AbstractOn Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the author received an email that would change the course of his teaching for the following twenty-four months. The university-wide communication indicated that, due to the emerging COVID-19 crisis, all classes, activities, and university business was suspended, with the email further instructing faculty to wait at home for more details. As the author mulled over the educational shifts ahead of him, his training as a technical communicator—and more specifically his knowledge of user-experience (UX) and design thinking—kicked in, offering him a set of tools he could pull from as he sought to create courses that reflected the quickly shifting needs of his students. In this article, the author discusses how the use of design thinking expands the limited conversations about course co-creation, a practice that leads to more effective and equitable course designs. The author additionally uses his experience employing design thinking in the creation of his Shakespeare seminar course as a case study, demonstrating the value that the collaborative nature of design thinking has for pedagogy.

Abstract These notes from the field describe one instructor's experience with adopting a narrative medicine-informed pedagogy in the literature classroom during the COVID-19 outbreak. It examines how the chronic stress of surviving through a pandemic can contribute to an international “empathy deficit” and how an attitude of receptivity and co-intentionality—paired with reading fictional stories about health and illness—can buoy the empathy reserves of both students and teachers.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

AbstractThis article recounts the experience of moving an in-person literature class online at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Drawing comparisons between the novel Mrs. Dalloway, which the class was reading at the time, and the experience of the early days of the pandemic, the piece outlines how the exigencies of the pandemic led to revised teaching and assessment practices.

Abstract In a world of Google-age information accessibility and Facebook-fueled quick rants, the author is interested in teaching a process of reading poetry that does not include easily accessed “answers” or result in reactionary analysis. By using contemporary poetry in introduction to literature courses, the author invites students to resist any quick way of accessing information about the poem. Instead, using Billy Collins's poem, “Introduction to Poetry,” the author helps students explore slower, maybe more contemplative and welcoming ways to listen to the language of the poems they study. And, along the way, the author invites students to consider the particular intellectual virtues they are cultivating in order to read well. In this essay, the author uses Aimee Nezhukumatathil's poem “Hummingbird Abecedarian,” published through the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day project, and a poem the author had only read a couple of times before introducing to a group of second-semester first-year “Introduction to Literature” students, as an illustrative example of how using contemporary poems can deepen students’ reading experiences when there are no academic resources around to save them from taking time to read well.

The title of this book is concerned with the axis between pedagogy and theory, creating a productive interaction and synthesis of the two, and so this review also focuses on these interrelations. Of all the major figures involved in the advent of theory on the American shores, Robert Scholes was the only one who had a burning concern with connecting the new ideas with teaching. When Jonathan Culler, acclaimed for his Structuralist Poetics (1975), visited my campus shortly after his book was published, I invited him to my graduate pedagogy seminar. He was tactful and gracious in talking to the future teachers, but he made it clear that at that point theory could and should not be applied to pedagogy any more than quantum mechanics should be taught to beginning physics students. Scholes, on the other hand, is in the line of pragmatic thinking that maintains abstract ideas have existence and meaning only when applied to concrete situations, where they can be clarified, tested, and revised. His early tetralogy, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985b), and Protocols of Reading (1989) all deal with this back and forth movement. At the end of Textual Power, Scholes writes, “My enterprise in this book has been to take the teaching situation as a theoretical position from which to look at other theories that impinge upon the study and teaching of texts. Large sections of my own text were written first to clarify things for myself, my students, and my colleagues” (166). Later he places as his inscription to Protocols this sentence of Roland Barthes: “And no doubt that is what reading is: rewriting the text of the work within the text of our lives” (1). This approach resonates with John Dewey explaining to his wife that he was creating a school for children because the classroom is to philosophy what a laboratory is to scientists. Scholes's later works further entwine critical theories with educational structures and forms: The Rise and Fall of English (1998), The Crafty Reader (2001), English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality (2011), and Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language (1988), coedited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer.One service that Ellen Carillo has performed for us in this well-edited and conceptualized volume is to include—and this is unusual for a Festschrift—generous examples of the subject's best work, not isolating them in an appendix, but strategically placing them among the essays most relevant to Scholes's concerns in his own. In rereading Scholes's pieces in this context, I am somewhat mystified that a writer as clear and persuasive as Scholes was not able to affect any widespread practical change, especially since his own writing outshines everyone else's in the volume. Although Scholes was able to create a new department, Modern Culture and Media at his home institution, Brown University, this department remained separate from the English department, and there seemed to be little interaction or collaboration between the two entities. At the end of After the Fall (2011), Scholes wistfully admits that he does not know of a single university that has adopted his suggestions for reshaping the teaching of English (142). This is partially due to the glacial rate of change in our educational institutions, but more because so many of those in the profession either have biases against his vision or do not fully comprehend it. Put briefly, that vision is what we would now call constructivist, student- and reader-centered, and radically democratic. The last two words are rarely put together but relevant now when too many politicians and Supreme Court justices appear to find universal suffrage obsolete.Scholes's vision is based more on immediate experience and process than definitive formulations and axioms and attempts to transcend or reconcile binaries such as theory/practice, consumption/production, analysis/creativity, concepts/specifics, and writing/reading. In this sense it is wholistic in the tradition of other educational thinkers such as bell hooks, who writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 85), What forms of passion make us whole? To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest of knowledge that enables us to unify theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.Ironically, Scholes's own commitment to the primacy of teaching is a central reason that his works have not found wide acceptance among many traditional academics, although most of them are teachers themselves. To begin with one of the apparent dichotomies, we can take one that Carillo embeds in her title, Reading and Writing, and quotes from the introductory chapter of an early Scholes book, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982): There is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read, we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation, we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. (4)Before it is written or spoken, our knowledge remains in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. This understanding of the interweaving of reading and writing echoes through Scholes's corpus, reappearing in a later book: “In all of this, I have assumed that reading is a constructive process, a kind of writing. . . . Learning to re-weave the texts we encounter in the texts of our lives is the process I have been trying to describe, and, in particular, I have tried to show how teachers may share the process with students” (2011: 14). This resembles what Dewey meant when he urged the necessity of having any intellectual proposition “reinstated into experience” to be realized.Several of the pieces in Carillo's volume seek to place Scholes's work in its place in the historical contexts of our disciplines. In the best of these, “How Scholes Helped English Departments Confront the Death of the Author, the Loss of Readers, and the Emergence of Intertextual Literacies,” Thomas P. Miller describes Scholes's career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism and his intellectual commitment to using pedagogy to validate theory in practice. The pragmatic perspective was fundamental to his integrated model of literary and literacy theories. . . . Scholes pointedly critiqued the self-validating binaries that structured the “arche-institutions of English”: the hierarchy of literature over non-literature that positioned consumption over production in ways that divorced academic inquiry from the “real world.” (171)Miller goes on to note, Scholes's engagement with the creative potentials of work with literacy is critical to understanding the distinction between his pragmatic concern with knowledge in the making and the rather disengaged stance that often has been assumed by cultural studies and literary criticism. Scholes's pragmatic engagement with the creative process of reading to write was fundamental to his efforts to reform the discipline to connect with the interactive literacies that have given rise to the maker movement and the active learning pedagogies that have become a mainstay of curricular reforms in the last decade. (175)In other words, Miller's work can lead us to view Scholes as a connecting link between a powerful but often subterranean current in our past educational history running through Transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott, pragmatists like William James and Dewey, and the Free School movement of the 1960s and 1970s forward to current trends like reader response criticism, constructivism, and active learning strategies such as the “flipped classroom.” In his more extensive earlier study, The Evolution of College English: Literary Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (2010), Miller elaborates in more detail: The marginal standing of teaching helps to explain why the theoretical challenges of the 1970s were rarely translated into new programs of undergraduate study. One proposal for curricular reform was Scholes's Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Scholes acknowledged that the “apparatus” of the discipline needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up, because it was founded upon binaries that had broken down—most notably the hierarchies of literature and “non-literature,” consumption and production, and the academic and “real” worlds. According to Scholes, once the autonomy of literature was called into question, the boundaries of the study came to seem contrived. . . . For an alternative framework, Scholes developed a pedagogically engaged vision of the transactional relations of writing and reading. . . . To break out of the “institutional sedimentations that threaten to fossilize” college English, Scholes looked to the classroom as a site of collaborative inquiry, with the model being the stance of the reader as a composer of meaning. (229–30)Although Miller does not make this connection, I see this marginalization of Scholes's viewpoint as similar to what happened to Louise Rosenblatt's progressive early work of reader response criticism, Exploring Literature (1938), which was buried by the increasingly hegemonic acceptance of the New Criticism and its master textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, published in the same year. Rosenblatt, fortunately, has come back in fashion. The MLA has now republished the fifth edition of her book and a later work of hers adopts the term transaction as the central relation between reader and text. So there are hopes for Scholes's work too, not just as a citation in the history of theory, but as a living force in restructuring our disciplines.To circle back to the first quotation from Miller, I want to underline his comment about Scholes's “career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism,” an aspect of Scholes's work that has not been given the attention it deserves in Carillo's collection. Text Book gives us the most specific sense of how Scholes applied his vision to the daily work with students and also suggests that this kind of work is best done in collaboration with both student feedback and with colleagues: all three editions were co-edited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book intersperses literary works with creative exercises focusing on the students’ own lives, tracing how their experiences can be transformed into narrative structures and vice-versa. The achievement is elaborated in rich detail in Robin Dizard's “Stranger than Friction: Learning and Teaching Literary Studies Using TEXT BOOK” (2010). The article's extensive use of selections and assignments from the book is supplemented by extended responses of students and Dizards's teacherly work with them in deepening and interpreting these responses. Contrasting this article with Scholes's own writing suggests one fault in the latter; Scholes rarely includes student voices either in the classroom or from their writings to further clarify and support his ideas. He does quote from students in The Crafty Reader to show that they are befuddled by New Critical expectations, but he does not demonstrate the positive reverse of real students encouraged to connect poetry to their own lives. There is some of this in Carillo's volume, but too often we hear more from the somewhat hermetic dialogues of academics conversing with each other in staking out their own positions than an attempt to speak directly to teachers, administrators, parents, and even students. I call this style “Dissertationese,” where this writing is often found, but some critics have yet to outgrow it.To unfairly choose just one example, I find particularly hard to read Kelsey McNiff “From Argument to Invitation: Promoting Empathy and Mutual Understanding in the Composition Classroom” (117–32). The essay is a sound empirical analysis of an essay assignment designed to test Scholes's ideas on using reading and writing to extend empathy. But the writing is clogged by passive constructions and the almost compulsive need to use citations from the academic literature in support of almost every assertion, such as “Like Scholes, many have argued that educators therefore should seek to cultivate students’ empathic imaginations (Von Write 2002; Fleckenstein 2007; Gerdes et al. 2011; Leake 2016; Damianidou and Phtiak 2016; English 2016; Tomlinson and Murphy 2018; Mirra 2018) and that the humanities in particular encourage this habit of mind (Nussbaum 2010; Jurecic 2011, 13–15).” This reminds me of a colleague's spouse who once said, “Howard thinks I should speak for myself.” McNiff has done a solid piece of work, but I must ask, as I do often in dissertation defenses, who is the intended reader and what kind of work is it supposed to do in the world? A good counterexample to this kind of writing is that of Alfie Kohn, whose more professional books appear in mainstream presses but are also offered as articles in the popular press or turned into shorter audio versions that can be played in the car by teachers and parents.In contrast to McNiff's article, I would like to mention Douglas D. Hesse, who wrote an “Afterword” (253–60) using a much more accessible and personal style but just as insightfully rigorous as anything else in the volume. His appreciation of another of Scholes's textbooks, The Practice of Writing (1981), coauthored with Nancy Comley, is articulate and concise: What's remarkable to me about the book is the way it invites students to exercise the full range of language with a creative mélange of texts of all sorts with experiments whimsical and serious and serious, at levels from sentences to self-contained texts. It challenged, already forty years ago, the kind of fractured model driving English departments, not only in literary but also in writing studies. In the name of specialization and expertise, literature and writing kept genres and purposes and historical periods separate, leaving students to figure out (if they wanted, and most didn't) what any of these highly defined courses might have to do with one another—or the nonacademic world beyond. Scholes challenged those divisions and wasn't afraid to use tools of serious play to engage student writers. If students learned anything canonical, it would be an indirect effect of the main enterprise: cultivating textual power through interpretation and production intertwined. (255)In this deft description of only one of Scholes's projects, Hesse suggests how he reconciled all of the dualities discussed in this review and the volume itself. Further, Hesse's penultimate paragraph provides a helpful guide to the best insights of the other contributors to this volume. In his last paragraph, Hesse sees himself tending toward pessimism, “a consequence of having been long enough in the profession to see Scholes's ideas roll in, then out, like waves on Dover Beach,” but is also able to eloquently endorse Scholes for his enabling and constant optimism: “It was an optimism born of plentitude and play, impelled by a multitude of texts to be interpreted and texts to be made, those basic yet inexhaustible activities of reading and writing” (260). It is this optimism that helped sustain Scholes through his long and varied career, elaborating a fairly constant vision through a variety of materials and perspectives.We are at an inflectional point in educational reform now where radical innovators have to face the forces of anti-intellectualism and timidity. In a book that has become “conventional wisdom”—an oxymoron to my mind—Tinkering toward Utopia, the historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue that teachers and parents have a basic conception of school—graded classrooms, separated subject matters, high-stakes testing, and so on. And to violate any more than a small number of these elements is to be charged with something other than “education.” I think exactly the opposite approach is called for. For one thing, the authors suppose in their use of utopia that the current system is getting incrementally better, when it is clear that the opposite is true. But more seriously, that it is a “system” and not a historically fossilized set of practices that often do not fit together. We can begin to scrutinize every aspect of what we do in terms of viability, effectiveness, and humane concern and begin to rebuild from the ruins through better thinking in constant dialogue with actual practice.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

Though only two names appear as authors of this volume, it would take a crowded eighteenth-century-style title page to include everyone whose work is included. The content as well as the format of this volume are collaborative, in the best senses of the term, making it of great value to teachers in the humanities with specialties well beyond the long eighteenth century. Bridget Draxler, of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and Danielle Spratt, of California State University, Northridge, take on crucial questions of engaging a wider audience with the scholarly dynamics of cultural history, and add to the rhetorical strategies of defending the humanities along the way. Their resolve to show both successful assignments and those that went wrong, and to prominently include the voices of imaginative and supportive administrators (thank you, John C. Keller at University of Iowa), inclusive museum and library directors such as Gillian Dow at Chawton House, and especially students and community collaborators, provides a reflective model for other educators. Austen scholar Devoney Looser's reflection that she had to “reinvent [her]self” to be “an engaging ambassador for the past” (52) speaks to the spirit of the volume: seeking participation without sacrificing attention, urging students and faculty to work beyond campus without condescension.Draxler and Spratt use a six-part structure to organize the volume: “The Street” takes on what Spratt calls “the savior complex” in service-learning projects, discussed in greater detail below. “The Library” and “The Museum” are differentiated based on the structure of student projects from “The Archives,” “The Digital Archives and the Database,” and “The Eighteenth Century Novel, Online.” Their theorizing of the connections between what service learning can look like in the humanities with the promises and limits of digital humanities strengthens the book. Some examples involve institutional support in terms of available collections and opportunities for enhancing the meaning of study-abroad programs, while others approach digitization strategies for institutions and students without access to such resources. “In the face of an expert-scoffing, diversity-averse, post-truth society that rejects care for language as mere political correctness it has never been more critical to teach the past with a public purpose” (8), the editors write in their introduction. From this, the examples of accountability and self-reflection to avoid a “savior complex” in connecting publicly engaged learning with literary studies, including undergraduate seminars on Austen, develops into an argument that expands from Austen into other examples.Austen's prominence in the title (and on the paperback cover) functions like Austen's name in lights in programming announcements and course titles: it brings in an audience who may have been exposed to Anya Taylor-Joy's expressive eyes in the most recent Emma or Ciaran Hinds's life-giving sideburns in the 1995 Persuasion and signed up for the books themselves. Once in, the connection to other cultural productions of the long eighteenth century besides Austen can ensue. The opening two chapters engage the most with Austen, while teachers in other historical fields might benefit the most from reading the later sections on digital archives. Emma is the most-cited novel, finding among its merits a fine object-lesson in a sort of “savior” complex: Emma's condescending visits to the cottages of the local poor, whose dingy interiors have been briefly illuminated by her visits. Spratt's opening chapter “The Street” augments recent Emma studies in a way that would make any reader want to enroll in her class, as she is able to use Emma Woodhouse's visits to the local poor as an object lesson to understand the class dynamics to be aware of in service learning. Two examples of complex moments in teaching Emma in the undergraduate classroom are used for extended examples. Both are helpfully presented, and one changed my mind in a way that parallels Spratt's account.From Emma the painful scene of Mrs. Elton, newly arrived in Highbury from Bristol, seeking to arrange Jane Fairfax's expected need for a position as governess has been one of the most famous in Austen studies at least since Edward Said (1993) centered the discussion of Bristol's role in the Atlantic slave trade in Culture and Imperialism. Spratt theorizes her approach to teaching this scene in ways that have become widely shared, but concludes that Emma's silence during a scene of discussing both “the sale of human flesh” and what Jane Fairfax calls “the sale of human intellect” and the suffering attached to unprotected governesses at the time demonstrates Emma's indifference to these topics. Certainly, Emma Woodhouse is no antiracist activist, any more than Austen was a Wollstonecraft, yet it is still possible to read her silence here as a shocked response to the arrogant, domineering, presumptive behavior of the newcomer. More convincing is Draxler's discussion of how student investment in their projects—especially preparing to lead discussions of each Austen novel at the local public library—changed her long-established feelings about the character of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. If the received reading of his famous harangue of Catherine endorses the novel's critique of Gothic fantasy, her students’ engaged response to Henry's “Remember that we are English, and that we are Christians” (qtd. on 92) positions him not as an ideal but as “his father's son”: “A few months before the #metoo movement started, my students taught me that it's not just the General Tilneys and Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps of the world who disempower women through villainous abuses of power; it is also, importantly and heartbreakingly, the Al Frankens and the Henry Tilneys, with their uncouth jokes and thoughtless entitlement” (92). At the time as such references may seem to risk a limited shelf life, this volume also includes one of the most thoughtful and useful definitions of “presentism” and its dangers that I know of, as it moves from a shared definition to a memorable, useful phrase many teachers will use: “Presentism occurs when we interpret historical phenomena according to the concepts, vocabulary, values, problems, or opinions endemic to our own time period, leading us to misapprehend the actual nature of our historical object of inquiry. Presentism interprets things as we are, not as they are” (emphasis added, 214). To write, and to teach, with the pull toward contemporaneity modified by this historical imagination comes close to my definition of the liberal arts, and that last sentence will show up in my class notes soon.The discussions of Austen's textual history, of the editing of primary sources from the long eighteenth century (with an extended example from the writings of Sarah Fielding), and of the undergraduate (and, in one chapter, graduate) productions that emerge from these sources would look quite different (the pandemic notwithstanding) at large institutions with substantial print-based library resources. For this reviewer, and for most of the teachers for whom their work is intended, the focus on digital access and shared resources for students at a range of schools other than Research 1 institutions are welcome and helpful, and even for those of us with commitment to printed texts and joyful unplugged reading, profoundly democratic and portable. Amy Weldon's contribution describing the guided tours she's led for her Luther College students to key Romantic-period author sites (which she presented brilliantly at a recent conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) also shows the need to theorize and complicate our historical experiences. Throughout the latter chapters the emphasis on making the work of editors and scholars understandable to students functions as another beyond-Austen structural example. This volume goes far to explain and contextualize for students the role and function of editors, which for the contexts of open-source and user-modified materials retain a special importance. Spratt's example from a graduate classroom of creating a digital edition of Sarah Fielding's 1759 novel The History of the Countess of Delwyn functions as a useful case study in this area. To the question of why digitization in itself cannot be the answer to every need, the inevitable challenge of the medial s remains instructive for teachers at every level: that is, from a high school history class encountering what looks like “Congrefs” in images of American Revolutionary documents, to the “Boatfwain” bellowed to in the opening dialogue of the First Folio: these cannot be scanned without intelligent, contextualized preparation of a reading text, even without the question of where and when to annotate. Austen's texts are among the first to transition away from the medial s in printed English, but even there such non-digitizable artifacts as paper quality (the acidic near-newsprint of the unknown author's first 1811 printing of Sense and Sensibility vis-à-vis the pleasantly heavy paper and generous margins of John Murray's 1816 first edition of Emma) provide useful reminders of humility for even the most passionate advocates of the digital humanities. Still, this volume features insightful analysis of how the implications of collaborative digital approaches challenge the philological precedents of what became the expected practices of modern literary scholarship. As part of a pattern of quoting students in this work, Draxler cites Alison Byerly from a Newberry Library seminar on a point that extends the interest of the book beyond the long eighteenth century to any “data-driven” “inherently collaborative” approach: “At some level, this requires us to abandon the notion that meaning can be generated only through the power of the individual mind. A different kind of meaning is exposed when technology uncovers patterns or information that would otherwise remain invisible. Coming to terms with that meaning requires a different way of thinking” (154). As much as this is in keeping with other theoretical approaches shaped by poststructuralist linguistics, the figure of “uncovering” the process of both editing and the selection of texts for attention provides a dynamic approach to a period of historical literature that won't keep still.Is 2018 already long ago? For teachers at most institutions, it certainly feels that way. The Enlightenment, and its spirited critique by many of the Romantic generations, created many institutions: the museums, libraries, schools that many current educators are working to make more accessible and inclusive. As remote learning, live-streamed events, and other virtual programming have become essential with the ongoing pandemic, the collaborators in this book are well positioned to help scholars in related fields with meaningful transitions. Though even the mention of sharing pizza at a class where students edit Wikipedia entries for eighteenth-century women writers, or of friendly talk and laughter among undergraduates and local senior citizens at Austen-related book discussions held off-campus take on a moving resonance of the power of in-person events, this reminder of the need for contact and synchronous discovery provides valuable inspiration as we move forward.

AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

Abstract This essay maps the logistics and advantages of reading and teaching texts in their original installments as a means of theorizing seriality in the undergraduate literature classroom.

AbstractThe activity of close reading lies at the heart of literary studies, a “signature pedagogy” that distinguishes English from other disciplines. Despite its centrality to the discipline, however, close reading has been curiously resistant to analysis. This lesson study aimed to determine where students encounter challenges in close reading. Contrary to dominant narratives in the discipline, the university students in this study were adept at formal analysis. They were challenged, on the other hand, by invitations to make intertextual and personal connections to the text. Analyzing features of successful close reading, the essay proposes that intertextual thinking and personal connection are important components. The essay recommends assessing student skills in the initial stages of teaching close reading and, when warranted, integrating instruction in intertextual thinking and making personal connections alongside formal analysis. It also suggests group discussion may help leverage these neglected components of close reading.

AbstractThis article uses narrative inquiry to examine one instructor's experiences teaching two first-year writing classes, each one marked by different pedagogical choices. Themed with the topic of place and foregrounding the recurring example of Appalachia, the classes were nonetheless taught outside the region usually called Appalachia and to college students coming from, and identifying with, places other than Appalachia. This resulting data lends support for easing non-Appalachian-identified students into studying Appalachia as a rhetorical case and for encouraging students to explore various ways that textual representations of Appalachia reveal social and economic patterns noticeable in some form elsewhere.

Abstract Is it possible to teach creative writing? Although creative talent may be innate, all individuals have the capacity to create, and creativity can be nurtured through specific approaches. The works of David Kolb in relation to experiential learning pedagogy are explored and adapted to creative writing courses, and examples of potential exercises are given.

AbstractFocusing on a course taught to Palestinian and Jewish Israelis, this essay suggests that the study of life writing can help students develop a better informed civic identity, particularly in relation to divisive national matters. By carefully constructing collective classroom practices of reading, writing, discussing, and listening, the instructor can forge an environment that strengthens students’ capacity to appreciate the textual and contemporary interaction between individuals and their historical contexts, and to hear alternative perspectives and experiences attentively, without argument. University classrooms can thus play a vital role in democratic culture, as spaces in which a broader range of voices can be heard and in which minority voices are specially protected and projected.

Ilana M. Blumberg is professor of English literature at Bar Ilan University in Israel and author, most recently, of the memoir Open Your Hand: Teaching as a Jew, Teaching as an American (2018). She has won teaching awards from University of Pennsylvania and Michigan State University and is currently a recipient of an Israel Science Foundation grant entitled Postsecular George Eliot.Rosalind Buckton-Tucker studied at King's College, London, and the University of Leicester, UK, and holds a PhD in American literature. Her main research interests are twentieth-century British and American literature, travel literature, and the pedagogy of literature and creative writing, and she has published a variety of articles and book chapters in these fields as well as presenting numerous papers at international conferences. She has taught in universities in Kuwait, Oman, Cyprus, the United Arab Emirates, and Iran, and has also worked as a freelance journalist and editor in the UAE and Oman. She enjoys writing fiction, memoirs, and travel articles.Elizabeth Effinger is associate professor of English at the University of New Brunswick, where she teaches British Romanticism with special interests in William Blake, the intersections of Romantic science and literature, the Anthropocene, and human-animal studies. She coedited (with Chris Bundock) William Blake's Gothic Imagination: Bodies of Horror (2018). She was principal investigator of Erasing Frankenstein, a SSHRC (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council)-funded public humanities outreach activity that transformed Shelley's 1818 novel into a book-length erasure poem in collaboration with incarcerated and nonincarcerated citizens. For more on the project, visit erasingfrankenstein.org.Moira Fitzgibbons is professor of English at Marist College. Her most recent work includes an edition of “The Merchant's Tale” in The Medieval Disability Sourcebook (2020).Michael Keenan Gutierrez is teaching associate professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is the author of The Trench Angel (2015) and his work appears in the Guardian, the Delmarva Review, the Collagist, Scarab, the Pisgah Review, Untoward, the Boiler, Crossborder, and Public Books.Angela Laflen teaches digital rhetoric and professional writing at California State University, Sacramento. Her work has appeared in Computers and Composition and Assessing Writing, among other venues.Laci Mattison is assistant professor at Florida Gulf Coast University in the Department of Language and Literature, where she teaches courses on twentieth-century, Victorian, and contemporary literature. She is one of the general editors for Bloomsbury's Understanding Philosophy, Understanding Modernism series. For this series, she has coedited volumes on Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. Alongside Derek Ryan, she has also coedited a special issue of Deleuze Studies titled Deleuze, Virginia Woolf, and Modernism (2013) and has published articles and book chapters on Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, H. D., Mulk Raj Anand, and Vladimir Nabokov.Kelly Neil is professor of English at Spartanburg Methodist College, a small liberal arts institution located in the upstate of South Carolina. She received her PhD in English literature from the University of California, Davis, where she studied early modern literature and gender. She has published in such journals as Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies and This Rough Magic. She is currently coediting a collection of essays on teaching Shakespeare to nonmajors.Sarah Ann Singer is assistant professor in the Department of English at University of Central Florida. Her work appears in College English, Technical Communication Quarterly, Journal of Medical Humanities, and Peitho.Rachel Tait-Ripperdan is associate librarian at Florida Gulf Coast University. She received her master's degree in library science from Florida State University and her master's degree in history from Florida Gulf Coast University. She serves as library liaison to the Departments of Language and Literature, History, Communication, Philosophy, and Religion. Her research interests include information literacy instruction, collection development, and graphic novels and manga in the academic classroom.Theresa Tinkle (she/her/hers) is a medievalist by training, a teacher committed to supporting students’ development and ambitions, and a disability studies scholar. Her most recent book is Gender and Power in Medieval Exegesis (2010). She has published widely on medieval English and Latin literature, gender, religion, and manuscript culture. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and is engaged in antiracist work, writing to learn, writing in the disciplines, and writing program assessment.

Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

Abstract This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world.

In this book, published in the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Mara Holt provides a historical overview of collaborative pedagogy in US writing classrooms. In fact, Holt argues that collaborative writing pedagogy reflects and is shaped by its historical context. The book defines collaborative learning broadly, as “a pedagogy that organizes students to work together in groups” (1). Although she focuses on collaborative writing, Holt casts a wide net to capture writing classroom practices that she sees as applications of John Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism. Holt argues that the American pragmatism espoused by Dewey is enacted in many collaborative writing practices, allowing those pedagogies to transform classrooms into training grounds for participatory democracy.Holt, who is professor and director of composition at Ohio University, intentionally operates both as a historian and as a writing studies scholar. The book has roots in Holt's (1988) history-based dissertation, “Collaborative Learning from 1911–1986,” submitted over thirty years ago, and in what the composition theorist James Berlin (1987) calls the significance of history in writing studies. Holt identifies a social-constructivist perspective in Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism that aligns with her argument that collaborative learning practices are shaped by their temporal context. Pragmatism, Holt says, offers general principles to ground education: 1) a focus on praxis; 2) knowledge creation as social, and collaboration as potentially “authoritative” (6); 3) the importance of critical thinking; and 4) the classroom as a place to model democracy and prepare students to participate in it. While Holt admits that Dewey probably never used the term collaborative (12), she implies that his principles are enacted in the most democratic collaborative learning practices.After a chapter of introduction, the chapters of Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice each provide case studies of collaborative learning in US writing classrooms at a transformational moment in US political or pedagogical history. In the introduction, Holt asserts her underlying thesis that a historical overview of collaborative writing pedagogy is needed to help new generations of writing teachers understand that they are part of a tradition of using collaborative writing in the classroom for democratic pedagogical purposes. Holt also argues that a historical perspective is necessary for educators to fully understand and assess collaborative writing practices. Chapters 2 and 3 outline collaborative learning in writing classrooms during the Progressive Era and the Cold War; chapter 4 considers the impacts of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Chapters 5 through 7 consider moments of pedagogical shift—feminist theory, the creation of writing centers, and computer-mediated collaboration. The book concludes with a chapter in which Holt reflects on the future of collaborative learning as it intersects with three current movements: globalization, posthumanism, and Black Lives Matter.In some ways, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is a contemporary complement to Anne Ruggles Gere's (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Writing at a time when social-constructivism was coming into its own, Gere outlines a theory to explain how writing groups, the collaborative writing pedagogy that she focuses on, are evidence of writing as a socially constructed activity. Holt's book, on the other hand, takes as accepted theory that writing is socially constructed and links that social interaction to Dewey's pragmatism. As a result, Gere and Holt share the notion that collaborative writing is affected by historical context. Like Gere, Holt includes historical background for the pedagogies she discusses, but Gere begins her history in the colonial era, starting at an earlier moment in US history than Holt, who extends the time line of collaborative writing into the twenty-first century.In addition to being a thesis-based history book, Holt's Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is part memoir. Holt weaves over forty years of personal experience as a writing studies scholar into her narrative. In the preface, Holt notes that her “first formal interaction with collaborative learning was at Kenneth Bruffee's Brooklyn College Institute in Peer Tutor Training and Collaborative Learning in 1980” (ix). Through her affiliation with the Brooklyn Institute she met Peter Elbow, Stanley Fish, Carol Stanger, John Trimbur, Harvey Kail, and Peter Hawkes. She read texts by Lev Vygotsky, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire. Her experiences at the Bruffee institute led Holt to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met James Berlin, who was a visiting professor from the University of Cincinnati. Holt's dissertation director was Lester Faigley. Holt also acknowledges Victor Villanueva as a major influence. The array of scholars that Holt was taught by, wrote with, and thought with shows the depth of her connection to the foundation of the field. Her connection and experience in the field lends credibility both to her authority to survey the history of collaborative learning within the field and to select case studies not just with an eye to proving her point, but because they were some of the most important developments of collaborative learning in the field at that moment.Sometimes, however, these personal details can distract from her argument; they add names and dates to case studies already crowded with such information. Some personal details may also distance Holt from readers when she recalls memories in a way that requires insider knowledge. For example, she references the iteration of the “CUNY Graduate School on 42nd Street,” which she attended as the “pre-Giuliani pornographic version,” which assumes knowledge of both the pre- and post-Giuliani versions of the building (5). The text also includes other unnecessary details. For example, Holt notes that 1930s progressivism affected how first-year writing programs were administered; that's interesting history about first-year writing, but it says little about collaborative learning.Overall, Holt effectively argues that collaborative learning in writing classrooms was shaped by its historical context. For example, during the labor movements and nascent socialism of the 1930s, pedagogies emerged that were based on collective, student-centered practices. Likewise, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in World War II, when international collectivist movements were viewed as oppressive, the use of collaborative pedagogies declined. In addition, Holt demonstrates that collaborative writing practices decades apart can mimic each other, proving her point that a historical knowledge of collaborative writing might prevent reinvention. For example, under the “Oregon Plan” of the 1950s, students critiqued each other's writing before revising it to be turned in to the teacher. These examples of peer critique foreshadowed Bruffee's peer revision of the 1970s, but Holt presents no causal link between the two pedagogies. In fact, Holt stresses that, while collaborative learning practices of one era may seem similar to those of another, their purposes will vary because their proponents are responding to different historical contexts and may be rejecting rather than amplifying democratic values. In the case above, Holt says that the Oregon Plan arose in a 1950s context in which students interacted with each other's texts suspiciously, whereas in Bruffee's context, students were encouraged to depend on classmates for educational gain.In chapter 6, Holt argues that writing centers, mostly through peer tutoring programs, have been key to the development of collaborative writing pedagogy. She also outlines current historical situations to which writing centers have responded in recent decades, including increasing numbers of underprepared and international students, and the shift from alpha text to multimodal composition. In focusing on the internationalization of writing centers, Holt also notes that American English is no longer the assumed standard in US writing centers and that institutions around the world have created writing centers of their own.In chapter 6 Holt traces the advent of computer-mediated collaboration in writing pedagogy by outlining how writing centers responded to the introduction of computers. In chapter 7 she extends her analysis of computer-mediated collaboration into the twenty-first century by acknowledging that much collaborative learning in writing classrooms is now mediated by technology. The tech-mediated case studies Holt considers in chapter 7 are the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment at the University of Texas in the 1980s and the more recent use of wikis in writing instruction. While Holt asserts that such tech-mediated pedagogies are “solidly connected to Deweyan/Bruffeean theory and practice” (109), her analysis overlooks the ideology of the infrastructure that supports tech-mediated collaboration—the technology itself. As a result, it may be that an updated version of a Deweyan/Bruffeean framework is needed to analyze collaborative learning in an increasingly tech-mediated classroom. As Holt persuasively shows, collaborative pedagogies in writing classrooms often embody democratic ideals, so a framework based on egalitarian principles is appropriate for their analysis, but perhaps that framework needs to have the capacity to analyze the infrastructure mediating the collaboration as well as the collaboration itself. Such a theoretical framework might be technofeminism, a framework concerned with issues of equity and access, but which also accounts for the ideology of the technology (Bates, Macarthy, and Warren-Riley 2018).Some readers may balk at the notion of examining collaborative writing pedagogies through any sort of theoretical framework at all. Indeed, educators from many ideological persuasions have used collaborative writing to help students improve their writing and thinking. Rather, what Holt implies is that collaborative writing almost by definition embodies elements of Dewey's democratic goals for education and that to practice collaborative writing is to enact Deweyism. Holt makes a strong case that collaborative writing pedagogies reflect the full context of their historical moment, and that many of them reflect Dewey's ideas of social reform; however, her survey also demonstrates that in an age of technology-mediated classrooms, a framework that incorporates the perspectives of colleagues who study technology through a lens of equity may be a way to productively analyze collaborative writing pedagogies in the future.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

AbstractThis article identifies in contemporary literary theory a new optimism about the power of literary texts. The medium of this power is not language, ideology, or form but readers open to being changed. Drawing on phenomenology, the article discusses methods for making literary theory students open to and aware of such change, suggesting that hope is the grounding condition for any effective teaching act as well as an effective ground for reading in an era of globalization.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

AbstractSelf-publishing is a topic not typically discussed in the literature classroom, yet it can provide an opportunity to highlight voices and works from the margins, think critically about the publishing methods, and promote the study of the book as a cultural artifact. This article provides a case study on using special collections materials to teach undergraduates about self-published American literature. It includes suggestions about how to find and select materials, details about facilitating a discussion and a hands-on activity on the topic, and recommendations for adapting these ideas for other teaching contexts.

Abstract As online content has rapidly proliferated in recent years, college teachers may find teaching students how to navigate their way to reputable sources both more challenging and more crucial. When we integrate reading the news into our curricula, we can engage our students, cultivate their critical reading and writing skills, harness digital tools and sources, and teach students how to transfer those skills to academic writing and other endeavors. To fight fake news, students must learn to interrogate sources and writing in the news, thereby empowering them to read, discuss, and engage with contemporary and real-world problems with compassion, complexity, and nuance.

Research Article| April 01 2021 Developing Critical Readers in the Age of Literacy Acceleration Joanne Baird Giordano; Joanne Baird Giordano Joanne Baird Giordano previous collaborative work on two-year college readers and writers has been published in edited collections and in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, and College English. Their work has received the 2010 Mark Reynolds Teaching English in the Two-Year College Best Article Award and the 2017 Council of Writing Program Administrators' Outstanding Scholarship award. Giordano teaches at Salt Lake Community College; Hassel is professor of English at North Dakota State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Holly Hassel Holly Hassel Holly Hassel's previous collaborative work on two-year college readers and writers has been published in edited collections and in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, College Composition and Communication, Pedagogy, and College English. Their work has received the 2010 Mark Reynolds Teaching English in the Two-Year College Best Article Award and the 2017 Council of Writing Program Administrators' Outstanding Scholarship award. Giordano teaches at Salt Lake Community College; Hassel is professor of English at North Dakota State University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2021) 21 (2): 241–258. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8811432 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Joanne Baird Giordano, Holly Hassel; Developing Critical Readers in the Age of Literacy Acceleration. Pedagogy 1 April 2021; 21 (2): 241–258. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8811432 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 critical reading, two-year colleges, information literacy, first-year writing Copyright © 2021 by Duke University Press2021 Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

AbstractAn important step in teaching critical reading for online civic reasoning is building teachers’ own acceptance of and comfort with screen literacies, understanding them not as alternative to gold-standard book literacies but as normative. To do so, teachers must better understand how web-based texts, and the reading of them, differ from the “classical” critical reading most teachers are used to. This article examines the “quantum” nature of web-based texts—their fundamental instability, their reader constructedness, and their nature as processes rather than objects—and relates these features to hyper-reading and other reading strategies that research shows allow engaged readers to screen-read critically.

AbstractThis article examines the role of critical reading in a racial literacy-focused composition curriculum. The author draws on student-produced data to demonstrate how the racial literacy curriculum prepares students to explore the situatedness of language, how individual positionalities influence the construction and interpretation of text, and how sociocultural ideologies are represented and disseminated through seemingly innocuous or objective reporting. Broadly, this article offers strategies for teaching critical reading to help teachers of writing improve students’ rhetorical awareness and engage them more fully as participants in a textually mediated society.

Theme courses are a common practice despite their limited presence in composition scholarship, which contributes to a fractured understanding of the theme course’s purpose and place in the discipline. This article offers an aggregate picture of theme (or topic) based courses based on disparate scholarly publications and affirmed by data collected through an online survey of writing instructors and program administrators. To trace the theme course within our disciplinary tradition and as a continuing practice, this article defines the theme course, distinguishing between writing as subject matter and theme content as a form of reinforcement. It furthermore historicizes the theme course’s limited life in scholarship, synthesizing key features of theme course practice, reinforced by survey responses. Ultimately, this article offers a framework for reflective practice that all theme course practitioners can use for developing, implementing, and evaluating their teaching methods. The underlying argument is that theme courses can support learning about writing, so long as theme selection and implementation work in purposeful support of the course’s learning about writing goals.

How should we teach a class on family in the twenty-first century, when the meaning and makeup of “family” are under attack from all political angles? This article relates an attempt to rethink the family course as interdisciplinary, thematically arranged, heavily dependent on student engagement, and collaborative. From course conception to pitfalls and retrospection, this article provides an overview of a course implemented by the authors and their students as part of the honors program at the University of Portland. At the center of the course was a common curiosity for the material that emerged in hallway conversations at the intersection of different disciplines, at the intersection of ecocriticism and feminist theory, and at the intersection of popular media and personal life. The authors argue that collaborative teaching and intersectionality led to more productive classroom discussions and destabilized assumptions for all the course participants, instructors included.

This article analyzes two of the inevitable messes of translingual scholarship and teaching in composition studies: the criticism that arose from cross-disciplinary conflict with second language writing and the semantic ambiguities that result from the–ism in translingualism. The article reviews a variation in uptakes of translingualism, while arguing that specific strands—translingualism as a disposition and praxis—are the most fruitful in pushing English studies toward a more collective pursuit of language awareness and justice.

Using a classroom experience teaching Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing alongside a contemporary controversy over racial identity, this article explores the value of literary study for intervening in student attitudes toward core curriculum requirements. The author argues that literature is uniquely situated to teach the skills colleges most want students to acquire in their general education curricula, in turn providing a crucial method for responding to the “crisis” of the humanities in higher education today.

This article examines how faculty at one college respond to student writing, how students interpret that feedback, and how through collective self-evaluation and community-building workshops some faculty paved a path toward more productive response. The first part of the findings resonate with what scholars in the 1980s discovered: that teachers’ feedback strategies often operate at cross-purposes with students’ motivations and understandings. Asking why, after forty years of scholarship, such counterproductive strategies still prevail, the study suggests burdensome workloads, lack of training, rigid applications of rubrics and genres, and isolation from peers are to blame. It then profiles three teachers who, despite these obstacles, provide deep-reaching feedback. Although their pedagogies and backgrounds differ, they share common bonds, teaching authentically from who they are, an approach that is open to all teachers once they feel freed to adopt it.

This article examines Hisaye Yamamoto’s short story “Wilshire Bus” in light of its pedagogical effectiveness in the contemporary cultural moment. The author argues that “Wilshire Bus,” published in 1950, resonates with many students today by evoking issues such as bullying, racist stereotyping, bystander responsibility, and post-traumatic stress disorder.

The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

Book Review| October 01 2020 Rereading the Reading Problem in English Studies Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom. Edited by Sullivan, Patrick; Tinberg, Howard B.; Blau, Sheridan D.National Council of Teachers of English, 2017, 386 pages. Nick Sanders Nick Sanders Nick Sanders is a doctoral student in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University in Lansing. His research explores antiracist interventions in writing program administration and teacher training. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (3): 563–568. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8544671 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nick Sanders; Rereading the Reading Problem in English Studies. Pedagogy 1 October 2020; 20 (3): 563–568. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8544671 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. © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review You do not currently have access to this content.

This article uses a contemporary literature class titled Alternatives to Realism that the author taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the basis to argue for the special value of experimental, speculative, and otherwise antirealistic literature for introductory-level undergraduate literature pedagogy. The author argues that, rather than choosing realistic narratives that students are likely to understand and relate to on first pass, professors should deliberately seek out works students are likely to initially find confusing or strange and then endeavor to help them understand those texts. The article suggests that the difficulty associated with such texts, rather than intimidating students, actually invites them to engage with the reading process more actively and enthusiastically. The article discusses the premise and overall structure of the class and the rationale behind it; delves into specific examples of discussions and assignments based on such texts as Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow; and examines students’ own ultimate responses to the class as presented in their final exam reflection essays. Ultimately, the author argues that teaching (seemingly) difficult, idiosyncratic literary works helps students appreciate the unique intellectual work of reading, strengthens their self-confidence, and leads them to a keener appreciation of the humanities more broadly.

In recent years it has become almost normal for politicians to overtly and routinely lie. How should educators respond? Students should explore post-truth politics, develop research skills, and practice inquirybased factual writing, but they need more than literacy skills. Liberal education prepares them to be active, ethical participants in democracy.

Formerly, to be a radical teacher one had to be a Marxist, but in the past three years, a simple commitment to honesty, empathy, and democratic community has become an act of resistance. Examining three examples of reader-response criticism suggests how one can apply these values to deepen receptivity to literature and create a sense of agency and dialogue between students and teachers.

While the term neoliberalism is commonly used to explain libertarian and conservative economic perspectives, its rapidly expanding contexts influence every aspect of our cultural environment, even the contexts of higher education. This article explores how neoliberal ideology affects the contemporary teaching environment for women of color teaching ideological critique.

In this interview, poet and LGBTQIA activist Minnie Bruce Pratt shares the development of her pedagogy as a new teacher, the connections between her classroom practices and the women’s liberation movement, and some of the assignments she teaches to help people understand themselves. Paradoxically, Pratt offers both a reminder of the limitations of the classroom as a site for change and specific classroom practices and assignments that thoughtfully enact a pedagogy developed from her life’s work for liberation.

Research Article| January 01 2020 How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon is assistant director in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University and course codirector of the class University Writing: Readings in Gender and Sexuality. He is editor-in-chief of the Morningside Review, an online journal that publishes exemplary essays by first-year undergraduates at Columbia. He leads an end-of-semester event on writing and publishing op-ed essays that has supported more than two hundred publications by first-year undergraduates. He lectures to medical and nursing school students at Columbia University Medical Center on compassionate and efficacious communication with LGBT patients and serves as an official faculty mentor to Columbia’s Division 1 wrestling team. Formerly, he was editor-in-chief of ReadersDigest.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including New York, Self, Departures, Writer’s Digest, Teacher Magazine, and Seventeen. He wrote frequently on men’s health and sexuality topics for WebMD and CNN.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Glenn Michael Gordon; How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 115–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 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 men, masculinities, consent, gender, sexuality, composition The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Reading is a key source of anxiety in the college literature classroom. While recent debates about critical reading have reimagined the work of the literature scholar, they have not engaged the work of the literature teacher. This article explores the pedagogical limits of critique and the pedagogical potential of postcritical reading practices. Reimagining the dynamics of reading addresses, engages, and reorients students’ anxiety in the literature classroom. Diversifying the models of reading we teach allows students to more deeply engage the pleasures and anxieties of reading literature. This article concludes by offering strategies for approaching reading in the college classroom, including collaborative digital reading, creative response assignments, and publicly oriented writing.

This introductory article argues that contemporary academic teaching contexts are filled with anxiety. Students enter the classroom with a host of uncertainties, while teachers often suffer the burden of personal and professional anxieties of their own. Although many of these are historically specific, rooted in particular political, economic, and ecological circumstances, the authors argue that they may be productively approached through the strategies outlined in this introduction and the articles of this cluster of articles. They advocate tackling the question of anxiety consciously, responsibly, and tactfully, guided both by teachers’ experiences and by their knowledge of theoretical approaches to course content. Drawing principally from affect theory, but also enfolding concepts from intersectional feminism, digital humanities, reader-response theory, and other critical methodologies, the authors share tactics for working with anxiety rather than striving to eliminate it or ignore it. They argue that, once we see our pedagogy as anxious, we begin to see opportunities to broach it as a subject that can productively engage with the core tenets of academic inquiry.

This article considers the pedagogical implications of climate change and other environmental catastrophes of the Anthropocene, the new geological epoch identified by climate scientists. In the Anthropocene, the human species has become the most significant force shaping Earth’s geosphere and is responsible for a number of anxiety-producing effects beyond the rise of global temperatures. As erratic weather patterns and extreme weather events have increased, climatologists have been perfecting new methods of single-event attribution capable of linking particular adverse weather events (including droughts, heat waves, flooding tornadoes, and hurricanes) directly to climate change. To provide a concrete example of those universal trends, the author applies her experiences in teaching in Texas, which is strongly marked by long-term forces of anthropogenic environmental devastation (such as the northward migration of the oak trees and alterations in the lithosphere caused by oil extraction). It has also been impacted by hurricanes, floods, and freezes that delayed the onset of the Fall 2017 and Spring 2018 semesters and, in many cases, damaged or destroyed her students’ homes at Texas A&M. The article recounts the strategies that her learning community used to adjust to these exigencies and then offers suggestions for adapting these strategies to other locales.

This article names microaggressions as a rhetorical and pedagogical phenomenon. To make the case for rhetorical and pedagogical intervention, the authors define and trace microaggressions in literature from rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies; share cross-disciplinary understandings of microaggressions; and offer illustrations from sites of research, teaching, and service.

In recent decades, Belfast writer Ciarán Carson has emerged as one of the most inventive of contemporary literary voices, in part for his unique style of textualizing space. Driven in some ways by the very specific technological challenges of the conflict zone of Troubles-era Belfast, Carson’s poetry and prose are marked by what we might describe as tech paranoia—but, in a constructive poetic answer, his texts create new logics for using tech materials, machines, and high-tech spaces in ways that privilege creativity. It is no coincidence, notes literary and technology theorist Katherine Hayles, that “the condition of virtuality is most pervasive and advanced” where centers of power are most concentrated and conflicted intersections most frequently occur. Carson’s oeuvre illustrates the point, employing the technology of the printed page to simulate and process the zone of conflict in new, postdigital ways. This article poses Carson’s texts as ideal for exploring issues that connect regional identities, technology, and the arts—including highly topical issues around terrorism and nationhood—that are highly relevant for contemporary students of literature.

Recent interest in reflective writing in the classroom is tied to the suggested links among reflection, metacognition, and learning transfer. There is still a limited understanding, however, about the distinguishing features of reflective writing and how teachers might identify and use these features to teach effective reflective practices and to interact with student reflective writing. This study uses Gorzelsky et al.’s (2016) taxonomy of metacognitive behaviors to examine the end-of-semester reflective essays of undergraduate students enrolled in a first-year writing course at a large midwestern university. The authors identify and describe a feature of student reflective writing involving the use of emotional language and, working from their findings, suggest a teaching strategy and set of classroom activities aimed at leveraging students’ emotive expressions in ways that foster metacognitive awareness.

Review Article| April 01 2019 "Stories People Tell" Myths of American Masculinity From Boys to Men: Rhetorics of Emergent American Masculinity, by Jones, Leigh Ann. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2016. Christopher M. Parsons Christopher M. Parsons Christopher M. Parsons is assistant professor of English and the coordinator of secondary English education at Keene State College. His current research interests include the circulation of ideologies about identity and literacy in English classes and the relationship between teacher education coursework and site-based fieldwork. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2019) 19 (2): 359–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296036 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christopher M. Parsons; "Stories People Tell" Myths of American Masculinity. Pedagogy 1 April 2019; 19 (2): 359–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296036 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. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Article| April 01 2019 Historicizing Women’s Public Pedagogies: Shared Authority and Cross- Cultural Collaboration Learning Legacies: Archive to Action through Women’s Cross- Cultural Teaching, by Robbins, Sarah Ruffing. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017. Siobhan Senier Siobhan Senier Siobhan Senier is professor of English and coordinator of the Women’s Studies Program at the University of New Hampshire. She is the editor of Dawnland Voices: An Anthology of Writing from Indigenous New England (2014) and author of Voices of Assimilation and Resistance: Helen Hunt Jackson, Sarah Winnemucca, and Victoria Howard (2001). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2019) 19 (2): 353–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296019 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Siobhan Senier; Historicizing Women’s Public Pedagogies: Shared Authority and Cross- Cultural Collaboration. Pedagogy 1 April 2019; 19 (2): 353–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7296019 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. Copyright © 2019 Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Drafted in the wake of Hurricane María in Puerto Rico, this article explores the potential benefits of students writing unrevised, real-time auto/biographical narratives as an element of disaster pedagogy. The lesson of the ugly auto/biography builds on an impromptu post-9/11 assignment and allows students the space to resituate themselves in the classroom after facing natural and/or national disasters. This article argues that such narratives offer faculty means to be present and active for students in times of crisis and tragedy, teach more complex and nuanced critical reading skills, and explore the structures of contextual frameworks necessary for close readings while modeling vital research practices.