Argues that the punctuation system does have features that generally make systems learnable, such as binary contrasts, limitation of parallel categories to seven or fewer options, and repeated application of the same criterion to different kinds of entities. Concludes that the simplicity that allows some readers to learn this system unconsciously…

Reviews the author's career as a teacher of composition and literature and as a writing program administrator of writing across the curriculum. Discusses the potential of poetry across the curriculum as an important tool for writing "against" the curriculum of academic discourse. Concludes that when they write poetry, students often express…

Focuses on Latino students' difficulties with higher education because of dual constructions of identity from and toward the Anglo mainstream. Addresses Other perception (the potential problems Latino students encounter in higher education based on how others perceive their individual and group identity); and self-perception (the contradictory…

Explores the educational process in which college sophomores enrolled in a reading and writing course are engaged. Defines this education as translation: a process of preservation, re-vision, and re-rendering of both texts and selves, prompted by particular course assignments, readings, and forums for interaction. Explores how the metaphor of…

Suggests that the marginalized teacher-subject look to contemporary theoretical notions of the "radical resignification" of power as well as to the neglected rhetorical concept of metis, or "cunning," to engage difference more efficaciously, if more sneakily. Argues that one possible praxis for better negotiating student resistance is the…

Addresses a situation in which a foreign student wrote an extremely homophobic message to a class mailing list--advocating the death penalty for homosexuals, something which is "a practice common in his homeland." Engages in a less triumphal reading of the episode with the homophobic student, then explicates the controversies over…

Uses the lens of postcolonial theory to reflect on the author's uses of a varied series of writing pedagogies in cross-cultural classrooms at an international college. Suggests that a pedagogy constructed against the backdrop of postcolonial theory might provide both students and their teacher in such a cross-cultural setting with a more complex…

Reflects on what the author has learned about university teaching from her experience being a novice student of karate. Asserts the value for even seasoned teachers to maintain a beginner's mind that is "free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and to open to all the possibilities." Concludes that from this new…

Turns to contemporary feminist object-relations theory to understand the efforts of students in a service learning course, to push beyond the usual subject-object, active-passive dualisms that pervade community-based literacy projects, and to compose instead complex representations in which all participants are composed as active, as knowing, and…

Examines the purposes of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), transformative experiences at professional conferences, and the elements of the author's literacy autobiography using a variety of common forms from first-year composition. Argues for recognition of the knowledge-building role of writing programs in two-year…

Argues for a context-sensitive understanding of plagiarism by analyzing a set of written institutional policies and suggesting ways that they might be revised. Offers examples of classroom practices to help teach a concept of plagiarism as situated in context. Concludes that plagiarism is an area where students need access to their teacher's…

Discusses problems in staffing introductory courses in composition, literature, and foreign languages including concerns about the professional status of teachers of introductory courses, and the many variances in staffing patterns in two-year, four-year, and research institutions. (NH)

Discusses how in the literature of critical pedagogy, resistance theory analyzes, ranks, and judges the emancipatory value of writing behaviors, privileging nonreproductive and transformative consciousness over cultural reproduction. Notes that the ranking of consciousness and the central metaphor of "reproduction" too often are naively…

Examines the author's involvement with writing centers as an example of how educators can look at the choices made within their areas of expertise to see why the choices attract them. Notes that in her case, the flexible, collaborative, individualized, non-evaluative, experimental, non-hierarchical, student-centered nature of writing centers is an…

Argues that educators need to acknowledge how the material interests of part-time and adjunct teachers, graduate assistants, tenure-stream faculty, and administrators can come into conflict in composition in order to negotiate fairly among them. Discusses how the culture of academic professionalism militates against such a consciousness, and…