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

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

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

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

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

This article argues that teaching Asian American literature should include immeasurable and nontangible factors that accompany racial grief, such as cultural betrayal, the trauma of belonging interstitially, and the sensation of displacement. I propose that these be introduced via a gothic motif, such as the double, haunting, and possession by ghosts. Such motifs have the advantage of familiarity (or, if not, are quite easy to explain) and being psychoanalytically informed.

Ruminating on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick around failed pedagogy and a confused cat, I consider ways to provoke new streams of critical thought in my composition students around issues of gender and sexuality without “pointing.” Thinking about Jean Genet's novel Querelle and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name, I delineate the specifics of how I teach these two difficult, often incomprehensible texts in an introductory class. In reviewing the confusion these works can provoke in student discourse upon reading and viewing the texts, I emphasize the role of disorientation and dislocation in the mapping of student thinking and writing, ultimately reemphasizing the importance of nondemagogic, malleable pedagogy in the teaching of sexuality and gender, particularly with composition students who are exploring and amplifying their voices. Teaching Querelle is like unleashing a virus of confusion and intrigue on student writers, but the incoherence it creates also creates opportunities to explore new ideas and horizons in these developing thinkers/writers.

This article describes my experiment with surveillance technology as a composition teaching tool in a computer classroom. The technology, a software program called Remote Desktop, displayed live on my lectern screen all of my students' activities on their computers. While I first intended mainly to use Remote Desktop to monitor students' focus on assigned tasks, I quickly became interested in the pedagogical possibilities it presented. Because I could read students' work as they were composing it, I could intervene quickly when they were struggling and offer near-instant feedback; I could also guide class discussions by identifying patterns of weakness to address, strong examples to share, or the single answer a given student had gotten right to praise. I could anticipate how debates might unfold among students with differing opinions, or how similarly minded students might offer support to one another. While these strategies might have been possible without the technology, they were significantly facilitated by it — especially because this group of students was particularly underprepared and found discussion difficult. Class time became more productive and built their confidence in their own abilities as readers, writers, and editors.

This article examines some of the central paradoxes of vernacular language use in the classroom and suggests methods for converting those paradoxes into productive teaching opportunities. Beginning from a linguistic point of view, the authors discuss the devaluing and marginalization of the vernacular in educational settings and then move on to literary examples, demonstrating how vernacular literature generates its own transnational conversation. The authors propose concrete strategies for incorporating vernacular language and literature in language arts, composition, and literature classrooms at secondary and university levels.

Review Article| January 01 2012 If I Don't Know What I'm Teaching, How Can I Make the Best of It? Teaching What You Don't Know. By Huston, Therese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Adam Pacton Adam Pacton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (1): 187–191. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416576 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Adam Pacton; If I Don't Know What I'm Teaching, How Can I Make the Best of It?. Pedagogy 1 January 2012; 12 (1): 187–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416576 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article explores how composition courses might address contemporary capitalism's strain on students' time resources through a classroom practice of temporal awareness. The piece discusses two related dimensions of this approach. The first involves incorporating students' considerations of time into course content; the second, rooted in teacher inquiry, asks writing instructors to examine how time mediates the pedagogical relationships developed within their courses.

Of the many fields affected by current economic conditions, the humanities are often hit especially hard because the very category “humanities” is inchoate. Mangum joins scholars who seek ways to bring the values of fields such as literature and history into focus for various public audiences. Engaging nonspecialists in practices of the humanities offers one way of “going public.” The forms of publicly engaged teaching, learning, scholarship, and collaboration can stretch as far as teachers' and scholars' imaginations and are applicable to social sciences and other disciplines as well.

College students often use the campus as a venue for their course-based research activities. More often than not, however, the university is simply a locus of research, not a subject of student inquiry. In this article, I consider what can be gained when students “study up” the university as an institution. I draw on data from my undergraduate students' research process in an ethnographic methods course at Illinois State University. I argue that an institutional focus provides an especially effective approach for teaching ethnographic methods — one that differs from standard introductory textbook instruction in ethnography and that helps students avoid routine pitfalls of beginning ethnographic research. In particular, I argue that the university focus enables novice students to analyze fine-grained ethnographic data within a middle-range institutional context without macrosocial theories and frameworks that are likely beyond the scope of their semester-long projects. I also argue that an institutional focus can help students become more engaged, critical stakeholders in the university community.

Review Article| January 01 2012 The Canon and the Cutting Edge: On Teaching the Graphic Novel Teaching the Graphic Novel. Edited by Tabachnick, Stephen E.. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Jennifer H. Williams Jennifer H. Williams Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (1): 193–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416585 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer H. Williams; The Canon and the Cutting Edge: On Teaching the Graphic Novel. Pedagogy 1 January 2012; 12 (1): 193–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416585 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

At the suggestion of a colleague, the narrator — a professor of oceanography — agrees to have dinner with Calais Steever, a professor of history from a nearby university, to talk about teaching. The conversation takes place in an informal but elegantly appointed bistro in a small city. Ever the skeptic, the oceanographer isn’t convinced at first that Steever’s passion for assigning students to write dialogues in courses across the curriculum would help his thoroughly fact-based, biologically oriented instruction. As the dinner proceeds, Steever shares examples of students’ dialogic writing from courses in such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology, biology, architecture, literature, chemistry, history, and political science. Slowly — but cautiously — the narrator begins to see possibilities for dialogic writing.

Review Article| October 01 2011 Countering the Pedagogy of Regression Poets on Teaching: A SourcebookWilkinson, Joshua Marie, ed. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010 Kevin Craft Kevin Craft Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (3): 609–614. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1302899 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Kevin Craft; Countering the Pedagogy of Regression. Pedagogy 1 October 2011; 11 (3): 609–614. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1302899 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

This essay addresses the question of how to best teach interdisciplinarity through a detailed discussion of a common upper-division gateway course for multiple majors housed in an interdisciplinary studies unit. It argues for a shift in the problematic within which discussions of interdisciplinary pedagogy generally take place by emphasizing the practice of interdisciplinarity itself.

Based on Walter Eggers's article “Teaching Drama: a Manifesto,” this article discusses practical ways to emphasize the persistence and popularity of the dramatic tradition in an introduction to drama course. I argue that drama's popularity is an essential tool for teaching the genre to undergraduates in all disciplines, and to demonstrate this tenet in my own experience, I give examples of how I taught formal and thematic elements through their use in contemporary media as well as several assignments that demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between staged theatre and its multimedia counterparts.

This article argues for a pedagogy that attends to emotion as a crucial, epistemological component of rhetorical education. After exploring dominant cultural tropes for understanding emotion, I examine examples of how these discourses materialize in popular culture. I then draw from classroom moments to analyze the possibilities for and complexities of studying emotion in the classroom.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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