Abstract This article argues that care — especially care grounded in Black feminist traditions — is not an affective supplement to teaching but rather the radical foundation of liberatory pedagogy. Amid rising attacks on critical education and the austerity logics of the neoliberal university, the authors theorize care as infrastructure, method, and resistance. Drawing from the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they offer a framework for care-centered teaching that foregrounds mutuality, trust, and collective accountability. Through vignettes, student reflections, and practices such as trauma-informed design, mutual aid, and collaborative assessment, the article demonstrates how care fosters relational transformation and deep intellectual engagement. It also interrogates the structural devaluation of care labor, particularly for women and faculty of color, and challenges dominant educational paradigms that equate rigor with detachment. As one student reflected, “You believed me when I said I needed more time, without asking for proof. That made me want to do the work even more.” Drawing from their institutional experiences, the authors position teaching as a form of organizing — an insurgent, relational practice that refuses extractive academic norms while building collective conditions for educational and institutional transformation.

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Abstract This article considers how Jacques Derrida's theory of hospitality, applied within university literature classrooms, can help instructors meaningfully respond to competing student desires for flexibility and belonging. Derrida contends that ideals of “absolute” hospitality must be embodied in concrete and inevitably “conditional” ways. Arguing that the tension between absolute and conditional is one to embrace, the article considers how story-centered classrooms (specifically, general-education literature classes) allow teachers and students alike to move in and out of the roles of welcoming host and gracious guest. The article breaks down this pedagogical process into three overlapping stages, where class participants move from a traditional relationship where a teacher-host welcomes the student-guest, to experiences of readerly co-dwelling in which they collectively allow a story to host its disparate readers. The article argues that this pedagogical rethinking of traditional hospitality hierarchies gives students empowering strategies for welcoming diverse perspectives and inhabiting varied roles with confidence. These hospitality skills, in turn, allow them to practice and experience belonging.

Abstract This article discusses and situates various grading practices — such as labor-based grading and specification grading — and their applications within a community college setting. Through two community college instructor voices with two disparate and continuing grading journeys, this article reflects on how these grading practices affect community college students in unforeseen and unjust ways, and ultimately argues that instructors should offer grading choices in order to serve the complex lives and needs of community college students.

Abstract This article focuses on student perceptions of their experiences in an ungraded classroom that uses engagement-based grading contracts (EBGCs). The assessment ecology is described in detail, and then the author shares student reflections on their experiences with EBGCs, which were collected in the form of an end-of-semester memo assignment. Comprehensively, students find EBGC use to be a positive and worthwhile assessment experience. While there is a learning curve involved, students appreciate the real-life approach to both labor and engagement on writing tasks, the amount of agency and choice built into the contract, and the ecology's incorporation of extensive written feedback in lieu of scores or points. Another key takeaway is its positive impact on student affect — especially in instances of students self-disclosing diagnoses of anxiety. Student-reported challenges to EBGC use are also discussed, including their own wrestling with ideas about past experiences with traditional grading, personal levels of motivation, and accountability. Overall, an engagement-based grading contract approach appears to be a pleasurable and accessible assessment option for teachers looking to pursue an ungraded approach in their writing classrooms.

Abstract Much of the conversation about ungrading has thus far focused on its impacts in the classroom, improving student learning and addressing ongoing inequities. Yet addressing the administrative structures necessary to sustain ungrading is equally important, especially considering the labor conditions of contingent, minoritized, or otherwise vulnerable faculty. This article proposes hostile/hospitable programmatic architectures as a framework for understanding how institutional ecologies may be configured in ways that undermine or support the use of equitable assessment practices. Where hostile programmatic architecture neglects the risk vulnerable faculty take on in using a new assessment practice, a hospitable programmatic architecture, deliberately attentive to faculty labor conditions and institutional locatedness, relies on supportive, cross-hierarchical relationships and ample material and affective resources to open institutional spaces for the effective use of ungrading. The article closes with a brief heuristic for writing program administrators and other departmental/university leaders interested in assessing the hospitality of their own program.

Abstract In this article, the author presents a theoretically oriented framework for teaching poetry that accounts for the role of affect. The author calls this framework reading for affective uncertainty, meaning an approach to affect and meaning that recognizes affects associated with the reading event as integral parts of the reading without expecting meaning to be inherent to texts and simply in need of interpretation, which is often a focus in teaching. Central to this framework are the notion of a poem as an object and Sara Ahmed's argument in The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2004), that objects do not cause emotions, but emotions are produced in circulation with objects. As concrete examples, the author discusses Evelyn Reilly's Echolocation (2018) and Wendy Trevino's Cruel Fiction (2018), two recent poetry books that consider relations between the human and the nonhuman and the notions of race and borders, respectively. These works generate uncertainty as to how to relate to others and thus serve as examples of the way in which reading for affective uncertainty works in acknowledging that poems can be viewed as ordinary objects that participate in generating emotion.

AbstractWriting is both affective and ecological. Consequently, effective writing instructors need a deep understanding of writing's affective and ecological aspects, making composition one of the most complex and challenging areas of pedagogical endeavor. This claim is especially true in institutions whose product-oriented epistemologies make writing potentially traumatizing for many student writers. To assist writing teachers in meeting student writers’ needs, this article draws on a diverse body of research to explain writing affect, its role in ecological processes of composition within early collegiate humanities curricula, the relation of writing affect to writers’ identities, and the impact collegiate corporatization may have on composition instruction. Subsequently, this article describes approaches for making writing pedagogy more process oriented, trauma informed, and equity centered.

Abstract Must we avoid the subjective and the personal when we stick to the text as close readers? By examining a moment of affective disruption in an advanced seminar, this autoethnographic account suggests that students should engage with their feelings as they develop meaningful readings of cultural texts.

Abstract The appearance of a spider in the classroom can disrupt the flow of teaching, often prompting strong reactions that unsettle classroom norms. Minor classroom disruptions like this might not seem worth theorizing, but this essay reframes such disruptions as rich sites for understanding the role of affect in humanities pedagogy. Ultimately arguing against killing a spider in the classroom, this essay theorizes the moment of disruption as an opportunity to model humanistic attention to both human and nonhuman actors in the classroom space.

Abstract This article introduces a grounded theory of assessment in literary studies. Analysis of instructor interviews elucidates the cultural and dispositional influences that shape some instructors’ conscious decision not to teach or assess affective learning outcomes like empathy. The author urges literature instructors to engage critical inquiry of disciplinary assessment practices.

Abstract Higher education faces dramatic transformations in demographics, politics, culture, labor, and technology—all of which are compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic. Chaos theory offers perspectives for weathering these changes, though ultimately, as the future remains unpredictable, the best instructors can offer is doing their best in their jobs.

Abstract Any attempt to control the content and conversations of first-year composition classrooms has become increasingly complicated by social media and technology. Building on the types of textual difficulty explored by scholars like Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue, Jeffrey Berman, and Alan Purves, this article considers the challenges presented to contemporary college-level readers by affectively difficult texts such as David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet. The article also explores the potential responses students express to difficult texts and encourages flexibility in the assumptions made about these reactions. By working through the importance of these questions, the author ultimately examines the potential benefits and best strategies of using difficult fictional texts in the writing classroom to help students investigate the nuances of verbal and written conversations such as those created by the #MeToo movement.

AbstractThis article examines how instructors may engage students in literature courses by leveraging students’ affective responses through a digital commonplace book. Corresponding to representations of identity in Shakespeare's 1603 play Othello, the commonplace book allows students to curate texts and consider how such arrangements reflect and construct their self-narratives.

AbstractThis article addresses the challenges of fake news and echo chambers in the digital age by exploring the possibility that susceptibility to misinformation derives not from an inevitable fault in the medium of digital publishing but, rather, from the slower development and adoption of pedagogies that leverage digital tools for reading. The authors examined student annotations and argue that focusing on reading using collaborative digital annotation can stimulate knowledge acquisition and personal belief formation and, further, can assist educators to evaluate the effectiveness of instruction and intervene where needed. Digital annotation tools promote affective and cognitive engagement with texts and enable both instructor-to-peer and peer-to-peer modeling of reading strategies.

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

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.

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 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 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.

This essay discusses the affordances of using an affect-based approach to 9/11 discourses that facilitates teaching civic engagement. Representations and rhetoric about 9/11 are found in a range of modes—film, documentary, literature, news coverage, and official government documents. Asking students to analyze these representations using a variety of rhetorical strategies highlights the way that various sources of (competing) knowledge about the national tragedy disrupt the notion that there is an accepted, uniform way of understanding this event. Furthermore, this approach demonstrates how varied sources of meaning making construct our public sphere.

This article explores the benefits of bringing museum education into the composition classroom to help students develop confidence and skill in oral presentation. Drawing on current scholarship in object-based learning and engaging museum audiences, it outlines a project in which students closely observed objects at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and critiqued a museum tour before presenting on their objects on-site at the museum. As well as teaching students new skills, the project also encouraged them to use their own experiences as audience members in the classroom and the museum to create more engaging and coherent presentations for their peers. The article explains the logistics of the project and students' reactions, concluding with students' own reflections on the benefits of presenting in a museum setting.

Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

The norms of professionalization, viewed through a queer lens, are seen as a means to regulate affect and to banish queer forms of pleasure—much to the detriment of the academic profession. A queer, medievalist approach may help us with the project of building happier doctoral student selves. By looking at the indeterminancies and contradictions within medieval theories about “professions,” and by examining the queer valences of the first recorded use of the word professionalism (1856), we might open up spaces within our doctoral programs for productively “unprofessional” behavior.

This article argues for the use of experiential learning to teach eighteenth-century travel literature to undergraduates. Exploring the three-dimensional virtual world of Second Life, students wrote their own travelogues and reflected on the ways in which the experience affected how they analyzed travelogues for the rest of the semester.

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.

Upon entering college composition courses, students often report a dislike for writing. Because researchers report that writing anxiety may be linked to high-stakes writing exams, a study of graduates of New York high schools was conducted to investigate whether the state's Regents Comprehensive Examination in English shapes attitudes or assumptions about writing. For this study, first-year writing students responded to a prompt that asked them to reconstruct an essay they wrote for the exam, as well as their feelings before, during, and after writing the essay. Evidence suggests that most students strongly dislike taking the exam. Preparing for and responding to it may impart lessons contradictory to objectives of many first-year writing programs. Most students report critical engagement with the test question but suppress critical commentary in their official responses so as to please the imagined graders, whom most students conflate with the specific audience posited by the question. The study indicates that open-form, experimental writing about standardized writing exams at the outset of the semester may help students transform resistance to writing from a general feeling to an attitude associated with a particular memory and, thus, may help clear the air for the work of college-level writing.

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.

This article analyzes classroom discussions of Boaz Yakin's 1994 film Fresh—an unsettling urban drama about a young boy (Fresh) who devises a creative escape from the drug dealers in his environment: he buys a large amount of cocaine that he uses to trick those dealers into thinking that they're all trying to break into each others' markets. In the end, he turns these negative and violent forces against each other and then enters the Witness Protection Program. The social commentary in the film is paramount since it highlights the disturbing cultural reasons why a twelve–year-old African American boy has to devise his own escape from the inner city. Most important, class discussions of (as well as the writing assignments focused on) Yakin's film necessarily confront the role that class hierarchies play in America as well as the cultural myths—like the unconditional individual—that affect many of our expectations and assumptions. Herein resides the film's pedagogical importance: it offers an intensely emotional and intellectual challenge to many of our foundational understandings of American values and cultural narratives. That is, it critiques the problematic rationalizations (like “the just-world phenomenon”) that seek to not only dis-empower but also neglect whole segments of American society.

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.

This essay explores how the “heat of composition” is inexorably linked to ethos and also how writers, student or otherwise, might seek to create and intensify pleasure through a sustained textual becoming. I consider how this ethics of affect is an unfolding, an exteriorization of the intensities and forces of becoming writers, student or otherwise, who engage with the movements of desire.

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.

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.

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.