Looks at the notion of the democratic public sphere as a useful construct for collaborative practices in portfolio classrooms. Describes the author's efforts to foster democratic participation by situating portfolio talk and assessment within the public space of one developmental writing classroom. Describes conflicts unseen until the end of the…

Argues that writing teachers need to expand their conception of the response situation to encompass all the interchanges about evaluation (valuing of writing and writers) that go on in writing classes. Suggests two ways of complicating how the response situation is constructed in research about teacher commentary. Presents a study asking students…

Describes an ethnographic study of a first-year writing classroom focusing on narrative's role in that particular classroom culture at a mid-size state university. Argues for narrative's constitutive and epistemic value in a writing classroom and for the autobiographical anecdote in particular as a bridge between teaching and learning. (SC)

Presents a course design for English 3310, a three-credit composition course offered to advanced writing majors and non-majors at the University of Florida. Describes the section subtitled "Rhetoric and Environment" that was taught in conjunction with the development of University of Florida's College of Natural Resources and Environment. (SC)

Offers a discussion of audience representation versus self-representation in the study of writing. Discusses hypertext, Web pages, hub pages, and links. Probes how writers represent themselves in the way they structure links in hypertext documents on their Web sites. (CR)

Discusses the teaching of writing and the focus of the writer's inner sense of well-being or fulfillment used by Romantic teachers. Mentions that some teachers believe that this is at the cost of suppressing the concept of discourse. Argues that writerly pleasure empowers students, and that this topic is relevant to the teaching of writing. (CR)

Discusses "teacher-texts" written by composition specialists who identify themselves as teacher/researchers for, presumably, a similar audience. States these texts-model approaches to the literacy classroom are based on reflection, practice, and analysis, but also are a way of representing the classroom in terms of theoretical and/or…

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)

Provides a course overview and a critical statement of a course for seniors (a capstone experience) at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington described as "a workshop leading to production of a senior manuscript in prose or poetry and public reading of selected work." (PA)

Describes writing assignments based on several readings on the ethical quagmire of pornography. Suggests that exploratory writing grounded in the texture of students' lives is an antidote to abstract, theoretical pronouncements. Urges returning to an ethics developed in a community of writers who begin with values already given but who form an…

Analyzes the rhetoric of history as it functions in Robert J. Connors'"Teaching and Learning as a Man" (published in the February 1996 issue of "College English"). Shows how Connors' historical account of a shift from agonistic to feminist values in composition studies reveals unexamined political and ideological positions that have dangerous…

Describes the author's first response to the concept of reflexivity in qualitative research. Explains how those initial perceptions were challenged when the author became a subject in a colleague's research. Considers reflexivity as a "recently researched researcher" and explains how the author drew on her experience as a research subject when she…

Notes that it is not unusual for writing teachers to place "religion" on lists of forbidden subject matter. Describes a two-year research project that developed and tested a pedagogy for responding to the unique problems that composition instructors face when intellectually and rhetorically unsophisticated religious texts do cross their desks. (RS)

Describes how a writing teacher teaches expository strategies to students within the engineering community. Demonstrates that expository strategies can invigorate--rather then suffocate--students when the composition course is linked to a disciplinary course where students can apply the strategies to concrete problems. (RS)

Suggests that part of the problem with instruction in mechanics has to do with the intuitively unappealing nature of most of the "rules" that have remained unchanged for a century. Discusses problems with current rules on the use of the apostrophe. Presents a one-page reproducible handout that summarizes a technique to teach usage of the…