Presents detailed information about school English, a functional variety that has influenced twentieth-century American vernaculars and the writings of most Americans. Sets school English in its nineteenth-century context and comments on factors that have favored its survival. Comments briefly on the Black English case in Ann Arbor, Michigan. (RL)

The author suggests that English-only classrooms are not only the implicit goal of much language policy in the United States, but also assumed to be already the case, an ironic situation in light of composition's historical role as "containing" language differences in U.S. higher education. He suggests that the myth of linguistic…

Community colleges have been engaged for the last sixty years in providing open access to public higher education to anyone with a high school diploma. Recently, disappointing success rates for developmental students have driven some colleges to reduce or restrict access to college based on standardized test scores. The operative phrase in most of…

What should college English be? This author contends that college English should be the intersection of the various areas of discourse that shape thought and produce knowledge. It should be the study of the mixing and remixing of connections: those connections that move from popular culture to the university, from geography to politics, from…

Argues that the practices of English studies are defined not only by the obvious variety of objects and methods of inquiry but also by competing divisions of service. Calls for a reconfiguration of the geography of the discipline's service functions with the goal of developing new ways of reaching extra-disciplinary student and community…

When assigned to do parodies of literary works, students explore a variety of legitimate parodic relationships of significant critical interest. (DD)

Questions the current expectation that writing theory will serve pedagogy in direct, immediate ways, because of the extraordinary variety and complexity of the writing process. (DD)

Examines the growing influence of Mikhail Bakhtin in a variety of fields. Describes two dominant strains that permeate Bakhtin's philosophical project: phenomenology and Marxism. Argues that the ambivalence displayed between these two poles in Bakhtin's work suggests an ambivalence in the larger arena of literary studies. (HB)

Notes the problem of teaching reading and writing in a way that is not racially or culturally biased. Offers teaching strategies for combating this, including using a wide variety of works from other races and cultures that provide a range of minority perspectives in a nonstereotypical fashion. (JC)

Assesses the benefits and limitations of writing as a cognitive process. Discusses the cognitive process model of writing, then proposes an ecological model of writing, where a fundamental tenet is that writing is an activity through which a person is continually engaged with a variety of socially constituted systems. (EL)

Focuses on women who practiced and wrote about medicine in nineteenth-century United States. Argues that the writing of women scientists complicates present understanding of the relations of gender, science, and writing as it presents in the discourse of medicine a variety of gendered positions rather than a univocal performance of patriarchal…