A collaborative faculty project was something of a failure for one instructor. About a year ago, the instructor invited everyone in the department to meet in her office every third week to talk about teaching literature and composition. The immediate concern was the use of writing in three general education literature courses that had been…

A series of three studies looked at argument across significant contexts to understand what students must learn to "argue" in these contexts and carry out their practices. Study 1 involved 19 pre-college minority writers who were asked to take a "rival hypothesis" stance to their source texts that discuss issues in minority…

Noting that college students in the 1990s are once again becoming interested in religious/spiritual phenomena, this analysis of religious humanism as persuasive discourse first touches upon the event-filled 1960s and 70s, which saw social unrest and turbulent change, much of it emanating from university students. As background, the analysis points…

Beliefs about distinct differences between expressive and academic discourse unnecessarily complicate the teaching of writing. A composition pedagogy which fails to attend to the complications arising from the rhetorical aspect of language leads to the promotion of reasoning as separable from context. Reasoning then becomes a skill to be learned…

Santeria is a religion which originated in West Africa and evolved from the syncretism of the culture of the Yoruba people with Catholicism in Cuba. Juanita, who was born in Puerto Rico and taught herself how to read and write, owns a "botanica," a retail shop specializing in Santeria paraphernalia. Juanita is a santera (priestess) in…

The common thread that runs through the activities in a literacy course for undergraduate preservice teachers is text. One such activity is a literacy autobiography in which students focus on themselves as learners and teachers. Students are treated as professionals and make their own decisions about how they want to present themselves to their…

Characteristics that describe composition studies at its best (interdisciplinarity, collaborative, dialogic, radically democratic, maintaining a dynamic tension between "praxis" and "theoria") do not reflect a view of writing which is widely shared either by academics in fields other than composition or by those engaged in…

The necessity for maintaining and extending the public space within which argumentation may appear, whether or not represented in the classroom, stems largely from pressures which have increasingly restricted that space. To function as public spaces, classrooms must enable students as citizens to confer in an unrestricted fashion about matters of…

The United States Institute of Peace held a two day workshop titled "Teaching about the Religious Other" on March 3-4, 2005. The sixteen workshop participants were professors experienced in teaching those of one Abrahamic faith about another Abrahamic faith either in U.S. classrooms or abroad. The purpose of the workshop was to enable these…

The learning goals that inform service learning as a whole can contribute to the computers and writing field significantly. This paper demonstrates how two lines of inquiry can be furthered, community-based writing and computers and writing, through new data and critical reflection on learning goals and communication tools. The paper presents a…

Suggests that incorporating popular culture into freshman composition classes can help students understand and engage in course content and can increase interest and motivation. Discusses the idea of discourse communities, or spaces in which meaning is negotiated. Reviews strategies for making students aware of different discourse communities when…

Argues for the importance of distinct discourse communities, and the importance of a theory and pedagogy that recognizes common practices, common goals, and common values among discourse communities. Analyzes professional samples of scholarship and sample student papers. Suggests that the transaction between writer and reader lies at the heart of…

Discusses some conditions for understanding teaching as an act of responsibility towards others, rather than as an instrumental act identified through epistemology. Argues that in order to make teaching an ethical relationship between individuals, teachers must give up their position on the safe side of knowledge and participate in the risk…

Explores the history of what is now called Writing across the Curriculum (WAC), using the analogy of the university as discourse community to place the WAC movement in historical perspective and to begin to assess its significance for advanced literacy. (MG)

Describes how two researchers developed a dialogic collaborative research agenda that has proven to be beneficial and stimulating for both participants. Advocates collaborative research as a means of productive intellectual activity. (HB)