"What is a fandom, and why do fandoms matter for school?" Fandoms are passionate communities dedicated to appreciating and engaging with texts of interest (movies, TV shows, books, bands, brands, sports teams, etc.) via personally and communally meaningful literacy practices. It is increasingly obvious that scripted literacy curricula…

Award-winning author Page Keeley and mathematics expert Cheryl Rose Tobey apply the successful format of Keeley's best-selling "Science Formative Assessment" to mathematics. They provide 75 formative assessment strategies and show teachers how to use them to inform instructional planning and better meet the needs of all students. Research shows…

Suggests that educators help students see their literacies as grounded in situation and community. Argues that high schools should provide a multitude of situational contexts for literacy-learning experiences beyond the general academic community. Draws on genre theory to offer five general suggestions for improving the teaching and learning of…

Explains a reconceptualization of writing by discussing the relationship between discourse communities and conceptual schemes and by exploring Donald Davidson's externalism. Concludes with some speculation concerning the ramifications for a theory of discourse production. (MG)

Describes the way one English teacher designed a course by creating discourse community and thereby producing a group publication for a specific audience. Shows the steps by which a large group produced and revised copy for the publication. Argues for the efficacy of such courses. (HB)

Defining risk communication as the "interactive process of exchange of information and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions,...involving multiple messages about the nature of risk," this Digest argues that risk communication has much to offer instructors of cultural studies composition who want to revive students' sense of…

Describes the way one English teacher designed a course by asking students to compare articles on the same topic from different newspapers. Claims that teaching such forms of textual analysis is highly motivating and pedagogically useful. (HB)

Describes an extension of dialog journals, audience journals. States that, with the advent of e-mail, English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) students can send their journals to an "E-partner," and they can also make meaning by summarizing their E-partners' journal entries which are sent to both E-partner and instructor. Suggests that this…

The awakening of public interest in curriculum has come at a time when, within the education profession, the conventional wisdom about teaching and learning has itself undergone a major transformation. New Constructivist theories of knowing have emphasized the social nature of the construction of knowledge: students learn by "putting it into…

A graduate student who was the only composition person in a two semester teaching seminar experienced the dilemma of defining and establishing that identity in the midst of a classroom struggle between cultural studies and literary theorists on one side and creative writers on the other. The factious teaching seminar mirrored the fact that English…

Emphasizes that composition teachers can create exercises fitted to the current psychological or process perspective on learning (freewriting, drafting, revision) by adding to classical or product perspective (copying, summarizing, paraphrasing, translating, amplifying) the elements of rhetorical purpose and sense of context and community. (RS)

Contrasts the presentational mode of industrial writing--its strategies and techniques--with the reflective mode of traditional academic essay writing. Details industrial writing techniques and the organizational reasons for such techniques. (SR)

Outlines some of the issues and problems inherent in the group dynamics in the English classroom. Considers how English teachers are part of the group in a classroom and, therefore, are subject to the same predictable anxieties and are reliant on similar coping behaviors. (HB)

Describes students' attempts to use rhetorical analysis to study the professional communities they intend to enter. Asks whether analyzing discourse conventions can help students feel like initiates in their chosen profession, and explores how such analyses might contribute to writing-across-the-curriculum as a whole. (RS)

According to author David Roochnik, the "tragedy of logos" refers to the condition of having a "logos" (meaning a view of the rational structure of the world) and colliding with its limits and limitations. The tragedy of logos arises when some event or experience shows that things are otherwise, because tragedy entails the…