Adolescents often bring popular culture into school, but often these literacies are not embraced or taught in the English classroom. The author makes the case for using "Glee" in the classroom by demonstrating its persuasive power to disrupt heteronormative notions of gender and sexuality with teens. The author uses a feminist rhetorical…

This study examines critical literacy and the intersections of oral, aural, written, and performative literate practices in City Debate, an afterschool program dedicated to providing debate instruction to students in a major Southeastern city. Previous research into definitions and beliefs about literacy in an urban debate program over its twenty…

The work of Students Informing Now (S.I.N.), an immigrant student organization at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is described in this column. The authors argue that S.I.N.'s diverse activities and textual products construct a counternarrative that challenges and reframes the debate on undocumented students and immigration. Focusing on…

A movement in late 20th-century rhetorical theory asked teachers to encourage writing on personal topics as well as formal, impersonal ones. Thus, to traditional writing goals (pleasing, persuading, and instructing) the exorcism of often deep emotions was added. This movement forced teachers to read and evaluate student writing in a more…

Describes a seven-week critical-inquiry unit in a writing course for college sophomores that studies the 1953 Rosenberg trial. Uses this unit to illustrate the importance of dissonance in learning development, and how rhetorical inquiry in Kenneth Burke's concept of "perspective by incongruity" leads to critical inquiry and deeper…

Discusses Kenneth Burke's notion of "symbolic action" as applied to texts and how it mediates perceptions. Discusses some ways to teach students to get outside their own perspectives and notice what they are overlooking (thus teaching Burke's "perspective by incongruity"). (SR)