AbstractThis article examines a required undergraduate empirical methods course in writing, rhetoric, and literacy to assess how well it introduces humanities students to empirical research methods. The common curriculum contains a commitment to affordable learning as well as to making students agents of their own learning. Student work artifacts, pre- and post-course surveys, and course evaluations were collected and analyzed to examine the impact of the course on student understanding of and engagement in undergraduate research. Initial results indicate that students are gaining skills that will enable them to function as researchers going forward.

This article provides a critical narrative of a flipped professional development program for experienced graduate teaching associates teaching a second-year writing course. We use a narrative approach to demonstrate that decisions about how and what to flip in a professional development program are intimately linked to the local exigencies—material, cultural, and pedagogical—that constitute administrative, teaching, and learning contexts. Furthermore, we theorize that our decision to flip professional development aligns with feminist ethics of power distribution and collaboration, raises questions about how this also changes the visibility of faculty's administrative labor, and may contribute to misperceptions about the intellectual work and expertise required for service and writing program administration. We close by proposing design as a critical and defining feature of WPA work.

Reviewed are Academic Writing and Plagiarism: A Linguistic Analysis by Diane Pecorari; My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture by Susan D. Blum; and Pluralizing Plagiarism: Identities, Contexts, Pedagogies, edited by Rebecca Moore Howard and Amy E. Robillard.

In “Dialogic Origin,” Mikhail Bakhtin—as teacher-researcher and theorist—presents readers with a remarkable essay on teaching grammar and style to 7th-year students (roughly equivalent to 10thgraders in the U.S. educational system). In doing so, Bakhtin employs some of his most notable concepts (among them dialogism and “hero”)as informing and generative principles of writing pedagogy. Modern readers will find much to value as Bakhtin illustrates contextualized grammar instruction, defines grammar as an element of style, proposes innovative teaching methods, and advocates for theory-based pedagogy. Despite these significant similarities, the essay relies exclusively on stylistics, ignoring the demonstrable rhetorical effects of the stylistic choices illustrated in the pedagogy he outlines. In perhaps his most illuminating move, Bakhtin introduces his notion of hero directly into the language arts classroom, illustrating the concept as fundamental even to the grammar and style of language in everyday and academic (not simply literary) contexts.

The three authors writing on Bakhtin’s essay, “Dialogic Origin and Dialogic Pedagogy of Grammar”—Farmer, Halasek, and Williams—respond to one another, and Bazerman provides a summative comment in the paragraphs that follow. The responses explore further some of Bakhtin’s thoughts concerning rhetoric and its relation to stylistics and his use of the concept of hero as a grammatical category. The discussion of Bakhtin leads to more general questions of the relation between spontaneous utterance and situationality and the implications for the possibility of a systematic grammar of style. Nonetheless, the commentators agree on Bakhtin’s explicit pedagogy and the interanimation of everyday speech with literary examples. The editor’s final comment notes a tension that informs all these responses, that is, between explicit teaching, on one hand, and avoiding formulaic writing, on the other. Bakhtin’s changing view of the relation of dialectics and dialogue is discussed as well.

My contribution to this issue of RSQ relates my thoughts and conclusions about the value of some of Bakhtin's ideas to conversations about reading and feminism, and in that respect it resembles a traditional academic essay., But what began as a traditional essay that presented and defended a thesis is now informed by an overt narration of the development of my thinking and reading. I make this statement not to disclaim but to explain my approach to writing as a woman about Bakhtin. To read or write about reading and writing processes is a difficult undertaking; as readers and writers in the academy we are hyperaware of the claims made by an author and the degree to which her text adheres to or embodies her claims. What follows is as much an attempt to recreate and relate the changing relationship between Bakhtin's work and my own thought as it is to outline and review feminist interpretations of Bakhtin's work. At some point after first reading Marxism and the Philosophy of Language and The Dialogic Imagination, when composing the first draft of my dissertation, I felt compelled to stop and consider my reading process because I was having trouble writing about what I had read. When stumbling through writing the section of my dissertation that explicated some of Bakhtin's concepts, I thought I was facing a case of writer's block, and when I questioned the cause of the block, I attributed it to lack of comprehension. So I began rereading, secretly hoping that careful reading-noting important concepts and topic sentences and underlining and looking up unfamiliar words as my elementary and high school teachers had suggested-would bring me better understanding. I found as I reread Bakhtin that my trouble wasn't lack of comprehension; I could reel off neat definitions and thorough explanationsthat's what passing my Ph.D orals was all about. The trouble was, I wasn't contributing anything. My writing was empty. Paragraph after paragraph did nothing but paraphrase and quote Bakhtin and his commentators, allowing them a monologue in my text. Some writing teachers would argue that I began writing too soon or that I hadn't spent enough time prewriting and formulating my own opinions about the material, and this is probably true to some extent. But more than a matter of the writing process, my difficulties resulted from my sense of myself as a reader and novice theorist and Bakhtin as a writer, master theorist, and authority. What I was encountering in my reading process is what I believe many students (particularly those designated developmental) experience. Teachers, textbook authors, counselors, administrators, parents-by virtue of