Webheads in Action is an online community of practice (CoP) comprising teachers and learners who, for well over a decade now, have engaged one another in frequent collaboration serving to enhance the learning and knowledge of all concerned. This is achieved through constant exchange of ideas not only about teaching but also on the use of the Internet to provide opportunities for learning through appropriate application of freely available Web 2.0 tools in personal learning networks (PLNs). This article introduces Webheads as a CoP and provides specific examples of how participants scaffold each other’s teaching of writing and development of multiliteracies skills.

The present article describes and evaluates collaborative interdisciplinary group projects initiated by content lecturers and an English-as-a-Foreign-Language (EFL) instructor for the purpose of teaching technical writing skills in an aeronautical engineering degree program. The proposed technical writing model is assessed against the results of a learner survey and refined accordingly. The survey showed that learners appreciated the cross-disciplinary collaboration in projects, and it delivered important insights into learning effects and student progress in both language and content matters. The article concludes with a list of recommendations for the implementation of project-based collaborative technical writing instruction, which may support or complement academic writing courses in similar contexts. The proposed model considers the circumstances of students in workload-intensive tertiary settings and synthesizes approaches such as problem-based learning, content-based instruction, task-based language teaching, a guided product approach to collaborative writing, and learner autonomy.

This article offers productive usability as a usability approach that focuses on the usefulness of civic Web sites. Although some sites meet traditional usability standards, civic sites might fail to support technical literacy, productive inquiry, collaboration, and a multidimensional perspective—all essential ingredients for citizen-initiated change online. In this article, we map productive usability onto broader philosophies of usability and offer a framework for rethinking usability in civic settings and for teaching productive usability.

Research problem: The purpose of this study is to examine US engineering students' intercultural competence and its pedagogical implications. Three research questions are addressed: (1) What are engineering students' levels of awareness and sensitivity toward intercultural communication? (2) What are their perceived needs in learning intercultural communication? (3) Given these findings, what are some useful approaches and methods to teach intercultural communication in the engineering communication service class? Literature review: The literature review examines current studies on US engineering students' intercultural competence and establishes the scope of the study: intercultural awareness and sensitivity. The researcher consulted literature in intercultural studies, international education, and engineering education. Methodology: The researcher conducted a mixed method study, using surveys, textual analysis, and interviews. Two-hundred seventy-two engineering undergraduates at a Midwestern public university participated in the study. Participants were recruited from an engineering communication class. Data were collected through survey instruments, written responses to cross-cultural dialogs and critical incidents, and interviews. Both qualitative and quantitative analyses were performed. Results and discussion: Participants exhibited vague and passive awareness of intercultural communication, average to high intercultural sensitivity (subject to self-assessment and social desirability bias), and partial acceptance of intercultural communication education. Based on these findings, the researcher suggests a cultural-general approach to teaching intercultural competence in engineering communication service classes. The study is limited to research participants at one institution and two aspects of intercultural competence. Future studies can involve diverse research participants, address more aspects of intercultural competence, and examine the use of cultural-general teaching methods in the classroom.

Reviews 319 trovano collocazione come fr. 89 in riferimento a Democrito, in virtü del noto aneddoto che circolava in antico secondo cui Democrito aveva pretérito lasciare a pascólo le proprie terre. Troppo poco, sostiene in maniera impeccabile Grilli, per un'attribuzione che l'esiguitá del materiale non puó in alcun modo sostenere. Mi sembra di aver dato qualche breve, ma significativo saggio del modo di procederé di Grilli, aperto per necessitá a piu direttrici di senso e impegnato , pour cause, a lavorare su piu fronti, in considerazione dell'amplissima fortuna di cui il trattato godette in ogni tempo, ma soprattutto in autori come Lattanzio o Agostino, presso i quali le meditazioni ciceroniane apparivano a tal punto contraddistinte da luciditá argomentativa da offrire un esempio particolarmente apprezzabile e un modello; ma proprio questa considera­ zione, che é nei fatti una valutazione attenta della ricezione del trattato e della considerevole fortuna di cui esso godette in ámbito cristiano, impone alio studioso le ragioni della prudenza, in special modo quando si tratta di operare tra ció che puó risultare quanto meno con ragionevole certezza imputabile a Cicerone e quello che, ispirato al?Arpíñate e al trattato, va invece letto come frutto della rielaborazione altrui. Di questi rischi Grilli avverte la pericolositá soprattutto per opere come il terzo libro delle Divinae institutiones di Lattanzio o i libri 13-14 del de Trinitate di Agostino, opere che risentono di certissimi influssi de\YHortensias, ma proprio per questo 'pericolose' per i rischi di indebite attribuzioni al trattato di riflessioni in ogni modo ad esso riconducibili. E proprio per tali ragioni, di tali finissime riflessioni di Grilli, maturate in un lungo arco cronológico e concretizzatesi in questa preziosissima opera, la comunitá scientifica non puó che dirsi grata all'Autore, cui é mancato il piacere di veder pubblicata l'opera nella veste definitiva, e a chi, meritoriamente, ne ha ultimato gli sforzi. Alfredo Casamento Palermo Joel B. Altman, The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 450 pages. Joel Altman's The Improbability of Othello: Rhetorical Anthropology and Shakespearean Selfhood is, like his earlier The Tudor Play of Mind, a big book. It offers extensive, detailed commentary on one of Shakespeare s major tragedies as well as briefer examinations of other plays. It situates those readings, as well as the stage practices, the acting, and Shakespeare s own sense of himself and his craft, in their historical context, specifically relating them all to what Altman calls the "rhetorical anthropology" that he sees as defining the Renaissance. It also traces that rhetorical anthropology back to 320 RHETORICA its sources in antiquity. Finally, Altman's study offers a detailed analysis of a concept that is central to rhetoric—probability—and shows us its importance not just for that discipline, but for dialectic and philosophy as well as for concepts of self and society. As in his previous book, Altman starts from the assumption that for the Renaissance rhetoric was the "Queen of the Sciences." But whereas in The Tu­ dor Play ofMind, he was interested in how the teaching of students to debate questions from different points of view (the argumentum in utramqne partem) shaped the development of the English Renaissance drama, here he sees rhetoric as determining the basic ways that people viewed both themselves and their culture. According to the pre-Socratic philosophers, who invented rhetoric, we live in a world of appearances, where matter is in flux and the senses unstable, the world of rhetoric that deals not with absolute truths, but with probabilities. This view, which was inherited by Renaissance humanists, is what Altman calls "rhetorical anthropology" It assumes that individuals operate in the transient historical world where cognition is always radically contingent; that people cannot truly know others; and that what they experi­ ence as their selves are the changeable products of rhetorical interactions. Orators can be persuasive in this world, not because their words reference realities, but because they create emotionally compelling heterocosms out of language for their audience. Altman distinguishes two kinds of rhetorical identities that get produced. Adapting Raymond Williams' terms for ideolo­ gies, he calls one "emergent," the identity that gets produced...

This paper uses critical discourse analysis to examine the language used in the teaching and learning of writing in a composition program in a public university in the United States. The objective was to identify metaphors and metonymies employed to construct an official standpoint of writing and the teaching of writing within the program, to identify the ideological position of the views conveyed in the documents and to analyze how this perspective is passed down hierarchically from the official documents to those actually developed and used by the instructors in the classrooms. The metaphors and metonymies used in the documents construct writing as an important commodity and college writing as more valuable than writing in other places. Metaphors and metonymies stood out as important semiotic devices for instructors to stay within a given pedagogical and educational perspective in ways that may normally be largely unnoticed by them.

In order to show difference as a dynamic, relational, and emergent construct, this article introduces “markers of difference,” rhetorical cues that signal the presence of difference between one or more interlocutors, and suggests practical means by which teachers can engage this concept to improve their teaching practice.

Books discussed in this essay: Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning, Linda Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neill Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement, Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, editors The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, editors Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee, editors

Engaging in a series of student-faculty discussions that highlight student perspectives on their own learning and faculty views on teaching provides opportunities for students and faculty to learn from one another and thereby enhance both teaching and learning.

Teaching developmental students to use simile and metaphor in their essays improves their writing and helps the teacher become a more dialogic reader; moreover, creating original figurative language kindles the analogical imagination that characterizes the academy.

In order to prepare effective writing teachers, teacher educators need an understanding of how preservice preparation programs, inservice professional development, and the policies and practices of K-12 schools work together to influence teachers’ writing instruction. This qualitative case study uses complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006) to analyze how one teacher learned to teach writing within and through the emergent, nested, interacting systems of teacher education and the school where she took her first teaching job. Data sources were fieldnotes of her teaching and interviews about her instructional decisions, which were coded using constant comparison (Glaser & Strauss, 1967) and the theoretical lens. Findings indicate the teacher’s understanding of writing instruction emerged through interactions between systems as she reproduced and recombined the ideas, values, goals, and activities she encountered within her undergraduate and graduate courses, her school district, and her sixth-grade classroom. The study concludes with discussions of the dynamics of learning to teach writing that emerged through the research and the implications of these dynamics for teacher education, educational policy, and future research.

This article discusses the ways issues of audience and authority are encountered and addressed by classroom teachers who write journal articles for publication. Drawing on an interview study of K-12 classroom teachers who have published articles in NCTE’s journals Language Arts, Voices from the Middle, and English Journal, we show that teachers developed and deployed strikingly different conceptions of audience at different points in their composing process. Before and after writing, they acknowledged the wide and mixed readership of those journals, including university-based scholars; however, while drafting their articles they thought about a much more limited group of “teachers like them.” In doing so, these teacher-authors found a concrete way to navigate the contested place of classroom teachers in wider education discourses. We highlight two major implications of this work. First, it complicates the standard advice to writers to “know your audience,” showing instead how considerations of audience are closely linked to questions of one’s status relative to members of that audience. Second, our work might complicate understandings of legitimate peripheral participation and how members of communities of practice are positioned relative to one another vis-à-vis authority: teacher-authors manipulated notions of authority, temporarily redefining some readers as more central and others as more peripheral, in ways that shifted according to the authority stances those definitions allowed them to take in composing.

Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour’s theories help expose such pedagogy’s limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work toward allaying potential disaster.

Our experiences in English 696e: Spatial and Visual Rhetorics culminated in a semester project that included large-scale installation projects and mini-workshops. This semester project was anevent—titled svr2—that we hosted for our local community, particularly targeting an audience of first-year composition instructors who would be teaching visual and spatial analysis to undergraduate students as part of the University of Arizona's first-year composition curriculum.

In response to the need for additional teacher-research on African American students, this article offers a case study of how one African American student-writer successfully produces expository writing in an Afrocentric first-year writing course at Michigan State University, a large land-grant midwestern research institution.

This article describes how contemporary psychoanalytic and poststructuralist theories inform my teaching of writing. It suggests that the psychological and academic challenges confronting freshmen recently placed in a new social/academic environment may be abated by a pedagogy that highlights a poststructuralist understanding of identity as multiple and performative.

This article discusses how teaching students to recognize the contemporary American Indian theoretical concepts of “rhetorical sovereignty” and “rhetorical alliance” in Native texts can help deepen understanding of American Indian voices and histories in an appropriate context, while also developing students' understandings of multiple and cross-cultural rhetorical frameworks.

This article interrogates the commonly used creative writing workshop model, calling for a higher degree of process-oriented work in the classroom and bringing to light process-oriented models already in place in universities across the country. This discussion can serve as a springboard for classroom development of alternative teaching models.

This scholarship of teaching and learning project explores how students read in a first-year general education class on critical writing and reading. In this article, I offer observations about which reading strategies seem most popular regardless of efficacy, which elements seem to foster student learning, and which obstacles remain.

Poster sessions aren't just for professional conferences. They are popular in a variety of academic disciplines, where they have been shown to boost motivation, foster alternative assessment, and promote peer interaction. They are gaining popularity as a classroom teaching strategy, because they promote the development of student research skills and foster positive attitudes toward research. They encourage collaboration and peer interaction. Visual presentation strategies provide opportunities for students to display their ideas and knowledge in several multimedia formats. Poster sessions also promote alternative assessment strategies such as peer and self-assessment. We report here on the ways that we have used this assignment format in our basic linguistics class, titled “The Nature of Language.” We conclude with tips on incorporating poster assignments into teacher education classes regardless of the content matter.

This article argues that teaching Asian American literature should include immeasurable and nontangible factors that accompany racial grief, such as cultural betrayal, the trauma of belonging interstitially, and the sensation of displacement. I propose that these be introduced via a gothic motif, such as the double, haunting, and possession by ghosts. Such motifs have the advantage of familiarity (or, if not, are quite easy to explain) and being psychoanalytically informed.

Ruminating on the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick around failed pedagogy and a confused cat, I consider ways to provoke new streams of critical thought in my composition students around issues of gender and sexuality without “pointing.” Thinking about Jean Genet's novel Querelle and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's film of the same name, I delineate the specifics of how I teach these two difficult, often incomprehensible texts in an introductory class. In reviewing the confusion these works can provoke in student discourse upon reading and viewing the texts, I emphasize the role of disorientation and dislocation in the mapping of student thinking and writing, ultimately reemphasizing the importance of nondemagogic, malleable pedagogy in the teaching of sexuality and gender, particularly with composition students who are exploring and amplifying their voices. Teaching Querelle is like unleashing a virus of confusion and intrigue on student writers, but the incoherence it creates also creates opportunities to explore new ideas and horizons in these developing thinkers/writers.

This article describes my experiment with surveillance technology as a composition teaching tool in a computer classroom. The technology, a software program called Remote Desktop, displayed live on my lectern screen all of my students' activities on their computers. While I first intended mainly to use Remote Desktop to monitor students' focus on assigned tasks, I quickly became interested in the pedagogical possibilities it presented. Because I could read students' work as they were composing it, I could intervene quickly when they were struggling and offer near-instant feedback; I could also guide class discussions by identifying patterns of weakness to address, strong examples to share, or the single answer a given student had gotten right to praise. I could anticipate how debates might unfold among students with differing opinions, or how similarly minded students might offer support to one another. While these strategies might have been possible without the technology, they were significantly facilitated by it — especially because this group of students was particularly underprepared and found discussion difficult. Class time became more productive and built their confidence in their own abilities as readers, writers, and editors.

Service-learning projects and traditional internships both prepare the student of technical communication for the workforce in many ways. What is lacking in the scholarship is a discussion of how to successfully link these two ideas. To help teachers implement courses that bridge the gap between service-learning projects and internships, I discuss how to design a course in technical communication that actively prepares students for subsequent internships with nonprofit agencies. In specific, I outline social development and social learning theories, service-learning pedagogies, and lesson plans and assignments that integrate these theories into practice. This project serves as a model that insists that the teacher first instructs students regarding not only rhetorical aspects of document design, including audience awareness and style, but also in placing the students in internships and designing assignments to be fulfilled in internship roles. The combination of classroom practices with an internship supports the idea that students learn the value of the process of writing, including the social embeddedness that can often influence their writing.

Community-based projects immerse technical writing students in intercultural communication, addressing local needs and shaping documents in human terms. Students at a South Texas university work to establish communication with clients in a city-county health department to create effective documents and disseminate family health legislation. To prepare students for interactions in multicultural settings, the teacher provides an instructional framework that highlights the concepts and values of intercultural communication and the principles for effective problem-solving. Students engaged in the Baby Moses ( el niño Moisés) project encounter misunderstandings, rhetorical challenges within the process of document creation, and cultural tensions that thwart their goal to disseminate information to the community. Students and the teacher learn that the classroom, like the city-county health department, is a fertile site for cultural disequilibrium, tensions, and potential cultural awareness. To insure a viable Technical and Professional Writing Program in a culturally diverse university and surrounding community, the teacher identifies opportunities that help students develop and enhance their identities as culturally-sensitive communicators and effective problem solvers.

Using tracings from a 1924 technical writing class, this article follows some normally unmarked processes of teaching and learning in order to highlight the humanities–utility binary from the perspective of the shadows of instructional practice. First, the article situates the humanities–utility debate as it is being addressed in postwar America, and second, it offers evidence of how far-reaching the resolution might have been, evidence taken from the margins of a copy of Watt’s (1917) The Composition of Technical Papers. Both the professional discussions and this textbook’s philosophy are reflected in jottings made by a technical writing student. This article suggests that tracing these issues through this underside of pedagogical history offers a type of evidence that is difficult to recover but worth seeking.

The field of technical communication has made notable progress in researching and teaching intercultural issues. Not enough discussion, however, is available on assessing students’ intercultural competence. This article attempts to start this discussion and invite further research. It suggests a working definition to conceptualize intercultural competence and draws upon diverse disciplines to review different assessment methods, including their strengths, drawbacks, and potential applications in technical communication classes.

Writing performance of a complex recommendation report produced by student teams for an actual client during a 15-week semester was compared in a writing-intensive Agronomy 356 course and in paired Agronomy 356/ English 309 courses. The longitudinal study investigated differences that existed between reports produced for each learning environment in terms of argument effectiveness, document usability, and professionalism. Three agronomy and three professional communication raters ranked the 12 lengthy reports in the sample. The study found that all top-rated reports were generated in the paired courses and all lowest-rated reports were generated in the stand-alone agronomy course. Four pedagogical factors appear influential in this result: working in dual problem-solving spaces, pushing the boundaries on problem solving, incorporating workplace realities, and using just-in-time teaching.

Research Problem: Studies identify peer review as an effective instructional method to improve student writing. Some teachers, however, avoid peer review, perhaps due to the workload required for assessing and correcting peer reviews. Previous studies have not proposed any method to reduce teacher workload by using an objective means to analyze the effects of peer review. Research Questions: This study assesses the degree of similarity between student essay drafts using normalized compression distance (NCD), a compression-based classification algorithm. How does peer review affect student essays, as measured by the NCD? What were the changes in essay length and holistic scores? How did students respond to peer essays? How did peer review affect students during revision? What were the NCD results? How did holistic scoring correspond to NCD results? Literature Review: Studies of pharmacists and engineers indicate that English language technical communication skills are important. Studies of peer review in language education indicate that peer comments are valuable but cultural differences and lack of confidence may impede making or using comments. Studies of NCD applied to web data, figures, and images indicate useful results. Methodology: This quantitative study used anonymous peer review and compared the results of traditional holistic scoring against a novel NCD measure. The researchers conducted the study with 35 student volunteers at a pharmaceutical university in Tokyo, Japan. The students had at least nine years of previous English instruction and previous peer-review experience. In class, students wrote an essay, anonymously reviewed a peer's essay according to instructions, then revised their own essays based on peer comments. An assessor graded the two drafts using a holistic scoring rubric. The researchers used NCD to quantify the change between drafts. Results and Discussion: Sixty percent of revisions contained more words than the originals. 51% percent of revisions received higher scores, 40% had no change, and 8.5% percent had reduced scores. Eleven percent of reviewers with low English proficiency did not identify obvious errors. Three revised essays had lower grades because the writers did not know how to incorporate peer comments. Anonymous peer review could lead to poor results where students had poor reviewing skills or did not know how to use peer comments. NCD helps teachers identify which revised essays to re-evaluate after peer review by indicating those with large quantities of changes. The study was limited by its small group of participants. Future research will examine longer essays, more participants, varied backgrounds, web delivery of NCD, and finding more factors to indicate the quality of written work to reduce teacher workload.

Reviews 207 thereby unmasking emotional frameworks that deprive others of the means to restore honor to social relations (p. 108). For many early modern authors, expression and regulation of emotion is closely tied to ethical behavior and the pursuit of justice. If readers are left wanting something from this book, it will most likely be further engagement with contemporary work on rhetoric and emotion. This is less a critique of the existing text and more a testament to the poten­ tial of further work in this area. Olmsted's close focus on the early modern period leaves ample room for studying the differences among emotional frameworks in other historical periods and provides the theoretical ground­ ing and the intellectual space in which to raise interesting and important questions about emotion and rhetoric. Scholars with interdisciplinary inter­ ests may find that Olmsted's insights into the gentle strand of persuasion have much to offer, for instance, to the contemporary study of diplomacy, the art of teaching, counseling, and to other contexts where coercion or force are considered unfit strategies for persuasion. As teachers, citizens, and friends, we are all involved in the schooling of emotion, helping others negotiate the competing emotional frameworks that determine the limits of persuasion and the shifting boundaries of the self. Just as Milton's advocacy of uncen­ sored publication supported an arena of competing truths, early modern counsel among friends supported an arena of competing emotional frame­ works. Olmsted's close attention to the early modern organization of these frameworks is both a caution and a model for how we enact persuasive, if imperfect, pedagogies of emotion. Eric D. Mason Nova Southeastern University Giancarlo Abbamonte, Lorenzo Miletti, Luigi Spina (a cura di), Dzscorsi alia prova. Atti del Quinto Colloquio italo-francese "Discorsi pronun­ cian, discorsi ascoltati: contesti di eloquenza tra Grecia, Roma ed Europa (Napoli - S. Maria di Castellabate 21 - 23 setiembre 2006), Napoli: Giannini ,2009.639 pp. ISBN 978-88-743-14-331 (http://www.fedoa.umna. it/2998/). Questo poderoso volume é il frutto di un colloquio organizzato dalle Universitá di Napoli (Federico II) e di Strasburgo, all interno dell ampio progetto, animato da un gruppo di ricerca misto italo-francese, Alie radici dell'Europa: la cultura d'assemblea e i suoi spazi (religione, retorica, teatro, politica ). Tra modelli antichi e ricezione moderna, che ha giá fornito numerosi contributi di alto valore, segnalati da L. Pernot nell'lntroduzione (p. 10). II vo­ lume fa il punto sul rapporto tra la produzione del discorso e la sua ricezione e tra contesto della performance, uditorio e oratore. 208 RHETORICA Per esigenze di brevità, segnalerô gli aspetti a mio parère più significativi e innovativi: i contributi di maggior peso saranno raggruppati temá­ ticamente, a prescindere dalla loro successione. Dopo la fine e puntúale analisi di A. De Vivo, Oratoria da camera. Il processo intra cubiculum di Valerio Asiático (Tac. Ann. XI1-3) (pp. 15-25), capace sia di illuminare le modalité di conduzione dei processi in età giulio-claudia sia di mettere in rilievo l'abilità tacitiana nel descrivere una situazione grottesca , il primo contributo di rilievo è di G. Abbamonte, Allocuzioni alie truppe: document!, origine e struttura retorica (pp. 29-46), che apre un trittico dedicato a Le allocuzioni alie truppe nella storiografia antica, - seguono: L. Miletti (Con­ test! dei discorsi alie truppe nella storiografia greca: Erodoto, Tucidide, Senofonte, pp. 47-61) e C. Buongiovanni (Il generale e il suo 'pubblico': le allocuzioni alie truppe in Sallustio, Tácito e Ammiano Marcellino, pp. 63-86). Abbamonte sottolinea come sia importante anche oggi affrontare questo argomento, perché si tratta di un genere ben lungi dall'essere estinto - purtroppo - e che, anzi, costituisce un capitolo di "storia della cultura ancora da scrivere" (p. 46). Le modalité del movere sono l'oggetto del contributo di L. Miletti, che esamina il discorso diretto di Hdt. 9,17,4, le informazioni offerte da Thuc. 4,91 e 7,69-70 e alcuni passi delle Elleniche e della Ciropedia di Senofonte. Entrando nell'annoso dibattito sulla veridicité dei discorsi nelle opere storiografiche (e soprattutto in Tucidide), Miletti si esprime per una loro rivalutazione contro Teccessivo scetticismo dimostrato per esempio da M...

This paper focuses on the ways girls use digital environments, like Word, PowerPoint and chatting programmes, for writing and communication purposes. By combining quantitative and qualitative methods of analysis and by adopting a critical discourse framework, we will explore the relationship between girls and new media, especially the ones related to digital writing, in terms of three interconnected variables. The first one is related to the role of the two most important socialisation institutions, home and school, at the present historical juncture, characterised by intense mobility and an expansion of traditional forms of literacy. The strategic choices of the girls’ families and their schools’ teaching practices contributed significantly to the formulation of their digital writing practices. The second variable is gender. Our data clearly show that a substantial number of girls were more inclined than their male peers to use word-processing and presentation software, performing, thus, the school discourses of ‘diligent students’. The third key variable concerns the personality of the girls who filtered in their own unique ways their social experiences, overcame limitations, took initiatives and appropriated technologically-mediated writing media for personally meaningful ends that enhanced their school and/or entertainment Discourses.

In this study, I use think-aloud protocol methods to determine how students respond to their teacher’s conversational and nonconversational written feedback on their writing.

In this latest in a series of commentaries from former chairs of the national Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), Sandie McGill Barnhouse, TYCA chair (2008–2010) shares her experiences and observations.

This essay examines how three of the most popular public speaking textbooks address rhetorical invention. The essay argues that textbooks minimize the discursive space shared by speakers and audiences in public speaking classrooms. As a consequence, topic and argument invention is framed largely as an internal affair that occurs prior to the speaker's interaction with the audience. The essay concludes with recommendations for teaching invention by reframing the public speaking classroom as a protopublic space.

By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

Winner of the 2013 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award Winner of the 2013 CCCC Research Impact Award Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times is a book-length project designed to document how people outside and within the United States take up digital literacies and fold them into the fabric of their daily lives. This research contributes to our knowledge of the impact of digital media on literate practices and also provides a basis for developing approaches for studying and teaching successful practices.

I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.

The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns Thomas Miller A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity Byron Hawk Toward A Composition Made Whole Jody Shipka Teaching with Student Texts: Essays toward an Informed Practice Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, Charles Paine, editors

This article examines some of the central paradoxes of vernacular language use in the classroom and suggests methods for converting those paradoxes into productive teaching opportunities. Beginning from a linguistic point of view, the authors discuss the devaluing and marginalization of the vernacular in educational settings and then move on to literary examples, demonstrating how vernacular literature generates its own transnational conversation. The authors propose concrete strategies for incorporating vernacular language and literature in language arts, composition, and literature classrooms at secondary and university levels.

Review Article| January 01 2012 If I Don't Know What I'm Teaching, How Can I Make the Best of It? Teaching What You Don't Know. By Huston, Therese. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Adam Pacton Adam Pacton Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (1): 187–191. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416576 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Adam Pacton; If I Don't Know What I'm Teaching, How Can I Make the Best of It?. Pedagogy 1 January 2012; 12 (1): 187–191. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416576 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. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article explores how composition courses might address contemporary capitalism's strain on students' time resources through a classroom practice of temporal awareness. The piece discusses two related dimensions of this approach. The first involves incorporating students' considerations of time into course content; the second, rooted in teacher inquiry, asks writing instructors to examine how time mediates the pedagogical relationships developed within their courses.

Of the many fields affected by current economic conditions, the humanities are often hit especially hard because the very category “humanities” is inchoate. Mangum joins scholars who seek ways to bring the values of fields such as literature and history into focus for various public audiences. Engaging nonspecialists in practices of the humanities offers one way of “going public.” The forms of publicly engaged teaching, learning, scholarship, and collaboration can stretch as far as teachers' and scholars' imaginations and are applicable to social sciences and other disciplines as well.

College students often use the campus as a venue for their course-based research activities. More often than not, however, the university is simply a locus of research, not a subject of student inquiry. In this article, I consider what can be gained when students “study up” the university as an institution. I draw on data from my undergraduate students' research process in an ethnographic methods course at Illinois State University. I argue that an institutional focus provides an especially effective approach for teaching ethnographic methods — one that differs from standard introductory textbook instruction in ethnography and that helps students avoid routine pitfalls of beginning ethnographic research. In particular, I argue that the university focus enables novice students to analyze fine-grained ethnographic data within a middle-range institutional context without macrosocial theories and frameworks that are likely beyond the scope of their semester-long projects. I also argue that an institutional focus can help students become more engaged, critical stakeholders in the university community.

Review Article| January 01 2012 The Canon and the Cutting Edge: On Teaching the Graphic Novel Teaching the Graphic Novel. Edited by Tabachnick, Stephen E.. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. Jennifer H. Williams Jennifer H. Williams Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2012) 12 (1): 193–199. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416585 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer H. Williams; The Canon and the Cutting Edge: On Teaching the Graphic Novel. Pedagogy 1 January 2012; 12 (1): 193–199. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-1416585 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. © 2011 by Duke University Press2011 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

This article describes what scholarly multimedia (i.e., webtexts) are and how one teacher-editor has students compose these texts as part of an assignment sequence in her writing classes. The article shows how one set of assessment criteria for scholarly multimedia—based on the Institute for Multimedia Literacy's parameters (see Kuhn, Johnson, & Lopez, 2010 Kuhn , V. , Johnson , D. J. , & Lopez , D. ( 2010 ). Speaking with students: Profiles in digital pedagogy . Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy , 14 ( 2 ). Retrieved from http://kairos.technorhetoric.net/14.2/interviews/kuhn/index.html [Google Scholar]) for assessing honor students’ multimedia projects—are used to give formative feedback to students’ projects.