination and superficial biblical belief, we require students to engage controversial theoretical perspectives and difficult life questions, resulting in the freedom for self-critical participation in a community, a language, and a Book. This exposition concludes with a consideration of belief versus bullshit, advocating Michael Bérubé's approach for “critical pluralism.”

This forum essay explores a collaboration between a teacher and a book. Combining autobiography with teaching notes about a variety of colleges (the writer held adjunct appointments in six colleges in fifteen years before joining the Keene State College faculty), the article claims Scholes, Comley, and Ulmer successfully show how to teach college students difficult texts and critical thinking through imitating language and forms drawn from wide-ranging models. In so doing, students realize how ideas circulate between popular and high culture, and how literary texts inform one another. Though some deem writing by Erving Goffman, Roland Barthes, and Jacques Derrida, however important for understanding current critical debates, too difficult for entering students, let alone their instructors, Dizard says Text Book “teaches well.” Quoting from student papers for proof, Dizard shows that advanced as well as uncertain students can and will master difficult material, provided the teacher is willing—-and brave enough—to learn anew.

College and university English departments always are active places, but those in many public liberal arts colleges are notably pleasant, as well. What accounts for this? Though these small academic units clearly learn much from large research institutions, perhaps the learning can be mutual. A question arises, however: can this oxymoronic blend of high-pitched professionalism and felicity be maintained?

Using George Hillocks's epistemic pedagogy and Michael Smith and Jeff Wilhelm's concept of “flow” as frameworks, I create a classroom in which students teach each other to read James Joyce's Ulysses. Students can do this while reading Ulysses for the first time because of the intricate scaffolding I create that requires close interaction outside of class with me, with one or two peer mentors, and with small groups of other students in the class, and that is actively supported by the library, which creates a special “Joyce room” whenever I offer my course. This essay describes how the course is organized and what students are required to do, and it attempts to explain why, in this particular course, students develop complex reading and writing skills and engage in critical work on a difficult literary text beyond what one would think could be possible in one semester on an undergraduate level. While one could teach this course in any type of college or university setting, I suggest that that the values and community of a small liberal arts college encourage faculty to create courses requiring intense student-faculty interaction and encourage students to blur intellectual and social boundaries that enable them to grow in myriad ways.

“Centers and Peripheries” introduces the two goals of Pedagogy's special issue: to investigate what might be possible in the small college department as well as to suggest how these possibilities might inspire comparable intellectual work in other professional and institutional contexts. The article surveys a selection of published writing produced within the small college department and points to the practices of smaller institutions and departments in which faculty and students collaborate and envision scholarly and creative activities within the mission and values of a particular institution. It suggests that if the current traditional conception of the discipline has rendered a great deal of the work of the profession invisible, then it would make sense to talk more about what our colleagues are actually doing outside the doctorate-granting institution. The article concludes that representing more fully what we do will require us to move beyond general claims for teaching as a form of scholarship and away from decontextualized arguments about the value of teaching.

Research Article| April 01 2010 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 (2010) 10 (2): 269–270. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-037 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Note from the Editors. Pedagogy 1 April 2010; 10 (2): 269–270. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-037 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. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Opening a window on a small department in a medium-sized comprehensive Catholic university, this essay describes how the Marywood English department has wrestled with the challenges of a changing institutional culture, one that has moved from an emphasis on teaching and service to one focused on teaching and publication. The department's response has been a rededication to its long-standing commitment to quality instruction and service.

In 1998, Stuart McDougal was recruited by Macalester College to create a new English department to replace one that had been decimated by a series of retirements. McDougal accepted the challenge and immediately confronted a series of questions: What should the curriculum of a liberal arts English department look like at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first? Who should be hired and what should they teach? How should one balance teaching and scholarship at a liberal arts college? What lessons could be drawn from experience at a large research university for the very different environment of a small liberal arts college? McDougal addresses these questions (and more) in his essay, “The Remaking of a Small College English Department.”

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories, or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

This article offers (1) scenarios showing why English studies scholars must pay attention to intellectual property issues; (2) a brief overview of copyright history in the United States; and (3) related research questions and pedagogical possibilities for English studies scholars to consider.

This article surveys the challenges college teachers in the United States will likely face in the near future and argues that overtly political attacks from the Right may be less important than the erosion of tenure entailed in universities' overuse of adjunct labor and the implications of the recent California district court case Hong v. Grant.

With the long-term decline in the cultural capital of literature and a steep decline in tenure-track hires in literary studies, faculty across English are rethinking their relationship to writing. As interest in digital media grows, together with rising enrollment in courses in creative, civic, and professional composition, can the figure of writing provide a sense of disciplinary coherence? What will it take for literature faculty to agree that they, too, are interested in writers and writing?

Using autobiographical incidents, the author argues that to reform our pedagogy we need to change our professional lives, abandoning our habits of solitary research for more direct and communal action. We must go beyond our disciplinary fields and enlist students as allies in changing their own educations.

This article interrogates the meaning of multiculturalism in literary study today, exploring a shift in focus from student-centered to subject-centered course work. It questions how teaching will be affected by efforts to roll back exploitative employment practices like part-time and non-tenure-track appointments.

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.