This article examines the disappearance of the student as a site for theoretical investigation. It considers the ramifications of this development for the disciplinary self-identification of composition studies and for a larger understanding of pedagogy as self-reflexive praxis.

Outcomes assessment is necessary in higher education partly because it can counteract courseocentrism, the assumption teaching naturally occurs in isolated classrooms that leave teachers knowing little about one another and that leave students vulnerable to confusingly mixed messages as they go from course to course and subject to subject.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Paradigms, Conversation, Prayer: Liberal Arts in Christian Colleges Donald G. Marshall Donald G. Marshall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (1): 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Donald G. Marshall; Paradigms, Conversation, Prayer: Liberal Arts in Christian Colleges. Pedagogy 1 January 2010; 10 (1): 183–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-031 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. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Who We Are, Why We Care Mark C. Long Mark C. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (1): 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark C. Long; Who We Are, Why We Care. Pedagogy 1 January 2010; 10 (1): 257–262. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 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. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Ten years ago in The Rise and Fall of English, I argued that the fall of English studies might be fortunate if the field could be reconstituted as a discipline. That no longer seems possible to me. In this article, I therefore argue for a shift from a field organized around the concept of literature to one organized around textuality: the production and reception of texts in all the media that use the English language. This will only be possible if we first recognize that English studies has really fallen.

This article examines the pervasive disciplinary commonplace that it's imperative to know students. Posing questions about what it means to know students, the essay recommends ways to acquire useful knowledge about students—typically a long-term process—under conditions of insufficient time.

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.

This article examines the challenges of addressing pedagogically the international dialogue on queer sexual identities. It focuses on the essayist's experiences preparing an anthology proposal for a queer studies volume that embraces the field in its transnational complexity and richness, using the problems encountered in that process to discuss what is omitted in queer classrooms and scholarly practices today.

Teaching narrative as rhetoric is a powerful pedagogical approach, because it connects students' experiences as readers with their work in the classroom. As an analysis of Time's Arrow shows, the approach provides a valuable way to access—and assess—the cognitive, affective, and ethical dimensions of readerly experience.

This article describes the current academic climate, among both faculty and students, as too harried and stressed for students to be really transformed by what they are learning. As a way to resist the neoliberalization of the university, it proposes that we rethink our relationship to enchantment.

This article argues that students still must be encouraged to participate in active, interpretive communities that build viable textual meanings in literature classes (and elsewhere). It questions how instructors in student-centered classrooms negotiate the balance between maintaining professorial authority and empowering students to test out interpretive arguments.

This article argues that English faculty do not avail themselves sufficiently of research on cognition and learning in their classrooms or in their training of graduate students. The tenets of brain-based learning would enhance our ability to teach practical skills and to hone aesthetic appreciation, but most faculty and graduate students are not familiar with this research and do not incorporate it into their pedagogy.

This article looks to a future where multimedia composing is the norm. While this paradigmatic shift in the cultural locus of literate activity will require the university to change, it also provides a rich opportunity for pedagogical innovation.

This article characterizes the first ten volume years of From the Classroom (FTC), one of three featured columns in Pedagogy. FTC articles, like other Pedagogy articles, showcase the work of scholars representing different ranks, subdisciplines, and institutional levels; unlike regular articles, FTC articles tend to be just 500 to 3,000 words. FTC authors, then, are challenged to raise a specific question or phenomenon by placing it momentarily within a larger theoretical, historical, and conceptual framework. Brockman groups most FTC articles into nine categories: Minding the Margins; Honoring Creative Nonfiction; Understanding Class, Culture, Gender, and Race; Mentoring Preservice Teachers; Incorporating Technology; Constructing Academic Arguments; Teaching Non-English Majors; Highlighting Effective Methods; and Showcasing Subdisciplines.

Readers of E. D. Hirsch's work on cultural literacy may be unaware that it is informed by the same theory of interpretation proposed by his much earlier book in literary studies, Validity in Interpretation. Understanding how the concept of genre functions in both projects clarifies why prior knowledge—not formal skills—is indispensable to all reading comprehension.

Little helps students see that the vitality of the first chapter of Thoreau's Walden inheres not in a suggestion that people live in the woods by subsistence farming and occasional wage labor, but rather in a challenge to readers to perform cost-benefit evaluations of their modes of living. Central to this effort is a writing assignment that asks students to (1) offer a research-based description of the economics of their postgraduation lives, assess on the basis of evidence drawn from Walden what Thoreau might think of their plans, then respond to Thoreau's probable views, or (2) explain and respond to what Thoreau might say about the U.S. Department of Labor's most recent table of average annual expenditures and characteristics from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. This assignment trades away one of the few opportunities that many students have to engage in literary criticism at a level beyond what is typical in freshman English, but an advantage is that students with a wide range of academic interests can produce competent discussions.

Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind elicited a storm of critical discourse regarding the condition of higher education in the United States. This essay performs a retrospective evaluation of the rhetorical modes that animated that body of discourse, suggesting that the polemical responses offered by Bloom's detractors validate his claims about the contradictory ways that openness, tolerance, and diversity are pursued in the university. Revisiting this controversy provides an opportunity for considering the ethics of the academic polemic.

This response by E. D. Hirsch Jr., author of Cultural Literacy, points out that despite the book's many critics and detractors, the its central claims and theories have been realized in practice, as powerfully suggested by research in cognitive science, education, and the success of the Core Knowledge Foundation.

This essay uses Jessica Benjamin's concept of intersubjectivity to consider a third space in the classroom, outside the teacher-centered or student-centered polarity. The intersubjective third space is characterized by the interplay of inner fantasy and recognition of otherness, and it is distinguished, above all, by the tension of paradox.

This article extends a conversation about teaching begun by Michael Bérubé. Prompted by Bérubé's assertion that his publishing experience translates to better responses to student writing, the piece argues that professors can teach beyond what Bérubé calls “the six” by scaffolding student writing.

This article documents a scholarship of teaching and learning project designed to help literature students cultivate the core disciplinary skill of reading for complexity. We offer a close reading of student responses from a collaboratively designed lesson to understand what happens when students read complex texts in introductory literature courses.

Lazere strongly endorses Paul G. Cook's essay as a step toward rehabilitation of E. D. Hirsch's reputation in English studies and disagrees with Adam Ellwanger's attempt to do the same for Allan Bloom. The coincidence of their books' appearance has caused Hirsch to be saddled with Bloom's debts.

Research Article| October 01 2009 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 (2009) 9 (3): 385–387. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-001 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 Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Editors' Introduction. Pedagogy 1 October 2009; 9 (3): 385–387. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-001 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. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this essay, Tulley and Blair combine instructional and editorial perspectives to analyze how the process of digital composing reshapes often entrenched notions of authorship and composing practice within the English major by having students reenvision a traditional print genre, the book review, in digital space.

Engaging the term rhetoricity, which refers both to Cultural Literacy as text and cultural literacy as concept, Cook claims that the most productive pedagogical component of Hirsch's proposal—the sophisticated rhetorical sensibility on which the entire conceptual edifice of cultural literacy depends—was obfuscated by the book's lightening-rod ethos, its deceptively simple veneer, and its smugly casual presumption to name “what every American needs to know.”

This essay explores strategies for teaching texts that are critical of an untempered pursuit of wealth to business students, although many of these students have chosen their course of study based on their internalization and privileging of capitalist discourse. Karl Marx's “Estranged Labour,” Charles Dickens's Hard Times, and the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech by Muhammad Yunus can be used in the classroom to encourage students to broaden their understanding of wealth, power, and class and to suggest that they, in their professional lives, may be agents of social change. Pedagogical strategies employed in this first-year course include giving students responsibility for the direction of class discussions, so that their specific interests and agendas receive attention, and requiring that students personalize these texts that may seem distant to them by exploring their own experiences in the world of work and commerce in the context of the readings. By the end of the semester, the binary structure of their worldview has been challenged and, ideally, complicated.

The publication of E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy and Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind in 1987 represented an exceptional moment, an opportunity for disciplinary and institutional reflection about the role and function of English studies, rhetoric and composition, the humanities and the academy writ large. The crucial moment demanded not only that we consider the merits of a variety of curricular ideals but also that we question the assumptions driving higher education in the United States. In Symposium: Revisiting the Work of Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch Jr., four articles and a response by Hirsch make an opportunity for self-reflection: if we can agree that a liberal education should be a liberating one, what do we mean by liberation and what sorts of people might that particular vision of freedom produce?

Creating a group paper has always made unusual demands on students as they figure out their role in the process of collaborative authorship. Inviting writers to work with newer technologies, such as online word processors and wikis, can provide opportunities to make the process and outcomes of collaboration more transparent. In this article, collaborative writing approaches that use a number of Web-based tools are discussed, including cooperative synchronous writing with Google Docs, inquiry-based writing with wikis, multigenre writing in response to literature, and collaboratively constructed study guides.

In assigning her university memoir-writing class to locate documents of significance to their lives as a starting point for composing personal essays, this teacher compelled her students to search outside themselves for material—in effect, to undertake research in a genre that many initially approach as if the story is already there, complete, inside their heads. By immersing themselves in material that was personal but also concrete and exterior, students discovered that memoir writing calls for as much exploration outside the self as searching within. As it turned out, the assignment not only helped to clarify the role of research in memoir writing, it also served as a springboard for discussions on the nature of documents and on their various uses in conveying a personal story.

Attention to the similarities between an academic class and a magazine illuminates how periodicity affects the reading and learning experience. Focusing on the subscribers' power in shaping the continuing life of a periodical, the teaching methodology presented here also underscores the collaborative nature of all teaching.

Review Article| April 01 2009 Motivating Students to Write: Some Empirical Answers (and Questions) Danielle A. Cordaro Danielle A. Cordaro Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (2): 361–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-038 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Danielle A. Cordaro; Motivating Students to Write: Some Empirical Answers (and Questions). Pedagogy 1 April 2009; 9 (2): 361–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-038 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. Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article discusses the origins and political effects of university-affiliated, college-accredited community education programs for low-income adults. While useful in their efforts to share the academic resources of the humanities with those otherwise deprived, such programs thrive on and perpetuate the myth that education—not economic policies—will reduce or eliminate poverty.

This article argues that introducing undergraduates to literary criticism and theory can be most effectively accomplished through the teaching of children's literature, fantasy literature, and Disney films alongside traditional literary criticism. We discuss a series of assignments we use in Pursuits of English, our department's introductory theory and criticism course.

Review Article| April 01 2009 Practical Answers, Four Perspectives: “What Is College-Level Writing?” Kathleen M. Hunzer Kathleen M. Hunzer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (2): 375–379. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-040 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen M. Hunzer; Practical Answers, Four Perspectives: “What Is College-Level Writing?”. Pedagogy 1 April 2009; 9 (2): 375–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-040 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. Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Critical thinking skills are valued across the university. Derek Bok writes that 90 percent of faculty identify critical thinking as the most important goal of a university education. In English and foreign language departments, critical thinking has often served as a default goal when faculty cannot agree on which texts or approaches to teach. Without disputing the importance of these skills, I argue that an exclusive focus on critical thinking compromises more modest but also very worthy aims, including appreciation. This article makes the case for renewed attention to appreciation as a goal of literary study. I argue that teaching appreciation helps to cultivate virtues of open-mindedness, responsiveness, and attunement, and that such teaching may be useful in addressing widespread declines in reading and reading skills. At the end of the essay I describe changes I have made in my own teaching practices to emphasize literary appreciation.

This article explores the dialectic between autonomy and mutuality within postsecondary composition programs. Grounded in a case study of writing instruction at a small, unionized, public university, the article argues that while broad workplace democracy and economic security are clearly desirable for communities of college composition teachers, their efficacy is seriously compromised absent sustained commitments to intellectual restlessness, professional deliberation, and collective action.

This article describes specific language experiences of three college writing teachers and the classroom practices that have resulted from these experiences. The authors want to raise awareness of linguistic diversity in writing classes and to help teachers connect with their own language experiences in order to integrate policies and practices that value students' own language varieties.

The Roanoke College Writing Initiative Grant (WIG) program provides a two-thousand-dollar stipend for non-English Department faculty to teach in the first-year writing program. Faculty is expected to teach three iterations of their proposed course and receive a year of training prior to entering the classroom. Hanstedt's introduction discusses the theoretical justifications for the program, as well as its historical roots and positive outcomes. The faculty development training of Roanoke's WIG program is described, as is how this member of the chemistry department put the lessons learned into action as he taught freshman writing for the first time. Rachelle Ankney taught an introductory writing course as a break from teaching many sections of introductory college math. She enjoyed learning a whole new approach to writing and had fun in the first-year writing course. But she was most surprised to find that teaching writing well makes teaching math better, too. She went from advocating “required writing across the curriculum” to being a firm supporter of “teaching writing across the curriculum.” This paper reflects on an experiment in using a writing course to teach critical thinking skills and vice versa, with special emphasis on helping students to get beyond their aversion to and distrust of argument. The course assigned short argument analyses, an exercise in literary interpretation, and a research paper in for students to gain more familiarity with argument and to appreciate its varied uses. One unforeseen result was the amount of time that had to be devoted to clarification of the terms of argument. Because clarification requires using inference, however, it is recommended that descriptive writing would be a helpful vehicle to start students addresstheir problems involving argument. This paper recounts a music professor's experience designing and teaching his first writing course, Music into Words. Research on the conceptualization of music argues that our ability to communicate musical understanding relies heavily on phenomenological and metaphorical description; the opportunity to teach writing about music to the general student offered the musician a laboratory for testing this hypothesis. However, the instructor discovered that, not surprisingly, narrative (story-telling) functioned as his students' primary mode of communicating meaning and significance in music. In the end, while reading and writing these stories, the students and the music professor learn important lessons about the role of music in human experience.

This article explores how the author folds prison studies into his composition courses at Texas' only open-admissions university, located directly across from a massive county jail bearing an uncanny resemblance to his home institution. The author not only examines the semiotics of the two buildings but also explains how and why he teaches students about the jail and its connection to a larger system of punishment. Asking first-year students to research a accustomed part of their local surroundings demystifies their understanding of incarceration as it helps to demystify the entire experience of research, writing, and going to school in a unique urban setting. Such a move fosters for the students a theoretical and experiential connection between public education and critical citizenship. It also reminds students to take a good look around (no matter where they are) and think more deeply about what's there, what's not there, and why.

The New York Times and others regularly implore us to raise the quality of teacher education. This essay explores why it is so difficult to do so, particularly at the urban, public institutions that produce many of our nation's teachers. It describes one such attempt to raise standards in writing. I document the process of building a new writing assessment program, including a writing assessment exam and a remediation program. I discuss our rubric and scoring procedures, samples of student work, and the poor score trends for our exam. I describe the difficulties in working without adequate resources, and I examine the ways in which our program posed a threat to the economics of the university. I conclude that efforts to raise program quality and produce higher-quality graduates are unlikely to succeed without fundamental changes to the economy of education generally and teacher education in particular.

The essay traces the genealogy and implications of the emergence of a discourse of ghosts, spectrality, hauntology, and phantoms within the rational machinery of the modern university. Moving across disciplines—including literature, sociology, physics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy—the article contends that the university is at a new moment of self-understanding.

This article proposes a strategy for teaching students about periodization, canonicity, and recovery work. It assigns Mary Darby Robinson's reading list as course material in women's literature as well as in Romantic-period classes and other kinds of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century interdisciplinary courses.

Entering college students often struggle with their professors' expectations for “analysis” since those expectations are often ingrained in disciplinary assumptions that scholars rarely need to articulate. In this essay, I argue that we need to teach analysis explicitly in first-year writing courses and that we need to help students transfer those lessons across the curriculum. By asking students to read “with” and “against” the grain of texts, I give them tangible ways to rough up and pull apart the sources we read together. Students find this language useful in helping them engage directly with sources and ideas, rather than sliding into description or summary. Reminding them that this particular approach originates in the discipline of literary studies, I then have students themselves draw conclusions about what “analysis” looks like -- and what it does -- in other disciplines by examining samples of scholarly writing.

Based on the experiences of three graduate assistant directors working in the Howe Writing Initiative, a joint WAC effort between Miami University's business school and English department, this essay introduces entrepreneurial consulting as a model for implementing WAC initiatives in different disciplines. The entrepreneurial consulting model emphasizes the need to establish an ongoing presence within a discourse community, to continually “sell” writing and rhetoric to both faculty and students, and to strategically use rhetoric to promote rhetoric.