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

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

Review Article| January 01 2011 Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations Paula Comeau Paula Comeau Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2011) 11 (1): 233–240. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-028 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paula Comeau; Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations. Pedagogy 1 January 2011; 11 (1): 233–240. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-028 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

Research Article| October 01 2010 Editors' Introduction Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (3): 455–456. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-001 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Editors' Introduction. Pedagogy 1 October 2010; 10 (3): 455–456. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2010-001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

This article 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.

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

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

Research Article| April 01 2010 Note from the Editors Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (2): 269–270. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-037 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Note from the Editors. Pedagogy 1 April 2010; 10 (2): 269–270. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-037 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2010 by Duke University Press2010 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

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.

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

Research Article| January 01 2010 Paradigms, Conversation, Prayer: Liberal Arts in Christian Colleges Donald G. Marshall Donald G. Marshall Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (1): 183–200. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Donald G. Marshall; Paradigms, Conversation, Prayer: Liberal Arts in Christian Colleges. Pedagogy 1 January 2010; 10 (1): 183–200. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-031 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2010 Who We Are, Why We Care Mark C. Long Mark C. Long Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2010) 10 (1): 257–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Mark C. Long; Who We Are, Why We Care. Pedagogy 1 January 2010; 10 (1): 257–262. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-036 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

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

Research Article| October 01 2009 Editors' Introduction Jennifer L. Holberg; Jennifer L. Holberg Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Marcy Taylor Marcy Taylor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (3): 385–387. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-001 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Jennifer L. Holberg, Marcy Taylor; Editors' Introduction. Pedagogy 1 October 2009; 9 (3): 385–387. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2009-001 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

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.

Review Article| April 01 2009 Motivating Students to Write: Some Empirical Answers (and Questions) Danielle A. Cordaro Danielle A. Cordaro Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (2): 361–367. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-038 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Danielle A. Cordaro; Motivating Students to Write: Some Empirical Answers (and Questions). Pedagogy 1 April 2009; 9 (2): 361–367. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-038 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Review Article| April 01 2009 Practical Answers, Four Perspectives: “What Is College-Level Writing?” Kathleen M. Hunzer Kathleen M. Hunzer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (2): 375–379. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-040 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen M. Hunzer; Practical Answers, Four Perspectives: “What Is College-Level Writing?”. Pedagogy 1 April 2009; 9 (2): 375–379. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-040 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

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

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

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

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

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

Fueled by disciplinary disagreements and resource fights, comp/lit conflicts continue. However, productive collaboration is possible and an opportunity remains in developing general education writing courses. A general education course in teaching writing through literature is argued for on the grounds that English studies has been positively transformed by the mainstreaming of composition, pedagogy, and cultural studies.

While disciplines such as law, journalism and medicine have ethics classes embedded into their degree structures, fiction writing has escaped this administrative scrutiny. This paper argues that an `ethics of representation' should be raised within the prose fiction classroom if creative writing teachers are serious about training future writers. Drawing on work by Michael Riffaterre and Seymour Chatman, this paper argues that due to the historic privileging of realism and ensuing reader assumptions, writing students need to understand the importance of research and representation. After a brief discussion of how creative writing is situated within the tertiary administrative context, this paper then cites a critical teaching pedagogy (as articulated by Rochelle Harris) and practical strategies that teachers can use to bring discussions of representation into the prose fiction classroom. Inspired by the work of creative writing academics such as George Kalamaras and Sandra Young, these strategies include using the workshop session, classroom readings and formal assignments to foreground matters of representation.

Review Article| January 01 2009 Recognizing Identity David A. Brenner David A. Brenner Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (1): 177–183. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation David A. Brenner; Recognizing Identity. Pedagogy 1 January 2009; 9 (1): 177–183. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-026 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article makes a case for using MySpace as a pedagogical tool in the survey course. MySpace can draw attention to the kinds of restrictions the collaboration between “literary” and “history” places on how the survey course interprets the past. The article gives detailed accounts of how students uploaded MySpace sites for a cross section of literary figures on the Brit Lit II survey syllabus in Spring 2007. Placing figures from the syllabus on MySpace got students to rethink the past as a series of interconnected networks of complicated and evolving conversations throughout the century. Students used the kinds of communication that MySpace makes possible for their personal lives and used it as a way to manage speculative and informed conversations between literary figures on the course syllabus. Excerpts from student essays suggest that transplanting figures like William Blake, Robert Burns, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Matthew Arnold, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf onto MySpace impacts how we understand the kinds of conversations the nineteenth century has with itself, and what this tells us about their literary and historical legacy.

Review Article| January 01 2009 Learning from Giants: Using the Inklings as Writing Mentors Sheryl O'Sullivan Sheryl O'Sullivan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2009) 9 (1): 159–165. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-024 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Sheryl O'Sullivan; Learning from Giants: Using the Inklings as Writing Mentors. Pedagogy 1 January 2009; 9 (1): 159–165. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2008-024 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. © 2009 by Duke University Press2009 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

With the importance of online research, writing, and communication, computers are increasingly vital to instruction within the humanities. To help prepare teachers and administrators who engage with computerized instruction, this article examines faculty development through the lens of technology training by reporting on issues and concerns expressed by twelve technology trainers in a series of interviews. The interviewees provided their experiences and advice, including ways to approach institutional challenges, faculty participation, and pedagogical integrity. Most importantly, the author argues that technology training is a complex rhetorical activity involving a strong sense of kairos, context, and audience.

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

This essay describes and critiques the creation and evolution of Teaching Circles, small groups of teachers meeting regularly to discuss curriculum and pedagogy, as a vehicle for teacher development in the composition program at the University of Miami. Included in the essay are comments from several of the full-time lecturers who participated in these discussion groups as both members and leaders. The essay makes visible the competing tensions inherent in fostering professional development through such a structure, especially the complications involved in turning lecturers into teacher educators as they take on responsibility for mentoring beginning teachers. The essay and the comments from the lecturers note the challenges inherent in making such an institutional structure productive over time and suggest that sustained critical reflection, willingness to revise, and attention to the scholarship of teaching teachers are important components of keeping any structure of professional development relevant.

It has become increasingly clear that U.S. faculty cannot afford to remain insular about global issues in teaching and the forces that are shaping them. At the same time, our desire to address or resist those issues, to join in or to find alternatives, needs to be contextualized. The three edited collections reviewed here address globalization of higher education in Australia, writing instruction in higher education in the United Kingdom, and interdisciplinary collaboration in U.S. higher education. The three bring different perspectives to current U.S. discussions of internationalization and interdisciplinary work in higher education and allow us to better understand issues in other cultures and disciplines while critically examining our own through new lenses.

Troilus and Criseyde is a work of magnificent scope and intimidating breadth. A strategy that I have found effective for addressing the potentially overwhelming pedagogical task of teaching this masterpiece is to ask students to analyze the relationships between genre and character. Through this process, I encourage students to engage in vectored analysis, which I describe as the examination of a text from at least two converging yet separate perspectives. Encouraging students to examine literature from complementary and vectoring perspectives enables them to make the cognitive leap from a static analysis of one issue to a more vibrant exploration of textual interplay. Vectored analysis provides a pedagogical foundation for students of all abilities to approach multigeneric texts and to reach deeper insights about them. In this essay, I demonstrate this approach with Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, but it could be readily reformulated for a range of multigeneric texts.

Review Article| April 01 2008 The Lesson of the Line: A Parable for Travelers of the Tenure Track William H. Wandless William H. Wandless Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2008) 8 (2): 391–397. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-018 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation William H. Wandless; The Lesson of the Line: A Parable for Travelers of the Tenure Track. Pedagogy 1 April 2008; 8 (2): 391–397. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-018 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. © 2008 by Duke University Press2008 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

After creating a taxonomy of classroom approaches to the teaching of creative writing, the authors discuss a current practice they have employed, the writing community. The authors detail its success, place it within current pedagogical research into small-group and team-based learning, and suggest possible applications to allied fields.

The question guiding “What Should We Do with Postprocess Theory?” is one of praxis: postprocess theory has articulated an advanced and promising theory of rhetoric in action, but few attempts have been made to develop a postprocess pedagogy. This article suggests several ways that postprocess ideals can be adapted to existing teaching strategies.