A review of general education at the author’s university led to an effort to include project- and theme-based interdisciplinary courses that addressed the “public good,” but many faculty resisted what they perceived as threats to purely disciplinary knowledge. When knowledge is under attack, professors in all disciplines should help prepare students to address problems in US democracy.

This article describes a collaborative effort by faculty at two very different institutions to integrate the study of language change into surveys of early British literature. Using a series of structured assignments, the Word Project engages students directly in linguistic research, literary analysis, and the making of literary history.

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.

This article explores the pedagogical efficacy and learning outcomes of an archive-based undergraduate research project in which students digitally transcribed a nineteenth-century woman’s diary and then reflected on their transcription work.

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.

This article considers the role of real-world writing pedagogy in the persistence of the real world/academy binary that fuels contemporary trigger warning debates, arguing instead for attention to the actual rhetorical constraints of the classrooms we all work in regularly.

Other| April 01 2020 Contributors Pedagogy (2020) 20 (2): 397–400. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8091989 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 April 2020; 20 (2): 397–400. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8091989 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. © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The authors argue that violence is the most important issue facing the profession of English now. Tracing their experiences with violence and trauma in and near their classrooms, they suggest that, while this problem seems intractable, practicing the arts of empathy and writing offers some hope for a different future.

Research Article| April 01 2020 A Note from the Founding Coeditors Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (2): 201–202. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8093527 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; A Note from the Founding Coeditors. Pedagogy 1 April 2020; 20 (2): 201–202. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8093527 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. © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Other| January 01 2020 Contributors Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 193–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8145945 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 193–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-8145945 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 © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In many ways, the transformative character of developing critical consciousness reflects the dynamics of acquiring threshold concepts. Drawing from research into threshold concept acquisition, the author argues that critical first-year composition instruction can more effectively scaffold students into critical perspectives by linking critical pedagogy more closely with efforts to develop students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing.

Ideological transparency is an issue in core literature classes, particularly where teachers understand literature as social critique. This article argues that the critical and prosocial growth we hope students will achieve in a semester with us requires a longer and more incremental process, one in which literature courses have a limited but potentially meaningful role.

This introduction frames this special issue on ideological transparency by contextualizing the original call for papers within our sociopolitical moment and outlining how various themes emerged — or did not — from the articles included. The editors posit that more nuance is needed in the justifications for how, why, and whether or not teachers of writing and literature inflect their own politics in class.

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.

This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.

This article analyzes ideologies underpinning argument-based writing assignments and considers how they may contribute to a current climate of polarization. The authors suggest that the argument-based essay may be what Kenneth Burke called an unquestioned and habituated “cow path” and conclude by considering how students may benefit from a deeper engagement with explanatory ways of knowing, writing, and relating to each other.

Review Article| January 01 2020 Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum Crafting Presence: The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies. By Wallack, Nicole B.Utah State University Press, 2017. 230 pages. Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner Jenny Spinner is associate professor of English at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia, where she teaches creative nonfiction and journalism and serves as director of the writing center. Her essays and essay criticism have appeared in Fourth Genre, Brevity, Writing on the Edge, Pedagogy, and Assay, and on NPR’s All Things Considered, among others. She is the author of Of Women and the Essay: An Anthology from 1655 to 2000 (2018) and coauthor, along with her twin sister Jackie Spinner, of Tell Them I Didn’t Cry (2006). Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 185–191. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jenny Spinner; Why Johnny Can (and Should) Write Essays: A Case for an Essay-centric Writing Curriculum. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 185–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879206 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 © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Review You do not currently have access to this content.

The two primary US political parties are increasingly polarizing along affective dimensions. To increase students’ engagement with controversial texts and conversations, the author theorizes a novel method of critical pedagogy: performed contradictoriness. By emphasizing seemingly contradictory identity markers, the instructor attempts to become opaque, thereby frustrating students’ attempts at interpretation.

This article examines the pedagogical response of English and writing faculty to a controversy that took place at their liberal arts college. Findings from faculty interviews highlight a number of ways that instructors might engage local controversies, in keeping with their curricular goals and commitments to pedagogical transparency.

Neutrality is often impossible when disabled teachers are at the front of the classroom. This article unpacks three domains in which neutrality needs to be cripped: in response to students’ resistance to disability content, when considering the audiences for our pedagogy, and when teachers need accommodations.

This article describes the rationale, development, and implementation of a digital archival curriculum within the first-year composition program at Oklahoma State University. Such a curriculum helps students engage genuine inquiry to discover arguments rather than defend their existing beliefs. Analytic complexity and hidden information are offered as potential sources of uncertainty.

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.

Using a case study of a Christian college student, this article develops a framework for understanding when and why students may choose to perform neutrality. The author argues that students may choose this form of “invisible” resistance in an effort to mitigate perceived power imbalances within an educational ecology.

The author reconsiders and revises her advocacy of the pedagogical performance of neutrality and argues that performing or otherwise rehabilitating notions of “objectivity” as we teach argument may be particularly useful and urgent in the Trump era.

Resistance narratives in composition studies often focus on how students resist pedagogies that challenge their received values and identities. These narratives ignore the complex developmental trajectory that students face in the writing classroom. The authors apply a developmental framework to this resistance and argue that helping students work through these challenges is essential to developing complex ways of seeing themselves as writers and citizens.

Classroom writing assessment practices can interrogate white supremacy through the way readers judge student writing. Furthermore, writing assessments designed and engaged in as ecologies offer social justice projects that can explore judgment as a racialized discourse. The author demonstrates one application of an antiracist writing assessment ecology through a practice called “problem posing the nature of judgment and language” and discusses the problem posing of two ecological places in the class.

This article considers the all too common experience of precarious employment in higher education, but under a unique set of circumstances: a three-year postdoctoral fellowship and residency in a stately home in the English countryside. The author explains how she harnesses the pedagogical possibilities of her precarity by operating a policy of radical honesty with her students, both inside and outside of the classroom. As a Victorianist, she petitioned to teach texts, including Jane Eyre, that allowed her to explore contingent academic labor with her students and compare the plight of the nineteenth-century governess—poorly paid, forced to lead an itinerant existence, and subject to dismissal when she outlived her utility—to the conditions that many academics currently face. She invites her students to share their struggles, and for her part, she frankly shares the difficulties of being a precarious academic, in the hopes of creating a place of mutual understanding, support, and solidarity.

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 article examines the use of comic adaptations of Shakespeare in the college classroom. After theorizing the class offering based upon performance pedagogy and inclusive learning practices, the author describes her experience coteaching a Shakespeare class that used three Shakespeare plays in both their traditional and graphic format. The success of the course revealed that comic adaptations of Shakespeare plays offer an accessible, rewarding means of understanding Shakespeare’s plays as both texts to be read and works to be performed.

This article explores how to use science fiction, particularly texts centered on android protagonists, to open up discussions of marginalization, race, and oppression in the introductory literature classroom. In response to the hateful rhetoric directed toward asylum seekers, this author developed an entire course around personhood and rights. She first examines how, in particular sci-fi works, paranoia and prejudice compel citizens to delineate between kinds of personhood. She then illuminates how students were invited to make parallels between the othering that the androids endure and historical and present-day examples of human rights abuses. After a semester of examining and debating these issues, students selected an android or robot in a television show, film, or video game of their choice and first assessed how the android’s personhood was delimited by human and then articulated why humans placed these boundaries on the android. Throughout the article, the author explains the kinds of texts she used for the course, the assignment students were tasked with, and how the course broached other issues of power dynamics, such as consent and disability rights.

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 traces the history of the word anxiety and explores its use as a way to describe the act of literary interpretation. Returning to Stanley Fish’s idea of the interpretive community, the article argues that pedagogy often reinforces anxiety as an individual, isolating experience. This bespeaks a larger concern about the role of pedagogy in student and faculty life. The article concludes by encouraging faculty to consider anxiety as an energy that can be productively harnessed through the construction of a more emotionally aware interpretive community.

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.

Review Article| October 01 2019 Composition’s Linguistic Diversity: Challenging the Emphasis on Standard American English Cosmopolitan English and Transliteracy. By You, Xiaoye. Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. 300 pages. Allison Giannotti Allison Giannotti Allison Giannotti is a third-year PhD student in composition studies at the University of New Hampshire. She specializes in writing in the sciences and narrative medicine. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2019) 19 (3): 579–584. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7615621 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Allison Giannotti; Composition’s Linguistic Diversity: Challenging the Emphasis on Standard American English. Pedagogy 1 October 2019; 19 (3): 579–584. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7615621 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 by Duke University Press2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article argues that the primary role of the instructor is to help students understand and work with the difficult emotional states that arise from struggling to learn. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and using his own experience with digital humanities instruction as a case study, the author offers ways to center emotional work, especially work involving frustration and anxiety, in the classroom. Asking students to develop failed prototypes and reflect on the process, for example, can provide them with a better sense of what it might mean to succeed. Giving the same exercise twice, with artificially imposed difficulties the second time, might help them learn concrete steps for working through mounting irritation. In short, frustration and anxiety are not things that emerge from time to time—they are ever-present. The author argues that it is the job of instructors to develop ways to prepare students not for the unexpected failure but for the inevitable frustration that comes even with success.

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.

This article examines the intersection between the feelings of anxiety and love. The author looks at how the affective labor she performs professionally has shifted as she has moved from a contingent faculty role to a faculty development role. This shift, while necessary, highlights the power imbalance within academia, as well as the devaluation of affective labor. She examines how her anxieties as a faculty developer differ from the anxieties that faculty are bringing with them in their interactions with her.

Review of The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature. By Gary Weissman. The Ohio State University Press, 2016. 219 pages.

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.

Using methods from corpus linguistics, the author argues that the practice of making knowledge in composition studies is bound with the discursive act of representing students. Students are represented both in ways that align with disciplinary knowledge about writing and in ways that align with major intellectual shifts in composition studies.

Research Article| April 01 2019 Contributors Pedagogy (2019) 19 (2): 369–371. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7522157 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Contributors. Pedagogy 1 April 2019; 19 (2): 369–371. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7522157 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.

This article examines the development of advanced writing curricula at a historically black public university during postrecession austerity measures. Analysis of institutional documents suggests that advocates enacted self-determined curricular changes by using strategies of subversive resilience to neoliberalism. Simultaneously accommodating and resistant, this form of resilience has roots in anticolonial, African American, and feminist responses to oppressive conditions.

While resilience often defines writing center survival strategies, resistance offers a familiar stance in relation to dominant classroom and institutional practices. However, both resilience and resistance are indexed to a perceived “normal,” and violations of normativity have consequences not always imagined in individual tutoring sessions or theoretical discussions.

This article presents a new examination of the history of the first-year composition requirement using the “adaptive cycle” idea about the resilience of systems. The author argues that we may be experiencing the collapse of required FYC and should look to other possible futures of college writing.

This article examines the development of advanced writing curricula at a historically black public university during postrecession austerity measures. Analysis of institutional documents suggests that advocates enacted selfdetermined curricular changes by using strategies of subversive resilience to neoliberalism. Simultaneously accommodating and resistant, this form of resilience has roots in anticolonial, African American, and feminist responses to oppressive conditions.