In Mary Louise Pratt's oft-cited essay, "Arts of the Contact Zone," she argues that her son Sam's extracurricular hobby as a baseball card collector taught him about economics, racism, and American history, constituting literate activity that enabled him to hold his own in conversations with adults. Sam was also playing baseball at the time in…

Over the past seven years, the 59 full-time faculty of Duke University's first-year writing faculty have birthed, fathered, or adopted 22 babies. What makes this faculty birth rate so staggering is not only that it nearly triples the United States' national average, but also that it differentiates their program from so many other spaces in…

The author's mother has taught advanced classes at a small Catholic elementary school. She also does private tutoring for at-risk students from neighboring high schools and colleges in an affluent suburban area. The author teaches at a large public, urban university. Her mother tutors Algebra through Calculus in a fairly traditional lecture-style…

Explores the tendency to deny embodiment in scholarly and pedagogical sites and the related tendency to conflate disembodiment with authority and freedom. Argues that while feminism has a long tradition of examining the body as a material, political site, "new" postmodernist scholarship has tended to "textualize" the body. Examines critical…

Presents a polylogue that represents the dilemmas, practicalities, tensions, and rewards encountered by four graduate students and two faculty members through participation in a seminar in qualitative methods and practice, a course that involved student-researchers in reading, reflection, and five weeks of fieldwork. Includes "prologues" for each…

Proposes that emotions should be regarded as important components of learning. Focuses on recent trends in composition relating to how the emotions have or have not been included in discussions emphasizing writing instruction. Suggests opportunities for further research that give attention to emotion. (PM)

Notes that writing instructors want to resist authoritarian classroom arrangements because they want students to be active in their education and in their lives. Describes efforts to develop a "new model of authority, a new space," using peer group leaders, advanced standing students who facilitated writing groups in a first-year basic writing…

Considers how effective teacher feedback increases students' awareness of the choices they make in a piece of writing and enables them to discuss those choices with others. Describes the Comment to Comment assignment, an asynchronous written collaboration between teacher and student. Discusses the process of trial and error that the author went…

Presents a story that illustrates attempts to conflate theory and practice, enact critical pedagogy, and dissolve traditional boundaries. Demonstrates the axiom that the personal is always political. Argues that personal relationships as teachers and students help both parties to confront and act within the politics of the academy. (SC)

Considers the circumstances under which "basic writing" emerged both as a college course and as a field of study. Aims to map the "strange context" of discourses that have composed basic writing and to determine the strategic function of each of these discourses, including David Bartholomae's recent call for undoing basic writing programs. (PA)

Discusses recent use by scholars of the term "negotiation" in critical discussions of teaching writing to talk about how students might have a hand in shaping the world of difference of which they are part. Advocates discussing not only positive associations but also negative associations of negotiation, thinking about political and rhetorical…

Examines how assessment is constructed and understood, i.e., some of the conflicting subject positions writing instructors occupy when in the throes of grading. Suggests that "teacher selves" affect the act of grading, but so too do the subject positions of "student selves," namely, unconscious and/or superficial factors. (PA)

Suggests that it is important for writing teachers to focus on specific students within specific contexts and to try to reclaim the term "student centered." Proposes a new formulation of critical pedagogy that calls for an examination and location of the teachers' positions. Reflects on teaching the course "Writing and Reading about Sports" using…

Proposes an alternative pedagogy and curriculum to one implied by the text, "Ways of Reading," which provides a set of difficult, theoretical texts for writing classes. Suggests that teachers should learn something of the student's world as the student learns of the teacher's. (TB)

Presents a report summarizing the opinions of 419 writing teachers on goals and methods of responding to student writing. Shows that most teachers perceive themselves as coaches, focusing on students' ideas. Finds that lack of time has a more significant effect on goals and methods than particular allegiances to composition theories. (SR)