“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 […]

“Key assumptions, goals, and pedagogical practices fundamental to the literature on critical pedagogy–namely, ’empowerment,’ ‘student voice,’ ‘dialogue,’ and even the term ‘critical’–are repressive myths that perpetuate relations of domination. By this I mean that when participants in our class attempted to put into practice prescriptions offered in the literature concerning empowerment, student voice, and dialogue, […]

“More important, as I have already indicated and as I plan to explain in detail later on, in teaching writing we are tacitly teaching a version of reality and the student’s place and mode of operation in it. Yet many teachers (and I suspect most) look upon their vocations as the imparting of a largely […]

“Our students, however, must have a place to begin. They cannot sit through lectures and read textbooks and, as a consequence, write as sociologists or write literary criticism. There must be steps along the way. Some of these steps will be marked by drafts and revisions. Some will be marked by courses, and in an […]