Book Review| May 01 2013 Review: Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe, by Marjorie Curry Woods Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Rhetorica (2013) 31 (2): 223–225. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.223 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Review: Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe, by Marjorie Curry Woods. Rhetorica 1 May 2013; 31 (2): 223–225. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2013.31.2.223 Download citation file: Ris (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 All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2013 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved.2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The author presents findings from a research study that examines the use of a racial literacy approach to teaching first-year composition.

Reviewed are: Composition’s Roots in English Education, by Patricia Lambert Stock, reviewed by Mark Blaauw-Hara Exploring More Signature Pedagogies: Approaches to Teaching Disciplinary Habits of Mind, edited by Nancy L. Chick, Aeron Haynie, and Regan A. R. Gurung, Reviewed by Yvonne Bruce Before and After the Tutorial: Writing Centers and Institutional Relationships, edited by Nicholas Mauriello, William J. Macauley Jr., and Robert T. Koch, Reviewed by Kristen Welch

After reviewing the past ten years of TETYC’s “What Works for Me,” I claim these pieces offer writing instructors much more than mere teaching tips; rather, they evidence a genre in a fraught relationship to academic discourse, a genre that asks readers to consider how the ways we write the classroom affect composition as a field, our teacherly selves, and the students in our classrooms.

This article describes working with a deaf student in a basic writing course and explores what teaching deaf students can teach us about composition studies.

This essay reports on a systematic assessment of 239 feature articles published in the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College between 2001 and 2012. It notes gaps in the published research on two-year college English teaching and recommends areas offocus for future work in the field.

This paper presents a study designed from a socially situated and activity theory perspective aimed at gaining a deeper understanding of how Ph.D. students regulate their academic writing activity. Writing regulation is a complex activity of a highly situated and social nature, involving cyclical thought-action-emotion dynamics and the individual’s capacity to monitor his/her activity. The central purpose was to analyze how writing regulation takes place within the framework of an educational intervention, a seminar designed to help Ph.D. students write their first research articles. The seminar not only focused on teaching the discursive resources of disciplinary articles in psychology but also sought to develop students’ recognition of epistemic stances (ways of knowing) and identities (ways of being) of their academic and disciplinary communities. While doing this, the seminar also aimed at helping students overcome the contradictions they encountered as they constructed their identities as researchers and writers through writing. We collected data on seminar participants’ perceptions (through analyses of interviews, diaries, and in-class interaction) and practices (through analyses of successive drafts and peers’ and tutors’ text revisions). Contradictions represent a challenge for which the individual does not have a clear answer. Consequently, solutions need to be creative and often painful; that is, the individual needs to work out something qualitatively different from a mere combination of two competing forces. The unit of analysis was the “Regulation Episode,” defined as the sequences of discourse and/or action from which a contradiction may be inferred and which, in turn, lead to the implementation of innovative actions to solve. Results showed that contradictions regarding students’ conceptualizations of their texts—as artifacts-in-activity versus as end-products—and of their identities as disciplinary writers become visible through certain discursive manifestations such as “dilemmas” and “critical conflicts” (Engeström & Sannino, 2011). The development of students’ disciplinary writing identity was affected by their perceptions of peripheral participation in the disciplinary community and of contradictions between different communities. Two successful ways students resolved contradictions and regulated their writing activity were to redefine the output and consider the text as a tool to think; implementing these solutions resulted in substantial changes to drafts. These results might be used to design socioculturally oriented educational interventions and tools to help students develop as disciplinary writers.

Over 2,500 years, philosophers in India refined a truth-centered and rhetorically egalitarian method of analogical debate: Nyāya vāda, and its five-part expression, the “Nyāya method.” According to Indian tradition, its practices emerged in the context of inter-scholar debates. However, most historical examples of Indian debate occur in mythical/religious dialogues between teacher and student, and currently Nyāya's scholars focus on theory, neglecting social practice. While Indologists describe the “what” of Nyāya, their bias toward theory leaves its conversational uses unexplored. Comparative rhetoricians describe Indian rhetoric with Greek terminologies as points of reference, and miss Nyāya's theoretical and practical debate tradition. This essay addresses this lack of social context and paucity of representation of Nyāya. It shows how informal debates in ancient literary/historical dialogues presage Nyāya's formulation and traces Nyāya's use in contemporary public examples, illustrating its rhetorical journey from discussions of scholars and kings, to academic formulization, to popular dialogic expression. Nyāya offers a clear alternative to Western confrontational rhetoric, and the presence of Indian “rhetorical” practice and theory undermines assumptions about “rhetoric” being uniquely Greek in origin, underscoring the need for comparative rhetorics.

Battle Linesoffers a compelling game experience that allows student-players to develop rhetorical, community-building, and digital literacies, crossing boundaries between academic and ludic practices. The game was test-run for the first time in a class of undergraduate students at UT Austin over the course of four weeks early in the spring semester of 2012.

This case study investigates Carolyn, an effective volunteer ESL and literacy instructor of adult African refugees, in order to understand both what it means to be a qualified instructor, and also how community-based volunteer instructors may become more qualified. The study’s findings suggest that Carolyn’s qualifications are a combination of personal dispositions, such as cultural sensitivity, and professional behaviors, including self-education, seeking mentoring and outside expertise, and purposeful reflection on her teaching. Several implications for supporting community-based volunteer literacy and ESL instructors emerge from these findings.

Considering the situated complexities and competing interest of exploitation and hope inherent in community literacy work, this article examines the ways that the Community Arts Program (CAP) at California State Prison-Sacramento complicates and also reifies archetypal grand literacy narratives and considers the place of such narratives within a broader argument for literacy as acts of creative resistance scaffolded by small, organic, tactical moves.

Review Article| April 01 2013 “We therefore ben tawht of that was write tho”: Teaching Gower in the Classroom Approaches to Teaching the Poetry of John Gower. Edited by R. F. Yeager and Brian W. Gastle. New York: Modern Language Association, 2011. Conrad van Dijk Conrad van Dijk Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (2): 383–385. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958530 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Conrad van Dijk; “We therefore ben tawht of that was write tho”: Teaching Gower in the Classroom. Pedagogy 1 April 2013; 13 (2): 383–385. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1958530 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. © 2013 by Duke University Press2013 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Innocent III’s 1215 decree requiring an annual confession of all Christians spurred the development of religious instructional works, some of the first texts written for nonnoble audiences and arguably the ancestors of working-class literature. This article explains the historical and cultural contexts that gave rise to these texts and the rich pedagogical opportunities they provide.

In modern usage, living “off the grid” means living totally independently, without the modern conveniences of publicly supplied gas, electricity, and water; it also refers to people who strive to remain unrecorded in governmental, financial, and medical documents. More generally, to live off the grid is to live against the grain of society, ideologically at odds with the mainstream. As we have put the idea to use for this guestedited issue, “Teaching Medieval Literature off the Grid,” instructors who incorporate noncanonical texts into their classrooms resemble the above definitions in several respects. For one thing, to teach “off the grid” is almost always to teach selfsufficiently — to locate the texts you think are important and figure out for yourself why they are important, to provide or create your own introductory notes, glosses, and other relevant contextualizing material for your students. It is to build a lesson literally from the ground up. You are certainly off the beaten path, without much assistance or advice from textbooks, teachers’ manuals, online resources, or other scholars’ work; there is little, if anything, to vouch for or justify your lesson plan. To put it simply, and most generally, to teach off the grid is to teach outside the comfort zone of the canon, without the builtin validations and pedagogies that literary tradition provides. The challenges of teaching off the grid are many, but this issue of Pedagogy argues that the rewards are great. Noncanonical texts can shed light on perspectives different from those represented by the culturally authoritative texts of the canon, often can serve the useful purpose of defamiliarizing traditional readings, and

Moving beyond the literary, this lesson on Hildegard of Bingen’s Physica touches on science, social studies, history, religion, music, and art to foster an imaginative and practical experience that encourages students to initiate productive conversations across several disciplines and to contribute to newly emerging fields such as the medical humanities.

Recent scholarship has emphasized the multilingualism of the medieval British Isles, but this has yet to translate into a fully integrated teaching practice free of anachronisms or stereotypes, particularly in the treatment of Irish and Welsh literature. This article suggests both theoretical and practical responses to this situation. Appendices offer specific guidance for teaching the Celtic-language texts now in the major anthologies of English and British literature.

The term dunamis, by which Aristotle defines rhetoric in the first chapter of The Art of Rhetoric, is a “power” term, as its various meanings in Aristotle's corpus—from vernacular ones like “political influence” to strictly philosophical ones like “potentiality”—attest.1 In the Rhetoric, however, dunamis is usually translated as “ability” or “faculty,” a designation that, compared to other terms that describe persuasion in ancient Greek poetics and rhetoric (such as “bia” [“force”] or “eros” [“seduction”]), marks rhetoric as a neutral human capacity rather than the use of language entangled in the vagaries of violence and desire.2 John Kirby calls Aristotle's definition “one of the boldest moves in the history of the philosophy of language: to redefine rhetoric, not as the use of peitho but as the study of peitho” (1990, 227). The presumption of rhetoric's ethical neutrality implied by dunamis has indeed become commonplace in interpretations of Aristotle's treatise itself and of rhetoric as a social phenomenon. As George Kennedy puts it in his authoritative translation of the Rhetoric, “Aristotle was the first person to recognize clearly that rhetoric as an art of communication was morally neutral, that it could be used either for good or ill” (1991, ix). In this article, I would like to probe another, perhaps not so reassuring, implication of dunamis as a term for rhetoric—that as “an ability to see all available means of persuasion,” it does not need to become (or emulate) practical oratory. In what follows, I suggest that Aristotle's terminology, however neutral it may appear, constitutes an intellectually and politically motivated act of naming that severs rhetorical knowledge from historically specific rhetorical practices and thereby erects a protective barrier between practical rationality and discourses of democracy.Defined as a capacity, rhetoric occupies a peculiar position with regard to existing practices of oratory and rhetorical instruction. In Metaphysics 9, dunamis describes “potentiality” of substances and nonrational animals and “ability” of humans. Among human dunameis, some are innate (such as the senses), some come by practice (such as flute playing), some are acquired through learning (such as the capacities of the crafts, technai) (see 1047b 33–35). Art “comes into being when out of many notions from experience we form one universal belief concerning similar facts,” and while experienced persons “know the fact but not the why of it,” those who possess a techne “know the why of it or the cause” (Aristotle 1979, 13). Accordingly, master craftsmen “are considered wiser not in virtue of their ability to do something but in virtue of having the theory and knowing the causes” (Aristotle 1979, 13). We see a similar logic at work in the opening chapter of the Rhetoric. As a rational capacity, rhetoric seems to be present among the general population, since most people are able to engage in verbal self-defense or attack. But their ability is often the result of random chance or habit rather than of a systematic art (Rhetoric 1354a). While one is unlikely to gain rhetorical dunamis through sheer experience, Aristotle insinuates that studying other currently available arts of rhetoric is even less preferable, for these arts give disproportionate attention to “matters outside the subject” (“ta exō tou pragmatos”) (Aristotle 1991a, 5, 7, 11). By offering a systematic investigation of “available means of persuasion” (Aristotle 1991a, 13) and stressing proofs (pisteis) and arguments (logoi), Aristotle sets up his version of the art above those purveyed by writers of rhetorical handbooks and other master teachers.Admittedly, the text of the Rhetoric disavows the first chapter's attack on other technai's treatment of emotions and matters “outside the subject” as it proceeds to furnish an extensive discussion of human emotions in book 2 and addresses style and delivery in book 3.3 However, the manner in which it presents rhetorical proofs and stylistic devices is detached from practices of oratory. Whether Aristotle considers rhetorical genres or emotions, his method of exposition is characterized by “surgical detachment and description” (Dubois 1993, 125). So, for example, he investigates the causes of anger without actually examining how this passion was stirred by a particular orator. According to Kennedy, the Rhetoric is one of Aristotle's “most Athenian works,” “for only in Athens did rhetoric fully function in the way he describes” (1996, 418), but the treatise contains little evidence of its author's direct contact with rhetorical practices of Athenian democracy. As J. C. Trevett has shown, “Aristotle fails … to quote from or allude to the text of a single deliberative or forensic speech” and instead “attributes statements or arguments to a particular speaker” or draws on various poetic genres such as epic, tragedy, and lyric (1996, 371, 372, 375). At the same time, Aristotle quotes extensively from epideictic compositions, including those written by Isocrates, for whom Aristotle reserves a minor place in the context of his discussion of style. This curiously inconsistent use of citations can be explained, in part, by the relative ease of access to literary genres and the paucity of deliberative and forensic texts, on the one hand, and Aristotle's lack of firsthand experience of oral practices of Athenian democracy due to his status as a resident alien, on the other.Yet Aristotle's many disparaging remarks about pandering orators and easily excitable and ignorant audiences indicate an entrenched suspicion toward the power of performed speech, the very power his rhetoric as dunamis is designed to guard against. The Rhetoric is indeed “the most Athenian” of Aristotle's works in the sense that in it the philosopher responds to an ideology that he regards as inimical to philosophical life and civic education.4 Aristotle is unequivocal that rhetoric would be of little use in a well-ordered state, since in such a state legislation limits the role of judges to a minimum and judges, in turn, are drawn from the ranks of prudent citizens. By contrast, in a corrupt regime such as Athenian democracy, judges are assigned their roles by lot and their decision making is often obscured by passion and self-interest (Rhetoric 1354a32–1354b12). It is the fickle and corrupt disposition of the demos that calls for the use of style and delivery that Aristotle considers vulgar and superfluous to proper argumentation (Rhetoric 1404a). Eager to meet their audience's expectations, orators worry more about securing the hearers' approval than about demonstrating the truth of their position. Aristotle observes the same deplorable state of affairs both in dramatic competitions and political contests, where a skillful performance, not the integrity of a tragic plot or a logically compelling demonstration, wins applause (Rhetoric 1403b).5 Not only does the audience influence the form and content of drama and oratory—it corrupts the very character of performers. Aristotle's association of performance in drama and oratory with pandering to a corrupt set of listeners is thus consonant with the conceptualization of rhetoric as a dunamis, a rational capacity that does not require imitation or practice.The status of rhetoric as a dunamis and a techne secures its position as a form of philosophically legitimate knowledge, for it allows its students to understand the “why” of persuasion without committing them to a morally precarious life of political performance in a corrupt regime. At the same time, rhetoric does not stand on its own as a “theory of civic discourse,” as the subtitle of Kennedy's translation (1991) of the Rhetoric calls it. Although the treatise's language, preoccupation with abstract categorization, and apparent detachment from the particulars of oratory might qualify it as a “theory” in our contemporary sense, for Aristotle rhetoric is a productive art, not to be confused with theoria, the highest form of philosophical knowledge that rules over practical and productive arts.6 In Aristotle's hierarchy of knowledge, rhetoric is subordinated to politike, the “master art” in the sphere of praxis, which comprises ethics and politics (Nicomachean Ethics, 1094b). As complementary parts of politike, ethics and politics investigate the principles that guide the attainment of virtue and practical wisdom and the forms of political organization most congenial to this pursuit.Aristotle would likely be surprised by our inclination to read the Rhetoric as a theory of civic discourse, since he explicitly disapproves of those who, “partly from ignorance, partly from boastfulness, and partly from other human weaknesses,” take the appearance of rhetoric as an “offshoot” of politike to mean that the two are the same art (Aristotle 1991a, 19). He points out that rhetoric, though it “slips under the garb” of politike, is but a dunamis of furnishing arguments (tou porisai logous), not an art of good life and good government (Aristotle 1991a, 19). Here he doesn't seem to be criticizing handbook writers; rather this objection is likely a reference to Isocrates, whose logon paideia was in Aristotle's sights when he lectured on rhetoric at the Academy and Lyceum. Isocrates regards discourse (logos) as an artificer of civic institutions and embraces the performative and politically constitutive character of traditional Greek education (paideia) by making character and political identity dependent on recurrent performance addressed to the polis. Despite his elitism, Isocrates accepts the norms of his rhetorical culture and tries to adapt them to a literary medium. On the contrary, Aristotle aspires to protect the practical rationality and virtue of a properly habituated student from being corrupted by these very cultural norms. It could be argued that Aristotle's effort to split the traditional link between eloquence (eu legein) and virtuous action (eu prattein) by making them subjects of different arts (rhetorike and politike, respectively) is a response to Isocrates' “boastful” incorporation of the two under the name philosophia.7By conceiving of rhetoric as a dunamis, Aristotle distances the art from practical oratory and reduces it to a faculty in the service of substantive intellectual disciplines. Why, then, are we (academic students of rhetoric) so beholden to this treatise? The text's current prestige is hardly the consequence of the way the rhetorical tradition has viewed it. As Carol Poster summarizes the history of its transmission and interpretation: Hellenistic rhetoricians didn't know it; neoplatonic commentators overlooked it; the Byzantines didn't understand it; the early Middle Ages didn't have it; the late middle ages and Renaissance scholars were puzzled by it; and not until the prejudice against Aristotle due to its association with scholasticism died away was the Rhetorica revived alongside Ciceronian rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. (1998, 332)The rise of the Rhetoric to its position of dominance in the twentieth century has many possible explanations. One of them, undoubtedly, is the name of Aristotle, whose historical authority is recognized across the university and, as such, allows scholars from less prestigious and less well-funded fields (such as rhetoric and composition) to gain at least some measure of respectability by sheer association with the Philosopher.8 Another reason is the ascendance of theory among the humanities and social sciences due to the increasing stress on research over teaching in modern universities. Perhaps because the Rhetoric looks so much more like “theory” than the fragmented record of the sophists and the writings of Isocrates, it has come to be regarded as a high point of rhetoric's evolution as an intellectual discipline in the fourth century BCE and a solid point of departure for contemporary students.9 This teleological view has not gone unchallenged, of course, but the recovery and interpretation of what Aristotle's conceptualization of rhetoric has marginalized or suppressed is an ongoing project.10 I would therefore like to conclude with a plea to young scholars to keep up questioning the beginnings of our discipline, including Aristotle's not-so-innocent definition of rhetoric.

Scholars in business and technical communication have continuously made efforts to look for effective teaching approaches for cross-cultural business and technical communication; however, little research has been conducted to study the process by which students develop intercultural competence; fewer studies have been conducted to assess learners' needs for gaining intercultural competence in the globalization age. To assess students' level of intercultural competence and understand whether they are likely to change in response to teaching, I first introduce a two-part framework for teaching and learning intercultural business and technical communication: the DMIS model—Developmental Model of Intercultural Sensitivity, and the related instrument to assess intercultural sensitivity—the Intercultural Development Inventory (IDI). Then I report the results of using the framework to assess and develop students' intercultural competence, and conclude the study by emphasizing the significance of the current empirical research and discuss the framework's limitations.

Novice Web developers and other technical communicators need to learn not only accessibility standards but also factors that make designs usable to audiences with disabilities. One challenge of teaching accessibility to novices is creating exigency; another is emulating experiences of users with disabilities. This article tackles teaching novices to create Web sites for visually impaired audiences using a five-stage, recursive approach. Teaching best coding practices is only one stage: Instructors should create exigency by introducing real users and their experiences. They should also check for accessibility and emulate screen-reader output using tools such as WAVE and FANGS, respectively. Furthermore, novice developers should examine how different tools can be used in combination to provide a variety of feedback.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher’s social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold. The discourse surrounding multimodal composition was analyzed via inductive analysis. Students’ use of semiotic resources in the HyperStudio composition was analyzed with Unsworth’s image-language intermodal framework. Then, teacher-student conversations related to visual and linguistic signs were triangulated with students’ compositions. Findings show that a classroom teacher’s limited content knowledge as related to metafunctions and metalanguage of visual and linguistic sign systems affected the information taught to the students and, ultimately, their use of visual and linguistic signs. Students demonstrated tacit knowledge of image-language relations beyond what was taught but lacked the explicit knowledge to more strategically use visual and linguistic signs. Implications include the importance of creating opportunities for teachers to develop more substantive content knowledge of the metalanguages and metafunctions of various sign systems.

Problem: This teaching case presents the authors' experience planning, teaching, and evaluating a semester-long course within a computer science undergraduate program; the aim of this course was to develop soft skills that enable students to actively contribute within multicultural and transdisciplinary teams. Research question: How can an undergraduate-level course help computer science students better understand the multicultural and interdisciplinary scenarios that compose today's working environment? Situating the case: The literature review contextualizes the case as part of a broader group of literature concerned with curricular reforms that replace the traditional emphasis on memorization of fixed disciplinary knowledge with what have been called “21st Century Skills.” In addition, it builds a theoretical framework followed by the course that brings together Hofstede's Cultural Theory and Vygotsky's ideas regarding the social formation of the mind. Methodology: The researchers conducted two studies with a group of 62 students who participated in the course. The first one measured how students appropriated the concepts presented in the course and learning outcomes. The second one evaluated the students' perception of the course a year after they had enrolled in it. About the teaching case: Results show that the vast majority of students appropriate the concepts of the theoretical framework used throughout the course. In addition, most students perceive the courses' contribution to their professional lives positively-particularly regarding understanding cultural and transdisciplinary issues. A small group does not consider a course like the one proposed to be useful. Conclusions: The implication of this teaching case is that the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences is something that can be addressed directly by a specifically designed course within a computer science curriculum (rather than exclusively being a secondary outcome of other courses). The limitations of the study are that it presents the authors' own teaching experience (therefore, it is not a third-party report) and that it uses pretesting and posttesting as an asessment tool for multicultural and transdisciplinary abilities. Future work would show how similar experiences could be conducted across other cultural scenarios and possible ways in which to engage the small group of students who do not consider the course useful.

Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni­ face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon­ nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi­ tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir­ teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre­ tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec­ tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta­ tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro­ viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans­ lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip­ tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic literacy to go unchallenged, a tendency that a focus on those literacy practices deemed nonacademic risks maintaining; second, and relatedly, insofar as work in composition studies remains tied by its location in the academy to programs charged with the study and teaching of academic writing, those of us identified with composition cannot allow cultural norms for academic literacy to go unchallenged; and third, some of the most promising work challenging such norms can be found in work taking an academic literacies approach.

A s I write this response, the end of the term is nearing, and with it, the end of my weekly meetings with a diverse group of graduate students (literature program, writing program, school of education, composition program) enrolled in my "Literacy and Pedagogy" seminar.The issues raised by this symposium's contributors resonate and echo back with the seminar's term-long collective investigation, so it is from within this context and through the concerns these graduate students have articulated throughout the term that I want to join the conversation.But first a few words about the seminar itself, the historical, theoretical, and ideological scrutiny of literacy and pedagogy it calls for, the reflexive inquiry it incites, and the contributions this kind of inquiry can make to a discussion of "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies" (LiCS Mission Statement).I started teaching this seminar in the late 1980s.What I had initially proposed was a seminar in histories, theories and practices of pedagogy (which eventually, led to my articulation of "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" (Salvatori 4).The intellectual atmosphere of my department at the time was beginning to be hospitable to the idea that advanced graduate students from our different programs, with their different teaching experiences and theoretical backgrounds, could benefit from such a course of study.But, it was suggested, it might be strategic for me to combine "pedagogy" with "literacy, " since as the subject of a graduate seminar, literacy would carry greater intellectual weight than pedagogy, and attract more students (and, I sensed, raise fewer faculty eyebrows).Needless to say, I was taken aback by the suggestion, but because I was equally invested in the study of theories of literacy, I complied and decided to foreground in my course proposal what would have been in any case two of my planned lines of critical inquiry: what kinds of literacy different theories of reading and writing, and their pedagogical enactments, assume and can presume to foster (Cultural Literacy was earning large numbers of academic and non-academic acolytes); and what can a critical and reflexive study of pedagogy contribute to and draw from the study of literacy.The "and" in the title became and has since remained the central focus of the seminar's theoretical investigations, a nexus that through the years, because of different texts and different students, has consistently disclosed new and exciting "matters of concern" (Latour) for graduate students who are about to make crucial decisions about their professional future.Since the very first time, the diversity of students' backgrounds and interests led to more expansive and inclusive articulations of the seminar's original keywords and concepts (Glascott), and consequently of the seminar's affordances (Vieira).Even before we read Street, the use of the singular for literacy and pedagogy in the original title soon felt inaccurate, constrictive, but for bureaucratic reasons, it could not be changed.Thus "the singular" remained.But it consistently occasioned early

This article describes a pilot study on developmental writers’ attitudes toward and use of instructor-written feedback in multiple sections of a precollege-level writing— course at our college.

This essay presents various perspectives about honors work among first- and second-year students as they proposed and completed independent, open-ended projects in BritishLiterature— I and British Literature— II.

Color highlighting is used to connect revision mini-lessons to teacher comments that are easy for students to identify and quicker for teachers to generate electronically.

In this response I offer a counternarrative to Keith’s dystopian vision and challenge some of his assumptions about the state of our profession. My alternate view notwithstanding, I fully agree with Kroll on more than a few points, not the least of which is the need for more faculty voices to join this conversation at the local and national levels.

This article develops a theoretical understanding of the processes involved in the co-construction of a written text by a teacher and student from a Vygotskian perspective. Drawing on cultural-historical and sociocultural theories of writing and Vygotsky’s concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), this case study of a student and teacher interaction in a UK secondary school examines the social mediation of collaborative activity in the negotiation of meaning.While expressivist process theories of writing focus on the development of the authentic voice of the writer, this article contends that the development of a student’s writing abilities requires active intervention by a teacher within a constructed zone of development. Writing is viewed as a situated activity system that involves a dialectical tension between thought and the act of composition.Finally, the article will argue that the recursive and complex nature of writing development is an integral tool in the learner’s own agency in creating a social environment for development.

In this article, we show how two transnational youth, with the instructional support of their teacher, recruited their languages and lifeworlds, particularly their border-crossing experiences, as tools for engaging with school-based literacy practices. We analyze literary texts that the students composed, showing how the students’ uses of their linguistic repertoires and experiences of border-crossing enhanced their compositions. Through our study, we seek to contribute a more thorough understanding of the combinations of student agency and teacher support that permit secondary school literacy learning to become a bridge from students’ past experience, existing knowledge, and everyday lifeworlds into work that is visible and valued in the world of school. More particularly, we offer border zones as an analytic framework for several dimensions of school literacy work for our focal students, and also as a potentially useful framework for curriculum and instruction.

Although mounting research evidence suggests that dialogic teaching correlates with student achievement gains and with high levels of student engagement, little work in English education addresses the challenge of supporting new teachers in developing dialogically organized instructional practices. In a design-based study, we examine a curricular intervention designed to cultivate development of dialogically organized instructional practices, defined as instruction that provides students with frequent opportunities to engage with core disciplinary concepts through sustained, substantive dialogue. The curriculum invited secondary English teacher candidates to repeatedly enact dialogically organized instruction and to receive feedback from peers using video and Web 2.0-based technologies across a year-long student teaching internship. In English methods seminars, eighty-seven participants from two cohorts generated over 300 five-minute video clips, associated planning documents, transcripts, and reflections. We coded documents for student participation, evidence of planning for dialogic instruction, and classroom discourse variables associated in previous research with greater student engagement in substantive classroom interaction. We find that those who planned for dialogic instruction using dialogic tools were significantly more likely to have higher ratios of student utterances in relation to teacher utterances. The use of dialogic tools—conceptualized as those practical tools mobilized in teacher planning and practice with potential to mediate dialogically organized instruction in a given classroom situation—explained more of the variance in student participation than did any other factor. Attention to such tools may help English teacher candidates enact dialogically organized instructional practices.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted at the University of Michigan, this article examines the extent to which composition instructors theorize and teach reading-writing connections and argues that explicitly teaching reading-writing connections may increase student motivation to complete assigned reading. The article also discusses using model texts as an effective means of teaching those connections.

Welcome to Double HelixSeattle has its double helix pedestrian bridge.The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) outside Chicago has its gold-colored double helix staircase within the Proton Pagoda

Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and race productively.

This essay discusses five main topoi in the Divine Comedy through which teachers might encourage students to explore the question of the Divine Comedy’s treatment of philosophy: (1) the Divine Comedy’s representations in Inferno of noble pagans who are allegorically or historically associated with philosophy or natural reason; (2) its treatment of the relationship between faith and reason and that relationship’s consequences for the text’s understanding of the respective authoritativeness of theology and philosophy; (3) representations in the Divine Comedy that relate to the question of the practical value of philosophical (not to mention theological) speculation; (4) the text’s treatment of the respective merits of practical and contemplative activities; and (5) its implicit defense of philosophy’s authority with respect to ethical and political questions.

This article examines how Dante used history and suggests approaches to incorporate his texts into undergraduate history teaching. Examples of successful assignments are offered that encourage students to compare Dante’s historical figures in a work like the Commedia with “real” history. Such exercises introduce students to some of the creative ways that Dante shaped many historical figures to meet his purposes — personal, political, or spiritual. An extended case study of Dante’s inclusion of southern Italian historical actors is used to illustrate some of the more complex ways that Dante revised or reinvented historical events. It is argued that Dante’s use of history can be a valuable tool to teach the skills of critical analysis and close reading.

English programs like mine face a particular challenge: implementing a manageable assessment process in an institutional context featuring scarce resources, staff reductions, and heavy teaching loads. We believe our portfolio-based process enables us to assess our program’s effectiveness without reducing our students’ performance to a set of abstract, statistical data.

How to engage students in the Commedia and involve them in the pleasure of decoding the rich density of Dante’s allusions to historical, literary, and Biblical characters? This article suggests that a class on the Inferno can be enriched by creating a wiki that encourages and facilitates individualized research, peer evaluation, and frequent teacher feedback.

This article argues that prevailing approaches to research instruction in introductory composition courses, as represented in print and digital instructional materials, reflect outdated theoretical views and may damage students’ researcher identity. Teaching research as a closed, linear, universal process prevents students from leaving the liminal space of the composition classroom.

In this article, the author explains the habits that she brought to teaching English from the field of second-language acquisition. She began teaching in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where graduate teaching assistants were trained to use the communicative language teaching method, especially as it is developed by Lee and VanPatten in Making Communicative Language Teaching Happen (1995). When the author switched to teaching world literature survey courses in the Department of English at North Carolina State University, she found that many of the techniques she had used in beginner language courses applied beautifully to what she was trying to do in her new field. After briefly explaining the characteristics of communicative language teaching, this article highlights the three main strategies that she found most useful: minimizing “teacher talk” and maximizing the work the students do in the classroom, emphasizing the process of learning to encourage the students’ metacognitive thinking about their own education, and making negotiation a key activity to engage their critical thinking skills. As universities and colleges increasingly decide to make critical thinking and student engagement key factors in their brand, it can be very useful to reexamine the habits that we adopt and to consider some of the best practices of our colleagues in other departments.

Review Article| January 01 2013 Notes from Post–9/11 Classrooms: Parsing Representation and Reality Teaching the Literature of Today's Middle East. Allen Webb, David Alvarez, Blain H. Auer, Monica Mona Eraqi, Jeffrey A. Patterson, Vivan Steemers. New York: Routledge, 2012. Beth Stickney Beth Stickney Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2013) 13 (1): 189–197. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814449 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Beth Stickney; Notes from Post–9/11 Classrooms: Parsing Representation and Reality. Pedagogy 1 January 2013; 13 (1): 189–197. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1814449 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. © 2012 by Duke University Press2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

Introducing Dante in a course on medieval visuality positioned the Commedia in relation to medieval women’s visionary and mystical literature. This article suggests how a comparison of the Commedia with this literature, particularly the works of Hildegard of Bingen, can illuminate the visionary mode of writing that Dante employed.