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.

Text-driven, quantitative methods provide new ways to analyze student writing, by uncovering recurring grammatical features and related stylistic effects that remain tacit to students and those who read and evaluate student writing. To date, however, these methods are rarely used in research on students transitioning into US postsecondary writing, and especially rare are studies of student writing that is already scored according to high-stakes writing expectations. This study offers a corpus-based, comparative analysis of higher- and lower-scoring Advanced Placement (AP) exams in English, revealing statistically significant syntactic patterns that distinguish higher-scoring exams according to “informational production” and lower-scoring essays according to “involved” or “interactional” production (Biber, 1988). These differences contribute to what we label emphatic generality in the lower-scoring essays, in which writers tend to foreground human actors, including themselves. In contrast, patterns in higher-scoring essays achieve what we call elaborated specificity, by focusing on and explicating specific, often abstract, concepts.These findings help uncover what is rewarded (or not) in high-stakes writing assessments and show that some students struggle with register awareness. A related implication, then, is the importance of teaching register awareness to students at the late secondary and early university level—students who are still relative novices, but are being invited to compose informationally dense prose. Such register considerations, and specific features revealed in this study, provide ways to help demystify privileged writing forms for students, particularly students for whom academic writing may seem distant from their own communicative practices and ambitions.

In this set of essays, the authors argue for the importance of affect and emotion in literacy education, teacher education, and classroom life. In the introduction, Boldt describes the authors’ shared belief in learning as happening within a landscape of relationships and emergent life in classrooms and beyond. The introduction makes clear that while the authors are writing from different intellectual traditions, they share a sense of anger about the fetishization of standardization, testing, and methods at the expense of ambiguity, improvisation, and unexpected, disruptive, and enlivening classroom relationships. In the first essay, Lewis demonstrates how emotion is regulated in a secondary English classroom and yet can never be fully regulated, giving rise to discomfort and to unexpected transformations of signs. In the second essay, Leander argues for a more emergent vision of lesson planning that begins with the body and its expression of energies and potentials in the present. In the final essay, Boldt urges that teachers be provided with opportunities to openly examine their negative emotional responses—including anxiety and, at times, aggression—to mismatches between children and what is required in a high-stakes environment. Throughout the essays, the authors enact rather than describe a Deleuzo-Guattarian perspective, laying their differences and their shared commitments side-by-side in the hope of creating for themselves and their readers new sets of relations and possibilities and, with those, the condition of potential for imagination and desire.

AbstractPeople use software in service of complex tasks that are distributed over sprawling and idiosyncratically constructed technological and social networks. The aims and means of carrying out those tasks are not only complex but uncertain, which creates problems for providing help if the tasks, starting points, and endpoints cannot be assumed. Uncertain problems are characteristic of networks, and software forums stand out as effective public spaces in which help can be pursued in a network fashion that differs from traditional help documentation. This article describes the results of a quantitative descriptive study of such practices in four software forums.Keywords: documentationforumsinstruction setsnetworks NotesThis study received an exemption approval from North Carolina State University IRB on November 24, 2010. IRB approval #1774. A condition of approval is that all quoted material is kept anonymous to the extent possible.Additional informationNotes on contributorsJason SwartsJason Swarts is a professor of English at North Carolina State University. His research and teaching centers on mobile communication, coordinative work practices, and emerging genres of technical communication.

An explanation of the history of standardized tests in the US reveals the ways they have shifted from tools of articulation to tools of accountability not only in K–12 classrooms but also in higher education. Understanding the competing interests at play and the potential effects of the Common Core State Standards at the college level is crucial to reasserting assessment as a teaching and learning practice instead of a system of accountability.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.

Drawing on interviews with writing teachers, this article highlights some of the affective responses that may arise for students, community partners, and teachers when we situate our pedagogies in public sites beyond the classroom. I analyze a teacher-narrated moment of student distress to demonstrate how theories of transformative learning might help us productively theorize affect in service-learning and community-based education. To conclude, I offer a reciprocal model of care that employs tenets of feminist pedagogy, such as transparency and decentering of authority, and that acknowledges the valid emotions students, teachers, and community members may experience. I call for community literacy practitioners to see the power of all participants to both give and receive care in transformative education.

In fields such as sociolinguistics and composition and rhetoric, communication is increasingly understood as translingual, that is, as negotiated socially across languages. Those of us engaged in community literacy can and should recognize the deeply multilingual nature of the communities in which we work, and we should understand, embrace, and forward the translingual approach. Here I reflect on my first conscious attempt to teach translingually in a college course with a community-based learning component. I present an overview of the translingual orientation, reflect on the decisions I made as I prepared a college community-based learning course with translingual intentions but not overt translingual objectives, and examine some the students’ reflections that reveal their language attitudes at the end of the course. I argue that small, intentional decisions made towards a broader translingual orientation towards language and literacy make an immediate difference in how students think about language, and that those engaged in community literacy partnerships are in need of a theory of communication that the translingual approach can provide.

Responding to evidence of a steep decline in the reading of poetry, this article advocates a set of broad principles for poetry teaching that address the aesthetic function and materiality of poetry, and argues for a dialectic relationship in the poetry classroom between thoughtful analysis and interpretive freedom.

This article explores The Crisis magazine as a framework for students to gain a better understanding of the historical and cultural contexts of the works produced during the Harlem Renaissance. Ortega’s essay details the benefits of archival research for undergraduate students and specific ways in which to use The Crisis as a teaching tool in an interdisciplinary curriculum. Finally, her essay examines the ways in which The Crisis helps facilitate an understanding of canon formation during the Harlem Renaissance.

This article shares tactics for teaching Blu’s Hanging as a text assigned because of its controversy, though not necessarily subsumed by it. The novel is presented so as to grapple with the stakes of ethnic/racial representation alongside careful textual analysis, using the controversy around Yamanaka’s work to “teach the conflicts” of literary studies.

Introduction| April 01 2015 Introduction: Encounter Tradition, Make It New: Essays on New Approaches for Teaching the Harlem Renaissance Fran L. Lassiter Fran L. Lassiter Guest Editor Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2015) 15 (2): 353–358. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845081 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Fran L. Lassiter; Introduction: Encounter Tradition, Make It New: Essays on New Approaches for Teaching the Harlem Renaissance. Pedagogy 1 April 2015; 15 (2): 353–358. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2845081 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2015 by Duke University Press2015 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Some literacy scholars have embraced rooted cosmopolitanism as a framework for educating in today’s globalized and pluralistic world, where communicating across difference is an important individual and societal good. But how is the “cosmopolitan turn” in writing complicated by considering the religiosity of writing teachers and student writers? Is it possible for writing instructors and student writers to stay rooted in their own faith traditions, while maintaining openness to other ethical vantage points? What new questions are raised for cosmopolitan-minded writing pedagogy by these considerations? Through portraiture, we present complex pictures of how an American evangelical Christian teacher, Sam, and one of his evangelical Christian students, Charlie, engaged with a writing unit focused on “This I Believe” essay writing. The portraitures suggest that Sam, a more cosmopolitan evangelical, envisioned the unit as an invitation to (a) articulate one’s own beliefs in the wide universe of moral possibility and (b) get used to the beliefs of others who are ethically different from oneself. Charlie, on the other hand, conceptualized the unit’s writing, listening, and reading tasks as ways of honoring God and letting God speak through his literate practices. Our interpretation suggests that his populist evangelical faith made it difficult for him to openly engage in cosmopolitan dialogue across ethical difference. We hope our portraits of Sam and Charlie might move scholars interested in writing, literacy education, and rooted cosmopolitanism to engage themselves with the challenges and possibilities opened up when students’ and teachers’ religious roots are taken seriously.

research-article Share on To what extent should we re-examine our teaching? Author: David Hailey Utah State University Utah State UniversityView Profile Authors Info & Claims Communication Design QuarterlyVolume 3Issue 2February 2015 pp 13–19https://doi.org/10.1145/2752853.2752855Published:27 March 2015Publication History 0citation15DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations0Total Downloads15Last 12 Months1Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

There's a saying, sometimes attributed as a French Proverb: "If you don't do politics, politics does you. " This seems a straightforward enough idea. Yet as a field, we seem hesitant to acknowledge our necessary and unavoidable role within political structures. Perhaps out of a sense of professionalism, we place a veneer of neutrality around our classrooms and scholarship that constrains our potential as rhetoricians, public writers, and educators. At such moments, we are reminded of Paulo Freire's "Letter to a North American Teacher": "The idea of an identical and neutral role for all teachers could only be accepted by someone who was either naive or very clever. Such a person might affirm the neutrality of education, thinking of school as merely a kind of parenthesis whose essential structure was immune to the influences of social class, of gender, or race" (211). That is, claims of neutrality are either naive of political conditions or a clever way of preserving an unjust status quo. Breaking free of this thinking allows us to ask what our teaching supports and challenges, what our scholarship maintains and combats. With these questions in mind and a recognition of the need to decide and to act, we developed this special issue.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.

magine a department where there is only one black professor, a common occurrence across universities and colleges today.She is the first black professor in the history of the department there and certainly the first to be tenured.After many years, she finally sees a graduate student complete her dissertation, a young black woman who is also amongst the first black females to graduate with a doctorate from this program.And while there are plenty of ancestors and kinfolk across states, countries, and even continents celebrating this achievement, some of the white faculty are not as ecstatic.In fact, a few white junior professors, self-proclaimed feminists who teach first year writing, both stunningly under-achieving in their fields, begin to tell people that the professor wrote the dissertation for this black female graduate student, with the full support of staff/administration in spreading this Untruth.In the parlay of black youth culture, yes, we can call that: haters gon hate.While fully acknowledging all that hateration, let's also dig deeper.It would seem that any researcher or scholar in the academy would know that you cannot possibly present at conferences, give keynote addresses, publish your own articles, review other articles for peer-reviewed journals, work on your own book manuscripts, review other people's manuscripts and books in print, work on grant-funded projects, and then also write someone else's dissertation for them.It seems safe to say that it is a huge task to even make time to read drafts of advisees' dissertations.This event is just one of many that show how white faculty and staff can be deeply invested in the illogic of their racism.This story, along with the many other stories that I will tell here, will serve not as micro-instances of campus racism but as macro-pictures of political life in American universities.I intend for these stories to offer a context for the ways in which we must understand and rupture whiteness, racial violence, and the institutional racism of our disciplinary constructs in composition-rhetoric as central to the political work we must do.

In Portuguese higher education, teachers from different scientific areas recognize that their students have difficulties with writing. Nevertheless, preparing students for academic writing is not a priority and any intervention depends more on the interest of particular teachers than on any institutional policy. The development of a more institutional approach to academic writing in Portugal will imply a deeper knowledge of the multifaceted reality of the students’ situation, involving identification of their own perceptions of their writing processes and of the academic writing practices they are subject to. This is the aim of our study, based on 1150 students’ answers to a questionnaire about literacy practices in Portuguese higher education.Our results show that students seem to be conscious of the procedural nature of writing and of the role and importance of planning, composing and reviewing in the course of their writing processes. As for their perceptions about institutional interventions aimed at fostering writing abilities and teacher feedback on their written work, the answers to the questionnaire allow us to conclude that such support is not frequently offered. There are, however, some differences in the way these issues are considered across the various fields of study.

The Millennial Generation presents a unique set of challenges to the classroom, including the desire to multi-task and teamwork as well as a strong need for attention and validation. Frequently, this creates a conflict between the students’ current skills and the teacher’s expectations when it comes to drafting and revision efforts. Restructuring traditional peer response methods into a group conferencing method allows students to utilize their current strengths while building skills necessary for later writing assignments. By participating in a six-step activity that occurs during a seventy-five minute class period, students are asked to listen, read, write, respond, discuss, and apply writing techniques. Over the semester, the author finds that students are invited into the writing discourse by developing vocabulary representative of global writing issues (development, transitions, paragraph structure, etc.) as well as that of grammar and mechanics. In the process, students learn how to trust their instincts and listen to others while participating in a methodical approach to decision-making.

The merits of reflective exercises in teacher training are well known. Reflection through journals, surveys/questionnaires, action research, or supervised teaching and classroom discussion creates opportunities for teachers in training to think critically of what they do in their classes, why they do it, and how they could improve. Sometimes, however, teacher training programs may not be ideally positioned to offer novice student teachers (NSTs) the most extensive and coordinated opportunities for teaching, observation, and reflection. The current study examines the usefulness of an intensive reflective exercise realized as a two-question questionnaire used in a Second Language Writing (SLW) course. The findings indicate that the questionnaire was useful in eliciting a fair amount of critical thinking and integration of prior knowledge, new content, and personal experience. For the teacher trainer, it worked as a tool for assessing student learning and planning lessons. The study reflects on the limitations of the intensive reflection exercise applied in it (such as brevity and isolation from other assignments), and makes pedagogical recommendations for future implementation.

This article shows how brief psycholinguistic reading experiments can illustrate the effects of various grammatical features, pique students’ interest, and position them to construct their own understanding of English grammar, separate from the teacher’s dictates.

This article situates the teaching of first- and second-semester college writing courses in relation to current discussions about the Common Core State Standards Initiative, competency-based education, the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing,” the “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition,” and vertical college writing curricula.

Pidgin, the Creole identified with “Local” culture in Hawaii, is seldom discussed in terms of its connection to the Hawaiian language and the ways it affirms Native identity.—Using Indigenous rhetorics and language politics as frames, I articulate Native Hawaiians’ adoption of Pidgin as acts of Ellen Cushman’s cultural perseverance and Scott Richard—Lyons’s rhetorical sovereignty. Using the poem “The Question,” written in Pidgin by Hawaiian poet Noelle Kahanu as an example of Indigenous rhetoric, I discuss how teaching—it through this lens, compared to a minority rhetoric lens, captures different histories and experiences and engenders critical awareness of the identities students perform.

We examine the explanatory weight of child-related and contextual factors on first graders’ achievements in spelling and separation between words. The participants were 215 kindergartners, 113 boys and 102 girls (M = 5 years 4 months, SD = 4 months) from both monolingual and bilingual communities in Spain. They were native speakers of Spanish in the monolingual communities and bilingual Spanish/Catalan or Spanish/Basque speakers in the bilingual communities and had Catalan and Basque, respectively, as the language of instruction. The three languages have shallow orthographies. Children were first examined in kindergarten in a number of literacy related abilities (e.g., knowledge of letters, writing) to detect predictors of spelling and separation between words that were, in turn, evaluated at the end of first grade of elementary school. All the participants were assessed in their language of instruction. The best explanatory models were those including interactions among child-level factors and between these factors and contextual variables. Only knowledge of writing in kindergarten appeared as the common explanatory factor for first graders’ attainments. Attainments in spelling were predicted by children’s level of literacy and knowledge of letters moderated by parent’s education; performance in word separation was predicted by phonological awareness and vocabulary knowledge moderated by parental education. Teaching practices affected spelling performance but not learning to separate between words.