Abstract Exhibition research, design, and creation offer students significant experience in a wide range of intellectual and practical pursuits. This essay presents these components as they are found in the Emory University joint undergraduate/graduate course Digging into the Archives and Creating an Exhibition. The students learn how to navigate archives; ways to collaborate successfully with library and museum exhibition teams (and each other); skills in design and presentation; public programming; and strategies for identifying and reaching broad and diverse audiences. This discussion of the course goals, structure, and outcomes details how such undertakings can enhance student learning in both undergraduate and graduate contexts, while building a range of transferrable skills.

Abstract Where do our most cherished teaching principles derive? How do we deploy them in ways that motivate students and nurture their critical engagement with the wider world? Drawing on insights gleaned from the film Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, this reflection explores how the development of two key strategies—engaging students through blended academic and pop-culture approaches and guiding their recognition and critical response to discursive power structures—transformed the author's pedagogical approach into one that is more student-centric and practically focused. Developed in the context of political science courses, but applicable especially to English and its instruction, these strategies decenter the instructor to promote more authentic engagement between students and the content they encounter, as well as with each other and the instructor. The strategies themselves, however, derive from a recognition that even the most light-hearted fare (such as Bill and Ted) may offer thoughtful insight into the craft of teaching: first, by recognizing that joy, passion, and creativity matter when structuring engaging learning experiences; and second, by clarifying how our attunement and response to subtle exercises of power—in the case of the film, pedagogical norms around acceptable academic projects—are instrumental in navigating a complex world.

AbstractThis article proposes that the methods and philosophies informing corequisite teaching could be generalized throughout English studies to support students at all levels who are undergoing and recovering from pandemic-related traumas. Corequisite courses, which promote equity among first-year students, are designed with attention to trauma-informed approaches and a focus on process-driven writing. Instructors address noncognitive skills with students, such as time management and note-taking, and consider the cultural relevance of their reading and writing assignments. By describing specific activities and methods used at Hostos Community College, the article considers how strategies that are central to corequisite pedagogy might be widely adopted or adapted in this moment of reorientation for English studies. Additionally, the article suggests that mission-driven practices of community colleges serve as a model for higher education more broadly.

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

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

Abstract This article discusses how we have used undergraduate research (UR) to foster habits of mind associated with information literacy (IL). Our strategy is course based and involves students as potential contributors to the Graphic Narrative Database (GND), a digital work in progress. Presenting students with focused parameters for their research and with the prospect of an authentic audience for their writing, the assignment provides students with many opportunities to explore our complex information landscape as practitioners. Students deploy a wide array of strategies to gather and share information about a body of texts that are themselves richly multimodal.

During the past decade, much reform has taken place within reading and writing developmental education at community colleges. One area of reform has focused on reducing the number of developmental education credits taken while accelerating the students’ literacy growth. This article describes a pilot project where, instead of taking a developmental education reading and writing course, the students co-enrolled in a zero-credit social sciences skills lab and at least one college-level gateway course. The lab focuses on reading and writing in the disciplines. Using classroom examples, the article also outlines the pedagogical approaches used in the lab. This 2018–19 pilot was characterized as promising, using prescribed institutional success metrics; as a result, version 2.0 will be implemented for 2021–22.

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

This essay considers the importance of nonstandard English to fostering a more inclusive and incisive Shakespeare classroom. Grady focuses on his experience as the instructor of a Shakespeare course that occasionally employed African American Vernacular English in its analysis of texts. His reflection considers how taking such language seriously encourages more genuine participation from a wide range of students. While this pedagogical approach offers one manner in which the field of early modern studies might expand points of access and foster cross-cultural dialogue, it also stands to deepen the analytic possibilities of the Shakespeare classroom. Grady uses the example of African American Vernacular English to demonstrate that nonstandard English can offer particularly nuanced means through which to investigate and discuss Shakespeare's works.

The military historian Yuval Noah Harari accounts for the enduring allure of war by calling attention to a change in soldiers' memoirs that occurred in the mid-eighteenth century. Soldiers began to describe how they felt rather than what they did. Harari introduces the term flesh-witnessing to distinguish inner experience from eyewitness testimony. Flesh-witnesses speak of combat as a transformative and indescribable experience comparable to the sublime. This view is often attributed to militarists, but Harari shows that it also motivates pacifists. Even antiwar arguments like those of Erich Maria Remarque are based on the authority of the flesh-witness. To test Harari's claims, I invited ROTC officers to speak to students enrolled in a course titled British Literature: The Twentieth Century about their military experience. The juxtaposition of Harari's research and the officers' comments provided a framework for teaching All Quiet on the Western Front and other texts about war. Whether war is portrayed as painful or exhilarating, degrading or ennobling, it is widely idealized as a crucible for the development of the self. This view makes war stories irresistible, whatever political views writers and readers may hold.

This essay describes a graduate course, The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context, that I developed and taught in fall 2011 at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. The essay was developed from an oral presentation that was part of a teaching panel at the Northeast Victorian Studies Association annual conference in the spring of 2013. The course was my final effort to “go wide” in teaching Victorian literature in its larger context, a desire that grew increasingly difficult to satisfy as the canon of Victorian literature became enlarged and thus somewhat unstable. I also wanted to organize the readings so that my students might get a sense of the literary context in which Victorian readers might have experienced the individual texts when they read them in the nineteenth century. In an effort to describe how I got to the syllabus for The Nineteenth-Century Novel in Context (included as an appendix), I give a personal sense of the history of the field of Victorian literature over the last fifty years, tracing the development of the field of English literature in general and Victorian literature in particular. I end with my evaluation of the course I developed, its strengths and its weaknesses, and what I learned from it.

Those of us who teach English literature are familiar with the wide range of skills and capacities of our students. It remains a challenge, though, for English students to demonstrate the applicability of those skills beyond the academy, for instance, to prospective employers. This essay argues that creative education through experiential learning provides important opportunities for students and enhances their development as independent individuals who make their own decisions. To examine the pedagogical benefits that such learning can have in the humanities, this article draws on two extracurricular projects that we coordinate, NuSense, an undergraduate online journal, and Shakespeare after School, a community drama program for children. The skills the student volunteers draw upon to complete these projects include research, editing, writing, analysis, dramaturgy, and time management. In other words, NuSense and Shakespeare after School utilize the core skills of English studies and help students both hone and demonstrate those skills in a practical and public setting.

Corley argues that college faculty can more effectively instruct student veterans by renewing their commitment to widely acknowledged hallmarks of excellent instruction: welcoming all students; giving clear and direct feedback; approaching self, subjects, and students with moral seriousness; teaching with integrity; relating the subject matter to everyday concerns; and holding all students to high standards. Through classroom anecdotes and descriptions of military life, Corley demonstrates numerous points of connection between military culture and the best instructional practices described.

Caroline Bowles's long narrative poem Ellen Fitzarthur (1820) offers a seduction tale reminiscent of Amelia Opie's The Father and Daughter (1801), tracing the seduction of a cloistered young woman by an unscrupulous military sailor taken in by Ellen's widower father after a shipwreck. Deceived by the sailor, Ellen follows him but is abandoned, pregnant, and subsequently travels home with her infant daughter, arriving repentant and exhausted at her ancestral home after a long and difficult journey. There she discovers her recently deceased father's grave, upon which she dies in shock, leaving her daughter to be taken in by the family of a villager who turns out to be Ellen's foster brother. Pairing Bowles's poem with Opie's novel allows students to explore the roles of genre (and generic conventions) in the presentation of similar tales and to examine both the technical and the aesthetic effects and consequences of authorial choices grounded in these different literary genres.

The authors call for more flexible dissertation projects but also argue that problems with graduate education range far wider than the doctoral dissertation. Many faculty resist the idea that the humanities can train students in skills that are useful, even marketable, outside of higher education. Graduate programs must find ways to stress these transferable skills and do better at preparing students for nonprofessorial jobs within and outside academia—including taking new approaches to the dissertation requirement. Humanists who take refuge in the seemingly high-minded idea that the humanities are only valuable for their own sake, or because they lack utility, make it harder to address these issues.

In this article R. F. Yeager offers a history of the development of the John Gower Society, by way of encouraging others who seek a process model by which wider audiences, and classroom recognition, for currently little-read texts and authors can be obtained.

The Prik of Conscience is a lengthy and widely distributed medieval poem (more than 9,600 lines, more than 115 surviving manuscripts). But should we call it literature? Spurring vigorous discussions of aesthetic value and providing a vivid introduction to spoken Middle English, the Prik of Conscience functions as a usefully disruptive classroom “voice.”

This project employs a student-generated geographic database that links the Commedia to relevant passages from Dino Compagni’s Cronica and visual records at appropriate locations in Florence. The database records evidence for social structure, physical infrastructure, and historic events, as well as the civic/religious ritual of the city, in order to consider the broader meanings of the built environment. This database is displayed on satellite images of the city using the open-source SIMILE widget Exhibit. The student can then analyze this evidence and consider how Dante constructed his allegorical societies, infernal, purgative, and paradisiacal, from the life of his contemporary Florence. It is suggested that this permits more rapid immersion into the dynamic of the poem and enables more effectively focused student research.

Much of Renaissance art reflects a Dantesque worldview. Addressed here is Dante’s link to early trecento art; to burgeoning pious art patronage resulting from Purgatorio’s salvific promise; to rising individualism resulting in growing civic identity, the cult of artistic fame, the art of portraiture, and biography as an early art historical methodology; and to an enduring fascination with antiquity, all made palatable and patriotic for later generations by glosses widely known in Commedia incunabula.

These papers were given at the 2011 MLA panel on faculty governance. They present the topic's importance in the face of budget crises and institutional pressure.

Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Critical thinking skills are valued across the university. Derek Bok writes that 90 percent of faculty identify critical thinking as the most important goal of a university education. In English and foreign language departments, critical thinking has often served as a default goal when faculty cannot agree on which texts or approaches to teach. Without disputing the importance of these skills, I argue that an exclusive focus on critical thinking compromises more modest but also very worthy aims, including appreciation. This article makes the case for renewed attention to appreciation as a goal of literary study. I argue that teaching appreciation helps to cultivate virtues of open-mindedness, responsiveness, and attunement, and that such teaching may be useful in addressing widespread declines in reading and reading skills. At the end of the essay I describe changes I have made in my own teaching practices to emphasize literary appreciation.

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.

Based on the experiences of three graduate assistant directors working in the Howe Writing Initiative, a joint WAC effort between Miami University's business school and English department, this essay introduces entrepreneurial consulting as a model for implementing WAC initiatives in different disciplines. The entrepreneurial consulting model emphasizes the need to establish an ongoing presence within a discourse community, to continually “sell” writing and rhetoric to both faculty and students, and to strategically use rhetoric to promote rhetoric.

An ecocompositional turn to suburban studies can help unlock the wider promise of environmentally oriented composition curricula by encouraging student writers to reevaluate the language in which they describe their world. As the embodiment of modern domesticity, suburban life dramatizes the fundamental role of place in the construction of writers' subjectivity.

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 article explores, through the lens of a WAC faculty developer, how it is difficult to maintain disciplinary neutrality when developing any program; both teaching and learning can easily become codified through the lens of one person, field, or group. By using the work of, among others, Krista Ratcliffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Bartholomae, I make a case for working differently with stakeholders: collaborating within a discipline and including students in faculty development plansas both learners and mentors. If we mutually examine our definitions (“teaching,” “learning,” “writing,” “students”) and engage in rhetorical and reflective listening, we can move away from a model of teaching as rules, templates, and regulations; we can begin to engage our own assumptions along with those of our students, changing together the very definitions that constrain the evolution of our own mutual development.

Research Article| April 01 2001 Comments on and Addenda to Holdstein's WAC Paradoxes Melinda L. Kreth Melinda L. Kreth Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (2): 287–296. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-287 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Melinda L. Kreth; Comments on and Addenda to Holdstein's WAC Paradoxes. Pedagogy 1 April 2001; 1 (2): 287–296. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-2-287 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. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2001 “Writing Across the Curriculum” and the Paradoxes of Institutional Initiatives Deborah H. Holdstein Deborah H. Holdstein Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2001) 1 (1): 37–52. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-37 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Deborah H. Holdstein; “Writing Across the Curriculum” and the Paradoxes of Institutional Initiatives. Pedagogy 1 January 2001; 1 (1): 37–52. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1-1-37 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. © 2001 Duke University Press2001 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.