This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

A number of studies have used interviews to find out L2 learners’ perceptions of different feedback practices. Usually, learners who have been interviewed have experienced a number of different feedback practices. The purpose of the present study is to investigate learner revision practices and perceptions of peer and teacher feedback after having received feedback from only one source. In this study, learners received either teacher feedback alone or only peer feedback for one year. Twelve students were then interviewed to investigate their revision practices and perceptions of both peer and teacher feedback. The narrative analysis of the interview data showed that participants were very concerned about ‘correcting’ their drafts. Students in both groups had similar levels of comprehension of feedback; however, those in the peer feedback group were more forthcoming about asking their peers when they did not understand. Students in the teacher feedback group felt that they did not have enough time between drafts for the revisions they wanted to make. It was also found that students in the peer feedback group seemed to benefit more from reading their peers’ writing than from receiving peer feedback.

Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.

This study examined the effects of an innovative comprehensive writing program in upper primary education on students’ writing performance and on teachers´ classroom practices, beliefs and skills. The program focused on the communicative nature of writing, on writing as a process, and on explicit teaching of five genre-specific writing strategies. It was implemented by 43 teachers in their regular classrooms (Grades 4 to 6, N = 1052), with three conditions: (1) a writing program condition, (2) the same program complemented by professional development sessions and coaching, and (3) a control condition in which teachers taught their usual writing lessons. Students’ writing performance was measured three times with multiple writing tasks. Data on teachers’ practices, beliefs and skills were collected through lesson observations, interviews, questionnaires, teacher logs, and a text assessment task. The comprehensive writing program had a beneficial effect on students’ writing performance and the extent to which teachers taught writing strategies. The complementary professional development and coaching had a direct effect on the number of lessons implemented, and an indirect effect on students' performance. Overall, the innovation proved to be effective for improving students’ writing performance in the upper grades of primary schools.

It is well established that students’ beliefs in skill malleability influence their academic performance. Specifically, thinking of ability as an incremental (vs. fixed) trait is associated with better outcomes. Though this was shown across many domains, little research exists into these beliefs in the writing domain and into the mechanisms underlying their effects on writing performance. The aim of this study was twofold: to gather evidence on the validity and reliability of instruments to measure beliefs in skill malleability, achievement goals, and self-efficacy in writing; and to test a path-analytic model specifying beliefs in writing skill malleability to influence writing performance, via goals and self-efficacy. For that, 196 Portuguese students in Grades 7-8 filled in the instruments and wrote an opinion essay that was assessed for writing performance. Confirmatory factor analyses supported instruments’ validity and reliability. Path analysis revealed direct effects from beliefs in writing skill malleability to mastery goals (ß = .45); from mastery goals to self-efficacy for conventions, ideation, and self-regulation (ß = .27, .42, and .42, respectively); and from self-efficacy for self-regulation to writing performance (ß = .16); along with indirect effects from beliefs in writing skill malleability to self-efficacy for self-regulation via mastery goals (ß = .19), and from mastery goals to writing performance via self-efficacy for self-regulation (ß = .07). Overall, students’ mastery goals and self-efficacy for self-regulation seem to be key factors underlying the link between beliefs in writing skill malleability and writing performance. These findings highlight the importance of attending to motivation-related components in the teaching of writing.

A reading of Inferno 32, Purgatorio 31, and Paradiso 31 compares a physical and interior pilgrimage, especially in the way in which the beginning and end of an interior journey are distinguished, to illuminate the concept of love that is central to the Divine Comedy.

Inferno 15 and Paradiso 15 are particularly suitable as a selected reading for a lower-level humanities class. Comparing Brunetto Latini and Cacciaguida as father figures and contrasting the images of Florence in each episode can help students develop a more complex understanding of Dante's poetic vision and social critiques.

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 discusses how and why one instructor uses a wiki as a space for students in a partially online American literature survey course to construct a class time line of American literature and history. Through participation in the class wiki, students are able to engage with course content in more expansive ways and to play active roles in creating course content; as such, the wiki is a space where the traditional teacher-student hierarchy is dismantled, as students and teacher collectively share the responsibilities of developing, assessing, and revising timeline content. In discussing the learning opportunities a wiki offers in a literature survey course, the author also argues that instructional technology and online tools should not be incorporated into courses merely to follow trends in digital humanities. Instead, digital and technological components should be thoughtfully integrated into humanities courses in ways that enhance and expand learning while furthering the objectives of the particular course.

Review Article| October 01 2017 Teaching What We Do in Literary Studies Digging into Literature: Strategies for Reading, Analysis, and Writing. By Wolfe, Joanna and Wilder, Laura. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2016. 448 pages.Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines. By Wilder, Laura. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. 238 pages. Paul T. Corrigan Paul T. Corrigan Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2017) 17 (3): 549–556. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3975671 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter Email Permissions Search Site Citation Paul T. Corrigan; Teaching What We Do in Literary Studies. Pedagogy 1 October 2017; 17 (3): 549–556. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3975671 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. © 2017 by Duke University Press2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

In the field of rhetorical studies, and more often than not in broader traditions of the humanities, nonhuman animals (NHAs) are remanded to epistemological margins in terms of both theory and case. Scholars of rhetoric tend to invoke animalism only when focusing on a human agent’s use of animal metaphors and parasitic tropes as a linguistic act or discursive tactic, or in movement studies, when constituting NHAs as objects of other-directed human activism. Sometimes, NHAs appear as negative foils, as in the illustration of Kenneth Burke’s distinction between human action and animalistic motion, or in the numerous examples of how logos punctuates humans’ rhetorical supremacy and singularity. Philosophically, scholars typically cipher NHAs as “cases in point” to discuss more expansive ethical dimensions of sentience in the service of arguing for the human condition. Technologically, in studies of media culture, NHAs perform as memes or serve as darling accoutrement in YouTube videos designed for human consumptive pleasure. In the end, what we find in the lion’s share (no pun) of humanities scholarship is the de-agentized NHA as a voiceless, silent, inactive, dispassionate, non-communicative, and ancillary object of humans’ rhetorical discourse and material action. (There are exceptions to this treatment in the field of communication studies [see Almiron, Cole, and Freeman, Critical Animal and Media Studies Communication; and the collected essays in Goodale and Black, Arguments about Animal Ethics].)Debra Hawhee’s book, Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw, responsibly cuts against the tradition of metonymically reducing NHAs to footnotes. Therein, she reanimates the positionality of NHAs as instructive actors in rhetorical theory and rhetorical education. Engaging in pan-historiographical methods, Hawhee brings a new perspective to the NHA-human relationship by centering the ways NHAs have circulated within and among ancient and modern texts not just as complements, but rather as charged inventional resources unto themselves. She explores rhetorical treatises ranging from those by Aristotle and Demetrius to Longinus, Erasmus, and new translations by Lucian and Psellos (among others) to locate how NHAs appear active as zoostylistic teachers.Hawhee does not make the argument that NHAs do rhetoric; instead, her larger claim is that NHAs’ influences outstrip verbal language and compel us to contemplate extra-lingual dimensions of rhetorical energy. In sum, she grounds sensation as a common point between humans and NHAs. The rhetorical history Hawhee traces does not presume, “as most histories of rhetoric do, the centrality of logos as both reason and speech” (11). Rather, her study “stresses energy, bodies, sensation, feeling, and imagination” (11).NHAs have been a part of human existence, and particularly human narratology, since time immemorial. Indeed, as Hawhee deftly points out, in the context of rhetorical theory and rhetorical education, many of us have likely encountered the ways that Aristotle’s dog in the Rhetoric (2.3.138oa.24–26) emblemizes how humans and NHAs assess each other’s dispositions and modulate their responses and how Herodotus’ and Libanius’ encomia on NHAs (crocodile in Histories; peacock in Progymnasmata, respectively) represent models for human epideictic genres. Perhaps we have wondered about the theriomorphic fashion in which Demetrius’s nightingale charms and delights, just as rhetorical handbooks suggest a rhetor ought to when considering the sensory touchstones of one’s discursive choices (On Style). Moreover, many of us may have contemplated Aesop’s fables and why animals stand as sentries over cautionary tales that become analogs for our public lives in the civis. Even Rhetorica from Giarda’s 1628 Bibliothecae Alexandrinae Icones Symbolicae holds at her left side a leashed, three-headed beast and in her right hand a snake-wound scepter. What does the presence of such NHAs mean for the study of rhetorical theory and the instructional ways it is actuated in the handbook tradition?Hawhee’s high water mark treatment of NHAs in some of Western culture’s most treasured rhetorical treatises adds to our field the importance of sensation. In fact, she argues that sensation “matters the most” and provides a vocabulary of logos and alogos to emphasize how the latter remains key to progymnasmata, or the system of exercises used to prepare one for rhetorical study. What began for Hawhee as a book about animals and rhetorical theory blossomed into a project that values and locates sensation and imagination in well-worn artifacts that have heretofore seemed locked into unidimensional interpretation. At a time in the humanities when affect is discussed and debated more and more, and when we are witnessing the return of pathos as a sine qua non rhetorical proof, Hawhee’s book gets us closer to the roots of aesthesis and pathe. Concomitantly, the project celebrates alogos, or those rhetorical movements not associated with traditional rationality. In the offing, the sensory emerges not as passive or attendant, but as central to rhetorical education. As Hawhee writes, “Sensation, feeling, and emotion, then, have emerged as the positive counterparts to rationality and reason—positive, that is, in comparison with the term nonrational” (7).Hawhee contends that NHAs keep sensation alive in rhetorical theory, whether by modeling sound, countenance, and efficiency in post-Aristotelian theory (chapter two) and providing deliberative rhetorical grounds through fables (chapter three), or by inculcating encomia and visual inquiry (chapter four), teaching memory in medieval rhetorical theory (chapter five), or considering accumulatio in Erasmus’s De Copia (chapter six). Every chapter, with its multiple case studies, enlivens this new interpretation of rhetorical history, scaffolding how NHAs intersect with our senses of sensation over time. Written convincingly and argued expertly, Hawhee’s book is a gem among new genealogical studies that help us reconsider the superstructures of rhetoric as art and craft.The audiences for Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw are plural, to say the least. Certainly, scholars interested in ancient and modern rhetorical theory will gain fresh insight into the way emotion and sensation unfolded in the rhetorical tradition vis-à-vis NHAs. Classicists and philosophers would also benefit from a study that centers alogos as both fundamental to the human communicative condition and endemically primeval to animal (human and NHA) sentience and ontology overall. One of the genuinely admirable qualities of Hawhee’s work is the way she merges rhetorical studies with animal studies. Animal studies largely claims roots in philosophy and animal sciences, mostly through the study of the ethical treatment of animals by way of human intervention into NHA lives and ethos (i.e., using animals for food, clothing, experimentation, and entertainment). Since the publication of Peter Singer’s watershed Animal Liberation (1975), animal studies has grown into its own discipline in many ways (made emblematic by programs such as Tufts University’s Center for Animals and Public Policy, and book series found at the University of Chicago Press [Animal Lives series] and Routledge [Human-Animal series]). Rhetoric in Tooth and Claw connects rhetorical studies (from classical approaches to critical-cultural spaces) to animal studies, what Richard Ryder calls the study of “the changing relationships between human and nonhuman animals over time” (Animal Revolution). Clearly, animal-studies scholars would be intensely attuned to Hawhee’s arguments about the sensory overlap present in NHA-human rhetorical connections.In the end, Hawhee is to be applauded for envisioning and presenting a volume that reenergizes the study of extra-lingual features in rhetorical theory (principally, sensation) and that advances the vivification of NHAs as voice-full, resonant, active, passionate, communicative, and primary subjects in their own right.

ABSTRACT In the late American nineteenth century, oratory was de rigueur. Institutionally, liberal arts colleges sought to distinguish themselves by teaching moral character. Such an ethotic education was sine qua non for any student of political oratory. This essay argues that such an emphasis on character and oratory, coupled with Illinois College’s rhetorical curriculum and extracurricular events, afforded a kairotic and didactic moment for William Jennings Bryan to learn and practice Isocrates’ brand of rhetorical paideia. Taught primarily through the use of paradigm cases and imitation, Isocrates emphasized the import of a speaker’s ethos over the art itself. Bryan shared this perspective. Drawing from both “Against the Sophists” and “Antidosis,” we conduct a comparative analysis by reading Isocrates’ ethotic-based rhetorical theory alongside of Bryan’s 1881 graduating oration entitled “Character.”

In The Iconoclastic Imagination, Ned O’Gorman sets three architectonic topoi in motion, charting them across a “range of political, aesthetic, and theological histories” (xiv). O’Gorman gives image, catastrophe, and economy greater presence in different sections of the book, enabling microscopic and macroscopic views of his particular objects of study as well as his ambitious inquiry as a whole. In method as well as conclusions The Iconoclastic Imagination provides a dynamic interplay of rhetorical history, theory, and criticism that together provide an inspiring example of what rhetorical studies—and rhetorical education—fully realized can see, make, and do.1In Part 2, for instance, what O’Gorman describes as “the heart of the book,” he “attend[s] not only to the explicit rhetoric of the texts … but also to subjectivities of spectatorship and the aesthetic logics of the technologies of representation in and against which they are situated” (xv). An example of the kind of profound insight such a method can provide comes two pages into O’Gorman’s conclusion: In the context of Hayek’s and Friedman’s argument that nation-states police economic systems, O’Gorman observes, The state appears as an instrument of necessity, rather than freedom. As such, we have a remarkable reversal of the ancient Greek distinction that Arendt discusses between the polis and the oikos. In the neoliberal version, politics is the space of necessity, and economics is the space of freedom. (199)To highlight the power of O’Gorman’s ideas and methods, I herein juxtapose his superlative study with another recent and worthwhile book that sets out to explicate our contemporary dis-ease.A metaphor O’Gorman uses at the end of chapter 1 pushed from likelihood to necessity my juxtaposition of The Iconoclastic Imagination with the proximately published Citizen-Protectors: The Everyday Politics of Guns in an Age of Decline by sociologist Jennifer Carlson. As O’Gorman sums up chapter 1 he observes, “though the age of market triumphalism may or may not be past, I think we remain today in important respects in the crosshairs of a contradiction with respect to the history of liberal democracy” (43). Crosshairs? And how.In Citizen-Protectors, Carlson states that she is “not … attempting to provide a value judgment on guns themselves” (10); nor does her book “attempt to advocate for specific gun policies” (9). Instead, Citizen-Protectorsexamines a world in which guns are a sensible, morally upstanding solution to the problem of crime, a world in which the NRA is not a hard-line lobby that distorts the political process in Washington, D.C., but rather a community service organization that serves middle America, and a world in which guns are attractive not only to white men but also to racial minorities. (9)Carlson’s training as a sociologist enables her to work from inside the norms and practices of men who use guns “to navigate a sense of social precariousness” (10). She analyzes what she first calls the “turn toward guns” and then “the celebration of guns” in terms of “three registers of decline”: First, “changing economic opportunities that have eroded men’s access to secure, stable employment”; second, “abiding fears and anxieties surrounding crime and police inefficacy, concerns that encourage men to embrace their duties as protectors”; and third, “a response to growing feelings of alienation and social isolation, such that guns come to represent not simply an individual’s right to self-defense but also a civic duty to protect one’s family and community” (10) and to police others—hence the book’s title, Citizen-Protectors.Carlson blames neoliberalism for the “age of decline” referenced in her title, and the loss of confidence in the state that Carlson posits harmonizes with O’Gorman’s account of legitimation crisis. Yet Carlson names an additional cause beyond neoliberalism for United States gun mania: what she calls “Mayberry,” “a fictional small North Carolina town on the long-gone Andy Griffith Show” (11). It is here that Carlson’s account becomes deeply unsatisfactory. In her words, “Rich in cultural imagery, Mayberry expresses a nostalgic longing for a ‘state of mind’ … about a particular version of America”; “Mayberry represents, in the American psyche, an idyllic space of single-family homes, nuclear families, community cohesion, and safety and security” (11). Perhaps sensing the inadequacy of the conceptual work she is asking a television program about a fictive town to do in a work of sociology, Carlson hastens to add that the real-life emergence of Mayberry depended on white flight en masse from American cities to suburbs in the 1950s, ‘60s, and ‘70s and a manufacturing-based economy that offered men a breadwinning wage to support the nuclear, single-family household that it idealized. While white middle-class Americans chased the socioeconomic security of the white picket fence, their mass divestment from urban centers helped to further concentrate and isolate poor people of color, who were left behind in American so-called ‘urban ghettos.’” (11)O’Gorman’s profound and novel connection between legitimation crisis and the aesthetics of representation offers a much more comprehensive account of the historical and cultural factors that prompt celebration of not only gun culture but other cultures of violence in the United States. What sums up the neoliberal imaginary better than the celebrated—and globally marketed—figure of the American sniper?Perhaps my preference for O’Gorman’s transdisciplinary understanding of neoliberalism and its entailments is merely a consequence of my own pluralist standpoint. While I long ago lamented Plato’s having “put the -ic in rhetoric” by adding the suffix -ike to rhetor (“Plato’s Shibboleth Delineations”), I have come to see that Plato’s ambivalence about rhetorike is—I will take it to be—a gift for rhetorical invention and reinvention. O’Gorman confesses that his study—in his words—“ranges widely”; that suits this free-range rhetorician just fine. To appropriate Luce Irigaray, this rhetoric “which-is-not-one” at its plural heart remains paideia, a teaching art. No better gift to a teacher than for a student to reciprocate and—to use a metaphor which as a non-athlete I have not earned any right to use—raise the bar. By synthesizing rhetoric’s interpretive and productive capacities in a work of unimpeachable scholarship that ends by stressing rhetoric as a teaching art, O’Gorman has, indeed, raised the bar for rhetorical studies.In his postscript, O’Gorman makes a case for, in his words, “a multidisciplinary school for the artificial in all its aspects. This would include a substantive revival of the liberal arts” (210). Nowhere more than in undergraduate rhetoric classrooms, even and especially in the required writing and speaking classes—for all students, not just honors students—can such a revival make a material difference in the quality of our polity. Many thanks to Ned for this book, for his example, and for passing to another generation of rhetorical teacher-scholars the powers of rhetoric’s kaleidoscope, through which we can glimpse in motion ideas across time.

This essay focuses on the pedagogical implications of teaching Atatürk’s “Address to the Youth” for a more inclusive and diverse understanding of global rhetorics in the U.S. writing classroom. We propose that the public work of rhetorical instruction includes helping students develop as global citizen leaders by allowing them to explore and critically become aware of various national cultures and rhetorical traditions across the world. Integrating non-Western public rhetorics into the U.S. writing classroom challenges students in this context to write outside of the classical conventions of rhetoric and affords students to mobilize a new discourse for civic action.

Expectancy violations theory, a communicative framework, is applied in this study to understand how recent college graduates form, evaluate, and respond to violated job-searching expectations. In-depth interviews of college seniors ( N = 20) who were currently job searching helped answer the three research questions posed. Using a thematic analysis, the findings indicate that young job seekers evaluate some negative information positively because it reduces their uncertainty and that expectations and responses to expectancy violations change over time and are not stagnant, as the theory originally predicted. Other contributions, limitations, and teaching implications are discussed.

This article, the second of a two-part series, presents 12 assignments designed to help students increase their online communication skills, conduct professional conferences, use advanced presentation software, develop problem-solving and critical thinking, gain greater awareness of gender effects in communication, and perform community service. These teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

Preview this article: Review: Teaching Composition at the Two-Year College: Background Readings, edited by Patrick M. Sullivan and Christie Toth, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/45/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege29313-1.gif

This report, produced by the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), provides guidelines for preparing future two-year college English faculty. The document, which aligns with the “CCCC Position Statement on Preparing Teachers of College Writing” and TYCA’s “Characteristics of a Highly Effective Two-Year College English Instructor,” presents recommendations for those who train future two-year college English professionals: directors and faculty of English studies graduate programs. These guidelines also provide graduate students who are interested in two-year college teaching careers with recommendations for a combination of relevant coursework and research, professionalization activities, and hands-on experiences that will prepare them to be engaged two-year college teacher-scholars.

TETYC’s Instructional Note genre has evolved and begun to contribute to an ongoing scholarly conversation by contributing new knowledge, not merely passing along teaching lore.

The author draws on analysis of a three-part study to argue that reprofessionalization of writing instructors at two-year colleges requires instructors to become better prepared and positioned to assert their teaching expertise through departmental and institutional interactions beyond the classroom.

Editor’s note: The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession

“Programmatic positions statements are a tool for generating and shaping the discourse of a program or, at the very least, making clear what a program’s expectations of writing teachers are so that they have more information about how their responses to student writing might be viewed by those outside the student-teacher interaction.”

“The editors and authors of the chapters included in Multimodal Composing in Classrooms: Learning and Teaching for the Digital World show how multimodal composing has become an indispensible new literacy.”

Fanfiction is a work of fantasy in which fans write stories based on original books, movies, TV series, and other cultural and artistic forms of expression. This study looks into fanfiction dedicated to the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In particular, it examines how fans construct the (spoken) dialogues of their (written) stories. The article explores the pedagogic value of using fanfiction in educational contexts, focusing on the analysis, creation, and enactment of stories inspired by TV series and movies that feature a combination of narration and ‘written speech’. The article also offers practical recommendations for classroom and online activities that support the development of skills and understandings related to writing and orality. The effort of representing speech in a written form (i.e., writing dialogues and descriptions of conversations) can help students reflect, with the aid of the teacher, on the distinctiveness and specificity of written and spoken communication. By comparing, contrasting, and critiquing audiovisual and written texts (e.g., the episodes of a TV series and the transcriptions of its dialogues), and by creating their own dialogue-rich stories, students can improve their understanding of the idiosyncrasies of writing and orality across modes, thus advancing their literacy and critical skills as creative producers, not just consumers, of popular culture and media.

Literacy education, especially writing in US secondary schools, suffers for its detachment from the breadth of social purposes for which literacy is required and in which literacy is developed. Complex forms of cultural communication are best learned in conjunction with creative, productive, action sanctioned through authentic social connections. Orality offers clues to the development of practice-oriented literacy education that can help contextualize emerging interest in disciplinary literacy within broader cultural worlds that give us practical reasons and rules. This paper presents four cases of practice-oriented communication, which encompass a broad set of communities of practice. They offer multiple avenues for thinking about the role of practice and oral communication in teaching writing as a twenty-first-century literacy. Discussion of the cases suggests opportunities for instruction in situated, contingent, and emergent twenty-first-century literacies.

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

This article explores how to train educators to teach online internship courses. The article introduces an online internship course focused on workplace communication available to students across the university. Approaches to training educators to teach this course include requiring educators to immerse themselves in experiential learning situations, leveraging innovative uses of contemporary technologies for communication, and reflecting on online teaching processes.

This article reports on an effort by the authors to use usability testing as a component of online teacher training for their multimajor technical communication course. The article further explains the ways in which program administrators at other institutions can create their own usability testing protocols for formative online teacher training in course design and in principles of user-centered design.

A common challenge facing those who prepare graduate students to teach writing online is the need to help those students connect online writing instruction (OWI) theory with their classroom practic...

Intended to contextualize and elaborate on the Two-Year College English Association's 2016 Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College, this article examines the history, current status, and possible futures of graduate preparation for two-year-college English professionals. It traces the five-decade history of efforts among two-year-college English faculty to articulate the distinct demands and opportunities of their profession and to hold university-based graduate programs accountable for providing meaningful preparation for future two-year- college teacher-scholars. Based on our survey of this history and the current landscape of graduate education in English studies, we argue that transforming graduate programs to meet the needs of the teaching majority will require embracing the four principles articulated in TYCA's 2016 Guidelines: develop curricula relevant to two-year-college teaching; collaborate with two-year-college colleagues; prepare future two-year-college faculty to be engaged professionals; and make two-year colleges visible to all graduate students.

370 RHETORICA Graban finds that she is unable to delineate Gougar's affiliations as stable and permanent because her relationships with other suffragists and politicians evolved throughout her life. And lastly, class-consciousness as the organizing topoi allows Graban to "complicate the language surrounding ... the middle class lens [typically used] to view social uplift in Gougar's work" (p. 154). In her final chapter, Graban presents more textual examples of irony through a critical frame—one from Golda Meir, prime minster of Israel, one from Madeline Albright, American diplomat, and another from Barbara Jordan, investigator of the Watergate Scandal. Although some might think Graban falls into the trap of "tokenism," whereby examples of a few stand in for all women, she works against it as she selects archives based on their ironic potential and qualities. Furthermore these archives are situated panhistorically so as not to essentialize women or their writings as representative of a specific place or time. In addition to alleged "tokenism," some might find fault with the scant textual evidence taken from Anne Askew's archive in chapter one. Yet, these critics should keep in mind the erasure of women's rhetoric throughout the Renaissance and employ their critical imagination to reconsider the potential for the evidence that does exist.2 It is also important to note that Graban not only examines textual evidence, she also employs "historical residue" as evidence—residue that includes: organizing topoi, intersecting contexts, and the positioning of audiences. Graban's scholarship resets the terms of scholarly engagement for those working in the field of rhetoric and history by resituating irony and using it to destabilize historical narratives and the ways in which these nar­ ratives are remembered. Tiffany Kinney, University of Utah, Salt Lake City Laurent Pernot, Epideictic Rhetoric: Questioning the Stakes of Ancient Praise, Austin: University of Texas Press, 2015. xiv, 166 pp. ISBN 978-1-4773-1133-2 In 1993 Pernot's highly acclaimed, two-volume work, La rhétorique de l'éloge dans le monde gréco-romain appeared. In 2012 at the meeting of the Rhetoric Society of America, with ISHR sponsorship, Pernot conducted a three-day seminar on epideictic for twenty participants (among whom was the current reviewer). Using the format of the seminar but drawing content from his earlier book, Pernot has now produced a concise but 2 J. J. Royster and G. Kirsch, Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition and Literacy Studies (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 72-73. ' Reviews 371 example-packed history, analytical summary, and contextualizing assessment of the theoretical treatises and actual speeches of ancient Greco-Roman epideictic rhetoric. Two questions drive the presentation: (1) How was it that epi­ deictic, originally the minor player in the famous trio of judicial, deliberative, and epideictic, acquired the far-and-away dominant role of the three in the Imperial age? and (2), What, in fact, was that role? Through an impressive breadth and depth of reading and a precise deployment of select ancient sour­ ces, Pernot shows how "every encomium is at once a literary work, a moral problem, and a social rite" (ix). In Chapter 1, "The Unstoppable Rise of Epideictic" (1-28), Pernot surveys the meager evidence for epideictic texts from Classical Greece to Republican Rome (1-9). Epideictic was, in those centuries, something of a sidecar to the normally stand-alone two wheels of deliberative and judicial oratory. Yet, as the chapter title suggests, the epideictic sidecar will "tri­ umph" (9) in the Imperial period, and the path of that triumph is delineated in the rest of the chapter (9-23). The conclusion? The Imperial period, for the whole of that Greco-Roman world—especially in Greek—"was the begin­ ning of a new rhetorical world order, in which oratory served no longer to rip apart an adversary or to cow an assembly, but to spread honeyed praise and trumpet meritorious conduct with previously unparalleled frequency and variety" (28). Chapter 2, "The Grammar of Praise," (29-65) surveys the methods and means of epideictic in light of the teaching texts that survive, drawing espe­ cially from Menander Rhetor, but Plato, Isocrates, and Aristotle are also quoted and even Aelius...

Bhimrao Ambedkar, famous for being a political ally to the “untouchable” castes and a political sparring partner to Gandhi in India’ss struggle for independence, is also well-known for his public advocacy for Buddhism. Starting in the 1930s, Ambedkar began arguing that he and his fellow untouchables should convert from Hinduism to escape caste oppression. Ambedkar was also influenced by his teacher at Columbia University, John Dewey. Religious conversion transformed in Ambedkar’s rhetorical strategy to a meliorative program. His rhetoric of conversion operated in three stages: reflection on one’s religious orientation, renunciation of a problematic orientation, and conversion to a more useful orientation. This study explicates the final phase of Ambedkar’s conversion rhetoric, the stage he only expands upon in his oratorical activity during his last decade of life. His rhetorical appeals to convert to Buddhism are found to be performative in nature and to be imbued with a Deweyan ethos of religious rhetoric as an emancipatory device for individuals and communities.

In recent years, embedding writing into subject teaching through genre-based writing instruction (GBWI) has been advocated in tertiary education. However, little is known about how this approach can be shaped and implemented in this context. In a design-based research study in Dutch higher professional education, we aimed to explore how GBWI can be used to scaffold students’ writing within the subject of Event Organization and to what extent students learned to use the typical features of the genre ‘event proposal’. A 5-week subject-specific writing intervention was designed and subsequently enacted by a subject lecturer in a first-year class involving 13 students. Using a coding scheme for interactional scaffolding strategies, five interaction fragments were analyzed against the background of designed scaffolding and learning goals. The fragments indicated that the interplay of designed scaffolding (instructional materials and activities) and interactional scaffolding (teacher-student interactions) promoted students’ writing performance over time. Comparison of students’ pre- and posttests by means of an analytic scoring scheme pointed to statistically significant growth in the use of typical genre features (d=1.41). Together, the results of this design-based research study indicate the potential of GBWI for scaffolding and promoting tertiary students’ writing.

This article, the first of a two-part series, presents 13 teaching innovations debuted at the 2016 Association for Business Communication’s annual conference. The second edition of My Favorite Assignment will be published in the fall 2017 Business and Professional Communication Quarterly. Assignments include international collaborative projects, students’ professional development, fast skill-building exercises, data interpretation, event planning, and more. Additional assignment support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on these websites: http://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments and http://salesleadershipcenter.com/research .

Free online survey tools provide a practical learning-by-induction platform for business communication instructors interested in trying out an advanced multidisciplinary survey activity coupled with an innovative teaching design. More than just building skills in marketing, survey projects marshal a wider set of thinking and doing activities that build student competency in the interrelated disciplines of communication, consumer analysis, and research. The design and sequence of a survey-learning module are outlined as well as expected learning outcomes, assessment considerations, and suggestions for exploring the interdisciplinary opportunities that surveys afford.

Interest in gamification in higher education has been growing steadily in the past decade. Using games and game elements has been shown to increase student engagement, motivation, and autonomy. This article draws parallels between game elements, instructional design, and the teaching of business and professional communication. It suggests ways that teachers can incorporate game elements into their courses (or perhaps identifies ways in which readers are already doing so without realizing it). The article concludes with an example of how game elements are used in the design of an introductory business communication course.

This essay, which pertains to translation studies, presents a reflection aiming at defining intersections between the areas covered respectively by rhetoric and by skopos theory, which, in the field of translation studies, is one of the most frequently used theoretical frameworks that structures practice, and therefore teaching. It aims to lay the foundations of a translatorial theoretical framework based on an extension of the skopos model including the stylistic elements of classical rhetoric, and perhaps also on an extension of the rhetorical model to embrace a wide range of text types.

In chapters on the Gorgias and the Meno in his 1997From Plato to Postmodernism, James Kasterly argues that an important point made in the Gorgias is that Socrates fails to persuade Callicles. Its lesson is that philosophers will never succeed in persuading nonphilosophers if they rely on dialectic, with its premises grounded in epistemology (32, 34), and in the Meno, he finds a type of dialectic that functions rhetorically (67). In this new book, The Rhetoric of Plato's “Republic”: Democracy and the Philosophical Problem of Persuasion, Kastely builds on his earlier work. He reads the Republic as Plato's effort to address the implicit challenge posed by Socrates' defeat in the Gorgias. Plato's purpose in the Republic, he claims, is to set forth and enact an alternative to dialectic, an alternative that he identifies as a philosophical rhetoric (that is, a rhetoric for philosophers), that would enable philosophers to persuade nonphilosophers to value justice and morality above all else. The Republic, on his reading, not only (if obliquely) argues for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic but also practices it and thus attempts to constitute interlocutors and engaged readers as the moral, justice-loving subjects of a new republic.The crucial passage that generates Kastely's reading occurs at the beginning of book 2, when Glaucon enters the conversation after Socrates' exchange with Thrasymachus in book 1 has stalled. Thrasymachus, exhausted and frustrated by Socrates' dialectic interrogation and by Socrates' refusal to allow him to state his opinion directly (350e), has withdrawn from genuine engagement; instead, he placidly agrees with whatever Socrates proposes (351c). Glaucon challenges Socrates: does he want really to persuade them or just give the appearance of having persuaded them (357a–b)? Kastely argues that here Glaucon is referring to the kind of “persuasion” that Socrates has practiced on Thrasymachus—a nit-picking (from Thrasymachus's point of view) dialectic that wins on technical points but that changes few people's minds and hearts. Yet there is a potential problem with Kastely's interpretation, namely, that Glaucon does not state that the distinction he intends is between two types of persuasion (artificial and real); rather he states that the distinction is between two types of arguments on behalf of justice—arguments that propose behaving justly as prudent for the benefits that treating others well confers and arguments for living justly for its own sake, without reference to benefits. However, Glaucon may indeed mean both, as Kastely maintains. And in support of Kastely's interpretation, there are other references in the Republic to dialectic as a problematic way of convincing nonphilosophers: most noteworthy (among several) is Adeimantus's insistence that although philosophers can as a result of their training often defeat nonphilosophers in dialectical argument, this “victory” does not mean they have really persuaded their opponent or anyone (487b–d).For Kastely, the development and enactment of a rhetoric for philosophers is at the heart of the Republic: “Is it possible, then, for a philosopher to discover a rhetoric that would permit philosophy to have some sort of purchase on public opinion and persuade an audience of the truths philosophy has discovered? The Republic is aware of the importance of this question and has chosen to foreground it dramatically. It understands that, as a dialogue, it must provide an answer to that question, if philosophy is to be anything other than a deeply limited and esoteric activity. … For this dialogue simply not to self-destruct, Socrates has to make the case for a viable philosophical rhetoric” (122).The title of chapter 4, “Confronting Obstacles to Persuasion,” captures the major theme in much of the rest of Kastely's argument. The most formidable obstacle that the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers confronts is ideology, though Kastely does not use this term, perhaps regarding its usage in this context as ahistorical. In Kastely's words, it is the problem of our failure to recognize that “the desires of the soul have been shaped by a culture and are never encountered in innocent form” (66) or that “the work of political culture is masked, and it is mistakenly read as if current values and desires are the product of nature” (206). With regard to justice, in the view of most people we are just out of fear of punishment or of retaliation if we are unjust; if we could practice injustice to our advantage with impunity (the myth of Gyges's ring), we would, and, moreover, it would be natural for us to do so. Thus, the first challenge to the philosopher who would persuade nonphilosophers that it is in our interest to be just even if it means losing an advantage is to bring them to understand that all knowledge is “rhetorically mediated” (66). Rhetoric is not the problem but the means of cure: its duty is to make citizens aware of the rhetorical character of what they experience as natural.In chapters 5, 6 and 7, Kastely explores the particular obstacles Socrates faces if his aim is to persuade Athenians of what they may regard as ideologically counterintuitive and unnatural, namely, that a life grounded in justice is the best life. For instance, Socrates' advocacy of women serving as guardians (452a) is, on Kastely's reading, motivated not only by Socrates' belief that there is inherent value in women serving as guardians but also and primarily by his desire to illustrate how a reigning ideology blinds his interlocutors to alternative possibilities (101). While Socrates' interlocutors regard the proposal as unnatural, Socrates argues that thinking of women as guardians is only unconventional but nevertheless thoroughly reasonable.The greatest challenge Socrates faces in the Republic is persuading his listeners that philosophers should be kings. On hearing the proposal, Glaucon warns Socrates that were he to issue the proposal publicly he would be greeted with not only disbelief but also violent resistance (473e). Kastely observes that “Socrates is fully aware of the general population's low estimation of philosophy [and philosophers],” and his discussion of philosophy is a “self conscious rhetorical act designed to mollify an angry audience and to transform that anger into calmness” (109–10). If the response to the proposal were to be as extreme as Glaucon envisions, it is surely unlikely that the crowd would be prepared to engage in dialectic. The foremost rhetorical means Socrates uses to overcome these ideological prejudices are the famous images and analogies of books 6 and 7: the sun, the divided line, and the parable of the cave. Kastely reads these tropes as rhetorical versions of Platonic philosophy that can persuade nonphilosophers, treating them as evidence for his thesis that the Republic argues for and practices a rhetorical presentation of philosophy that is superior to dialectic, at least when it comes to discussing philosophy with nonphilosophers.But there is at least one problem with this interpretation of books 6 and 7 of the Republic. The argument that underpins Kastely's reading—that the Republic is about a search for a rhetorical alternative to dialectic—seems to me to rest on the assumption that Socrates could have presented a more technical and accurate description of these truths but instead took into consideration the limitations of his audience. He chose images because they were more effective than dialectic's definitions and divisions. But Socrates claims that the nature of the subject requires use of images. In a subsequent chapter, Kastely concedes that “even Socrates himself cannot claim with certainty that he has achieved a full philosophical vision” of goodness (157). At least through the period of the Republic, Socrates notoriously relies on analogies and images to describe the good. Socrates resorts to images because he has no choice, not because rhetorically images are the preferred means for a particular audience. In Kastely's defense, it is true that these images have an affective dimension that makes them appealing, and the fact that there are no alternative ways to express this vision does not make the images less rhetorical. They function rhetorically, neither dialectically as argument nor as the simplification of teaching.That a specific philosophical rhetoric is not thematized as such in the Republic leads Kastely almost necessarily to argue that Plato and Socrates enact their program through mimesis rather than overtly arguing for it. Socrates in effect says do as I do here rather than do what I say, since I don't say much about rhetoric. For Kastely, Socrates' criticism of the mimesis of epic poetry and drama is tacit admission of its effectiveness (210), and he would in fact employ it to a good end to advance his own program: “While the Republic ostensibly argues for a certain kind of rhetorical constitution through a specifically prescribed curriculum, what it offers its readers is in fact a different kind of education embodied in the mimetic presentation of an extended act of persuasion. Presumably, Plato intends this kind of education or rhetorical constitution for the actual readers of the dialogue—the readers who have already been subjected to the cultural influences that Socrates would undo or minimize” (79). At the heart of this mimetic theory is “an act of constitution or identification” (217). On Kastely's reading, the rhetoric Socrates enacts in the Republic is obviously not the rhetoric that Socrates criticizes in the Gorgias. The rhetoric that Kastely sees in the Republic is to be “understood as a practice of individual and political constitution” (220). This Burkean description is not one that Plato would associate with rhetoric, though it is not impossible (given the way he envisions dialectic functioning) that Plato could imagine a type of dialectic that is similarly transformative. There are many varieties of dialectic in Plato, including less rule-driven varieties that resemble the semidisciplined conversation of the Republic. Kastely has appropriated for rhetoric what others (including Plato) might see as a version of dialectic. But perhaps this objection reduces to a quibble about names.Socrates' famous admission in book 9 that only divine intervention could bring about the rule of philosopher-kings would seem to announce the failure of the philosophical rhetoric that Socrates (on Kastely's reading) had hoped would mimetically persuade interlocutors and readers. Kastely's response to the challenge that book 9 presents is twofold. With most other commentators, he argues that Plato never intended to present an ideal polis in the Republic: the description of the guardians, the philosopher king, and so forth was never to be taken literally. The Republic is not about the formation of an ideal state; the description of the kallipolis that dominates is in fact a trope to show the formation of the properly ordered soul. If this is the case, then Socrates' admission does not thwart his purpose. Secondly, Kastely argues that Socrates' withdrawal from politics can be read as a rejection of the imposition of the philosophical life by a philosopher, who is, after all, a king, in favor of the transformation of individual citizens through the rhetorical means that he sees Socrates' enacting (181).Kastely's is a bold thesis. It asks us to accept not only that Plato came to accept a socially responsible role for rhetoric in the polis but also that in the Republic Plato acknowledges epistemologically that there is no escape from culture, that all “knowledge” is rhetorically mediated. It is also an honest book, as Kastely raises and addresses objections to his reading. Because it is an honest, rigorous book, I benefited immensely from the encounter with it, though I was ultimately not persuaded by its thesis.

Teaching user experience (UX) can be challenging due to the situated, complex, and messy nature of the work. However, the complexity of UX in practice is often invisible to students learning these methods and practices for the first time in class. In this article, we present findings from a study of rhetorical strategies of UX practitioners and pair them with strategies for teaching UX to students. While previous work on teaching UX reflects current practices in the classroom or reflections of practitioners, this study demonstrates the benefits of researching existing industry practices in order to inform pedagogy.

All the pieces in this issue ask readers to consider, reflect on, and try new ways of engaged teaching and learning, but in particular a cluster of pieces speak to current national conversations about service-learning and civic engagement.

The case method uses real-life scenarios to motivate students to engage with issues in the narratives and develop greater interest in their writing.

The Alan C. Purves Award Committee is pleased to announce this year’s award recipient, Denise Dávila, for her article, “#WhoNeedsDiverseBooks?: Preservice Teachers and Religious Neutrality with Children’s Literature” (which appeared in Volume 50, Number 1, of Research in the Teaching of English, pp. 60–84). The Alan C. Purves Award is given annually to an article in RTE that holds significant implications for informing classroom practice and is likely to have the greatest impact on instruction and classrooms.