As Peter Elbow embarks on his fifth decade as a central contributor to the national conversation on writing pedagogy, his new book—Vernacular Eloquence: What Speech Can Bring to Writing—is at once ...

The authors describe their individual and collective experiences reconstructing their New Orleans-based university composition program in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. They emphasize how the concept of floating foundations helps account for changes in their students’ interests, and they suggest that this idea is applicable to the work of writing instructors in general.

Occasioned by the recent epidemic of violence in schools and the author’s memory of violent schoolyard rhymes, this essay explores the ways students experience contemporary writing pedagogy. To do so, the essay ranges from rhetoric’s historical discussion of the pleasures of writing to composition’s more recent interest in academic professionalism to Gilles Deleuze’s theory of masochism to the problem of teaching and learning in a consumer culture.