these reflections on working group discussions held at the ARS meeting has quickly taken me back to Evanston in mid-September 2003 and to the extraordinarily productive and provocative work that got done there. I vividly remember listening as Jerzy Axer and then Jeffrey Walker sounded an emergent theme: rhetoric, they said, is a teaching tradition. I remember being surprised at this theme - in fact, I would not have predicted it, and that surprise took me even further back, to the disappointment I felt in having a proposal rejected for an ISHR meeting: awe do not accept papers on pedagogy, the letter said. The dismissal of pedagogy is not unique to ISHR, of course; MLA and NGA have also been reluctant to yield pedagogy a place at the disciplinary table. Even in the GGGG, which was founded on pedagogical concerns, a sometimes bitter conflict has sprung up between theory and practice, with those advocating for the crucial role of theory arguing that studies in composition/rhetoric will not prosper or mature unless the field gives up its attachment to practice, to pedagogy. So I was surprised at the primacy of pedagogy at the ARS conference, and I was heartened by it as well. As Mike Leff has since remarked, at ARS, all roads lead to teaching. In his essay in this issue, Jerry Hauser offers a retrospective explanation for the marginalization of pedagogy and teaching: the ancient Greek rhetorical tradition, grounded in the paedeia and on the capacitating the individual student to lead the life of an active and responsible citizen gave way to the model of the German research institution, with its emphasis on and valorization of discovering new knowledge. This is an elegant explanation, one that leads to Hauser's equally elegant peroration: capacitating students to be competent citizens is our birthright It has been ours since antiquity. Modern education has stripped us of We need to reclaim it. What became increasingly clear to me is that a second key term that animated the conference - performance - must also play a central role in any such reclamation. In retrospect, I realized that every keynote address touched not only on pedagogy but also on performance: the performance of teaching; the performance of civic duty and discourse; the performance of student speaking and writing; the performance of disciplinarity. As I listened and talked, the focus on performance and pedagogy seemed perfectly to bridge the rhetoric/composition and communication traditions to which

Abstract In his essay “Disciplinary Identities: On the Rhetorical Paths between English and Communication Studies,”; Steven Mailloux laments the separation between rhetoricians in English and Communication and issues a call for them to join a multi‐disciplinary coalition. Mailloux tries to connect the two by studying their disciplinary histories, and I respond to his account of developments in Communication. While his history of the discipline seems flawed in detail, I argue that his main point holds true and is a matter of considerable importance: Communication‐rhetoricians generally have adhered to a scientific rather than a “rhetorical, hermenemic”; conception of disciplinarity, and this commitment has hampered their ability to enter into interdisciplinary endeavors. But there is also another significant difference between rhetoricians in the two disciplines. Communication rhetoricians, for a variety of reasons, have a weaker sense of internal disciplinarity, and I argue that an unstable disciplinary self‐conception results in a confusion between disciplinary rhetoric located at a particular academic site and the global rhetoric of disciplinarity. Dealingwith this problem presents a major problem for Communication‐rhetoricians and for those who seek to establish effective interdisciplinary ties between English and Communication.