Review of A Long Way Together and Reading the Past, Writing the Future ,Barbara L’Eplattenier Seeking Connections, Articulating Commonalities: English Education, Composition Studies, and Writing Teacher Education, Janet Alsup, Elizabeth Brockman, Jonathan Bush, and Mark Letcher Preparing Writing Teachers: A Case Study in Constructing a More Connected Future for CCCC and NCTE., Shelley Reid Contesting the Space between High School and College in the Era of Dual-Enrollment, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau

The third goal of Zen practice, helping others achieve enlightenment, suggests that we should help students learn about their own composing practices and histories as part of their instruction, but we cannot help others until we learn to help ourselves by reflecting on our own processes and histories, becoming enlightened, and liberating ourselves.

Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by William DeGenaro Teaching Developmental Writing, by Susan Naomi Bernstein; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer William DeGenaro’s Response to Gregory Shafer; Gregory Shafer’s Response to William DeGenaro

A study of scholarly research articles from six disciplines provides insights about academic writing that composition instructors can use to prepare students to write across the curriculum.

While teaching field research methods to freshman composition students, this professor uses online digital video to scaffold note-taking, interviewing, and observation skills.

Despite a long debate and the accompanying call for changes in the past few decades, grammarinstruction in college English classes, according to some scholars, has remained largely “disempowering,” “decontextualized,” and “remedial” (Micciche, 2004, p. 718). To search for more effectiveand empowering grammar teaching, this study explores the use of corpora for problem-basedlearning/teaching of lexicogrammar in a college English grammar course. This pedagogy wasmotivated by research findings that (1) corpora are a very useful source and tool for languageresearch and for active discovery learning of second/foreign languages, and (2) problem-basedlearning (PBL) is an effective and motivating instructional approach. The data collected andanalyzed include students’ individual and group corpus research projects, reflection papers oncorpus use, and responses to a post-study survey consisting of both open-ended and Likert questions.The analysis of the data found the following four themes in students’ use of, and reflectionsabout, corpus study: (1) critical understanding about lexicogrammatical and broader languageuse issues, (2) awareness of the dynamic nature of language, (3) appreciation for the context/register-appropriate use of lexicogrammar, and (4) grasping of the nuances of lexicogrammaticalusages. The paper also discusses the challenges involved in incorporating corpus use into Englishclasses and offers suggestions for further research.

The authors discuss courses in which they examined with students female rhetors’ historical presence in the public imagination, investigating how rhetorical work has inscribed these women into public memory and erased them from it.

This article suggests that the methodology of community-based action research provides concrete strategies for fostering effective community problem solving. To argue for a community research pedagogy, the author draws upon past and present scholarship in action research and participatory action research, experiences teaching an undergraduate writing course revolving around action research, and conversations with community members who have benefitted from student research.

Based on Walter Eggers's article “Teaching Drama: a Manifesto,” this article discusses practical ways to emphasize the persistence and popularity of the dramatic tradition in an introduction to drama course. I argue that drama's popularity is an essential tool for teaching the genre to undergraduates in all disciplines, and to demonstrate this tenet in my own experience, I give examples of how I taught formal and thematic elements through their use in contemporary media as well as several assignments that demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between staged theatre and its multimedia counterparts.

This article argues for a pedagogy that attends to emotion as a crucial, epistemological component of rhetorical education. After exploring dominant cultural tropes for understanding emotion, I examine examples of how these discourses materialize in popular culture. I then draw from classroom moments to analyze the possibilities for and complexities of studying emotion in the classroom.

It has been suggested that teaching professional writing students how to think visually can improve their ability to design visual texts. This article extends this suggestion and explores how the ability to think visuospatially influenced students’ success at designing visual texts in a small upper-division class on visual communication. Although all the students received the same instruction, students who demonstrated higher spatial faculties were more successful at developing and designing visual materials than were the other students in the class. This result suggests that the ability to think visuospatially is advantageous for learning how to communicate visually and that teaching students to think visuospatially should be a primary instructional focus to maximize all student learning.

The authors describe two pedagogical strategies—rhetorical sentence combining and rhetorical pattern practice—that blend once-popular teaching techniques with rhetorical decision making. A literature review identified studies that associated linguistic and rhetorical knowledge with success in engineering writing; this information was used to create exercises teaching technical communication students to write Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion (IMRaD) reports. Two pilot studies report promising results: Preliminary findings suggest that students who were taught this method wrote essays that were perceived as significantly higher in quality than those written by students in a control section. At the same time, however, the pilot studies point to some challenges and shortcomings of exercise-oriented pedagogies.

Abstract Although scholars in the field have begun to investigate normal schools, they still represent an underexamined site. One significant aspect of normal schools that has been overlooked is the educational activities of their alumni associations. California State Normal School Alumni Association, the focus of this analysis, provided a woman-centered space where women could engage in lively, rhetorically sophisticated public discussion of issues integral to women teachers in the 1890s. This analysis demonstrates that these alumni members, like clubwomen across the nation, participated in the process of transforming conventional assumptions about women during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Notes 1I thank RR reviewers Catherine Hobbs and Vicki Burton for their thoughtful and helpful revision suggestions. I also thank Elizabethada Wright and Martha Chang for their encouragement and willingness to read earlier versions of this essay. 2For relevant research on normal schools, please see the following: Gold, "'Where Brains Had a Chance': William Mayo and Rhetorical Instruction at East Texas Normal College, 1889–1917" (2005) and Rhetoric at the Margins: Revising the History of Writing Instruction in American Colleges, 1873–1947 (2008), chapter 3, "Challenging Orthodoxies at a Rural Normal College"; Gray, "Life in the Margins: Student Writing and Curricular Change at Fitchburg Normal, 1895–1910" (2008); Harmon, "'The Voice, Pen, and Influence of Our Women Are Abroad in the Land': Women and the Illinois State Normal University, 1857–1899" (1995); Fitzgerald, "The Platteville Papers Revisited: Gender and Genre in a Normal School Writing Assignment" (2007) and "A Rediscovered Tradition: European Pedagogy and Composition Studies" (2001); Lindblom, Banks, and Quay, "Mid-Nineteenth-Century Writing Instruction at Illinois State Normal University: Credentials, Correctness, and the Rise of a Teaching Class" (2007); Lindblom and Dunn, "Cooperative Writing 'Program' Administration at Illinois State Normal University: The Committee on English of 1904-05 and the Influence of Professor J. Rose Colby" (2004); Rothermel, "'Our Life's Work': Rhetorical Preparation and Teacher Training at a Massachusetts Normal School, 1839–1929" (2007) and "A Sphere of Noble Action: Gender, Rhetoric, and Influence at a Nineteenth-Century Massachusetts State Normal School" (2003). 3Here I draw on Gold's definition of rhetorical education. (See Rhetoric at the Margins, page x.) 4The five normal schools that Ogren investigated were Genesco, New York; Florence, Alabama; Pine Bluff, Arkansas; Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and San Jose, California. 5For examples, see Gold and Rothermel. 6As Barbara E. L'Eplattenier has asserted, "We can and should begin incorporating more explicit discussion of our primary research methods into our historical research" (68). Archival materials discussed in this article are held by San Jose State University Special Collections and Archives, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library. Materials were gathered during two week-long and one three-day visit completed between 2008 and 2010. During the time I was completing research, San Jose Special Collections' staff was processing the normal school materials. As the material becomes available, it is being listed on the Online Archive of California. 7The association was also known as the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose and the Alumni Association of the San Jose State Normal School. 8In the field of rhetoric and composition, normal school alumni associations and West Coast normal schools have received little attention. In her history of American public normal schools, Ogren includes California State Normal School among the normal schools she examined. Although clubwomen have received attention by scholars, I have been unable to locate research on normal school alumni associations by scholars of rhetoric and composition. 9This information is from an article pasted into the Minutes of the State Normal Alumni Association of San Jose for June, 1895. The article, "A Successful Session" was published in The Teacher and Student 3.1 (1895).

Text-based interviews that compared the teacher's intention for a given comment on an engineering student's paper with the student's understanding of the comment were used to examine the extent to which students understand the comments they receive and to determine the characteristics of comments that are well understood and those that are not. The teachers' comments analyzed in this study were fully understood only about half the time. Inclusion of a reason or explicit instructions helped students understand the comments.

Engineering programs in the US made notable efforts to develop students' intercultural competence, but they tended to overlook the teaching of intercultural communication. Technical communication teachers can fill this gap by addressing intercultural issues in the service class. This proposal faces challenges: the lack of class time, teacher training, textbooks, and teaching methods. To address these challenges, this tutorial uses various materials and genre-based instruction to integrate intercultural communication into the service class. This approach helps to raise students' intercultural awareness and sensitivity as they learn engineering communication genres. This tutorial may be used in service classes for other majors.

208 RHETORICA appears to have read every relevant primary and secondary text, so that the book serves as an excellent introduction to the topic. A further virtue of Swaminathan's book is that it elegantly models how rhetorical and literary analysis can be interwoven for a nuanced presentation of the complexities of social change. The puzzle about slavery is, as Swaminathan says, that "Great Britain dismantled this profitable trade, albeit unevenly and in a fraught manner, seemingly for the benefit of principle" (p. 213). It is a striking instance of effective rhetoric. Yet, it was not a case of a single text having done that considerable cultural work. Although some texts might have been more popular, and possibly more effective, than others, the abolitionists were successful because of a long series of arguments and counterarguments. They were successful because various topoi were repeated across genres, and not just in what we traditionally think of as "political" discourse. The book usefully reminds us of the breadth of rhetoric, and, hence, the potential breadth of rhetorical scholarship. Patricia Roberts-Miller University of Texas, Austin Mark Longaker, Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2007. xx + 266 pp. ISBN 978-0-8173-1547-4 While in the past five years we have seen a number of books chal­ lenging and diversifying our understanding of rhetorical education in late nineteenth-century United States, including David Gold's Rhetoric at the Mar­ gins: Revising the History ofWriting Instruction in American Colleges, 1873-1947, Jessica Enoch's Refiguring Rhetorical Education: Women Teaching African Amer­ ican, Native American, and Chicano/a Students, 1865—1911, and Brian Fehler's Calvinist Rhetoric in Nineteenth-Century America. The Bartlet Professors of Sa­ cred Rhetoric ofAndover Seminary, relatively little work has examined rhetor­ ical education within colonial America. Indeed, Mark Garrett Longaker's Rhetoric and the Republic is likely the most important work to do so since Thomas P. Miller's The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces. Unlike works bv Gold or Enoch, the primary virtue of Longaker s research does not come from his examining underrep­ resented communities, nor does his work take us to different parts of the university as does Fehler s. Rather, Longaker's work is important because it asks us to fundamentally reexamine our historiography at the same time that it challenges us to think harder about some of our pedagogical practices. Revising accounts by Miller, Halloran, and Clark (Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric), Longaker argues that "early American republicanism was a con­ tested political terrain" which allowed for a number of conflicting peda­ Reviews 209 gogical ideals and practices to emerge in its name (p. xviii). This historical narrative in turn allows Longaker to demonstrate the anemia of the republi­ can revival which has been championed by both contemporary American academics and politicians alike. Since at least the 1950s, scholars represent­ ing various disciplines have called for a revival of civic republican political discourses as a counterweight to the hegemony of liberal political discourse. Indeed, in the United States, civic republicanism represented something of an academic third way between Soviet-inspired communist totalitarianism and American-inspired liberal capitalism. Whereas liberalism promoted negative liberty, legal proceduralism, and the interest of autonomous individuals, re­ publicanism promoted positive liberty, substantive values, and civic virtue. Finding a way of reviving civic republicanism would help revive active citi­ zenship, or so we believed. But the truth of the matter has always been that the sharp division between republicanism and liberalism was itself a prod­ uct of the Cold War, and one that was unsustainable when examining the eighteen and nineteenth centuries, a point Longaker brings home especially well in his analvsis of John Witherspoon. Oddly enough, Longaker never makes that argument explicitly and in­ stead spends most of his book demonstrating, through the use of Gramscian articulation theory, the various ways early American republican theory lent itself to very different political and economic discourses. So much the better for us, the real value of the book as far as this reader is...

We offer here a critical assessment of our experiences teaching in Kingsborough Community College's learning communities—in a descriptive, personal mode that echoes the frequent conversations we have together—to illuminate how official data fail to capture both important successes and failures and to model the kind of reflective, subjective assessment from a professorial perspective that we believe is vital for larger institutional decision making.

Abstract The Stoic is often seen as the forerunner of Adam Smith's market man of morals, but others have suggested that the sophist played a role in the formation of market morality and political economy. This article traces Smith's treatment of ancient sophists and his use of the term sophistry in the Wealth of Nations. Smith praised ancient sophists for their effective didactic oratory and their ability to make money through teaching. Smith criticized arguments as sophistic when they promoted monetary advantage for a few over and above the principle of competition. This varied reception of sophists and sophistry suggests a keen understanding of the rhetorical tradition and its capacity to influence the development of the discourse of political economy. Smith's use of sophistry and reference to the sophists invites a deeper awareness of the essential vitality of effective argumentation for Smith's “system of natural liberty.”

In undergraduate natural science courses, two types of evaluators are commonly used to assess student writing: graduate-student teaching assistants (TAs) or peers. The current study examines how well these approaches to evaluation support student writing. These differences between the two possible evaluators are likely to affect multiple aspects of the writing process: first draft quality, amount and types of feedback provided, amount and types of revisions, and final draft quality. Therefore, we examined how these aspects of the writing process were affected when undergraduate students wrote papers to be evaluated by a group of peers versus their TA. Several interesting results were found. First, the quality of the students' first draft was greater when they were writing for their peers than when writing for their TA. In terms of feedback, students provided longer comments, and they also focused more on the prose than the TAs. Finally, more revisions were made if the students received feedback from their peers-especially prose revisions. Despite all of the benefits seen with peers as evaluators, there was only a moderate difference in final draft quality. This result indicates that while peer-review is helpful, there continues to be a need for research regarding how to enhance the benefits.

A significant percentage of students who attend secondary schools in the United States do not acquire the basic writing skills required to gain admission to four-year colleges and universities. In the present study, participants were 41 low-income, multi-ethnic 12th-grade students, 19 of whom received instruction on specific genre features for writing college admission essays. The other 22 12th-grade students formed the comparison group and received instruction as usual in their regular English class (mostly on literary analysis). The students who received instruction on genre features of the college admission essay scored higher on a rubric-based rating of the pre and post test essay writing and on writing self-efficacy surveys associated with the genre. Findings yielded from this study point to the merit of using a features-based genre instructional approach to teaching college admission essays to low-income, multi-ethnic high school students.

The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech W. Ross Winterowd gave at the CCCC meeting in Louisville on March 18, 2010. We’re sorry to report that Winterowd died on January 21, 2011.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

Drawing on a long tradition of teaching rhetoric that extends back to the late antique and even Hellenistic periods, the Byzantine rhetorical commentaries offer a unique witness to a “syncretic” pedagogy, in which argument and language structure are taught as two sides of the same coin. This article examines the Byzantine commentaries on four figures from the Hermogenic corpus, the standard “textbook” used in rhetorical education in Byzantium. Somewhat “untraditional,” these figures—known as period, pneuma, akmê, and antitheton—are assumed to have significant value in the invention and arrangement of arguments. Moreover, the commentaries indicate that teaching the figures presupposed lively peer work among the students as well as much interaction between the performing student and his classmates.

Reviews 115 in more advanced rhetorical practice. Webb s contention that the persuasive force of ekphrasis is a matter of the orator eliciting predictable responses from listeners based on widely accepted cultural conventions (pp. 109, 122, and passim) is certainly demonstrable but does not allow much scope for con­ testation. This view has an unfortunate resonance with an assumption Webb seeks to overturn, namely that ekphraseis tend to be predictable set pieces and that epideictic speeches in particular—a fertile ground for ekphrastic rhetoric—are usually "a catalogue of platitudes" (p. 164). On the other hand, her observations about the use of ekphrasis in orations to "cast a particular light (or chroma, 'colour' or 'gloss')" on the case at issue and to turn spectators into witnesses through the artful use of vivid detail (pp. 145-65) contribute to a vision of ekphrasis as far more than "decorative digression" (p. 158). It is difficult to do justice to the wealth of primary and secondary material arrayed in Webb's book on this multi-faceted rhetorical subject. Her impressive learning and obvious passion for the material are on abundant display; particularly notable is her familiarity with French scholarship. But this wide reach can frustrate an interested reader: a great deal of ground is covered here rapidly, with subjects such as "Ekphrasis and Interpretation" (pp. 145-46), "Ekphrasis as Fiction" (pp. 168-69), and "Statues and Signs" (pp. 186-87) treated in one or two paragraphs. The net effect is at times like standing too close to a mosaic: hundreds of tiles spark with color but the pattern is difficult to discern. In her Preface Webb acknowledges the constraints of space which prevented extended analyses of examples (p. xiii). A few such analyses would have been welcome. But the book succeeds in achieving the author's primary goal: elucidating the main sources for ekphrasis and enargeia. Although rhetoric scholars may find some points in this rhetorical treatment of ekphrasis familiar, they will appreciate the close attention paid to rhetorical handbooks and the wealth of material concerning ekphrasis accumulated here. Susan C. Jarratt University of California, Irvine Pernille EEarsting and Jon Viklund, eds., Rhetoric and Literature in Linland and Sweden, 1600-1900 (Nordic Studies in the History of Rhetoric 2), Copenhagen: Nordisk Netvaerk for Rhetorikkens Historie, 2008. ISBN 9788798882923 This is the second collection of studies produced by NNRH. It is not available in bookstores, but is available online at http://www.nnrh.dk. There are eight papers published here, arranged roughly in chronological order, beginning with Mats Malm s Rhetoric, ^/locals, and Patriotism in Early Swedish Literature: Georg Stiernhielm's Hercules (1658)." Here (pp. 126 ), Malm argues that the Hercules by Stiernhielm (1598-1672) is more than 116 RHETORICA just an allegory about the choice between virtue and vice, the traditional interpretation of the Hercules at the crossroads story. It is also an allegory about good style and bad style, and hence should be read as an allegory of importance to the teaching and practice of rhetoric. The second paper is "Apostrophe and Subjectivity in Johan Paulinus Lillienstedt 'sMagnus Principatus Finlandia (1678)" (pp. 27-65), by Tua Korhonen. This Finlandia, a versified oration of 379 verses in Classical Greek hexameters (of which Korhonen provides the first translation into English, pp. 52-61) is a classical epideixis of Finland, but his use of apostrophe and self-referential passages shows that Lillienstedt (1655-1732) transcends the limitations of his classical models, adapting the genre to quite different cultural conditions prevailing in 17th-Century Scandinavia. Hannu K. Riikonen's "Laus urbis in Seventeenth Century Finland: Georg Haveman's Oratio de Wiburgo and Olof Hermelin's Viburgum" (pp. 67-85) is the third paper. Hermelin's Viburgum is one of the elegiac poems describing 101 towns in the Kingdom of Sweden in his Hecatompolis Suiorum (1691 or 1692), seen by many scholars as one of the finest examples of Nordic neo-Latin poetry from the 17th Century. About three years after the publication of Hecatompolis, one of Hermelin's students at the University of Tartu, Georg Haveman, delivered an oration in praise of Vyborg, a town on the Finnish-Russian frontier. Both Hermelin's elegy and Haveman...

Based on an action research project implemented at two South African universities, we argue that content and language integration (ICL) collaborative partnerships benefit not only from collaboration between language and content specialists, but in addition, from collaboration between language specialists, general education specialists and content specialists from a variety of disciplines. However, as we illustrate below, these benefits may be accompanied by substantial challenges. We make a further claim, for the value of a transformative approach towards collaboration for content and language integration, in which the teacher/researchers engage in their practice in a critical and reflexive manner, and by so doing, foster their own deep learning, as well as the deep learning of the students.

In this paper I address the issue of collaboration between content lecturers and language lecturers or educational researchers. Whilst such collaboration is a desirable goal for disciplinary learning in monolingual settings, I suggest it takes on extra significance when two or more languages are involved in teaching and learning a discipline. Drawing on work in the area of scientific literacy, I make a case for the concept of disciplinary literacy as a useful vehicle for such collaboration, with the Carnegie Foundation's notion of the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) being used as the overarching motivation. I argue that input from peers in other disciplines can help content lecturers, make informed decisions about the particular mix of communicative practices that are needed to develop disciplinary literacy in their courses. Clearly, this mix will be different from discipline to discipline and indeed vary within a discipline depending on the local linguistic environment and the nature of the course under discussion. As an aid to collaboration, I present a simple heuristic tool for initiating inter-faculty discussion—the Disciplinary Literacy Discussion Matrix. Using the matrix, content lecturers can discuss the disciplinary literacy goals of their teaching with other professionals, making their own decisions about the particular mix of communicative practices desired and the most appropriate methods for promoting these.

Adopting a critical approach to identification in literature pedagogy, this article examines the dynamics of identification in the text, critical history, performance history, and teaching of Othello. The author theorizes a pedagogical approach that interrogates the play's systems of identification while foregrounding ethical responsibility.

The report “Education in the Balance” represents a significant new acknowledgment of the centrality of teaching faculty to the academic project on the part of professional organizations in English studies. David Bartholomae is right to worry that the emergence of positions for teaching faculty may “enact an argument about the separation of teaching and research” that should be resisted, and healthy models of the academic workplace should make sure that teaching and research remain meaningfully responsive to one another. Recent developments in higher education, which promise an ever finer fragmentation of the academic labor force—along with new possibilities for labor abuses—make this especially urgent.

John Boe responds to David Bartholomae's “Teaching On and Off the Tenure Track: Highlights from the ADE Survey of Staffing Patterns in English.” Using his experience in a thirty-year career as a nontenured lecturer, the author addresses the discrimination lecturers face even in the most generous and democratic of institutions. It discusses the difficulty of finding an appropriate term for nontenured faculty, the unlikelihood of untenured faculty ever having full participation in the lives of their departments and institutions, the inequity of support given to the tenured for research and of support continuing to be given even when the tenured stop producing valuable (or any) research, the financial benefits that accrue to institutions through exploitation of the nontenured, the culpability of those in power for the flaws in the tenure system, and the solution to the aforesaid problems: eliminating tenure.

David Bartholomae warns against a growing reliance on MAs as instructors in English departments. I suggest in response that one way to reconnect research and teaching is to invite PhDs from other disciplines to join us in teaching academic writing.

This article presents highlights from “Education in the Balance: A Report on the Academic Workforce in English,” the 2008 ADE/MLA survey of staffing patterns in English departments. It raises questions about the increased institutional separation of research and teaching.

In teaching a course on death in modern theater to fifteen undergraduates, I had to engage with a real-life death “drama” (the death of a peer of my students) that impinged on my class, presenting me with an uncomfortable pedagogical conundrum. I had to re-think my objectives as an instructor and my conception of the classroom as a safe space. In this article, I rehearse this complicated and potentially fractious class scenario and scrutinize my approach to it. I investigate the potential merits of thinking, feeling, and working through crisis in a classroom situation, thereby fashioning a type of pedagogical “third space” in which ideational and circumstantial crossover is allowed. Some of the issues that arise are the ways in which we can situate pedagogy in praxis with “real life” and what challenges are provided?

In a 2002 article in College English, Peter Elbow argued that writing pedagogy would benefit by “[m]ore honoring of style, playfulness, fun, pleasure, humor” (543). Although Elbow was referring specifically to the need for cross-fertilization between the disciplines of literature and composition, his call for attention to playfulness in writing pedagogy is equally relevant to the teaching of creative nonfiction. The question he fails to consider is how playfulness can become an essential part of writing pedagogy without undermining the seriousness of the endeavor. My experience teaching an upper-level creative nonfiction class devoted to humor writing suggests that while incorporating playfulness into nonfiction-writing pedagogy poses serious challenges, it also provides significant rewards and develops skills transferable to other writing tasks.

This article examines how working-class bodies perform physically, affectively, and discursively in academic spaces. Through its conversation between a tenured professor and graduate student, the article employs performance theory to highlight how disruptive working-class teacher-bodies can be and the potential they offer for understanding the ideological work of academic social space.

“Teaching Native Autobiographies as Acts of Narrative Resistance” is written for non-specialists in Native literature who include a Native-authored work in their classes. This article offers strategies to increase our understanding and appreciation of Native literature by opening up classroom discussions to critical issues in the study of Native literary texts.

In research-intensive universities, a complex web of inter-relations between mandates for research productivity and for general education teaching perpetuates the division into a two-tiered faculty described in the ADE survey of staffing patterns in departments of English. Other published and planned MLA and ADE reports—specifically, on the evaluation of scholarship for tenure and promotion, and on the master's degree—further illuminate the inter-relations between graduate education and general education staffing practices. MLA (in its “Academic Workforce Advocacy Kit”) and the Coalition for the Academic Workforce (in its issue brief entitled “On Faculty Serving All Students”) provide leadership for productive workforce changes.

This article describes the culture of some English departments and the value system often attached to various forms of media in them. Because English studies so often values the letter, texts, and the consumption of these, it's been caught in its own hierarchy of signs. English studies has been slow to create new media scholarship and train future teachers to understand multiple media despite challenges from within and outside of the discipline to do so. Samples of new media scholarship are offered to demonstrate the plurality of scholarship and teaching practices possible with new media.

Scholars have consistently claimed that rhetorical patterns are culturally bound, and indirectness is a defining characteristic of Chinese writing. Through examining how the rhetorical mechanism of directness and indirectness is presented in 29 English business communication textbooks published in China, we explore how English business communication textbook writers in China keep up with the contextual changes in the Chinese society and how the rhetorical mechanism of directness and indirectness is locally situated in the English business communication teaching practices in China. We conclude that the pedagogical strategy on directness and indirectness represented in Chinese English business communication textbooks echoes the same strategy favored by scholars in the United States.

Previous research has suggested the need for developing technical communication education in Chinese universities. Following this suggestion, this article examines the possibility of integrating technical communication into China’s English major curriculum. Based on findings from two universities, the article discusses the design of China’s English major curriculum and Chinese teacher and student perspectives on technical communication. The author suggests that China’s English for Specific Purposes (ESP) education provides a promising home for integrating technical communication and that this integration can enhance China’s current ESP education. The author presents three integration models and discusses questions for future research.

This study explores the types of feedback and implicated relational systems in an online design critique using an inductive analysis of an online critique about a project focused on designing a new food pyramid. The results reveal eight types of feedback and three implied relational systems, all of which suggest relational archetypes that are disconnected from typical preprofessional activity systems. These results illustrate the potential for the online medium to be a space in which participants pursue idealized relational identities and interactions that are not necessarily authentic approximations of actual relational systems. Using these results as a foundation, the author discusses the potential relevance of the online medium to this setting and the implications of relational authenticity and genre knowledge on oral genre teaching and learning.

Students are expected to come into the current college classroom already possessing certain skills including the ability to write at the appropriate academic level regardless of discipline and the ability to create well-structured arguments. Research indicates, however, that most students entering college are underprepared in both areas. One strategy that may help students write at a more academic level is teaching students to focus on spending their time on revision. In the current study, we examine two potential sources of difficulty in the revision of argumentative essays: a poorly developed argument schema and a poorly developed global revision task schema. We created and tested the effectiveness of two written tutorials designed to provide college students information to saturate their knowledge base as well as provide them with procedural tasks to complete. We found that without instruction, students focused their revisions on making local wording changes that did not qualitatively improve their essays. An argument tutorial helped students make higher level global changes, include more argument content, and improve the structure of the essay. A global revision tutorial also helped students make more substantive structural changes. Thus, both tutorials helped students improve their revisions, and the tutorials were completed independently by the students successfully.

Drawing on the case of a student of his who, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, simply preferred not to write, the author argues that current celebration of technology encourages passive resistance. He emphasizes that authentic, productive classroom experiences derive from in-person interactions that directly connect in relevant ways to students’ lives.

The Microreview feature is intended to present a series of condensed reviews of online work by an invited scholar. By providing an informed perspective chosen by the reviewer, readers can not only find out about this type of online work, but begin to understand how the online work may be relevant to their own scholarly and teaching practices.