“Adopting subjectivity as a defining value, therefore, is instructive. However, the multidimensionality of the instruction also reveals the need for a shift in paradigms, a need that I find especially evident with regard to the notion of ‘voice,’ as a central manifestation of subjectivity.” —Jacqueline Jones Royster Jacqueline Jones Royster sets out three aims in […]

“The language represented in the headnotes of this essay reveals deeply held beliefs. It has a tradition and a style, and it plays off the fundamental tension between the general education and the research missions of the American university. The more I think about this language and recall the contexts in which I’ve heard it […]

“Although some accounts suggest that feminism, until recently, has been absent or at least late-blooming in the field, we find a more complex relationship in our reading of essays and books in composition written from a feminist perspective–in particular, the many accounts of personal experience in the field written by feminists and by women since […]

“We are looking for the pedagogical arts of the contact zone. These will include, we are sure, exercises in storytelling and in identifying with the ideas, interests, histories, and attitudes of others; experiments in transculturation and collaborative work and in the arts of critique, parody, and comparison (including unseemly comparisons between elite and vernacular cultural […]

“Having a certain image of students is not problematic in itself; images of students are inevitable and even necessary. Without those images, discussing pedagogical issues across institutions would be impossible. An image of students becomes problematic when it inaccurately represents the actual student population in the classroom to the extent that it inhibits the teacher’s […]

“We believe that focusing primarily on distinctions between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ rhetoric has led to unfortunate oversimplifications and distortions. Consequently, our purpose in this essay is to survey the distinctions typically drawn between classical and modern rhetoric, to suggest why these distinctions are inaccurate and, most importantly, to note the compelling similarities between […]

“Invention, conceived broadly as the process of actively creating as well as finding what comes to be known and said in the discourse of any discipline, is, I think, best understood as occurring when individuals interact dialectically with socioculture in a distinctive way to generate something.” –Karen LeFevre In this chapter of Invention as a […]

“In short, we want to move beyond the essentialist act of situating ourselves as scholars authorized to speak about specific issues; we want instead to argue for a kind of universal authorization of discourse.” –Gibson, Marinara, and Meem In this article, Michelle Gibson, Martha Marinara, and Deborah Meem argue for a fluidity of a teacher’s […]

“We need, I believe, a far more integrated theoretical vision which can explain how context cues cognition, which in its turn mediates and interprets the particular world that context provides.” –Linda Flower In “Cognition, Context, and Theory Building” (1989), Linda Flower problematizes a dichotomy between “cognition” and “context” models of composition studies. She explains how […]