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The *Othello* staging project invites introductory literature students to imagine that they are directing a new production of *Othello*. Students create a production proposal and poster that illustrate their directorial choices, using their original interpretation of the play as a guiding philosophy. This assignment successfully addresses many of the challenges associated with teaching an introductory-level, required "core" course of non-English-majors, as well as the challenges of teaching drama in general and Shakespeare in particular. Creative response assignments like this prompt can foster student engagement, mitigate student writing anxiety, and deepen student understandings of plays as living documents open to artistic interpretation.

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

This article expands composition research on response by examining how Dweck’s theory of mindsets impacts graduate writers’ ability to process critical and praise-oriented teacher response, apply critical and praise-oriented teacher response in revision, and ultimately, develop as learners and transfer knowledge from these experiences. We conducted this examination through in-depth case studies of two writers over a six-year period that spanned undergraduate and graduate education. The case studies included interviews, teacher response, and writing to develop thick descriptions of graduate writers’ experiences. We demonstrate how students’ mindsets intersect with processing and applying both critical and praise-oriented response throughout their academic careers, which ultimately helps or hinders opportunities for learning transfer and writing development. The implications of this work apply to how teachers respond to writing and how they teach graduate students about processing and applying teacher comments.

It has been suggested that students experience more autonomy in the feedback process when they communicate feedback preferences to their teacher or peers. However, little is known about what kinds of feedback students request when given this autonomy. Furthermore, when student writers supply feedback requests, it is unknown to what extent readers act in accordance with such feedback requests while providing feedback. In this study, Japanese university students made feedback requests to teacher and peer reviewers, and I evaluated the feedback requests and the feedback subsequently received. The findings indicate that the most common feedback requests were about the content and successful communication of ideas. The next most common requests concerned grammar and vocabulary, and the least prioritized requests involved organization and academic style. When students requested feedback on content, grammar, and academic style, readers increased feedback on those areas; however, feedback on other areas correlated weakly with the requests given.

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university’s writing center (WC) director, share their different but parallel paths to “going multimodal” for the first time. They show how they joined forces to determine how best to teach and respond to students’ diverse multimodal projects. First, Christina explains how she taught herself and her students about multimodal rhetoric and genres with the help of two dedicated WC tutors. She also outlines how she created a rubric to respond to students’ projects throughout their composing processes. Then Lucie shares her initial hesitancy about going multimodal and how she ultimately prepared her tutors to respond to the projects that Christina’s students presented. The article concludes with Christina and Lucie discussing the exciting synergy they experienced while working together and with the tutors and the challenges they faced. For composition instructors, tutors, and WC directors interested in adopting multimodal assignments, this article provides ideas and suggestions for teaching, giving feedback, and mentoring.

Peer review is frequently used in both first-language (L1) and second-language (L2) writing courses to help students develop reading and writing skills and foster interaction and collaboration. To maximize these benefits in the L2 classroom, instructors should train their students to provide feedback to their peers (Lam, 2010; Rahimi, 2013; Rollinson, 2005). However, sufficient training and practice can require considerable class time. In this teaching article, we detail how we used a flipped learning approach to prepare undergraduate international students to conduct peer review in a university-level English as a Second Language reading and writing course. First, we discuss how we used flipped learning in four course sections in the Fall 2018 semester to structure peer review training both in and out of the classroom. Then, we reflect on the benefits and considerations concerning how to implement flipped learning for peer review and conclude with suggestions for future research.

In spite of a host of scholarship pertaining to response and the contexts that surround our response practices, few have studied how everyday classroom texts may inform students’ interpretations of teachers’ written feedback on their writing. This article examines the results from case studies of six students across two firstyear composition (FYC) classrooms and explores how these students drew upon three types of contextual factors—assignment descriptions/texts, student-teacher conferences, and grading materials—in order to articulate their interpretations of their teachers’ written feedback. This article investigates the roles each of these contextual factors play in students’ interpretations of their teachers’ written commentary. It also discusses how classroom texts work reciprocally with one another and in conjunction with teachers’ overall pedagogical practices. The article further argues for greater attention to these classroom texts in response scholarship and practice, along with recommending an approach to response that views these contextual factors and written feedback in a more pedagogically integrated fashion. The article concludes by advocating for the development of cohesive narratives about writing across the texts teachers create in their classrooms and the written commentary they provide to students.

As recent studies have shown (Ferris, 2014; Reid, Estrem, & Belcheir, 2012), formalized types of pedagogical instruction may be less effective for new instructors than previously thought. As new instructors form beliefs about responding to student writing through their first years of teaching and training, they may continue to rely heavily on knowledge from various communities of practice (Wenger, 2000) outside of their current programs while shaping their beliefs about feedback. This study examines these informal influences on the feedback beliefs of first-year writing instructors. Specifically, this study uses both surveys and interviews with teachers in their first 2 years of teaching at a university in the United States to uncover influences on these individuals that result from informal training. The purpose of this study is to examine how personal experiences, values, or beliefs based on their own lives might affect the beliefs with which instructors respond to their students’ writing in the classroom. Findings suggest that informal training is a valuable tool to new teachers for motivating them to respond to student writing and should be taken into account in teacher training.

Error correction for English language learners’ (ELL) writing has long been debated in the field of teaching English to speakers of other languages (TESOL). Some researchers say that marking all errors in students’ papers with written corrective feedback (WCF) is not manageable, while others think it is manageable. This study examines the manageability of the innovative dynamic written corrective feedback (DWCF) strategy, which has a more comprehensive approach to error feedback, and asks what factors influence the manageability of the strategy (including how long marking sessions take on average) and what suggestions experienced teachers who use DWCF have. The strategy has shown to be highly effective in previous studies, but its manageability has been questionable. A qualitative analysis of the manageability of DWCF was conducted via interviews of experienced teachers that have used DWCF and the authors’ experiences and reflections using the strategy. The results indicate that this strategy can be manageable with some possible adaptions while avoiding common pitfalls.

This article explores the problems associated with a pedagogy of severity, which influences how teachers read and respond to student papers, and suggests that reflection, especially reflection-in-action, can be useful to writing instructors as they respond to their students’ texts. Reflection-in-action, or the reflection that occurs while one is still in the process of completing a task, offers teachers and students the opportunity to reflect on the value of written comments while still possessing the chance to create effective and informative student texts and teacher comments. After exploring how reflection can benefit response, experiences with two reflective activities are given as examples of how reflection-in-action can be introduced into a teacher’s response practices.

Horace’s Art of Poetry supplied the medieval schools with the only available classical doctrines on fiction and poetry before Aristotle’s Poetics became widely studied in the fifteenth century. Horace exercized both practical and theoretical influence on literary exegesis, and shaped medieval and early Renaissance doctrines of composition by discussing the very nature of fiction, narrative techniques, authorial roles, description of character and tone, including performance and reading of a text. The anonymous commentators as well as the Dante commentator Francesco da Buti (1395) were deeply influenced by the twelfth-century “Materia” Commentary, but also by the Arabic notion of an independent art of poetics, and remained in lively dialogue with the teaching of Ciceronian rhetoric of invention, disposition, elocution, and delivery.

Christoph Georg Leidl In memoriam January 10, 1960 - August 17, 2019. t came as a terrible shock for all of us when just a few weeks after the Biennial Con­ ference in New Orleans this past July, where we had been together with him and shared hilarious chats, drinks, and music, the news spread that our friend, colleague and fellow ISEiR member Christoph Leidl had passed away from this world at the age of only 59 years. Born in Burghausen, Upper Bavaria in 1960, from 1979 to 1986 Christoph studied Greek, Latin, and History at the Uni­ versity of Munich, Germany, and (during the academic year 1982-1983) at St. John's College, Oxford, UK. It was from the University of Munich that he earned his M.A. in 1987 and his PhD in Ancient History, Greek and Latin in 1991, with an edition and commentary on Appian's history of the Second Punic War in Spain, printed 1996. During the years 1987 to 1999 he was Assistant Professor at the Department of Classics in Munich, again interrupted by a stay in Oxford from 1995 to 1997 on a research grant from the German Research Fund (DFG). From 1999 to 2001 he was Assistant Professor in Classics at the University of Mannheim, until he received a tenured post as Akademischer Rat Rhetorica, Vol. XXXVIII, Issue 1, pp. 1-13. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 15338541 . © 2020 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http:/ /www. nrnress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2020.38.1.1 2 RHETORICA at the University of Heidelberg in 2002 (promoted to Akademischer Oberrat in 2006), where he has been working and teaching ever since. Besides a steadily growing emphasis on the theory and history of rhetoric, in which he particularly focused on the theory of metaphor and tropes, the orator's ethos, rhetorical pedagogy, and humour in oratory, Christoph also did research and published on poetics and literary criticism, on ancient historiography and on the reception of ancient drama in music. Christoph had been an ISHR member since 1995, and missed almost none of our conferences, with the sad exception precisely of the one in Tubingen in 2015, when he fell ill. He also held various offi­ ces in ISHR. He was a Council member from 2011 to 2015, and in 2013 also took on the chair of the membership committee, a duty he fulfilled with enormous dedication and accuracy until his last days. Everyone will remember his meticulous membership reports delivered at each Council or General Business meeting. Christoph was perfectly versed not only in ancient literature, but also in modern and contemporary literatures. He knew his Shakespeare, Moliere and Goethe just as well as his Homer, Virgil, or Horace, and he was acquainted with contemporary approaches to rhetoric just as much as with Aristotle, Cicero or Quintilian. His private library filled an entire house and might have been the envy of many a department library. One wondered when, alongside his exorbitant duties in teaching and administration, he ever found the time for reading all those books. In addition, he was also a great lover of music. He had stupendous knowledge in all things music and was able to talk in minute details about concert pianists, conduc­ tors or particular recordings, and he was himself an excellent piano player. He was also a passionate mountain hiker. Besides all this, he had a wonderful and subtle sense of humour, and an extremely amiable character; his big inviting smile remains unforgettable. On the other hand, Christoph was an indefatigable worker with an outstanding sense of duty. Not only was he more than thorough in his research, but he was also always available for his students whenever they needed help. He seemed to be permanently active; it appeared as if he never rested, and indeed he may well too often have burnt the candle at both ends. Only lately he talked about a change in his way of life. But it...

Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

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.

In this interview, poet and LGBTQIA activist Minnie Bruce Pratt shares the development of her pedagogy as a new teacher, the connections between her classroom practices and the women’s liberation movement, and some of the assignments she teaches to help people understand themselves. Paradoxically, Pratt offers both a reminder of the limitations of the classroom as a site for change and specific classroom practices and assignments that thoughtfully enact a pedagogy developed from her life’s work for liberation.

Research Article| January 01 2020 How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon is assistant director in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University and course codirector of the class University Writing: Readings in Gender and Sexuality. He is editor-in-chief of the Morningside Review, an online journal that publishes exemplary essays by first-year undergraduates at Columbia. He leads an end-of-semester event on writing and publishing op-ed essays that has supported more than two hundred publications by first-year undergraduates. He lectures to medical and nursing school students at Columbia University Medical Center on compassionate and efficacious communication with LGBT patients and serves as an official faculty mentor to Columbia’s Division 1 wrestling team. Formerly, he was editor-in-chief of ReadersDigest.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including New York, Self, Departures, Writer’s Digest, Teacher Magazine, and Seventeen. He wrote frequently on men’s health and sexuality topics for WebMD and CNN.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Glenn Michael Gordon; How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 115–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search men, masculinities, consent, gender, sexuality, composition The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

A synthesis of converging and contrasting perspectives on ways of knowing and doing in digital rhetoric pedagogy among 25 teacher-scholars that provides a rough sketch of the state of digital rhetoric pedagogy as it is understood and practiced in the second decade of the 21st century and as it is told by a range of voices, including leading voices, in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and identifies and highlights areas of productive tension among interviewees’ responses.

As more writing centers move to include synchronous chat as a writing center consultation option, writing center researchers and practitioners must continue examining the affordances and constraints of the medium. In this article, we analyze four synchronous online consultation transcripts from one writing center’s pilot program to evaluate consultation patterns and arcs, approaches to teaching and tutoring, and the role of digital language, or netspeak (Crystal 19), in tutors’ feedback. We use this preliminary analysis to argue that writing center tutors can effectively use synchronous tutoring to meet the needs of diverse student populations, but these consultations might be more effective if tutors thoughtfully utilize some of the best practices of face-to-face tutoring. One finding suggests that tutors might engage student writers in online consultations more effectively by employing soliciting and reacting techniques more often than unintentionally using directive structuring practices, which can serve to limit dialogue with student writers (Fanselow 21; Davis et al. 29). Additionally, although netspeak can potentially establish common linguistic ground with writers, tutors should be aware of the disadvantages of using an informal tone and non-academic language in chat consultations; in fact, student writers might benefit from reading tutors’ chat feedback in Edited Academic Discourse. By employing the positive elements of face-to-face consultations in chat sessions, this medium has the potential for effective tutoring in a space where many students feel most comfortable. Our analysis may serve as a heuristic for others to use in assessing chat consultations, developing tutor training, and initiating future research on this consultation option.

This essay contributes to the emerging conversation about two-year college teacher-scholar-activism by revisiting the work of Elisabeth McPherson, the first community college faculty member to chair CCCC. Arguing that McPherson's fade from disciplinary memory reflects the marginalization of two-year college faculty that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, Christie Toth traces three key themes in McPherson's published work: advocating for two-year colleges and the professionalization of their faculty; subverting institutional labeling of two-year college students; and challenging racism, classism, and sexism through pedagogy and policy. While her published work is not beyond critique, McPherson's career offers historical precedent for a two-year college English professional identity that integrates critical teaching, scholarly and organizational engagement, and activism for social justice at multiple scales.

This essay examines the complexities involved in taking up and sustaining one’s work as a teacher-scholar-activist working within literacy education today.  Spiegel argues that the guerrilla moniker may be a productive metaphor through which faculty can see and resee their positioning and approach to their work.  Focusing upon guerrilla cause, band, and tactics, she provides guided heuristics to help faculty shape their response to local context as exigencies compete, resources drain, and terrain shifts.

Not only is the current scholarship on technology professional development (TPD) of writing faculty at the periphery of Writing Studies, there doesn’t seem to be a clear conceptualization of the scope of knowledge and skills needed to teach writing with technology critically and productively. In this study, I address these issues using two research questions: a) What are the teaching with technology-related expectations for college writing faculty as stipulated in 11 CWPA, CCCC, and NCTE position statements? b) What are the characteristics of technology professional development programs, as identified in these statements, that train teachers to meet these expectations? The deductive analysis of these statements reveals that the three organizations have collectively stipulated three levels of technology-related expectations for writing faculty as well as the fundamental characteristics of an effective TPD program that would train in-service faculty to meet these expectations. Based on findings of this study, I argue that the institutional responsibility to provide writing faculty with robust TPD opportunities is not only professional but ethical as well.

For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current ; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice ). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

In this interview, on the eve of his retirement in spring 2020, I speak with Dr. Lad Tobin about his career and work in composition and rhetoric, his commitment to the teaching of writing, including and especially personal or expressive writing, and his arguments about the continued relevance of creative-nonfiction to composition.

Although writing scholars have increasingly emphasized the need for more equitable approaches to language (difference) in the composition classroom, specific examples of teaching praxis remain sorely needed. In this article, we offer three sets of activities that we have used in our own classes designed for multilingual students. In formulating these activities, we adopt a critical-pragmatic approach to linguistic social justice, inviting students to grapple with standard language ideology and its consequences while questioning the idea that students can or should be liberated by us. Focusing on notions of “standard” and “correct” English, our proposal is grounded in relevant debates, connecting insights from sociolinguistics and World Englishes/Global English Language Teaching with Jerry Won Lee’s theory of “translanguaging pedagogy.” We hope that these examples will inspire more concrete initiatives aimed at promoting linguistic social justice and student agency.

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power relations between languages, texts, writers, and readers. Critical translations by an international student and a resident multilingual student receive particular attention in this article in that they strategically utilize paratexts as discursive spaces for interrogating, resisting, and reconstituting academic English writing standards and conventions. Foregrounding such paratextual interventions in critical translations as forms of translingual and anti-racist practice can bring about social justice and change in multilingual writing and its teaching.

This article reports survey and interview research on how graduate student instructors (GSIs) across the United States navigate the boundaries of disciplinary expertise that define their work as students and teachers. The disciplinary backgrounds of GSIs in this study influenced their experiences with formal writing pedagogy education and their teaching practices. GSIs imported content, mindsets, pedagogies, and skills and expertise from their home disciplines into the FYW classroom and exported practices and dispositions from FYW into their own work as graduate students. I suggest how writing pedagogy educators might reframe preparation experiences to recognize the disciplinary boundaries GSIs work across and to repurpose these boundaries as sites for richer professional development and writing instruction.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

Teachers’ identities as writers and language users can have an important impact on their pedagogical practices. As the population of writing teachers becomes increasingly diverse, the development of teachers’ identities is an important but under-researched topic. This study examines how three prospective teachers from varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds constructed new identities through a multi-draft literacy autobiography project. We trace how these teachers’ identities changed and developed across the drafts of their literacy autobiographies, how their identity construction was mediated by the feedback they received, and how their language and literacy identities related to their emerging professional identities as prospective writing teachers.

Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this variation. From our reading of over 40 published accounts of WAW courses, curricula, or programs, we articulate a WAW typology using an axiological heuristic that non-reductively but clearly identifies variations of WAW as well as the values that underlie the differences among them. We then explore the implications of these theoretical and axiological differences for the probable results of different WAW approaches, particularly related to claims that WAW effectively facilitates transfer of learning. We conclude with an exploration of questions regarding WAW and transfer that our typology and analysis raise that might be the focus of future research.

Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriate transfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Writing about environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity, especially in lower-division writing courses. Yet, for teachers and writing program administrators, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in first-year composition affect students’ writing outcomes? This article discusses a two-year, case study at a comprehensive research university of an experimental course-design model involving 1,421 students and 63 teachers. Students engaged with the university’s sustainability theme in Composition I, as well as other courses. This article includes a description of Composition I’s framework and its assessment practices, and raters measure the writing outcomes for the class’s major essay, a literature review. Overall, teachers utilizing ecocomposition practices presented students with a cohesive, relevant curriculum and assisted them in developing and organizing the literature review; writing and thinking about diverse spaces related to their experiences, majors, and futures; and forging and documenting campus and local ties, including through community-based learning. The study’s results have implications for teaching ecocomposition and sustainability themes in first-year composition.

This article identifies how a cohort of preservice teachers educated during the No Child Left Behind Era thought about the teaching of writing when they entered a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher preparation program. Most participants shared the beliefs that: (1) writing was primarily the demonstration of specific skills, often on a standardized test; (2) alternatives to the five-paragraph essay would be extra, with formulaic writing central to instruction; (3) teachers had little role in student writing development beyond assigning writing; (4) feedback on writing should be ‘objective’ and tied to a grade; and (5) the purpose of ELA is primarily to teach literature. Authors believe identifying preservice teachers’ beliefs about writing and the role of the writing teacher at the beginning of a program can help teacher educators design experiences to expand students’ notions of literacy and of writing instruction.

The socially tumultuous Chicago of the 1890s—epicenter of the Pullman Strike of 1894, home to immigrants, site of a new kind of urban poverty—also saw the birth of two monumental projects in American pragmatism: John Dewey's pioneering work in education at the University of Chicago in 1896 and Jane Addams's founding of Hull House in 1889. Dewey and Addams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and the poor, were close collaborators as they developed the theory and practice of pragmatism. Addams is not the overt focus of Robert Danisch's book Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism, but Hull House, its founder, and that social project are recurring touchstones throughout, serving as exemplars of the themes his title suggests. Danisch asserts that American pragmatism's key commitment is to social democracy, arguing as Dewey and other pragmatists have that democracy is “not just a system of government” but “a way of life.” Civic-oriented projects such as Dewey's experimental school in Chicago and Addams's settlement house “made that argument real.” Indeed, one might say that making the American pragmatist philosophy “real”—to concretize it in our communities and daily lives, in our social interactions, speeches, and deliberations—is Danisch's purpose here. To not do so is to leave idle and unused “America's greatest intellectual contribution to the world.”To renew democracy and fulfill its greater promise—as Danisch claims in this book and Dewey in The Public and Its Problems—we must revitalize how we communicate. Because both the nature of existence and the social fabric of America are marked by contingency, uncertainty, and pluralism, it is through rhetorical communication that we find the “principal means of coping.” While Dewey valorizes communication explicitly throughout his work, he does not specifically discuss “rhetoric.” However, Danisch is right to say that often when Dewey is writing about communication, he actually means rhetoric. For Danisch, communication is a “broad, constitutive process of making meaning” whereas rhetoric is a “narrower, more focused kind of ‘communication’ practice related to the long civic tradition of rhetorical studies.” In the Greek tradition, rhetoric was “the artful use of language … capable of generating some degree of order out of uncertainty and ambiguity,” a practice and purpose Dewey certainly embraced, if not the word itself. Thus, in his project to recover and make use of rhetorical resources from the American pragmatist tradition, Danisch makes a distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. His core argument is that pragmatists such as Dewey developed the philosophical strand of pragmatism, which formed strong underpinnings for a rhetorical strand of pragmatism, but that the neopragmatists failed to complete the rhetorical turn, leaving it to others to realize the socially constructive potential of rhetorical pragmatism.The book's argument is organized in three parts. In the first part, Danisch follows his account of traditional pragmatism's implicit valuing of social democracy and rhetoric with a sustained criticism of mainstream neopragmatism's alleged neglect of both. In the second part, he explores the origins of a rhetorical turn in pragmatism within the works of relatively unknown figures outside of mainstream philosophy—“the lost voices of pragmatism”—during the mid-twentieth century. In the third part, he proposes to demonstrate how rhetorical pragmatism can be put into practice.Although traditional American pragmatism clearly valued communication as the fundamental process of democracy and community life, Dewey and others neglected to give clear guidance on how to enact a pragmatist rhetoric. In the work of neopragmatists Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West, the author sees a missed opportunity to make a much-needed turn toward rhetoric as the practical means to renew American social democracy. In Danisch's analysis, we see that Rorty, while full of praise for pragmatism, fails to fully move from philosophical issues to practical, rhetorical solutions. Rorty's linguistic turn makes for an “inconsequential” kind of pragmatism, one ironically still mired in traditional philosophical problems, which have no real impact on social democracy. One might object, thinking of Rorty's commitment to “edifying conversation” for instance, but as Danisch attempts to show, Rorty's offering is “thin” at best compared to Dewey's. Turning to Fish's contribution to neopragmatism, Danisch cites the eminent literary analyst's commitment to anti-foundationalism, which traditional pragmatists share. But his brand of anti-foundationalism makes Fish wary of social projects, which, as Danisch contends, shows Fish's “flawed” understanding of both pragmatism and its rhetorical resources. In the cases of Rorty and Fish, both approach rhetoric in unhelpful ways, but as problematic for Danisch is their disregard for, practically speaking, the search for ways to build social democracy. West, on the other hand, is more clearly committed to social democracy. And yet, according to Danisch, “West reads communication … out of the pragmatist tradition.” Danisch also sees West's focus on Socrates as the “model and hero” of philosophy as emblematic of the problem. Socrates's penchant for speculative philosophy, his misgivings toward democracy, and his hostility toward rhetoric work against the social democratic project. The neopragmatists are caught in the postmodern turn, deconstruction, and the “university's abstract pursuit of knowledge,” such that they fail to “answer the how question.” And much like the other neopragmatists, West is caught within traditional philosophical problems, blind to the need for real, practical, rhetorical solutions to actual, current social problems—emphasis on rhetorical. Readers' reception of Danisch's argument will rest much on how well they take to heart his critique of academic philosophy as well as his valuation of rhetoric and its fundamental necessity to meliorating social problems.At this point, Danisch turns to what he calls “outliers” in the history of pragmatism to find a deliberate, effective turn from merely philosophical pragmatism to the “promises” of rhetorical pragmatism. Readers already familiar with the intellectual history of American pragmatism might find Danisch's recovery of these “lost voices” of pragmatism enlightening, and perhaps of most interest. The first figure, Richard McKeon, was a student of Dewey and a teacher of Rorty. McKeon's focus on rhetoric and practical solutions to problems—he was instrumental in the development of UNESCO as well as being an academic—caused him to fall outside the mainstream of philosophy. Yet his development of a new rhetoric as “a universal and architectonic art”—uniting philosophers and rhetoricians in one enterprise, promoting interdisciplinary communication and “the art of doing”—makes a key, if underappreciated, contribution to the “pivot” from philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragmatism Danisch wants to make. Another academic to make this pivot was Hugh Dalziel Duncan, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Duncan was a close associate of Kenneth Burke, whom Danisch also treats as a pivotal figure—though his contribution is sketched lightly here. “Both are a useful resource for the development of contemporary pragmatism,” Danisch argues, “because they provide the means by which we can explain how communication works within democratic societies, what effect communicative practices produce, and why communication is necessary in the maintenance of social order.” Again, communication here in the pragmatist sense means rhetoric—communicative practices that work toward changing society and constructing social democracy.The resources for rhetorical pragmatism, dormant in the tradition, unrealized in neopragmatism, elaborated by little-known pragmatist thinkers during the middle of the twentieth century, come to fruition in the final section of the book, “The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism.” Here, Danisch touches on Hull House once again, because for him it constitutes what he calls a “rhetorical structure.” It is actual concrete institutions like Hull House—a place where people commune, deliberate, and commit to action—that provide the structure necessary for rhetoric to fulfill its purpose. They enable what Danisch calls “deliberative ecologies,” a concept that honors how communication is not mere transmission but a complex web of interconnected persons, environments, social structures, and symbols. Danisch goes on to analyze the Occupy Wall Street movement to examine what he calls “rhetorical citizenship.” By this he means “a citizen is not just someone in possession of legal status within a state. A citizen is also a person engaged in rhetorical practices that help shape the process of decision-making.” Drawing on C. S. Peirce, he uses the OWS movement to show how a Peircean commitment to inquiry is fundamental to a rhetorical kind of citizenship. Another fundamental is artistry, which is a key aspect of Dewey's work. To illustrate artistry, Danisch draws on another relatively unknown figure, Donald Schön, a philosopher, sometime academic, and student of Dewey. Speaking of the art of conversation and improvisation, Schön wrote that a rhetorically minded citizen ought to be comfortable with uncertainty and be willing to experiment in the face of the unknown. Finally, Danisch ties the foregoing together with a final concept necessary for the fulfillment of a rhetorical pragmatism: “rhetorical leadership.” Such a leader demonstrates, supports, and teaches “an array of communication practices able to aid in the coordination, collaboration and cooperation of plural, diverse groups of citizens.” As examples of rhetorical leadership aside from Addams, Danisch offers William James as a circuit lecturer, Saul Alinsky's community organizing, and Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.In addition to foregrounding these rhetorical leaders and recovering the “lost voices” of pragmatism, the main value of Building a Social Democracy is its exhortation for scholars of communication, rhetoric, and democracy to study and fulfill American pragmatism's rich offering for renewing our democratic way of life. In response to questions raised by pragmatic rhetorical leaders such as Addams, it will not suffice to “spin out analytical explanations.” We must, as Dewey put it, commit to developing and enacting “the art of full and moving communication.”