I address how participating as a parent in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process has helped to transform my own approach to teaching by reinforcing how important it is to endorse a pedagogy that recognizes and values the individuality of my students. Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) has served as the best model I have found to help me move closer to my ideal classroom, and the course that most reflects this ideal classroom is my upper-level Disability and Literature course. The course's greatest strength lies in the extent to which its format and delivery are inextricably tied to its subject matter through an ethic of care(taking), especially through the incorporation of a number of UDI features into this course. What is more, while the traditional class meetings remain a privileged site of collaborative engagement and learning, the course blog is an equally crucial component to such collaboration, as the students create nearly all of its content. Indeed, the blog space serves not only as a place for students to record their responses to the assigned readings and in-class discussions but also as a student-driven supplement to the instructor-supplied focus points, a supplement that truly expands the range of possibilities implicitly represented in my choice of readings. I now understand such a pedagogical orientation not simply as a generic model for “good teaching” but as a reflection of a disability-inflected pedagogy of care.

This special issue of Pedagogy , titled “Caring From, Caring Through: Pedagogical Responses to Disability” explores the complex dynamics of disability, pedagogy, and care work and thus augments important scholarship on the personal experiences of disabled teachers, on how mental and physical variation shapes classroom encounters, and on parenting disabled children while inside the academy. Different from these conversations, though, this special issue applies disability theory more explicitly to pedagogical techniques and teaching philosophies. Put another way, the issue outlines pedagogical logics, classroom practices, and ethical considerations that might provoke radical institutional change and that testify to the generative symbiosis of lived disability, disability research/scholarship, and disability content/practices in the classroom. The articles in this issue grow out of authors’ situated, embodied knowledges and experiences of caring from or through disability; contributors contemplate what — and how — caring for/with/through disability has taught them about teaching. At the heart of each of these articles lies the belief that our common humanity is evidenced, paradoxically, through diverse human variation. Questions about how to enact in our lives and classrooms a politics that honors, engages, and conserves that variation — a politics of inclusion, equity, and access — motivate the meditations that follow.

This article discusses how the experience of caring for my severely autistic son, Charlie, and my academic research in disability studies have given me insights into teaching the ancient Greek and Latin languages to university students. My efforts to teach Charlie, who is almost nonverbal, to talk and communicate have inspired me to create strategies that help students review grammatical material for exams in a highly effective way. Teaching, I have learned, can happen in the absence of speech. My research about the history of the treatment of individuals with intellectual disabilities has shown me how to make mundane vocabulary-building exercises come alive. For example, explaining what certain ancient Greek words mean with reference to contemporary medical and ethical questions about the care of children with disabilities, born and unborn, has been of great benefit to students learning medical terminology for their science classes and preparing for careers in the health professions.

This article explores how the experience of being a caregiver and service provider informs teaching disability studies to students who are also frontline workers in service agencies. I discuss my own history as a service provider and stepparent of an adult with disabilities who has a long history as a service recipient. The history of the City University of New York (CUNY) disability studies program and target student population is reviewed, enabling readers to understand that the approach CUNY takes may be different from that of other programs in the country. The article also describes frustrations students encounter as course readings emphasizing the social construction of disability and the importance of self-determination collide with students' lived experiences of program structures and processes required by regulations and funding sources. Additional sources of tension for students who are frontline workers are the expectations of self-advocates and their parents, and the conflicts in values that may surface when serving a multicultural population in a large urban area. Disability studies courses provide a safe place for students to raise and examine these conflicts in the context of larger disability theory. I utilize my multiple roles and the perspectives they allow to deepen class discussions and offer a more nuanced reflection of disability theory as it is expressed in service praxis.

This article describes the unique journey both of a blind student in our Physical Therapist Assistant (PTA) Program and of the faculty who taught him as they all navigated through uncharted territories. We were unable to identify any programs that had enrolled students with this particular impairment; thus, there were no previous parameters set by other PTA programs, nor were we able to seek advice from any other physical therapy educators. For instance, we knew that we needed to make certain accommodations but were very aware, as was the student, of the necessity of not overaccommodating. Despite the fact that the physical therapy profession trains practitioners to help clients with disabilities to maximize their physical function and teaches them how to adapt to the challenges of daily activity, we initially assumed that a blind student would not be able to complete the program or be able to become a self-sufficient practitioner. We were very wrong. This article describes our learning process over the course of an eighteen-month program and details a valuable pedagogical experience pertinent to anyone in the teaching profession. We particularly stress the importance of being flexible and open in modifying one's teaching style to accommodate the needs of the individual student and offer tips on doing so without bias or overcompensation.

Teaching technical writing without formal training can be daunting. However, there are many resources available that can provide background and materials for teaching. My approach involved reading textbooks and articles not only on approaches to technical writing but also on what students can expect once they complete their education and are hired. Journals both in the field and in similar fields, working as a technical editor or writer, and attending conferences and talking with both other academics and those in the field offer help. This article, therefore, describes my approach from the day I was hired to teach two technical writing courses to my retirement 37 years later.

Background: The diffusion of component content management and structured authoring workflows and technologies in technical communication requires that instructors of documentation courses determine effective ways to teach component content management to students who may initially be intimidated by authoring environments and structures, such as the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This teaching case describes how component content management and DITA were integrated into the Creating User Documentation course of an undergraduate professional writing program. Research questions: How can instructors of technical and professional writing best teach English and humanities students to operate within a structured authoring workflow? How can computational abstraction be combined with students' previously acquired genre knowledge to ease their adoption of the DITA to create technical documentation? Situating the case: The development of this course was informed by literature from a variety of scholarly and industry sources, which reveal connections between DITA, computational thinking, and Rhetorical Genre theory. Specifically, the concept of “layers of abstraction” guides the development of the course's structure, allowing students to separate and independently process the various aspects of a structured authoring workflow. How the case was studied: The case was studied informally through the experience of the authors as they developed and taught the course, through informal discussions and structured interviews with industry professionals, and through student reflections from discussion forum posts from Fall 2012 through Fall 2013. About the case: Initially developed with a focus on print manuals and online help, the course began teaching topic-based authoring in the mid-2000s; however, most enterprise-level editors and tools were cost-prohibitive for students and faculty. Furthermore, many computing concepts associated with structured authoring were intimidating for an audience of students in an English department. An affordable solution was adopting the open-source DITA standard, using free trials or open-source editors. The intimidation factor was minimized by designing the course around five layers of abstraction that draw on students' previous rhetorical knowledge: Layer 1: Developing quality documentation, Layer 2: Separating content from design, Layer 3: Authoring granular content with XML, Layer 4: Authoring and linking Component Content Management modules with DITA, and Layer 5: Single-sourcing and content reuse. This case discusses each layer of abstraction, the associated assignments for each layer, and the results of each layer based on student feedback. Results and conclusions: Although the course is not universally loved by students, it has seen many successes and provides a much-needed foundation in component content management and structured authoring for students who might become technical communicators. The teaching team has learned to avoid overemphasizing coding and automation in structured authoring, maintain a solid grounding on writing principles and good technical communication requirements, and draw upon students' existing knowledge of genres and their constraints.

440 RHETORIC A and justice. It offers an aspirational vision for the new rhetoric that has been unfolding for nearly a century. Hannah Arendt famously wrote of the human condition as in the world. Crosswhite's project embraces her vision as synonymous with the deep insight into the human condition that is offered by a philosophical rhetoric and the world its insights might instigate. Gerard A. Hauser University of Colorado Boulder Quentin Skinner, Forensic Shakespeare (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), 368 pp. ISBN: 978-0199558247 Quentin Skinner last devoted a monograph to theories of rhetoric almost twenty years ago, in his Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy ofHobbes (1996). Forensic Shakespeare is in the same vein, deviating from the attention Skinner gives to republican liberty in his two more recent works (Liberty Before Liberalism, 1997 and Hobbes and Republican Liberty, 2008). Those look­ ing for further commentary on these themes within the scope of the history of political thought will not find it here; it is not Skinner's purpose. Forensic Shakespeare at no point treads this familiar ground of the history of political thought; the analysis, however, remains thoroughly within the realm of intellectual history. There are questions literary scholars might be keen to ask of this book, especially related to interpretation and theatrical staging, but Skinner makes clear from the outset that these are outside his remit. He is interested in what he calls "explanation" rather than "interpretation", in treating Shakespeare's works as historical texts, open to the sort of histor­ ical analysis Skinner is known for. The central claim of the book is that "among Shakespeare's plays there are several in which the dramaturgy is extensively drawn from clas­ sical and Renaissance treatises on judicial rhetoric" (p. 1). Skinner's focus is on two periods in Shakespeare's career - between 1594 and 1600, and between the summer of 1603 and the beginning of 1605 - covering plays such as Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, Hamlet, and Othello. These, especially Hamlet and those belonging to the Jacobean period, Skinner sug­ gests can be referred to as Shakespeare's "forensic plays" for their use of the rules and styles of forensic rhetoric - the rhetoric of the courtroom. This should immediately resonate with any reader familiar with these plays; the climax of the plot often involves a court scene in which the guilt of characters is disputed, whether in the courtroom of The Merchant of Venice or the tomb of Romeo and Juliet. But the question of why Shakespeare turns to forensic rhetoric in these periods of his career is a question that Skinner leaves open. As he 'states in his introduction, he intends this book as a foundational one - he will argue that Shakespeare was using these rhetorical sources in his plays, any further questions or conclusions are left for future studies. Reviews 441 Aftei a shoi t inti eduction, setting out his purpose, giving fulsome acknowledgement to the existing literature on the subject, and establishing his methodological boundaries, Skinner opens with a description of the clas­ sical rhetorical tiadition in Shakespeare s England, giving a thorough over­ view on the topic for those not otherwise familiar with it. Already Skinner begins to hint at Shakespeare's deviation from such traditional rhetorical norms, a topic to which he returns in the final pages of the book. This first chapter almost stands alone as a useful introduction to the revival, teaching and debates of classical rhetoric in Renaissance England, and is of itself demonstrative of Skinner's rich knowledge of the topic. The second chapter introduces the forensic plays, which are distin­ guished from the rest of Shakespeare's work in their focus on the forensic yem/s of rhetoric. Skinner makes the tantalizing suggestion that "Shakes­ peare is interested at most stages of his literary career in the full range of distinctively rhetorical utterance" (p. 48), but focuses on Shakespeare's use of forensic rhetoric in this selection of plays, leaving space for a study of Shakespeare and his engagement with the other two types of rhetoric - epideictic and deliberative, both which have a strong relationship with the political. The remaining chapters explore the parts of...

Our assessment research suggests that quantitative business courses that rely primarily on algorithmic problem solving may not produce the deep learning required for addressing real-world business problems. This article illustrates a strategy, supported by recent learning theory, for promoting deep learning by moving students gradually from “well-structured” algorithmic problems with single correct answers to “ill-structured” real-world business problems that may have multiple correct answers and require an argument addressed to a specific audience. We show how these scaffolded communication assignments promote deep learning, and suggest ways that interested faculty can adapt the assignments to their own courses.

PowerPoint has received much criticism regarding excessive use of text and the lack of contact with the audience. Why presenters use PowerPoint in this way has not been studied so far. Our study using interviews with beginning and advanced presenters shows that some use the program as a speaking note and as a means to draw the attention away from themselves. Some even think that PowerPoint can replace rhetorical skills. Slides are mainly designed on the basis of commonsense, instead of guidelines based on human information processing. Implications for the teaching of PowerPoint use in business communication are discussed.

This article, the second of a two-part series, features 11 teaching innovations presented at the 2014 Association for Business Communication annual conference. These 11 assignments included leadership and other-focused communication—detecting communication style, adaptive communication, personality type, delivering feedback, problem solving, and critical thinking—and projects—analytic reports, presentation, slide deck creation, visual tools, ethics, team communication, field observation and reporting, rhetoric, persuasion, advertising messages strategies, delivering bad news, reporting financial data, and cross-cultural and international communication. Additional teaching materials—including instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the Association for Business Communication website http://businesscommunication.org/assignments .

A veteran writing teacher asks the question—What keeps teaching fresh and new?—and discovers, in the process of writing a teaching narrative, how her teaching voice and writing voice intertwine, both in the classroom and on the page.

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe's famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to his Untimely Meditations: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (1982, 59). Another way of saying this is that the “personal” quality of this book indicates something quite different from one person's idiosyncratic attempt to expand their consciousness—whether through learning or smoking. Instead, it points toward a kind of impersonal singularity that is the conjunction of multiple affective/conceptual directions and speeds. It is, in short, a pedagogy in the strongest sense.So as not to be misleading, I should also say that I did know someone else named Doyle some fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student at Penn State. That other Doyle (not exactly “Richard”) was then an assistant professor who had only just published his first book exploring the “rhetorical software” that enabled the field of molecular biology and that drove the sequencing frenzy that was the Human Genome Project. I am indebted to that other Doyle for provoking in me an enthusiasm for thinking and for teaching me that if our scholarship is to be worth anything at all, it must be oriented toward learning how to live. Indeed, reading, writing, teaching, and all the practices of our industry are inextricably parts of life and therefore parts of a carbon- (and silicon-) based ecology that need to be taken seriously if we are going to claim to have been alive at all. But as Darwin's Pharmacy shows, learning how to live is often a brutal, painful, and even a literally nauseating process. Suffice to say that I did not like that Doyle then any more than I like this other one now. But I have learned from (and with) them both.This book is remarkable for several reasons. First, and most apparent, is because it manages to connect extraordinarily disparate discourses in ways that in retrospect look obvious. The chapter entitled “LSDNA” (about the multivalent links between midcentury research on DNA and the discovery of LSD, including the fact that Francis Crick was apparently under the influence of LSD when he first envisioned the double helical structure of the molecule) typifies the provocative quality of these conjunctions. But the more significant attribute that makes this book so important for rhetorical studies is that it depicts rhetoric as a deeply powerful adjunct to all the lines it follows. What this means is that rhetoric here is not merely the stylistic or persuasive adornment of a linguistic content (although it is also that) but is also a constitutive element of what we might very broadly call “experience.” Doyle is at pains to emphasize this point especially through the analysis of trip reports by those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. It would appear from the sheer quantity of these reports that the ingestion of psychotropic drugs produces an intense desire to generate language—a language that would somehow attempt (and fail) to capture the experience of the trip. But more than that, this language also provides a crucial element of the set and setting that are key elements of all encounters with hallucinogens. “To read trip reports for what they can teach us about psychedelic experience,” Doyle argues, “we must read them as if they are less failed signs of the ineffable than symptoms of, and subsequent frames for, psychedelic states” (54). Turning from a traditional emphasis on language to a contemporary thinking of information allows Doyle to foreground the active quality of rhetoric: “Information is less a phenomenon to be understood than … a potent mutagen of human experience.”The common element shared by the various sites that Doyle investigates—from global and medical imaging, to psychedelic drug use, to the love poetry of Cyrano de Bergerac—is that they all provoke an experience of connectedness, “suggesting that in some fashion human perception is indeed “wired” for a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment” (9). Now of course, this message isn't new or even especially noteworthy, but what Doyle is after here is less the content of the message of interconnection and more the practices and relations through which humans come to attune themselves to this event.What interests Doyle about each of these sites is that they are all involved in pragmatic experiments that explore the distributed quality of life. One of the many things that makes Doyle's itinerary deeply compelling is that he does not follow the theoretical line about the death of the subject or the overcoming of humanism but analyzes the actual practices of people involved in pursuing these projects. Thus, for instance, hallucinogenic drug users (“psychonauts”) are pioneers, “early adopters of a transitional, transhuman identity precipitated by our intensified and amplified ecologies of information in the context of an ecosystem in distress” (230). These psychonauts are not so much attempting to “expand” consciousness (as if consciousness were merely quantitative entities) but to turn it otherwise, to explore its alternate capacities by “troping” consciousness (hence the term “psychotropic” drugs).Interestingly enough, and contra the many so-called postmodern critiques of the value of consciousness, in Doyle's account, consciousness does not disappear. Nor is it merely an epiphenomenon masking certain underlying material practices. Indeed, consciousness plays an extremely crucial role in this newly configured biosphere as “the distributed capacity to manipulate and transform living systems” (252). That is, consciousness allows us (and not only us) to pay attention to certain things in certain ways and is thus deeply motivated by what we can only call “seduction.”This emphasis on seduction connects to what I think is the most powerful argument of the book, that Darwin's evolutionary engine of natural selection has unjustly overshadowed the other evolutionary motor that he discovered: sexual selection. Focusing primarily on The Descent of Man, Doyle shows that “Darwin introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but to the sexiest, those who are adepts at attention gathering” (139). From the plumage of the peacock, to the petals of the orchid, to the thought troping of peyote, this capacity to seduce and to fascinate may well be the most fundamental, rhetorical (and evolutionary) attribute of life. And this attribute is in marked contrast to some alleged demand that the individual organism exists in robust distinction against its environment. That is, “the experience of seduction … provokes not fitness but entanglement[;] sexual selection excels at the momentary breakdown of inside/outside topologies” (249).Now it is also the case that the psychonauts that Doyle investigates are not at all casual drug users and that they are involved in a very precise and care-ful relationship to psychotropic drugs. This book is not simply advocating for the mind-altering quality of hallucinogens themselves; you will not find anything like a mindless celebration of Burning Man here. When he speaks of those who have managed to “form a commons with ayhuasca” (246), as well as the fascinated (and fascinating) artisans of marijuana cultivation, Doyle is predominantly concerned with those who are dedicated to a connoisseur-like relation to these plants (and to consciousness). This is to say that such psychonauts seem to offer a privileged and perhaps altogether rare relation to “drugs” (and to the nooshpere more generally) in that they are “more than recreational” drug users; they demonstrate “a serious intent” in their relations to the exploration of consciousness (258). And indeed, this raises the essential question (for me) as to what styles of exclusions are necessary for any pedagogy and any rhetoric. But that may be a question for a different review. For the moment, it seems to me that the stakes of ingesting this other Doyle's pedagogy are well worth the risks.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

The social media campaign #WeNeedDiverseBooks has called for more varied works of literature. However, one of the arguments for increasing the visibility of diverse books has not received much attention: using #WNDB to cultivate religiously pluralistic thinkers. Currently, there is a conflict between the evasion of religious neutrality in English language arts (ELA) instruction and the need to prepare young people to become pluralistic thinkers in a global society. This article examines three lines of inquiry: How likely are preservice teachers to (a) include children’s books with religious diversity in their future classrooms, (b) discuss the religious content of the books with their future students, and/or (c) employ dominant social discourses in interpreting the religious content? Grounded in theories of religious neutrality, social discourses, and cultural superiority,the study analyzes 79 preservice teachers’ responses to the cultural-religious milieu of the renowned picture book memoir In My Family/En Mi Familia (Garza, 1996). The corpus of data, which includes the preservice teachers’ written reflections and responses to a set of open-ended questions,indicates that privileging a nonreligious reading lens and excluding relevant religious perspectives from discussions about diverse works of children’s literature can inadvertently contribute to the defamation of other cultures and religious traditions. The study underscores the responsibility of teacher educators to help preservice teachers take a religiously neutral approach to ELA instruction.

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word of this journal's title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year-RTE's 50th anniversary-thinking about the first word in the journal's title: research. We come to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking this 50th volume year-a year that in any person or institution's life traditionally invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of a former colleague, who-in his research methods courses-would often say of a research report: I believe the author, but the story's all wrong. We know for certain that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly editorial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing.Todd DeStigter opens this issue with argument about argument. Using ethnographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding argument's esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously published in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation's utility in fostering democracy and students' socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument's position of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian claims to an objective, made accessible through a combination of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter's article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is there really such a thing as extra-human reality? Might the reality we report in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator, who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability-or unreliability, for that matter-more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter's article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter's quest to legitimize other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression as well as actions that grow from them (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration as teachers, as researchers, as persons.Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcherwriters who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links between two teachers' writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the professional. …

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

This essay examines high school poetry instruction in the 1920s and 1930s in light of the influence of Hughes Mearns, a teacher who wrote about and lectured on his experiences in teaching what he coined “creative writing” and who played a major role in reconceiving how teachers taught students to read and write poetry. Rather than focusing on memorization and recitation, Hughes enacted an experiential and “emotional” method of teaching students poetry. This student-centered approach reflected major thoughts in pedagogical progressivism of the period at the same time that it conflicted with the education tracking and standardization that also took shape under the name of progressivism. The innovative work of Mearns and teachers who embraced his philosophies is especially important to revisit given the analogies to our own period,where spoken-word programs, for example, exist alongside school standardization measures that often devalue poetry. Understanding the arguments Mearns and other teachers made for the unique value of poetry, as well as some of the shortcomings in their thought, can help educators to better articulate the need for K–12 poetry instruction now.

Efforts on the part of specific individuals, particular programs, and professional organizations to be change agents within various spheres of influence (i.e., within particular programs, departments, institutions, or national and international contexts) is understandably difficult given the dual challenge of bringing change to both the practices as well as the infrastructures that can support (but can also thwart) the activities of writing instruction.

New standards for writing provide the opportunity to rethink definitions of what writing is in schools. While traditional assessment methods align with many of the new standards and offer an important tool for gauging the success of some elements of writing, they often neglect other elements. In traditional assessment, the elements that are quantifiable become those that are valued. Teachers can promote consideration of other elements, those intangibles that change a text from an assignment to be completed into a powerful communicative act, by intervening in the prewriting or planning stage of the writing process. This article discusses one possible form of intervention in which the teacher has a conversation with a student that centers on the student’s investment of interest in her/his topic and helps the student plan a paper that will make a unique contribution and not just fulfill a task. By using a prewriting rubric to focus the conversation, the teacher is able to track student progress in understanding and enacting this important component of writing.

Although many second language writing classes use a process approach, anecdotal evidence suggests that assessment of writing in such classes often still focuses on the written product alone. This assessment practice continues despite specialists having recommended that both process and product be assessed. This study compares second-year university students in Japan who were assessed on feedback processes and product with others assessed on product alone in terms of perceptions of the feedback received. Perceptions were determined through a post-treatment questionnaire. Neither the assessment of the use of teacher feedback in revisions nor the assessment of the quality and quantity of peer feedback was found to have a clear benefit in terms of students’ perceptions of the feedback received. This finding suggests the need for further research to confirm whether the assessment of both process and product is worth the considerable time investment required.

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

This article establishes traits of adaptable communicators in the 21st century, explains why adaptability should be a goal of technical communication educators, and shows how multimodal pedagogy supports adaptability. Three examples of scalable, multimodal assignments (infographics, research interviews, and software demonstrations) that evidence this philosophy are discussed in detail. Asking students to communicate multimodally drives them to effectively filter information, remix modes, and remake practices that are core characteristics of adaptable communicators. Beyond teaching students how to teach themselves as an essential part of living in an information society, contending with new and unfamiliar tools also prepares students for their roles as empathic mediators in the workplace.

Although most technical communication pedagogy provides students with solid advice on how to visualize particular numerical representations, it underproblematizes the rhetorical decisions we make in choosing which numbers to display in the first place. This pedagogical reflection uses Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concept of interpretative level to foreground the rhetorical choices that underlie our decisions on how to summarize, aggregate, and synthesize the data we visualize. It then describes two informal classroom activities that emphasize the importance of interpretative level and help students see the recursive nature of data visualization and invention.

Research has shown that novice writers tend to ignore opposing viewpoints when framing and developing arguments in writing, a phenomenon commonly referred to as my-side bias. In the present article, we contrast two forms of argumentative discourse conditions (arguing to persuade and arguing to reach consensus) and examine their differential effects on my-side bias in writing. Our data reveal that when asked to write an essay to support their opinions on capital punishment, individuals who had argued to reach consensus were more likely to cite claims that challenge their position, reconcile these claims with their position, and make use of claims that had originally been introduced by their dialogue partners. We discuss these findings in light of educational policy and practice and caution against an overemphasis on using persuasive discourse as a means of teaching argumentative reasoning and writing.

This article seeks to characterize the discourse community represented by the biennial conferences of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing (EATAW). Drawing on information from EATAW's conference programs, the authors define the topical emphases of the 565 standard presentation abstracts (SPAs) accepted for the first six conferences, identify some of the community's dominant research practices and common methods of presentation, and track the changing international distribution of presenters over time. We conclude that the EATAW discourse community, true to its name, has remained focused primarily on pedagogy and on pragmatic research aimed at improving teaching practices. Working in a multilingual context, EATAW teachers/researchers tend towards an 'internationalist perspective' (Horner and Trimbur 2002: 624), one that is attentive to linguistic and cultural differences and favours empirical research as a means of identifying diverse student needs. This perspective, along with a tendency toward cross-institutional and international research partnerships, stands in contrast to the perspective of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) the conference which best represents the American composition tradition.

Screencasting is a technology that enables the user to record screen activity on video while also capturing audio or video narration of the lecturer demonstrating that screen activity. This technology has improved over the years, and has now become streamlined enough to be integrated easily in popular learning platforms like Blackboard, Desire2Learn, and Moodle. The technology’s high usability factor and the varieties of screencasting software now available as open source makes screencasting appealing to writing instructors, not only as a means to improve teaching, but also as a tool for students to create and engage with multimedia texts that facilitate the acquisition of contemporary literacy skills. In the United States, the National Council of Teachers of English proposes that 21st century definitions of literacy must, among other things, include the ability of writers and readers to analyze, create, and interact with multimedia texts and to gain proficiency with the use of modern technologies. I argue that screencasting is a practical and creative technology that can be used for a variety of purposes: to address 21st century literacy requirements in writing classes, to improve teaching effectiveness in both online and “flipped classroom” learning, and to enhance the instructor’s social presence in online learning environments. I give examples from my own teaching experience using Camtasia and ScreenFlow software, as well as review some popular applications of screencasting technology currently in use in academic environments.

This article is based on the idea that there is latent storytelling already in proposals. It explores the various ways in which storytelling functions as a pedagogical model of teaching the writing of proposals in business and technical writing courses. The central premise is that stories, like proposals, are forms of discourse that place events sequentially from beginning to end with meaningful and graspable connections in between. Stories take (identified) audiences into account by being selective of events that are carefully rearranged and described through composites of scenarios and characters. This article explores those storytelling patterns in theory and in practice. It aims to enhance the perspective of teaching proposal writing by calling attention to a seemingly inconsequential or unrelated notion – storytelling.

This article outlines strategies that have been put in place in a nursing degree program with the aim of increasing student confidence regarding academic writing in the field of nursing. It introduces an embedded co-teaching approach and outlines how this approach is enacted in practice. Strategies are introduced, including class sessions, a three part multi-stage assignment, and the feedback systems being used. Issues identified in the literature with regard to academic writing in undergraduate study are discussed, and a case is put forward for the continued use of embedded discipline-specific classes for nursing and other students in higher education.

This essay is concerned with contemporary writing center and composition studies and focuses on including fiction in both the theory and practice of writing centers and classrooms. Stemming from contemporary theorists such as Andrea Lunsford and Min-zhan Lu, my work incorporates Sapphire’s (1996) novel, Push, so as to highlight the unique perspectives fiction can give as to how we approach teaching and tutoring students. Offering fiction as impacting both theory and practice – in its potential inclusion within tutor-training syllabi, for instance – I assert that fiction is an untapped resource for writing center and pedagogical studies that is often overlooked or cast aside. By also observing race and education theorists such as Laura Greenfield, Karen Rowan, and Victor Villanueva, my analysis of Sapphire’s work makes evident the potential for fiction to more thoroughly inform our approaches towards past, present, and future writing center and pedagogical studies.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

Background: Virtual teams collaborate across distances using information communication technologies (ICTs). A distinctive set of communication skills is needed by people who work successfully in virtual teams, and few universities or companies provide structured education and training in virtual teamwork. At a midsized southeastern Masters Comprehensive University, professors from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education came together to explore how they might use cross-disciplinary student teams (groups comprised of students with different backgrounds and educational goals) to teach concepts in their own disciplines while providing students with the opportunity to become more proficient in virtual team communication. Research questions: (1) Can cross-disciplinary student team projects successfully support learning in virtual team communication as well as address the learning objectives of specific courses? (2) What can faculty learn from a cross-disciplinary teaching model that can be applied to virtual teams? Situating the case: Experiential learning is based on performing real tasks and reflecting on that process; it benefits learners by engaging them in complex, authentic situations. Virtual teams are significant because they support a great deal of the work currently taking place in our global economy; they are significant in higher education because students need to develop skills in international virtual communication before they are introduced to high-stakes work environments. In previous cases, students have collaborated across national cultures to develop project deliverables, such as websites, reports, and usability studies and present them in virtual environments using such tools as WebEx, Skype, and live streaming. How this case was studied: The findings from this case are based on individual student reflections, which were used to create a data matrix for each project, and instructor observation and evaluation. About the case: In Spring 2013, six faculty from the same university worked together to incorporate virtual teams into their classrooms. These six faculty members were divided into two groups of three with each group representing three colleges mentioned earlier. The faculty developed two interdisciplinary projects (one on infographics and another on social media) that enabled rich and diverse student collaboration. In both groups, the three faculty leaders worked together to define a project scope that students could achieve and that would relate to learning goals in each discipline. Conclusions: The lessons learned from this experience are that: (1) technical challenges will occur; (2) students from all disciplines must receive the same information; (3) instructors must balance respect for their colleagues and support for their students; (4) team assignments need to be consistent and fair; (5) instructors need to establish appropriate and fair assessment measurements for their own students; and (6) projects need to be realistic in order to show the students the value of virtual work.

320 RHETORICA attuali, esse non valgono certamente per il libro che Emmanuelle Danblon ci ha regalato: una ricerca coraggiosa, ricca di ipotesi originali ed innovative, all'altezza delle sfide che la modernità pone ad una disciplina che da Aristotele in poi non ha mai smesso di nutriré la cultura occidentale. Mauro Serra, Fisciano (Salerno) Tarik Wareh, The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philoso­ phers. Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies. Distributed by Harvard University Press, 2012, viii + 236 pp. ISBN 9780674067134 The perennial contest between rhetoric and philosophy expresses itself, among other ways, in the expulsion from the potted stories these disciplines tell about themselves of authors who in their own day were thickly intertwi­ ned. The granddaddy of such expulsions is the erasure of Isocrates from the story of ancient philosophy. I blithely suppose that most teachers of Greek philosophy know who Isocrates was, if only because Plato and Aristotle both mention him (Phaedrus 279a; Rhetoric, fifteen loci). They may also know that these mentions allude to the rivalry between Academics and Isocrateans , who established competing schools in 4th century Athens. When he was young Aristotle effectively hawked the wares of the Academy in public performances that were long appreciated, by Cicero among others, for their eloquence. But no sooner do historians of philosophy mention these facts than we hear that Isocrates's advertisement of himself as a teacher of philosophia was little more than a pretentious way of differentiating himself from (other) sophists and of cutting into the Academics's (and later the Lyceum's) market. By contrast, Tarik Wareh's The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers builds on growing appreciation of the way in which Aristotle took Isocrates's philosophia (general education achieved by imita­ tion with a view to public success in oratory and so in politics) seriously enough to incorporate Isocratean themes into his own philosophy of human things (ta anthropopina): ethics, politics, rhetoric, and poetics. The question is how deeply Aristotle transformed these themes in appropriating them. In addressing this issue Wareh is encouraged by the appearance of yet another reconstruction (from a lacunose array of fragments and testimonial of Aristotle's Protrepticus, a speech inviting prospective students to frame their lives around the love of wisdom as Academics conceived it and solicit­ ing the powers that be to support (or at least tolerate) the Academic approach to education. D. S. Hutchinson's and M. R. Johnson's edition of the Protrepticus frames the issues that divided Isocrateans and Academics by reconstructing the fragments as a dialogue-well, a set of rival speeches, anyway-between 'Isocrates,' 'Aristotle,' and a Pythagorean named 'Heraclides ' (http://www.protrepticus.info). 'Heraclides' adopts the apolitical, indeed anti-political, view of a sub-sect of Pythagoreans whom 'Aristotle' Reviews 321 identifies as 'nnithematici.' "The human creature is nothing/' he says, "and nothing is secure in human affairs ... All the things that seem great to peo­ ple are an optical illusion." From this sour perspective there is little or no difference between external goods such as wealth, health, beauty, and power and the ends of political life. Isocrates's philosophia inscribed just this difference into rhetorical practice by inducing reflective understanding of the big picture as a way of responding in a timely way to issues closer to hand. 'Aristotle's row was harder to hoe. The Academic curriculum fea­ tured high-end mathematics as propaedeutic to other studies. That is because Plato and the mathematician Eudoxus, co-founder of the Academy, regarded mathematical sciences as valuable, while, like the aristocrats they were or sympathized with, despising their practical and technical applica­ tions. They thereby seemed to ask citizens to waste their time on useless subjects that by their very nature depreciate civic life. According to Wareh, 'Aristotle' distinguishes himself from 'Heraclites' by repeating the Acade­ my's party line only' after having "stronglv assured us that his vision is inclusive of everything moral and intelligent that would generally have been credited to the Isocratean approach" (44). 'Aristotle' does recognize techne and praxis as successively developed forms of knowledge that have been nurtured by and contribute to polis life. He also realizes that the...

In her recent article 'Re-integrating Academic Development and Academic Language and Learning: a Call to Reason' (2014), Alisa Percy describes the historically separate trajectories in universities (in Australia but also more widely) of professional expertise in academic (educational) development and academic language and learning. She argues that this separation (in which, broadly, the former is staff-facing whilst the latter is student-facing) is unhelpful and calls for a reintegration of language and literacy expertise with academic development work in order to 'promote the development of students' language and learning simultaneously' (2014:1203). Percy's analysis and her conclusions are convincing to me. If I'm asked at a party what my job is (groan), I'm never quite sure which professional title to adopteducational developer, writing developer, learning developer, academic developerand, similarly, as its chronic institutional grumblings attest, the university in which I work is also never quite definitively cured of its anxieties about where the work I do should belong (historically over here, logically perhaps over there?). Conveniently sheltering under the nonpindownable, un-institutional, and non-generic name, 'Thinking Writing', the team in which I work has always taken the view that language and learningand knowing and being and doingare intimately connected, and that attention to language (writing specifically) isat least in principleas much the responsibility of disciplinary academics as is the teaching and learning of disciplinary content; the two, that is, can't really be separated.

In this article, we outline a competency-based approach to teaching business communication. At the heart of this approach, classroom instruction, assignments, and evaluation center on a goals-oriented and receiver-centric understanding of communication in which students are taught strategies for meeting five core competencies of business communication: professional, clear, concise, evidence driven, and persuasive. This is not a reinvention of the curriculum but instead a pivot that positions existing disciplinary knowledge and best practices into a clear, memorable, and professionally oriented framework to help students build critical communication skills that can be applied strategically across a range of business situations.

This article, the first of a two-part series, catalogs teaching innovations from the 2014 Association for Business Communication Annual Conference. These 12 assignments debuted during two My Favorite Assignment sessions. Learning experiences included job-seeking skills—résumé writing, writing job applications, sharpening interview skills, interview performance feedback via video, peers, and handheld mirrors and communication tools—creating effective graphs, charts and figures, interactive web-based communication, crafting PowerPoint slides, managing communication anxiety via the web, and corporate social media strategy/tactics. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on http://businesscommunication.org/assignments .

This article examines how the Computers in Writing-Intensive Classrooms (CIWIC)/Digital Media and Composition (DMAC) Institute has realized founding director Cynthia L. Selfe's commitment to prioritizing people first, then teaching, then technology. I analyze how institute curricula introduce and model pedagogies for teaching digital composing, foster networking among participants, articulate a critical stance toward technology, and encourage newcomers to enter the field as administrators and scholars (as well as teachers). I also draw on participant documents (social media posts, publications, and CVs) to investigate the uptake of these ideas. Moving forward, I suggest that in light of the institute's growing emphasis on digital composing, 1) knowledge-making should be seen as the larger frame for CIWIC/DMAC work, and 2) research should be added to the institute's existing articulation of the field in terms of people→teaching→technology.

On June 10, 2014, Emilio Hoffman was shot and killed in a gym locker room and a teacher was wounded in a Troutdale, Oregon school. The shooter killed himself after a shootout with police. Two days earlier, a couple shot two police officers at point blank range in a restaurant, covered one of them with a Gadsden flag and a swastika, and then later killed an armed civilian who tried to stop them in a Walmart. They died by their own hands. On June 5, 2014, a gunman at Seattle Pacific University shot one student and injured two others before being stopped with pepper spray and disarmed by a student. This came on the heels of another shooting in May in Isla Vista, California, where a man stabbed his three roommates to death, shot and killed three others, and injured 13 others—eight by gunshot and four by hitting them with his car. He died by his own hand. Similar incidents have received widespread attention: Newtown, Connecticut; Virginia Tech; and Fort Hood stand out in recent memory because of their coverage by the mass media. However, these events represent only a small fraction of gun violence in the United States. The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence reports that “on average, 32 Americans are murdered with guns every day and 140 are treated for a gun assault in an emergency room.” As was the case in the killings at ThurstonHigh School, ColumbineHigh School, and Virginia Tech, many expected stronger gun control legislation

Western education has always stressed the need for an intelligent use of literalness, especially in the fields of natural sciences. Plain style, clear expressions, transparent meanings, and methods of disambiguation were held in high esteem while tropes and figures like metaphor, hyperbole, irony, chiasmus etc. were viewed with suspicion, and their use was discouraged. Yet, in the writings of Kenneth Burke, especially his essay "Linguistic approaches to problems of education"(1955), and subsequently in other publications such as The Rhetoric of the Human Sciences (Nelson, Megill, and McCloskey ed. 1990), and The Rhetorical Turn: Invention and Persuasion in the Conduct of Inquiry (Herbert Simons ed. 1990), it has been shown that rhetoric pertains to all domains of teaching, learning and research. It is from here that the present paper departs in order to recall some of Kenneth Burke's flamboyant contributions to the study of rhetoric, which help us to better understand how figurative forms of expression are indispensible not only in educational practice but also when we think and argue about the discipline itself. Can Western forms of education claim universal relevance, or are they in other cultural contexts inappropriate - even destructive? The search for an answer will lead us to Maimire Mennasemay, an eminent Ethiopian scholar who more than anyone else has tried to figure out what the development of genuine forms of education in his country may involve.

This article uses a short reflection on the life and work of Father António Vieira (born Portugal, 1608, died Brazil, 1697) to draw our attention to the need to account not just for the dynamic interplay between colony and metropolis, but also the colony’s impact on the teaching, theory, and practice of rhetoric since 1492. Specifically, my reflection focuses on Vieira’s Le Lacrime d’Eraclito, a text that suggests that for rhetorical theory and practice the colonial encounter had ramifications on the European continent as profound as those on the American. We cannot speak of an American or Western rhetorical tradition and history without considering this interplay in which the American colonies were active participants, not passive subjects.

In this essay, I examine how Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner used her 2007 inaugural address to legitimize her political leadership. Placing the address within Argentina’s political climate and working in light of the fact that Fernández de Kirchner’s spouse was the out-going president, I use theories of political ethos to examine the challenges Fernández de Kirchner faced in inaugurating her presidency. I suggest that she constructed a hybrid ethos, combining multiple presidential images to reconcile competing concerns. I treat in depth three elements of that hybrid ethos: the ethos of a presidential couple that positioned Fernández de Kirchner alongside her popular husband; the ethos of a woman president building on a tradition of other influential Argentine women; and the ethos of a teacher-expert whose knowledge authorized national leadership. Enacting these varied ethoi, I argue, Fernández de Kirchner turned political challenges to her advantage and crafted the presidency she would assume.

Most professional education tracks combine school learning with practical workplace training. Although in theory alternating between these two settings is a great opportunity for learning, vocational education students encounter difficulties in integrating the formal explicit knowledge imparted in school with the informal tacit knowledge acquired in the workplace. This design study explores the potential of writing and peer collaboration as mediating tools to facilitate the articulation of conceptual and experiential knowledge. In the context of a school for social and health care assistants, 40 first- and second-year students wrote about critical situations encountered in the workplace, shared them with their classmates, and engaged in written and oral discussions with colleagues and the teacher. A web-based collaborative writing tool (wiki) was used for writing and facilitating participants’ interactions. The results showed significant gains in self-efficacy beliefs and performance on a case-based competence test for the first-year students, but not for those in the second-year. In addition, all students reported a high level of satisfaction with the instructional scenario and particularly its collaborative dimension. The discussion raises some issues and recommendations regarding the design of learning activities involving writing and peer feedback to support students in articulating conceptual and experiential knowledge

This essay uses the Community of Inquiry model to discuss strategies online writing instructors can use to provide effective feedback to students while intentionally creating a

I suggest that we deliberately frame our professional identity, in part, as activists—accepting and embracing the revolutionary and inescapably political nature of our work.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.