Review of composing(media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing by editors Arola, K. l., & Wysocki, A. F.

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning. The author uses autoethnography to trace her thinking throughout a yearlong fellows program, during which she developed and taught a new service-learning writing curriculum. She describes how the fellows program helped her to turn several challenges into threshold experiences that resulted in key shifts in thinking.

Both creative writing and composition seek to teach writing, yet their pedagogical approaches are poles apart, especially concerning instructors. Creative writing instructors serve as “mentor-models,” whose authority comes from their writing practice rather than (only) departmental sanction. Despite potential pitfalls, a mentor-model approach could reaffirm composition instructors' identities as writers.

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

This article addresses the teaching of Amy Levy's “Xantippe” (1880), a poem 279 lines long, in an upper-division survey of British literature from 1800 to the present focused on life stories. Though the poem is short enough to be read in a single sitting, it is also long enough to pose the pedagogical challenges common to teaching all long poems: asking students to read both closely and at length, to discern unifying tropes or themes across manifold details or narrative episodes, to engage in sufficient discussion commensurate with the long poem's complexity, and to discover the pleasures of the long poem (deep immersion, sweep of vistas, narrative propulsion, and more). Since Levy is not anthologized in most survey textbooks, the article also concerns teaching noncanonical poetry. The methods presented include prompts posing questions and explaining the work's poetic and cultural contexts, and student reading diaries listing what students found challenging and what they learned. The article thus incorporates real-time student responses, as well as discussion of teaching strategies.

“The Fairy of the Fountains” is one of Letitia Landon's most enigmatic and disturbing poems. It makes for particularly difficult reading because Landon sought in this poem to translate the forms of ballad and medieval lay into her own nineteenth-century poetic idiom. Her replication of the ellipses and abrupt transitions common to folkloric forms renders the poem both demanding and powerfully suggestive. These significant challenges to a coherent reading of the poem are magnified by its length. Based on the author's experience of teaching “The Fairy of the Fountains” in an upper-division course on gothic and supernatural literature, this article elucidates how placing it in the context of other, better-known Gothic texts significantly enhances students' appreciation of this long poem by helping to illuminate the most puzzling aspects of Landon's narrative. This approach implicitly asserts that Landon's poem is worthy to be read alongside these equally enigmatic canonical poems and also offers students two much more accessible prose versions of the Melusine legend. Through this comparative, intertextual approach, students gain a rich sense of the variations possible on an ancient folkloric motif and develop an understanding of the place of these texts in nineteenth-century literary history.

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

This article introduces a roundtable on teaching long poems by British women writers, presented as a special session at the 2014 Modern Language Association conference in Chicago. The articles in the roundtable provide teaching strategies that are pertinent to the writers under review but can easily be extended to many more writers and works. The resistance of students to long poems by any poet, much less by women, reveals that professors still have much work to do in establishing lesser-known women writers as coequal with their better-known male contemporaries. This resistance is a teaching opportunity to address issues of genre, gender, and canonicity. In a larger sense, the articles argue for the potential of pedagogical practice to reconstitute the canon.

This article depicts a multimodal approach to teaching Charlotte Smith's Beachy Head that has proved successful in a sophomore-level survey. As a greater romantic lyric fragment of twenty-one blank-verse paragraphs with sixty-four footnotes and two embedded rhyming poems by the “stranger” poet, Beachy Head poses many difficulties for students. Ruwe identifies student difficulties with the poem's form and content and suggests practical methods for overcoming these barriers. She provides a reading guide to the poem's various sections and suggests ways to help students experience the poem's auditory, visual, gestural, spatial, and linguistic design through a process akin to reverse engineering. The article includes student responses, handouts, and links to useful websites for a multimodal approach.

This article argues that the short-story cycle should be central to teaching American literature, because the genre crystallizes major tensions of American literary history: marginality and inclusion, the individual and the community, and the formation of a national literature from transnational and local materials.

We report the results of a pilot study that offers the field of technical and professional communication its first look at material working conditions of contingent faculty, such as course loads, compensation, and professional support. Findings include that contingent faculty are more enduring with stable full-time, multi-year contracts; they carry a substantial teaching loads; and the majority are satisfied and happy in their present position, but half would prefer to be working on the tenure track.

Drawing from the author’s experience teaching online technical communication courses with an embedded service-learning component, this essay opens the discussion to the potential problems involved in designing online service-learning courses and provides practical approaches to integrating service learning into online coursework. The essay addresses specifically those classrooms where students may be required to develop or find their own service opportunities, whether those opportunities are within their community, on the college or university campus, or in another community. The essay argues by implementing service learning into online classrooms and requiring students to locate their own agencies, students not only build a greater sense of civic engagement because they are working with agencies whose missions they support, but also they develop a greater sense of responsibility for their own education and the coursework they undertake.

This article describes how a special kind of academe–industry collaboration—based on a joint appointment agreement between a university and an industry site—was set up, promoted, and experienced by a professor of technical communication and his student interns. To illustrate the nature and value of this kind of collaboration, the article discusses several of the professor’s research projects, and the teaching scenario connected with this collaboration, as well as the experience of the student interns. The keys to success for such an exchange are to (a) create a clearly structured agreement that is easy for both parties to implement within their respective institutions, (b) promote the agreement to administrators and employees at both institutions, and (c) launch into the exchange with enthusiasm for learning, networking, and finding research projects.

“What I have offered is less an employable set of texts, lessons, or advice, and more the performance of a teacher coming to terms with race in pedagogy both during and after the course. What I have done is (re)turn to rhetoric.”

Background: This teaching case describes the evolution of a course on content strategy aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the digital and professional writing programs at Michigan State University. The course has gone through three major shifts to reflect corresponding shifts in focus among professional and technical communicators: from developing content for the World Wide Web (original focus) to single sourcing; from single-sourcing to Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS), and from ECMS to content strategy. The case primarily focuses on the most recent shift. Research questions: How can a course on content strategy be useful to both advanced undergraduates preparing to enter the job market in industry and graduate students interested in learning theories in technical communication? In turn, how can a course on content strategy reflect current practices in industry while maintaining grounding for the course in academic research? Situating the case: Three emerging themes relevant to teaching content strategy emerge in the literature. The first is the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, who creates a repeatable system for designing and managing all aspects of a website [1, 2, 3]. The second is the need to develop strategies for addressing stakeholders, especially clients and users, whose goals are to learn more about why they should invest in an organization and its broader vision. The third is adapting content for reuse, which involves designing content that can be easily accessed through various platforms and formats. How the case was studied: This is an experience report by the four faculty members who, together, have taught every section of the course in the last 15 years. Two of the instructors also participated in the course as students. About the case: The most recent version of the course is a one-term course that teaches theory and best practices for managing dynamic and distributed web content, while also incorporating assignments that help students practice content strategies with real clients. It addressed these issues with the previous version that focused on content management by collaborating with industry practitioners to help students understand the real-world implications of developing strategies for and creating web content with clients and organizations. It specifically addresses three themes identified from the literature-emphasizing the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, differentiating the needs of clients and users, and designing for reuse. Course assignments include a landscape analysis of content-management systems and strategies used by various companies, designing content templates for specific clients, and developing a content strategy for a client selected by student groups. Key issues to address when developing the most recent version of the course included creating a course that was useful to graduate and undergraduate students aiming to enter content strategy professions, developing a balance between theory and practice in course readings and assignments, and revising a course to reflect current industry demands for skills in content strategy. Results: Anecdotal evidence from students is that the course was successful and acts as a defacto capstone for the program. Through their course evaluations and unsolicited follow-up emails, students exiting the most recent version of this course became valuable assets who help organizations develop big-picture strategies for adaptable content to be shared through various platforms. Conclusion: A course on content strategy that incorporates current industry perspectives helps graduate and undergraduate professional writing students become more adequately prepared for their future professions working with organizations.

Flipped classrooms have become a major trend in higher education. A Google search of “flipped classroom” now comes up with almost 5 million hits, a twofold increase since one of the authors presented in this issue did the same search. Flipping generally refers to a model in which activities inside and outside of class are reversed, or flipped, a pedagogy made possible by advances in technology. Bergmann and Sams (2012), who have been strong promoters of the model and have been credited with coining the term, defined the flipped classroom as “that which is traditionally done in class is now done at home, and that which is traditionally done as homework is now done in class” (p. 13). Bergmann and Sams were concerned about students who could not translate content from lectures into useful information for completing assignments. They argued that where students need help is not in hearing lectures but in answering questions and having individualized support (Bergmann & Sams, 2012, pp. 4-5). This special issue of Business and Professional Communication Quarterly, the first ever special issue of BPCQ since the journal’s name was changed from Business Communication Quarterly, offers a collection of articles on the theory and practice of flipping and contributes to the ongoing conversations and debates about the value of this approach. At first, many have assumed that the flipped component might consist of students watching videos of lectures at home and then coming to class for discussion (EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, 2012). The focus on video lectures reminds me of the time not so long ago when students might be snail mailed CD-ROMs (remember those?) with lectures and materials for first-generation online courses. But these days, those who practice flipping successfully consider the primary goal to be increasing student interaction and engagement, as opposed to simply imparting knowledge via lectures and textbooks. Flipping makes possible teaching methods that were impossible prior to technological innovation. Thus, it is not just the flip that is significant, but the actual pedagogy, and flipped learning is not the same as a flipped classroom. Videos used in a flipped classroom are not just reproductions of live lectures on content delivered by university instructors but can instead serve as digital learning platforms. 633828 BCQXXX10.1177/2329490616633828Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyKnight editorial2016

Flipping originated in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics fields, where didactic transmission of conceptual knowledge has been the standard pedagogy. Flipping has resulted in additional focus on procedural knowledge within class meetings. This article argues that business and professional writing pedagogy, which already focuses largely on procedural knowledge within class meetings, would benefit from flipping because it could create an additional focus on conceptual knowledge outside of the classroom. The article explains why we need to teach conceptual foundations, why video is a good choice for that teaching, and what challenges we face in creating those instructional videos.

This article examines how Web 2.0 technologies can be used to “flip” the online classroom by creating asynchronous workshops in social environments where immediacy and social presence can be maximized. Using experience teaching several communication and writing classes in Google Apps (Google+, Google Hangouts, Google Drive, etc.), I argue that flipping the classroom online with Web 2.0 technologies can maximize student participation and engagement, while also helping students develop flexible strategies for writing collaboratively and publicly in online spaces.

Drawing on findings from a national survey of TYCA members about how and why they access published scholarship, this article makes recommendations for fostering local teacher-scholar communities of practice within two-year college English departments.

Applying data from surveys and interviews, the authors examine why many experienced two-year college English faculty give up assigning group projects. They then propose a model of group training developed in the field of business management that aims to prevent many of these difficulties—the self-managed work team.

Preview this article: Readers Write: Response to “Demystifying Poetry: Teaching a Process to Write Haiku”, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/43/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege28380-1.gif

What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary efforts to advocate for job security for teaching-track faculty in English studies, especially in composition, can be enhanced by identifying and reconfiguring two types of negative affects: those circulating around the “affective labor” required to teach writing and those circulating around the educational spaces in which such labor typically occurs. After defining my terms, I begin analyzing the impact of these two types of negative affect on calls for teaching-track job security. I then use Grego and Thompson’s “studio” model of basic writing as an example of teaching work that can be used to generate and circulate positive affects regarding the “affective-labor-in-space” performed by writing teachers. Finally, I articulate three premises designed to help articulate and emplace positive affects regarding teaching-track composition work such that possibilities for job security are enhanced.

John Dewey is a philosopher who seems perpetually on the verge of rhetoric. He displays a continual interest in the necessity of communication for democracy, and yet he often remains vague (maddeningly so) as to what shape such communication should take. While this would seem to limit his usefulness for rhetoricians, the opposite has proven true. As scholars of rhetoric, we now find ourselves in the midst of a renaissance in studies of Dewey. Trained Capacities: John Dewey, Rhetoric, and Democratic Practice seeks to both consolidate the gains made by such scholarship and further encourage rhetoricians' interest in Dewey's work. Namely, the various authors in this volume concern themselves with treating Dewey's writings as contributions to a broader “democratic culture” (2) of which rhetoric is a vital, animating component. In doing so, they offer a collective argument as to why Dewey is, and should remain, a rich resource for rhetorical inquiries into democracy, treated here as both a practice and a way of life.Trained Capacities is divided into three sections, each dealing with an aspect of Dewey's scholarly work and his career as a public intellectual. The essays in the first section, “Dewey and Democratic Practice,” look to Dewey's engagement with the perpetually important yet problematic subjects of science, philosophy, and religion—“the architectonic assumptions of democratic practice” (20). William Keith and Robert Danisch lead off this section with “Dewey on Science, Deliberation, and the Sociology of Rhetoric.” They begin by arguing that “Dewey does not offer a rhetorical pedagogy, a way of practicing rhetoric,” which is no surprise to rhetoricians familiar with Dewey's work (28). Rather, they argue, Dewey's unification of scientific thinking and democratic deliberation provides a “sociology of rhetoric,” or “a systematic account of the theoretical and normative ways in which social structures, institutions, and forms of individual agency are both guided by and constituted by communicative practices” (28). For Keith and Danisch, Dewey supplies a way of discussing the structures through which rhetorical action is made possible in the first place. Publics who are facing problems must attend to the ways in which their specific structural contingencies delimit the available means for developing democratic practices and arriving at sound judgment. Keith and Danish's essay is rich with ideas, and sure to provoke further discussion amongst pragmatist philosophers and rhetoricians alike.Philosophy and Rhetoric readers will want to pay special attention to Scott Stroud's contribution to Trained Capacities, “John Dewey, Kenneth Burke, and the Role of Orientation in Rhetoric.” We found it to be one of the high notes of this edited volume in that it goes beyond “the account of rhetoric that Dewey held (or failed to hold)” in order to craft a “Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric” (48). This is a worthwhile project that has been under way for some time, but Stroud does something too few have done by bringing Kenneth Burke into the mix. The result is enjoyable and provocative. Deweyan rhetoric scholars will likely have intuited the linkages between Burke's notion of orientation and Dewey's understanding of habituation on their own, and it is this intuition that Stroud fleshes out for the book's readers. Stroud argues that Deweyan morality is situational and that Burke helps us understand how these situations are constructed linguistically via grammars of motivations and purpose. Individuals' responses to these situations are habitual, as they have already been oriented to them by the language of their respective communities. However, that does not guarantee that the individual's habituated responses are helpful—sometimes they are trained incapacities.Stroud suggests that our various trained incapacities call out for reorientations. He reaches beyond Dewey's preference for respect and civility and embraces Burke's notion of impiety. Drawing on Richard Rorty's understanding of the strong poet, Stroud suggests that the poet and the ironist are the artful critics most suited to addressing public moral dilemmas. Importantly, such artistic provocations are not undertaken for their own sake but rather (in keeping with a Deweyan pragmatist rhetoric) to answer actual problematic situations. Finally, in true Deweyan form, Stroud insists that these artful incongruities should take place experimentally if the project of moral reorientation is to result in moral development.Scholars have long been fascinated with Dewey's conflicting views on religious faith, and they go to great pains to demonstrate that his democratic faith was closely tied to his religious beliefs. Paul Stob's contribution, “Minister of Democracy: John Dewey, Religious Rhetoric, and the Great Community” extends this project. He begins with Dewey's response to William Jennings Bryan's discourse during the Scopes trial, noting Dewey's frustration with Bryan's “divisive, antagonistic, intolerant religious rhetoric” (66). Is there any room for such “fire spitting” in Dewey's Great Community? For Dewey, religious rhetoric should tend toward inclusivity, and its uses should be governed by the kind of society it is likely to produce. Stob argues that rather than dismiss religious rhetoric outright, Dewey appreciated the power of religious symbols as evinced by his own use of religious rhetoric. Stob contends that in using religious rhetoric himself, Dewey did not simply co-opt religious symbols but also infused “public culture with a new religious purpose” (68) and direction. Stob argues that Dewey's own rhetorical project—one characterized by religious dissociation and democratic faith—cemented his reputation as a minister of democracy. In the end, “Dewey's gospel, like Bryan's gospel, relied on judgments of sin and evil, of hope and deliverance, of community and communion” (80). The key for Dewey was to dissociate religiously infused language from the kinds of dogmatism that breed division and instead turn it to the work of creating the Great Community.Part 2, “Dewey and His Interlocutors,” is of particular interest to rhetoricians since it shows Dewey practicing the sort of democratic culture that the book as a whole works to theorize. Essays by Jean Goodwin, Louise W. Knight, Keith Gilyard, and Walton Muyumba treat Dewey's public interactions with the familiar figures of Lippmann, Addams, Du Bois, and James Baldwin, respectively. While these authors tread familiar ground, they nonetheless shed new light upon the close connection between Dewey's interactions with his various interlocutors and his subsequent public pronouncements. Across these essays the message is clear: “indispensable opposition” (as Goodwin figures Lippmann) is of vital importance to a democratic culture animated by rhetorical practice. Such opposition is no small matter, and these essays demonstrate the mutual influence necessary to sustain a democratic public. However, for those who pick up Trained Capacities with the hope of learning more about either rhetoric or Dewey's philosophy, it is worth noting that the essays in this section tend to focus more on the respective interlocutor than Dewey himself. Rhetorical theory and philosophy take a backseat to history—albeit history that is fascinating and very well written.One exception to this section's overt focus on history is Jeremy Engels's “Dewey on Jefferson: Reiterating Democratic Faith in Times of War.” Engels investigates Dewey's rhetorical uses of Thomas Jefferson for the purpose of affirming the necessity of democratic faith. It was through his invocation of the historical Jefferson, Engels argues, that Dewey attempted to build “an ontological, prepolitical foundation that would keep Americans from straying too far from the democratic cause and that would keep democracy itself from transforming into something else entirely” (94). Engels supports this claim by supplying a fascinating, though necessarily brief, genealogy of Jeffersonian tropes in American democratic theory (which surfaced in a variety of forms throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries). Engels's primary purpose in doing so is to demonstrate the importance of history, and its rhetorical translation into new situations, when responding to antidemocratic challenges. In Engels's telling, Dewey's democratic faith was beset by a “crisis of war and exception” (103) not unlike our own. He responded by turning to Jefferson's writings, seeing in them a moral foundation for a lasting democratic faith. The challenge for rhetorical theorists today is to understand “how best to render democratic faith to the jaded ears of a postmodern generation” (103), a particularly salient problem for citizens struggling with the prospects of a seemingly endless war on terror. No easy answers are given, but the lesson is clear: attending to Dewey's rhetoric of democratic faith better equips us, immersed as we are in our in our own conflict-laden politics, to confront the challenges of crisis and war that necessarily and tragically lurk at the margins of democratic culture.The essays in section 2 serve as a powerful reminder that Dewey's contributions to both democratic theory and rhetoric were at their most robust when they reflected his engagements with equally committed interlocutors. As Knight states, summarizing the outcome of Dewey and Jane Addams's disagreements over the First World War, “Addams had learned from Dewey and experience, and Dewey had learned from Addams and experience. Their debate over World War I illustrates how they applied their ideas of pragmatism to their own lives as well as a point made often in this book: that when, over time, debate turns into shared inquiry, there is mutual learning on both sides” (121).Though Dewey did not directly engage in rhetorical theorizing, his work nonetheless affirms the social necessity of rhetoric for the vitality of a democratic society. This point is particularly evident when we turn to Dewey's work on education, which is taken up in the third section of the book. Evincing concern for the ways in which Dewey's philosophy can be applied to rhetorical pedagogy, the essays in this section demonstrate that practice is the central link between Dewey's pragmatism and “experimental” methods of rhetorical instruction designed to inculcate democratic values. As Nathan Crick observes in “Rhetoric and Dewey's Experimental Pedagogy,” such an “experimental attitude … is not merely one facet of democracy; its cultivation within a public is the culmination of democratic social life itself” (186). In short, as students are given lease to test ideas through rhetorical interaction, their capacity for healthy skepticism, self-reliant inquiry, and other critical tools necessary for sustained democratic practices increase exponentially. As Donald Jones is quick to point out, encouraging this type of rhetorical engagement is no easy task for the teacher. Nonetheless, such an experimental attitude is necessary for the building and maintenance of a truly democratic culture.To be clear, Trained Capacities is not concerned with crafting a clear narrative in which Dewey's work is transformed into rhetorical theory, nor one in which Dewey is treated as a rhetorician. Rather, Trained Capacities moves beyond such strict binaries—“Dewey and Rhetoric,” or “Dewey as Rhetorician”—and instead treats his pragmatism, public engagement, and commitment to education as equally valuable components of an overarching faith in democratic culture. Central to, and constitutive of, such a democratic culture is the practice and teaching of rhetoric. It goes without saying that such a broad, sweeping project is bound to miss some things, to focus too much on others, and to appeal to a variety of readers from all over the intellectual spectrum. Even so, Philosophy and Rhetorics's readers will want to read Trained Capacities, which is a welcome contribution to studies of pragmatism and rhetorical theory. The individual chapters, each with their various strengths and weaknesses, work in concert to create the beginnings of a Great Community of Dewey scholarship.

The concept of metanoia illuminates the spaces that exist around and beyond opportune moments. As such, metanoia offers ways to reframe the affective elements of teaching and learning, writing and revising. This essay examines emotion, agency, and transformation in the concept of metanoia as a way to expand “opportunity” in writing processes. View a short video by Myers and some of her students on the CCC Videos page.

Intercultural professional communication (IPC) requires a nuanced understanding of international users' interactions with technology and information. This requirement poses a distinct challenge to international communication and information designers who must overcome geographic, linguistic, and cultural barriers to understanding users as complex agents. The United Nations Development Program (UNDP) annually publishes aHuman Development Report (HDR)that contains high-quality international statistics on the regional, national, and transnational contexts in which individuals use technology and information. Thus, the HDR can serve as a resource for communication designers working in international contexts. This article presents strategies for how communication designers might use the HDR when designing materials for users in other cultures as well as use when teaching international aspects of professional writing/communication."

It’s exciting to already be introducing the first issue of our second volume year of this new journal! We’ve been receiving positive feedback on volume 1 and great contributions for this and upcoming issues. In this issue, we present two research articles and two teaching articles. In the first piece, “Papers are Never Finished, Just Abandoned: The Role of Written Teacher Comments in the Revision Process.” M. Sidury Christiansen and Joel Bloch examine the delicate dynamics occurring between teachers’ written comments and subsequent revisions. Their study follows four students receiving written comments from one teacher over a series of three papers and two revisions per paper. The four students were postgraduate science or engineering students, all international students taking an ESL writing course at a university in the U.S. The teacher feedback took the form of marginal comments using the Microsoft Word® Comments tool as well as an add-on set of macros allowing the teacher to standardize commonly made comments (and customize them as needed).

The debate over the efficacy of written teacher comments has raised a variety of questions for consideration by both researchers and practitioners. Teachers can use written comments, in Vygotsky’s (1978) framework, to scaffold the development of student writing. By reflecting on his or her own commenting process, a teacher can assess and modify his or her comments as well as the method by which the comments are delivered. This study examines how four second-language (L2) students responded to comments on a series of three papers. The results show that students overwhelmingly followed the strategy training given during class on how to respond to teacher’s comments; however, the strategies used to make changes did not always result in a positive revision. While students believed they followed the teacher’s suggestions, they did not always pay attention to the paper as a whole, which resulted in problems with coherence or grammar, and even instances of plagiarism. Results indicate that strategy training does not guarantee an outcome of successful revision. This suggests that revision will be more effective for student paper development if understood as part of the creative process of writing rather than mere error correction. Based on these results, several proposals are made for modifying the comment process.

This article introduces the idea of grammar agreements as a way to offer a more “finely tuned approach” to grammar feedback in the L2 classroom (Ferris, Liu, Sinha, & Senna, p. 307). These agreements offer students options for how the teacher will respond to writing done in their first-year composition classes. The authors offer suggestions for both why grammar agreements are a useful tool in the L2 writing classroom (and possibly beyond) and how to implement grammar agreements effectively.

For decades, researchers and teachers in composition have wrestled with how to respond to student writing. Part of this discussion has focused on what role teachers should assume when reading and responding to texts. From these discussions, different roles have emerged, including the gatekeeper, the critic, the facilitator, the coach, and the judge, among others. While some have argued that the use of response identities helps teachers focus their responses while offering students an audience for their texts, others are more wary of what influence these roles may have on the student-teacher relationship and teacher comments. This article explores the history of response identities, including research on both the positive and negative outcomes from their use. It then offers a new perspective of response as an intellectual endeavor, emphasizing both the labor that goes into response and the rewards that both students and teachers can receive from the process. Ideas of how to move toward this view of response are offered.

This issue completes the second volume year of JRW. It is hard to believe how quickly the two years have gone by, and we are gratified with the excellent work that authors have shared with us and with the positive response from readers. This issue has five papers—two research articles, two teaching articles, and a book review—which notably discuss response topics from a broad range of pedagogical contexts. With the publication of Magda Tigchelaar’s article, “The Impact of Peer Review on Writing Development in French as a Foreign Language,” we are happy to extend our discussions of response to writing to the teaching of languages other than English. Comparing the effects of peer review and self-review over a semester, Tigchelaar found that student writers were more likely to attend to/apply suggestions from their own self-reviews than they were to incorporate suggestions from their peers. She also found that peers were more likely to emphasize global concerns such as organization, and self-reviewers were more interested in fine-tuning at the sentence level and across sentences (cohesion). In particular, the study argues for a meaningful and increased role for guided self-feedback in writing instruction: “Learning how to review one’s own texts may require more time and training, but this initial investment may plant the seeds for more effective development of autonomous writers.”

A substantial body of research has demonstrated the important role of providing feedback in students’ writing development. Among the various feedback methods, the teacher-student writing conference has often been rated by learners as the most beneficial to writing development, but research on English as a Foreign Language (EFL) students’ perceptions of writing conferences is scant. Aiming to investigate students’ experiences and attitudes towards writing conferences, this study collected data through questionnaires and individual interviews with 34 EFL students from 2 college English writing classes. Findings suggested that the students held high expectations and gave high ratings on the helpfulness and success of the conferences that they experienced. Affectively, the questionnaire results indicated a generally positive experience, but the interviews revealed that attending conferences provoked anxiety in some learners. Most significantly, the study found that although students did not openly reject setting and leading the agenda, most were not enthusiastic about taking on the responsibility of establishing the direction of the conference.

In addition to other unfortunate circumstances, teacher response that comes in the form of negative, generic, and unintelligible commentary causes students to become alienated from writing. This problematic response often results from the lack of supportive student-centered response pedagogies within the first-year composition classroom. In an attempt to prevent additional writerly estrangement and to undo students’ isolation from the writing process, this article explores Marshall Rosenberg’s nonviolent communication theory as a potential framework for a dialogic, compassionate writing response pedagogy.

Reviews Janet Downie, At the Limits ofArt: A Literary Study ofAelius Aristides' Hieroi Logoi New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. pp. 1-223. ISBN 9780199924875 In this book Janet Downie displays an expert and intimate understand­ ing of Aelius Aristides, the eccentric second-century rhetor from Asia Minor. She focuses in particular on his Hieroi logoi (HL) and the relationship between religion and rhetoric. In his concern with the divine, Aristides pushed the rhetoric of religion to its limits. Asclepius was his inspiration, his teacher, and, to some degree, his co-author, and was at the center of the HL, which Aristides considered the fulfillment of his obligation to this god. Yet the real protagonist of the work is Aristides with his failing body, his dreams, his cures, his performances, and his powerful self-assertion. Downie argues that Aristides' purpose is rhetorical, and he uses his narrative of divine healing to create a portrait of himself as a professional rhetor. Whether Aristides succeeded in this purpose, and was able to commu­ nicate his vision to his audience is a question which persists throughout the book, but, basically, cannot be solved. No reaction from Aristides' contempo­ rary audience has been preserved. It is puzzling that in his Lives ofthe Sophists Philostratus recognized the rhetor's craft but did not mention the religious character of his rhetoric, ignored the presence of Asclepius, and dismissed Aristides' talent because of his lack of improvisation. Apart from Libanius and some of his friends in the fourth century, later reception of Aristides and the HL was decidedly cool, and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centu­ ries, utterly disdainful. Downie attributes this to the fact that the HL were not read in conjunction with the rest of Aristides' work. It is uncertain whether she is right, or if generations of readers simply considered the work too eccentric and odd. A merit of Downie's book, in any case, is that it puts the HL in dialogue with all Aristides' writings, his orations and Hymns in particular, so that the whole of this challenging author is illuminated. One of the difficulties in approaching the HL as a coherent literary work is the discontinuity in its style. Book 1 is in diary form, and books 2-5 proceed thematically and have narrative aims. With great literary sensibility, Downie shows that the different styles derive from various and deliberate layers of composition intended to throw into high relief the combination of the divine voice with the human voice. Aristides' dreams are many and so vivid that Rhetorica, Vol. XXXIV, Issue 1, pp. 106-118. ISSN: 0734-8584, electronic ISSN: 1533-8541. © 2016 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.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints. DOI: 10.1525/rh.20l6.34.l.l0b. Reviews 107 they make an impact on the reader. Discontinuity is typical of dreams and Downie links the unique language of dreams to Aristides' desire to suggest dreaming as a cognitiv e process. This reviewer does wish that Downie had taken briefly into account the dreams of the sons of Glaukias in Ptolemaic Memphis who lived and slept in the temple of Sarapis. Their words and expressions on papyri were those of common people and so they could have prov ided a useful comparison. Undoubtedly' the most disconcerting parts of the HL are those in which the author appears to further weaken his body by endless vomiting or dipping in frigid waters. Aristides knew7 contemporary medicine and the medical tradi­ tion and sometimes first consulted doctors who appear as rivals of Asclepius who triumphs at the end. Downie rightly remarks that this is the first instance in which an author revealed the illnesses and cures he personally experienced. Yet, we can surmise that these passages were the most repulsive to his contemporaries and may hav e been the cause of their disregard of the whole work. While Aristides sometimes is a patient passive in the hands of his doc­ tors and Asclepius, at times he has...

110 RHETORICA dialect when the sophists spread their teaching in the Hellenic world. The inscriptive evidence provides a strong case for the utility of sophistic rhetoric. This innovative volume builds a case for using physical artifacts along with textual evidence to research the histories of rhetoric. Researchers look­ ing into under-represented or marginalized traditions may find this book useful for providing a method to examine the cultural context of these understudied rhetorics. Enos is arguing for an expansion of method which feminist rhetoricians are already strongly embracing. Scholars looking to expand their repertoires in academic investigation may find these new ave­ nues for research rewarding. Robert Lively, Arizona State University B. Fernandes Pereira, Retórica e Eloquéncia em Portugal na época do Renascimento, Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional - Casa da Moeda, 2012; 988 pp. ISBN 9789722719711 For most people, the rich history of Portuguese rhetoric is terra incog­ nita. The comprehensive survey of Belmiro Pereira offers a unique occasion to explore these unknown fields and discover their many treasures. Many ISHR members will be delighted to see their names in the footnotes of this extremely well documented book. It starts with an overview of medieval rhetoric and the transmission of ancient texts during this period; there are chapters on the artes dictandi and artes praedicandi, on classical rhetoric in medieval Portuguese culture, on reading the Fathers of the Church, on the growing interest in the works of Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian in the four­ teenth and fifteenth centuries. As in other parts of the book, Pereira indica­ tes where the manuscripts of these works are to be found: this precise information about the major places of learning in Portugal and Spain is very welcome. It also shows the aim of the author to present rhetoric in the wider context of education, culture and religion. This aim continues to be pursued in the second part of the book, which deals with rhetoric and the rise of humanism in Portugal. The prominence of rhetoric in Renaissance culture is considered in an international perspec­ tive, with special emphasis on developments in Spain, France and, more unexpectedly, in Germany and the Low Countries. Indeed, one of the major discoveries in this book is the importance of Northern humanism for the evolution of rhetorical education in Portugal. The author has founded his research on an extensive knowledge of the sources in the various countries under consideration. His reading of studies published in all these countries on the subject of Renaissance rhetoric is vast, up to date and accurate. A stu­ dent of German or Spanish rhetoric may learn a great deal from this book about his or her own field of interest. The presence of major works of ancient, medieval and Renaissance rhetoric in the more important Portuguese libraries is documented for two Reviews 111 periods, before and after the year 1537. The author singles out the years 1527 to 1548 for special consideration. In these two decades the King of Portugal, John the Third, sent his country's most promising students to Paris to have them acquaint themselves with the ideas and methods of Erasmian humanism. They gathered in a college run more or less perma­ nently by Portuguese scholars: Sancta Barbara, in French Sainte-Barbe. Moreover, the syllabus of the Santa Cruz monastery in Coimbra was reorga­ nised according to modern standards. Finallv, in the year 1548 the humanist Colegio das Artes is established by order of the King in the same city; and teachers educated in centres of learning in Paris and elsewhere in Europe are engaged to bring to Portugal the methods of reading and writing devel­ oped by major humanist educators. According to B. Pereira 1537 was a pivotal year: the centre of higher education was transferred from Eisbon to Coimbra and the King's brother Henry (D. Henrique) founded in Braga a new college, Saint Paul's. In this latter college, the influence of Northern humanism is conspicuous due to the presence of teachers such as N. Clenardus and J. Vasaeus. Pereira gives a great deal of attention to the career of A. Pinus (Pinheiro), educated in Paris and afterwards entrus­ ted with high offices at the Portuguese court...

Globalization, most sociologists agree, is not a new phenomenon.Its phase in the late 20 th century and early 21 st century, however, is recognized now as one of the more transformative periods in human history-what Anthony Giddens (2011) has characterized as a "runaway world."In the last few decades, there has scarcely been a domain of human activity untouched by these forces-economic systems, mass media and communication, cultural flows, the movement of people.A global site as intensive as any has of course been our universities; indeed, it is these "runaway" forces that have been responsible for so many of the changes witnessed on our campuses in recent decades.They are evident, for example, in the considerably more diverse student cohorts who now participate in university education, along with the rich variety of languages and cultures they bring to their studies.Dramatic changes have also been seen in what is taught on programs, including the push within many disciplines to systematically "internationalize curricula."Along with new content are radically new ways of delivering programs, as digital communications become more and more sophisticated at replicating-and also reconfiguring-the learning experiences of the traditional classroom.Finally, these forces have also brought about new types of collegial relationships as institutions and academics reach out across borders to connect and collaborate on a great variety of educational and research enterprises.Versions of these changes have been experienced in many parts of the world.In my home country, Australia, for example, such has been the scale of these developments that international education has emerged in recent times as one the nation's largest export industries.But while global forces have reshaped university education in all sorts of interesting and dynamic ways, it is not to say that there are not issues and challenges associated with these developments.Frederic Jameson (2000) has suggested that globalization is in many respects a euphemism for "anglocization."The dominance of the anglosphere, according to this view, has meant that global capital-whether this be of an economic, cultural or educational kind-is unavoidably spread in highly uneven ways.Within higher education, this raises issues of power, privilege and potential inequity in the ways that different cultural groups engage with their studies, and in the rewards and successes they get to enjoy.Arguably, nowhere is this more evident than on the less-thanlevel playing field where first and second language students must compete in the assessment and evaluation of their academic abilities.So, while global forces have provided students with unprecedented access to what were once largely exclusive and culturally homogenous institutions, the view of many is that considerable work still needs to be done to address these "asymmetries" and to truly value the diversity that is now such a part of our institutions (Rizvi, 2000).A related critique is the view that globalization, in tandem with its ideological bedfellow neo-liberalism, has led sadly to an increasing commodification of higher education, so that students, especially our

Globalization, most sociologists agree, is not a new phenomenon. Its phase in the late 20 th century and early 21 st century, however, is recognized now as one of the more transformative periods in human history-what Anthony Giddens (2011) has characterized as a "runaway world." In the last few decades, there has scarcely been a domain of human activity untouched by these forces-economic systems, mass media and communication, cultural flows, the movement of people. A global site as intensive as any has of course been our universities; indeed, it is these "runaway" forces that have been responsible for so many of the changes witnessed on our campuses in recent decades. They are evident, for example, in the considerably more diverse student cohorts who now participate in university education, along with the rich variety of languages and cultures they bring to their studies. Dramatic changes have also been seen in what is taught on programs, including the push within many disciplines to systematically "internationalize curricula." Along with new content are radically new ways of delivering programs, as digital communications become more and more sophisticated at replicating-and also reconfiguring-the learning experiences of the traditional classroom. Finally, these forces have also brought about new types of collegial relationships as institutions and academics reach out across borders to connect and collaborate on a great variety of educational and research enterprises. Versions of these changes have been experienced in many parts of the world. In my home country, Australia, for example, such has been the scale of these developments that international education has emerged in recent times as one the nation's largest export industries.

1986. New Orleans. The Conference on College Composition and Communication. The two of us and Elaine O. Lees are presenting on a panel titled “ReaderResponse Theory and the Teaching of Writing: The Teacher as Responding Reader.” Our titles? Salvatori: “Some Implications of Iser’s Theory of Reading for the Teaching of Writing.” Donahue: “Barthes and the Obtuse Reader.” Lees: “Is There an Error in This Text? What Stanley Fish’s Theory of Reading Implies about the Teaching of English.” There was something special about the Conference on College Composition and Communication that year, especially for anyone concerned about reading. A few books had already been published: Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap, edited by Winfred Bryan Horner (1983); Writ­ ing and Reading Differently, edited by G. Douglas Atkins and Michael Johnson (1985); Only Connect, edited by Thomas Newkirk (1986); and Conver­ gences: Transactions in Reading and Writing, edited by Bruce T. Peterson (1986). More appeared to be on the way, for instance, Reclaiming Pedagogy: The Rhetoric of the Classroom, edited by Patricia Donahue and Ellen Quandahl (1989). College English and College Composition and Communication were brimming with provocative investigations. Interest in reading was, paradoxically, both bourgeoning and at its apex, which we came to recognize only in retrospect. Over the next few years, while we and a few others (most notably David Bartholomae, Elizabeth Flynn, Joseph Harris, David Jolliffe, Kathleen McCormick, Susan Miller, Thomas Newkirk, and Donna Qualley)

This article argues for the importance of teaching reading in first-year composition courses within a metacognitive framework called mindful reading. Crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy practices that students can transfer into other courses and contexts, this framework encourages students to actively reflect on a range of reading practices in order to become more knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read. This work is intended to prepare students to successfully engage with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their postsecondary academic careers and beyond.

This essay argues that students must call on their rhetorical sensibilities each time they sit down to write instead of automatically assuming that engaging in code-meshing is the appropriate response to every writing situation. It also encourages pedagogical efforts among teachers that invite students to locate translingualism in its larger contextual relationship with monolingualism and multlingualism, two other approaches to language difference that inform the teaching of writing. In the end, the essay suggests, students must take into consideration how each of these approaches to language difference influences the various decisions they are required to make in the writing classroom.

Teacher preparation for translingual writing differs from dominant forms of professional development wherein teachers are armed with predefined norms, materials, and knowledge for classroom purposes. Describing the principles that guide a teacher training course, this essay argues that teacher preparation for translingual writing should focus on encouraging teachers to construct their pedagogies with sensitivity to student, writing, and course diversity, thus continuing to develop their pedagogical knowledge and practice for changing contexts of writing. The essay outlines the principles (practice-based, dialogical, and ecological) that shape the course, describes its main features, and assesses its outcomes.

This essay examines what a translingual orientation offers to the study and teaching of genre, in particular what we gain when we think of genre difference not as a deviation from a patterned norm but rather as the norm of all genre performance. A translingual perspective draws our attention to genre uptake as a site of transaction where memory, language, and other semiotic resources, genre knowledge, and meanings are translated and negotiated across genres, modalities, and contexts. Focusing on genre uptake performances shifts attention from genre conventions to the interplays between genres where agency is in constant play.

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model.