A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY59 start with A start with A
Each of the twelve essays that comprise this collection sparks new insights about the phenomenon of writing. A must-read for rhetoric and composition scholars and students, Abducting Writing Studies is sure to foster vibrant discussions about what is possible in writing research and instruction.
As sign language interpreting has emerged and evolved in the last 20 years as an academic field of study, the scope of learning has broadened to include fields beyond the language and culture of deaf people. This text surveys six disciplines that have informed the study of sign language interpreting: history, translation, linguistics, sociology, social psychology, and cognitive psychology, along with their major ideas, principal scholars, and ways of viewing human interaction. Each chapter includes clear learning goals, definitions, discussion questions, and images to aid understanding. The Academic Foundations of Interpreting Studies is required reading for upper-level undergraduate or first-year graduate students in interpreting, Deaf studies, and sign language programs.
Candace Spigelman investigates the dynamics of ownership in small group writing workshops, basing her findings on case studies involving two groups: a five-member creative writing group meeting monthly at a local Philadelphia coffee bar and a four-member college-level writing group meeting in their composition classroom. She explores the relationship between particular notions of intellectual property within each group as well as the effectiveness of writing groups that embrace these notions. Addressing the negotiations between the public and private domains of writing within these groups, she discovers that for both the committed writers and the novices, “values associated with textual ownership play a crucial role in writing group performance.”
Spigelman discusses textual ownership, intellectual property, and writing group processes and then reviews theories relating to authorship and knowledge making. After introducing the participants in each group, discussing their texts, and describing their workshop sessions, she examines the writers’ avowed and implied beliefs about exchanging ideas and protecting individual property rights.
Spigelman stresses the necessary tension between individual and social aspects of writing practices: She argues for the need to foster more collaborative activity among student writers by replicating the processes of writers working in nonacademic settings but also contends that all writers must be allowed to imagine their individual agency and authority as they compose.
In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class.
Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York.
These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.
Drawing on recent developments in framing theory and the resurgent traditions of progressive organizers, Linda Adler-Kassner calls upon composition teachers and administrators to develop strategic programs of collective action that do justice to composition’s best principles. Adler-Kassner argues that the “story” of college composition can be changed only when writing scholars bring the wonders down, to articulate a theory framework that is pragmatic and intelligible to those outside the field--and then create messages that reference that framework. In The Activist WPA, she makes a case for developing a more integrated vision of outreach, English education, and writing program administration.
An essential resource for museum professionals, teachers, and students, the award winning Teaching in the Art Museum (Getty Publications, 2011) set a new standard in the field of gallery education. This follow-up book blends theory and practice to help educators—from teachers and docents to curators and parents—create meaningful interpretive activities for children and adults.
Written by a team of veteran museum educators, Activity-Based Teaching in the Art Museum offers diverse perspectives on embodiment, emotions, empathy, and mindfulness to inspire imaginative, spontaneous interactions that are firmly grounded in history and theory. The authors begin by surveying the emergence of activity-based teaching in the 1960s and 1970s and move on to articulate a theory of play as the cornerstone of their innovative methodology. The volume is replete with sidebars describing activities facilitated with museum visitors of all ages.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Part I History
1 The Modern History of Presence and Meaning
A philosophical shift from a language-based understanding of the world to direct, physical interaction with it.
2 A New Age in Museum Education: The 1960s and 1970s
A brief history of some of the innovative museum education programs developed in the United States in the late 1960s and 1970s. The sudden and widespread adoption of nondiscursive gallery activities during this period, especially but not exclusively in programs designed for younger students and school groups, expressed the spirit of the times.
Part II Theory
3 Starts and Stops
Two attempts by American museum educators to articulate a theory for their new, nondiscursive programs: the first deriving from the early work of Project Zero, the Harvard Graduate School of Education program founded by the philosopher Nelson Goodman to study arts learning as a cognitive activity; the second stemming from the work of Viola Spolin, the acclaimed theater educator and coach whose teaching methods, embodied in a series of “theater games,” were detailed in her well-known book Improvisation for the Theater (1963).
4 A Theory of Play in the Museum
A theory of play that posits activities in the museum as forms of play that take place in spaces (or “playgrounds”) temporarily designated as such by educators and their adult visitors or students. Play is defined essentially as movement—both physical and imaginary (metaphorical)—toward and away from, around, and inside and outside the works of art that are foregrounded within those spaces. Gallery activities conceived in this way respond to the possibilities that the objects themselves offer for the visitor to explore and engage with them. The particular movements characterizing an activity are crucially conditioned by the object in question; they constitute a process of discovery and learning conceptually distinct from, but supportive of, traditional dialogue-based modes of museum education, which they supplement rather than supplant.
Part III Aspects of Play
5 Embodiment, Affordances
The idea of embodiment adopted here recognizes that both mind and body are joined in their interactions with things. Investigating works of art thus involves apprehending them physically as well as intellectually—in the sense of responding to the ways in which a particular work allows and even solicits the viewer’s physical grasp of it.
6 Skills
Ways in which objects present themselves to us, as viewers, and what we might do in response as they fit with the bodily skills we have developed over the course of our lives. Such skills might be as simple as getting dressed, washing, or eating; or as specialized as doing one’s hair, dancing, playing an instrument, or acting—all of which may allow us to “grasp” and even feel that we inhabit particular works of art.
7 Movement
Embodied looking is always looking from somewhere. We apprehend objects as we physically move around and in front of them; they reveal themselves differently as we approach them from different viewpoints. Viewers orient themselves spatially to both the surfaces of objects and to the things and spaces depicte4d in or suggested by representational works of art. Activity-based teaching gets visitors and students to move among the objects—away from them, close to them, and even into them.
8 The Senses
Both adult visitors and younger students come to the museum expecting to use their eyes, yet “visual” art appeals to several of the senses at once, though rarely to the same degree. Sculpture, for example, almost always appeals to touch (whether or not that is actually possible or allowed) as well as sight. A painting depicting a scene in which people appear to be talking may induce viewers to not only look but also “listen” to what the figures might be saying.
9 Drawing in the Museum
Looking at art with a pencil in hand amplifies viewers’ ability to imaginatively touch and feel their way across and around an artwork. Contour drawing by its nature requires participants to imagine that they are touching the contours of an object beneath the tips of their pencils. Other types of drawing allow viewers to feel their way around objects through observation and movement.
10 Emotion
Visitors’ emotional responses to art represent a complex process with many components, from physiological to cognitive, and a particular work of art may elicit a wide range of emotional reactions. This chapter describes specific ways in which museum educators can go well beyond merely asking visitors how a work of art makes them feel.
11 Empathy and Intersubjectivity
One aspect of viewers’ emotional responses to art that is often taken for granted, if not neglected altogether: the empathetic connections that human beings make to images of other people. This chapter advocates an approach that prompts viewers to physically engage with the representations of people they see.
12 Mindful Looking
Mindfulness involves awareness and attention, both as a conscious practice and as an attitude that gallery teachers can encourage in museum visitors. This is not solely a matter of cultivating the mind, however; it is also a matter of cultivating the body, since mindfulness is only possible when mind and body are in a state of harmonious, relaxed attentiveness. Mindfulness practice in the art museum actively directs the viewer’s focus on the object itself and insists on returning to it over and over; yet it also balances activity with conscious stillness.
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Amman and Russia call for immediate ceasefire
French riots extend to immigrant communities
Lawyers call for fair trial of Guantanamo prisoners
China aims at increasing trade with Russia
20 casualties in an earthquake in Pakistan
Headlines—print and broadcast—have gone global. As a result, news and information from authentic sources make a useful resource for foreign language learners.
Advanced Media Arabic systematically introduces authentic texts and audio files from a wide variety of media sources. This textbook helps students develop analytical and translation skills in Arabic and expand their reading, writing, listening, and speaking capabilities. The book emphasizes the semantic and stylistic aspects of media Arabic rather than its grammar and aims to equip students with the ability to listen to and converse about current events.
Organized by theme, each of the ten chapters covers current issues like:
o Diplomacyo Electionso Trade and Industryo Violence and Disordero Law and Ordero Economyo War and Military Actiono Natural Disasterso Terrorismo Arabic television talk shows
Each chapter provides important vocabulary; examples of language in context; exercises for reading and listening comprehension, writing, and translation; and a section for discussion and debate.
The listening material—60 minutes of spoken material—is available for free online at www.press.georgetown.edu.
Downloading Audio Files from press.georgetown.eduPlease click on the link under “Sample Content” to download a compressed zip file of all ten MP3 audio tracks that accompany the book. Files can be downloaded using a Mac or a PC. We recommend playing the files using iTunes or Windows Media Player. Please note that Georgetown University Press does not provide technical support for audio downloads.
For Mac, files will automatically be saved to your “Downloads” folder. (For older Macs, you may need to unzip the files using Stuffit.) To add files to iTunes, open iTunes, and click File>Add to Library and navigate to your file location.
For PC, save the compressed file to your desktop. Once the file has downloaded, go to the folder location on the desktop. Double-click the .zip file icon to unzip the file. Another folder will appear on the desktop. Open to reveal “Lahlali audio” folder. Open that folder to see all ten MP3 files. Import the files in to your music player from your file location by selecting all ten audio tracks, right-click and select Add to Playlist.
PLEASE NOTE: There are no audio files for lessons 6 and 7. Those lessons have reading passages only.
Picking up where Innovative Practices in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters left off, this new collection presents the best new interpreter teaching techniques proven in action by the eminent contributors assembled here. In the first chapter, Dennis Cokely discusses revising curricula in the new century based upon experiences at Northeastern University. Jeffrey E. Davis delineates how to teach observation techniques to interpreters, while Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski suggest how discourse mapping can be considered the Global Positioning System of translation.
In other chapters, Laurie Swabey proposes ways to handle the challenge of referring expressions for interpreting students, and Melanie Metzger describes how to learn and recognize what interpreters do in interaction. Jemina Napier contributes information on training interpreting students to identify omission potential. Robert G. Lee explains how to make the interpreting process come alive in the classroom. Mieke Van Herreweghe discusses turn-taking and turn-yielding in meetings with Deaf and hearing participants in her contribution. Anna-Lena Nilsson defines “false friends,” or how contextually incorrect use of facial expressions with certain signs in Swedish Sign Language can be detrimental influences on interpreters. The final chapter by Kyra Pollitt and Claire Haddon recommends retraining interpreters in the art of telephone interpreting, completing Advances in Teaching Sign Language Interpreters as the new authoritative volume in this vital communication profession.
During the past twenty years, the world’s most renowned critical theorist—the scholar who defined the field of postcolonial studies—has experienced a radical reorientation in her thinking. Finding the neat polarities of tradition and modernity, colonial and postcolonial, no longer sufficient for interpreting the globalized present, she turns elsewhere to make her central argument: that aesthetic education is the last available instrument for implementing global justice and democracy.
Spivak’s unwillingness to sacrifice the ethical in the name of the aesthetic, or to sacrifice the aesthetic in grappling with the political, makes her task formidable. As she wrestles with these fraught relationships, she rewrites Friedrich Schiller’s concept of play as double bind, reading Gregory Bateson with Gramsci as she negotiates Immanuel Kant, while in dialogue with her teacher Paul de Man. Among the concerns Spivak addresses is this: Are we ready to forfeit the wealth of the world’s languages in the name of global communication? “Even a good globalization (the failed dream of socialism) requires the uniformity which the diversity of mother-tongues must challenge,” Spivak writes. “The tower of Babel is our refuge.”
In essays on theory, translation, Marxism, gender, and world literature, and on writers such as Assia Djebar, J. M. Coetzee, and Rabindranath Tagore, Spivak argues for the social urgency of the humanities and renews the case for literary studies, imprisoned in the corporate university. “Perhaps,” she writes, “the literary can still do something.”
What is the appropriate content of aesthetics for students of art at different age levels? How can it best be taught? How should it be combined with studio work and other art disciplines?
Michael J. Parsons and H. gene Blocker answer these and other questions in a volume designed to help art educators, potential educators, and curriculum developers integrate aesthetics into the study of art in the school curriculum. The two introduce some of the philosophical problems and questions in art, encouraging teachers and others to form a personal outlook on these issues.
Examines how our understanding of emotion is shaped by the devices we use to measure it
Since the late nineteenth century, psychologists have used technological forms of media to measure and analyze emotion. In The Affect Lab, Grant Bollmer examines the use of measurement tools such as electrical shocks, photography, video, and the electroencephalograph to argue that research on emotions has confused the physiology of emotion with the tools that define its inscription.
Bollmer shows that the psychological definitions of emotion have long been directly shaped by the physical qualities of the devices used in laboratory research. To investigate these devices, The Affect Lab examines four technologies related to the history of psychology in North America: spiritualist toys at Harvard University, serial photography in early American psychological laboratories, experiments on “psychopaths” performed with an instrument called an Offner Dynograph, and the development of the “electropsychometer,” or “E-Meter,” by Volney Mathison and L. Ron Hubbard.
Challenging the large body of humanities research surrounding affect theory, The Affect Lab identifies an understudied problem in formulations of affect: how affect is a construction inseparable from the techniques and devices used to identify and measure it. Ultimately, Bollmer offers a new critique of affect and affect theory, demonstrating how deferrals to psychology and neuroscience in contemporary theory and philosophy neglect the material of experimental, scientific research.
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This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.
Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.
African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.
After the Program Era explores the consequences and implications, as well as the lacunae and liabilities, of McGurl’s foundational intervention. Glass focuses only on American fiction and the traditional MFA program, and this collection aims to expand and examine its insights in terms of other genres and sites. Postwar poetry, in particular, has until now been neglected as a product of the Program Era, even though it is, arguably, a “purer” example, since poets now depend almost entirely on the patronage of the university. Similarly, this collection looks beyond the traditional MFA writing program to explore the pre-history of writing programs in American universities, as well as alternatives to the traditionally structured program that have emerged along the way.
Taken together, the essays in After the Program Era seek to answer and explore many of these questions and continue the conversations McGurl only began.
CONTRIBUTORS
Seth Abramson, Greg Barnhisel, Eric Bennett, Matthew Blackwell, Kelly Budruweit, Mike Chasar, Simon During, Donal Harris, Michael Hill, Benjamin Kirbach, Sean McCann, Mark McGurl, Marija Rieff, Juliana Spahr, Stephen Voyce, Stephanie Young
Farmer examines two very different kinds of publics, cultural and disciplinary, and discusses two counterpublics within those broad categories: zine discourses and certain academic discourses. By juxtaposing these two significantly different kinds of publics, Farmer suggests that each discursive world can be seen, in its own distinct way, as a counterpublic, an oppositional social formation that has a stake in widening or altering public life as we know it.
Drawing on major figures in rhetoric and cultural theory, Farmer builds his argument about composition teaching and its relation to the public sphere, leading to a more sophisticated understanding of public life and a deeper sense of what democratic citizenship means for our time.
Linked by a persistent inquiry into the nature and identity of “the law,” these essays are informed by the conviction that the conventional representations of law, both in law schools and the courts, cannot be taken at face value—that the law, as commonly conceived, makes no sense. The authors argue that the relentlessly normative prescriptions of American legal thinkers are frequently futile and, indeed, often pernicious. They also argue that the failure to recognize the role that authorship must play in the production of legal thought plagues both the teaching and the practice of American law. Ranging from the institutional to the psychological and metaphysical deficiencies of the American legal system, the depth of criticism offered by Against the Law is unprecedented.
In a departure from the nearly universal legitimating and reformist tendencies of American legal thought, this book will be of interest not only to the legal academics under attack in the book, but also to sociologists, historians, and social theorists. More particularly, it will engage all the American lawyers who suspect that there is something very wrong with the nature and direction of their profession, law students who anticipate becoming part of that profession, and those readers concerned with the status of the American legal system.
In this illuminating book, Margaret Morganroth Gullette reveals that aging doesn't start in our chromosomes, but in midlife downsizing, the erosion of workplace seniority, threats to Social Security, or media portrayals of "aging Xers" and "greedy" Baby Boomers. To combat the forces aging us prematurely, Gullette invites us to change our attitudes, our life storytelling, and our society. Part intimate autobiography, part startling cultural expose, this book does for age what gender and race studies have done for their categories. Aged by Culture is an impassioned manifesto against the pernicious ideologies that steal hope from every stage of our lives.
While many studies of transfer are longitudinal, with data collected over several years, Nowacek’s is synchronous, a rich cross-section of the writing and classroom discussions produced by a team-taught learning community—three professors and eighteen students enrolled in a one-semester general education interdisciplinary humanities seminar that consisted of three linked courses in history, literature, and religious studies. With extensive field notes, carefully selected student and teacher self-reports in the form of interviews and focus groups, and thorough examinations of recorded classroom discussions, student papers with professor comments, and student notebooks, Nowacek presents a nuanced and engaging analysis that outlines how transfer is not simply a cognitive act but a rhetorical one that involves both seeing connections and presenting them to the instructors who are institutionally positioned to recognize and value them.
Considering the challenges facing instructors teaching for transfer and the transfer of writing-related knowledge, Nowacek develops and outlines a new theoretical framework and methodological model of transfer and illustrates the practical implications through case studies and other classroom examples. She proposes transfer is best understood as an act of recontextualization, and she builds on this premise throughout the book by drawing from previous work in cognitive psychology, activity theory, and rhetorical genre theory, as well as her own analyses of student work.
This focused examination complements existing longitudinal studies and will help readers better understand not only the opportunities and challenges confronting students as they work to become agents of integration but also the challenges facing instructors as they seek to support that student work.
This interdisciplinary collection brings together contributors working in Asian American studies, English, anthropology, sociology, and art history. They consider issues of cultural authenticity raised by Asian American participation in hip hop and jazz, the emergence of an orientalist “Indo-chic” in U.S. youth culture, and the circulation of Vietnamese music variety shows. They examine the relationship between Chinese restaurants and American culture, issues of sexuality and race brought to the fore in the video performance art of a Bruce Lee–channeling drag king, and immigrant television viewers’ dismayed reactions to a Chinese American chef who is “not Chinese enough.” The essays in Alien Encounters demonstrate the importance of scholarly engagement with popular culture. Taking popular culture seriously reveals how people imagine and express their affective relationships to history, identity, and belonging.
Contributors. Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Kevin Fellezs, Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Joan Kee, Nhi T. Lieu, Sunaina Maira, Martin F. Manalansan IV, Mimi Thi Nguyen, Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Sukhdev Sandhu, Christopher A. Shinn, Indigo Som, Thuy Linh Nguyen Tu, Oliver Wang
The first annotated edition of Syrian writer Nihad Sirees's The Silence and the Roar, created for the Arabic language classroom
Al-Samt wa-al-Sakhab (The Silence and the Roar) is an award-winning novella by Syrian author Nihad Sirees. This edition—abridged and in the original Arabic with vocabulary aids, reading questions, and supplementary materials—introduces intermediate and advanced Arabic language students to the world of contemporary Arab literature.
In Al-Samt wa-al-Sakhab, Sirees weaves an Orwellian tale of freedom, love, and resistance amid a backdrop of bureaucracy and despotism. Fathi Sheen is a writer living in an unnamed Middle Eastern country whose work has been silenced by the ruling government and its despotic leader. On the twentieth anniversary of the regime, Fathi decides to leave the roar of the parade snaking its way through the city and visit his mother and his girlfriend, but when he stops to help a student being beaten by the police, his ID is confiscated. With no choice but to report to the police station, Fathi fights to stay sane against the oppressive—and increasingly absurd—state bureaucracy. This political satire, originally published in 2004 but no less relevant to our times, shows how to remain free even in captivity.
In this abridged and annotated edition for the Arabic language classroom, editor Hanadi Al-Samman includes a historical and cultural preface in Arabic, a biography of Sirees, footnotes for vocabulary aid, and pre- and postreading questions and activities to guide students through the book's literary concepts and to teach literary analysis skills. An interview with Sirees and excerpt readings in his voice are available on the publisher's website. Authorized by Sirees, this edition preserves the author's original style while making the novella easy to use in the classroom or to read independently.
Recognizing the urgent need for students to understand the emergence of the United States' power and prestige in relation to world events, Gary W. Reichard and Ted Dickson reframe the teaching of American history in a global context. Each essay covers a specific chronological period and approaches fundamental topics and events in United States history from an international perspective, emphasizing how the development of the United States has always depended on its transactions with other nations for commodities, cultural values, and populations. For each historical period, the authors also provide practical guidance on bringing this international approach to the classroom, with suggested lesson plans and activities. Ranging from the colonial period to the civil rights era and everywhere in between, this collection will help prepare Americans for success in an era of global competition and collaboration.
Contributors are David Armitage, Stephen Aron, Edward L. Ayers, Thomas Bender, Stuart M. Blumin, J. D. Bowers, Orville Vernon Burton, Lawrence Charap, Jonathan Chu, Kathleen Dalton, Betty A. Dessants, Ted Dickson, Kevin Gaines, Fred Jordan, Melvyn P. Leffler, Louisa Bond Moffitt, Philip D. Morgan, Mark A. Noll, Gary W. Reichard, Daniel T. Rodgers, Leila J. Rupp, Brenda Santos, Gloria Sesso, Carole Shammas, Suzanne M. Sinke, Omar Valerio-Jimenez, Penny M. Von Eschen, Patrick Wolfe, and Pingchao Zhu.
When defining culture, one must indeed take into account even the minutest of details. What of a lighter, for example, or a telephone? The essays in this new collection examine just that. The contributors pose not only a historical, pragmatic use for the items, but also delve into more imaginative aspects of what defines us as Americans. Both the lighter and the telephone are investigated, as well as how the lava lamp represents sixties counterculture and containment. The late nineteenth-century corset is discussed as an embodiment of womanhood, and an Amish quilt is used as an illustration of cultural continuity. These are just a few of the artifacts discussed. Scholars will be intrigued by the historical interpretations that contributors proposed concerning a teapot, card table, and locket; students will not only find merit in the expositions, but also by learning from the models how such interpretation can be carried out. This collection helps us understand that very thing that makes us who we are. Viewing these objects from both our past and our present, we can begin to define what it is to be American.
"By casting the collection explicitly as an outreach to the larger community of Americanists---not primarily those who self-identify as 'digital scholars'---Earhart and Jewell have made an important choice, and one that will likely make this a landmark publication."
---Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, which features a wide range of practitioner-scholars, is the first of its kind: a gathering of people who are expert in American literary studies and in digital technologies, scholars uniquely able to draw from experience with building digital resources and to provide theoretical commentary on how the transformation to new technologies alters the way we think about and articulate scholarship in American literature. The volume collects articles from those who are involved in tool development, usability testing, editing and textual scholarship, digital librarianship, and issues of race and ethnicity in digital humanities, while also situating digital humanities work within the larger literary discipline. In addition, the volume examines the traditional structures of the fields, including tenure and promotion criteria, modes of scholarly production, the skill sets required for scholarship, and the training of new scholars.
The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age will attract practitioners of digital humanities in multiple fields, Americanists who utilize digital materials, and those who are intellectually curious about the new movement and materials.
Amy E. Earhart is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Texas A&M University.
Andrew Jewell is Associate Professor of Digital Projects, University Libraries, at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.
Cover art: Book background ©iStockphoto.com/natashika
digitalculturebooks is an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
The essays raise such issues as the education of civil servants, the changes necessitated by crises, the growth of social sciences in governmental concerns, and primarily, the role of public administrators in America. Each author is a distinguished expert in his own right, and each essay can stand alone as a remarkable insight into the changing world of public administration within American society. Frederick Mosher’s expertise and supervision shapes this work into a remarkable and holistic perspective on public administration over time.
A forthright look at the future of the discipline in the wake of immense social changes.
What becomes of "national knowledge" in our age of globalization? If dramatic changes in technology, commerce, and social relations are undermining familiar connections between culture and place, what happens to legacies of learning that put the nation at the center of the study of history, culture, language, politics, and geography? In short, what remains of American Studies? At a critical moment, this book offers a richly textured historical perspective on where our notions of national knowledge-and our sense of American Studies-have come from and where they may lead in a future of new ideas about culture and community.
The America that seems to be disappearing before our very eyes is, George Lipsitz argues, actually the cumulative creation of yesterday’s struggles over identity, culture, and power. With examples from statistics and history, poster designs and music lyrics, Lipsitz shows how American Studies has been shaped by the social movements of the 1930s, 1960s, and 1980s. His analysis reveals the sedimented history of social movement contestation contained in contemporary popular music, visual art, and cinema.Finally, Lipsitz identifies the ways in which the globalization of commerce and culture are producing radically new understandings of politics, performance, consumption, knowledge, and nostalgia; the changing realities present not so much a danger as a clear challenge to a still-evolving American Studies-a challenge that this book helps us to confront wisely, flexibly, and effectively. Critical American Studies SeriesAnnouncing a new seriesCritical American Studies George Lipsitz, series editorThis series examines recent trends in American Studies that address fundamental questions about history, culture, social structure, race, gender, sexuality, and citizenship. It examines the forces-including mass migration, global economy, the seeming weaknesses of the nation-state, and ongoing ethnic antagonisms-that compel the field to reexamine the role of culture in producing individual and collective identities.
“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.”
—Harold Bloom
“The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.”
—David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University
The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard.
Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty.
Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few.
Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.
A highly readable introduction to and overview of the postwar social sciences in the United States, The Americanization of Social Science explores a critical period in the evolution of American sociology’s professional identity from the late 1940s through the early 1960s. David Paul Haney contends that during this time leading sociologists encouraged a professional secession from public engagement in the name of establishing the discipline’s scientific integrity.
According to Haney, influential practitioners encouraged a willful withdrawal from public sociology by separating their professional work from public life. He argues that this separation diminished sociologists’ capacity for conveying their findings to wider publics, especially given their ambivalence towards the mass media, as witnessed by the professional estrangement that scholars like David Riesman and C. Wright Mills experienced as their writing found receptive lay audiences. He argues further that this sense of professional insularity has inhibited sociology’s participation in the national discussion about social issues to the present day.
Analyzing Syntax and Semantics features the Personalized System of Instruction (PSI) approach. This method uses student performance objectives, practice, feedback, individualization of pace, and repeatable testing as instructional strategies.
In this fourth collection of reflections on writing and the writing life, the late William Stafford's lifelong refusal to separate his work from the task of living responsibly -- "What a person is shows up in what a person does" -- rings clear.
The Answers Are Inside the Mountains collects unpublished interviews, poems, articles, aphorisms, and writing exercises from this great American man of letters and hugely prolific author, who kept a journal for nearly half a century and produced over 20,000 poems -- a staggering output by any standard.
The book begins with the words "To overwhelm by rightness," a phrase evoking the two demands Stafford made on himself: to write daily, and to live uprightly. The Answers Are Inside the Mountains lives up to those deceptively simple ethics, and confirms William Stafford's enduringly important voice for our uncertain age.
William Stafford (1914-93) authored more than thirty-five books of poetry and prose, including the highly acclaimed Writing the Australian Crawl, You Must Revise Your Life, Crossing Unmarked Snow: Further Views on the Writer's Vocation, and Traveling Through the Dark, winner of the National Book Award for Poetry.
Addressing Native American studies past, present, and future, the essays in New Indians, Old Wars tackle the discipline head-on, presenting a radical revision of the popular view of the American West in the process. Instead of luxuriating in the West's past glories or accepting the widespread historians' view of it as a shared place, Elizabeth Cook-Lynn argues that the American West should be fundamentally understood as stolen.
Cook-Lynn says that the Indian Wars of Resistance to the nineteenth- and twentieth-century colonial effort to seize native lands and resources must be given standing in the face of the ever-growing imperial narrative of America--because the terror the world is now witnessing may be the direct consequence of events which began in America's earliest dealings with the natives of this continent. Cook-Lynn's story examines the ongoing and perennial relationship of conflict between colonizers and indigenous people, and it is a story that every American must read.
Cook-Lynn understands that the story of the American West teaches the political language of land theft and tyranny. She argues that to remedy this situation, Native American studies must be considered and pursued as its own discipline, rather than as a subset of history or anthropology. She makes an impassioned claim that such a shift, not merely an institutional or theoretical change, could allow Native American studies to play an important role in defending the sovereignty of indigenous nations today.
Lincoln presents critiques of recent attempts at grand comparison, and enlists numerous theoretical examples of how a more modest, cautious, and discriminating form of comparison might work and what it can accomplish. He does this through studies of shamans, werewolves, human sacrifices, apocalyptic prophecies, sacred kings, and surveys of materials as diverse and wide-ranging as Beowulf, Herodotus’s account of the Scythians, the Native American Ghost Dance, and the Spanish Civil War.
Ultimately, Lincoln argues that concentrating one's focus on a relatively small number of items that the researcher can compare closely, offering equal attention to relations of similarity and difference, not only grants dignity to all parties considered, it yields more reliable and more interesting—if less grandiose—results. Giving equal attention to the social, historical, and political contexts and subtexts of religious and literary texts also allows scholars not just to assess their content, but also to understand the forces, problems, and circumstances that motivated and shaped them.
This is a practical text, providing ways to employ the best instructional strategies possible for today’s diverse and dynamic digital writing courses. Organized into three sections—Course Conceptualization and Support, Fostering Student Engagement, and MOOCs—chapters explore principles of rhetorically savvy writing crossed with examples of effective digital teaching contexts and genres of digital text. Contributors consider not only pedagogy but also the demographics of online students and the special constraints of the online environments for common writing assignments.
The scope of online learning and its place within higher education is continually evolving. Applied Pedagogies offers tools for the online writing classrooms of today and anticipates the needs of students in digital contexts yet to come. This book is a valuable resource for established and emerging writing instructors as they continue to transition to the digital learning environment.
Contributors: Kristine L. Blair, Jessie C. Borgman, Mary-Lynn Chambers, Katherine Ericsson, Chris Friend, Tamara Girardi, Heidi Skurat Harris, Kimberley M. Holloway, Angela Laflen, Leni Marshall, Sean Michael Morris, Danielle Nielsen, Dani Nier-Weber, Daniel Ruefman, Abigail G. Scheg, Jesse Stommel
Editors Monica Prendergast and Juliana Saxton have updated the book to reflect shifts in practice over the last few years in the world of applied theater. With their background in drama education and pedagogy, the contributors offer introductory chapters and dozens of case studies on applied theater projects around the globe. This new edition of Applied Theatre will encourage students and practitioners to acquire a deeper, more concrete understanding of the field and its best practice.
Copublished with CSU Open Press
This edited collection builds on the three themes that emerged from the 2018 inaugural lifespan writing conference—identity, society, and theory—to further the study of writing through the lifespan. The contributors to this collection provide a framework within which the reader can develop a dynamic, interdisciplinary, multifaceted understanding of the limits and possibilities of studying lifespan writing. Recognizing that such research requires methodological rigor and flexibility as well as theoretical precision and adaptability, Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research draws on a range of methodological and theoretical approaches, from autoethnography to longitudinal structural equation modeling. This methodological and theoretical flexibility reflects the challenges inherent in studying lifespan writing—in particular, the need to develop an integrated framework that enables the “translation” of research findings for use by other lifespan writing researchers. Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research begins that process.
This book is also available as an open access ebook through the WAC Clearinghouse
For decades, students learning the Arabic language have begun with Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and then transitioned to learning spoken Arabic. While the MSA-first approach neither reflects the sociolinguistic reality of the language nor gives students the communicative skills required to fully function in Arabic, the field continues to debate the widespread adoption of this approach. Little research or evidence has been presented about the effectiveness of integrating dialect in the curriculum. With the recent publication of textbooks that integrate dialect in the Arabic curriculum, however, a more systematic analysis of such integration is clearly becoming necessary.
In this seminal volume, Mahmoud Al-Batal gathers key scholars who have implemented integration to present data and research on the method’s success. The studies address curricular models, students' outcomes, and attitudes of students and teachers using integration in their curricula. This volume is an essential resource for all teachers of Arabic language and those working in Teaching Arabic as a Foreign Language (TAFL).
Both a historical recovery and a critical rethinking of the functions and practices of textbooks, Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States argues for an alternative understanding of our rhetorical traditions. The authors describe how the pervasive influence of nineteenth-century literacy textbooks demonstrate the early emergence of substantive instruction in reading and writing. Tracing the histories of widespread educational practices, the authors treat the textbooks as an important means of cultural formation that restores a sense of their distinguished and unique contributions.
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, few people in the United States had access to significant school education or to the materials of instruction. By century’s end, education was a mass—though not universal—experience, and literacy textbooks were ubiquitous artifacts, used both in home and in school by a growing number of learners from diverse backgrounds. Many of the books have been forgotten, their contributions slighted or dismissed, or they are remembered through a haze of nostalgia as tokens of an idyllic form of schooling. Archives of Instruction suggests strategies for re-reading the texts and details the watersheds in the genre, providing a new perspective on the material conditions of schooling, book publication, and emerging practices of literacy instruction. The volume includes a substantial bibliography of primary and secondary works related to literacy instruction at all levels of education in the United States during the nineteenth century.
In this book, Jasper Neel’s sure-to-be-controversial resituating of Aristotle centers around three questions that have been constants in his twenty-two years of teaching experience: What does itmean to teach writing? What should one know before teaching writing? And, if there is such a thing as "research in the teaching of writing," what is it?
Believing that all composition teachers are situated politically and socially, both as part of the institution in which they teach and as beings with lived histories, Neel examines his own life and the life of composition studies as a discipline in the context of Aristotle. Neel first situates the Rhetoric as a political document; he then situates the Rhetoric in the Aristotelian system and describes how professional discourse came to know itself through Aristotle’s way of studying the world; finally, he examines the operation of the Rhetoric inside itself before arguing the need to turn to Aristotle’s notion of sophistry as a way of negating his system.
By pointing out the connections among Aristotelian rhetoric, the contemporary university, and the contemporary writing teacher, Neel shows that Aristotle’s frightening social theories are as alive today as are Aristotelian notions of discourse.
Neel explains that by their very nature teachers must speak with a professional voice. It is through showing how to "hear" one’s professional voice that Neel explores the notion of professional discourse that originates with Aristotle. In maintaining that one must pay a high price in order to speak through Aristotle’s theory or to assume the role of "professional," he argues that no neutral ground exists either for pedagogy or for the analysis of pedagogy. Neel concludes this discussion by proposing that Aristotelian sophistry is both an antidote to Aristotelian racism, sexism, and bigotry and a way of allowing Aristotelian categories of discourse to remain useful.
Finally, as an Aristotelian, a teacher, and a writer, Neel responds both to Aristotle and to professionalism by rethinking the influence of the past and reviving the voice of Aristotelian sophistry.
philosophical rationale for the idea of discipline-based art education.
Levi and Smith discuss topics ranging over both the public and private
aspects of art, the disciplines of artistic creation, art history, art
criticism, and aesthetics, and curriculum proposals featuring five phases
of aesthetic learning.
While there is no consensus on how the various components of aesthetic
learning should be presented in order to accomplish the goals of discipline-based
art education, the authors point out that progress toward those goals
will require that those who design art education programs bring an understanding
of the four disciplines to their work. The introductory volume of a five-volume
series, this book will appeal to elementary and secondary art teachers,
those who prepare teachers at the college level, and museum educators.
Many of the essays pinpoint the stagnancy of teaching methods today and discuss the reductive parameters enforced by the current curriculum. The radical tone that echoes through the entire series of papers is unmistakable. Throughout the book, postmodern theory informs the polemical debate concerning new directions in educative practice. Contributors shed new light on a postmodern view of art in education with emphasis upon difference, plurality and independence of mind. Ultimately, the paper provides a detailed insight into the various concepts that shape and drive the contemporary art world and expands the debate regarding the impression of postmodern thinking in art education.
From 1952 to 1981, South Africa’s apartheid government ran an art school for the training of African art teachers at Indaleni, in what is today KwaZulu-Natal. The Art of Life in South Africa is the story of the students, teachers, art, and politics that circulated through a small school, housed in a remote former mission station. It is the story of a community that made its way through the travails of white supremacist South Africa and demonstrates how the art students and teachers made together became the art of their lives.
Daniel Magaziner radically reframes apartheid-era South African history. Against the dominant narrative of apartheid oppression and black resistance, as well as recent scholarship that explores violence, criminality, and the hopeless entanglements of the apartheid state, this book focuses instead on a small group’s efforts to fashion more fulfilling lives for its members and their community through the ironic medium of the apartheid-era school.
There is no book like this in South African historiography. Lushly illustrated and poetically written, it gives us fully formed lives that offer remarkable insights into the now clichéd experience of black life under segregation and apartheid.
A comprehensive guide to Russian-language instruction combining the latest research, pedagogy, and practice.
The Art of Teaching Russian offers practitioners current research, pedagogical thinking, and specific methodologies for teaching the Russian language and culture in the twenty-first century. With contributions from the leading professionals in the field, this collection covers the most important aspects of teaching the Russian language.
The book begins with an overview of the past and current trends in foreign language education and in Russian instruction in the United States. Other topics include the effects of ACTFL's World-Readiness Standards on the field; different pedagogical approaches to teaching at various levels of proficiency; curriculum and materials development; and teaching Russian culture to develop students' intercultural competence. The collection concludes with a discussion on how to use technology in the Russian-language classroom to enhance students' learning.
The Art of Teaching Russian includes practical approaches for successful teaching, supported by original research. Teachers and graduate students will rely upon this collection to enhance their instruction.
The Art of Teaching Spanish explores in-depth the findings of research in second language acquisition (SLA) and other language-related fields and translates those findings into practical pedagogical tools for current—and future—Spanish-language instructors. This volume addresses how theoretical frameworks affect the application of research findings to the teaching of Spanish, how logistical factors affect the way research findings can be applied to teach Spanish, and how findings from Spanish SLA research would be applicable to Spanish second language teaching and represented in Spanish curricula through objectives and goals (as evidenced in pedagogical materials such as textbooks and computer-assisted language learning software).
Top SLA researchers and applied linguists lend their expertise on matters such as foreign language across curriculum programs, testing, online learning, the incorporation of linguistic variation into the classroom, heritage language learners, the teaching of translation, the effects of study abroad and classroom contexts on learning, and other pedagogical issues. Other common themes of The Art of Teaching Spanish include the rejection of the concept of a monolithic language competence, the importance of language as social practice and cultural competence, the psycholinguistic component of SLA, and the need for more cross-fertilization from related fields.
*Which tasks or activities really help build speaking fluency?
*What does the research show regarding speaking activities?
*What mistakes do ESL teachers often make in speaking activity design?
In this highly accessible and practical resource, Keith S. Folse provides a wealth of information to help ESL/EFL teachers design and use speaking tasks that will actually improve students' speaking fluency. The book presents and discusses the relevant research and assessment issues and includes case studies from twenty different settings and classrooms around the world so that readers learn from others about the problems and successes of using various speaking activities.
Teachers will find the chapters on Twenty Successful Activities and Ten Unsuccessful Activities particularly valuable. The successful activities are provided for classroom use and are reproducible. The book also contains five appendixes that explain what teachers need to know about vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar and how they affect the teaching of speaking. Samples of successful lesson plans and a list of resources useful for teaching speaking are also included.
Keith S. Folse, Ph.D., is Coordinator, TESOL Programs, University of Central Florida (Orlando). He is the author of Vocabulary Myths (University of Michigan Press, 2004) and more than 35 second language textbooks, including texts on grammar, reading, speaking, listening, and writing.
At the genesis of the Republic of China in 1912, many political leaders, educators, and social reformers argued that republican education should transform China's people into dynamic modern citizens—social and political agents whose public actions would rescue the national community. Over subsequent decades, however, they came to argue fiercely over the contents of citizenship and how it should be taught. Moreover, many of their carefully crafted policies and programs came to be transformed by textbook authors, teachers, administrators, and students. Furthermore, the idea of citizenship, once introduced, raised many troubling questions. Who belonged to the national community in China, and how was the nation constituted? What were the best modes of political action? How should modern people take responsibility for "public matters"? What morality was proper for the modern public?
This book reconstructs civic education and citizenship training in secondary schools in the lower Yangzi region during the Republican era. It also analyzes how students used the tools of civic education introduced in their schools to make themselves into young citizens and explores the complex social and political effects of educated youths' civic action.
Chen is one of the most important intellectuals working in East Asia today; his writing has been influential in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and mainland China for the past fifteen years. As a founding member of the Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Society and its journal, he has helped to initiate change in the dynamics and intellectual orientation of the region, building a network that has facilitated inter-Asian connections. Asia as Method encapsulates Chen’s vision and activities within the increasingly “inter-referencing” East Asian intellectual community and charts necessary new directions for cultural studies.
Assessing English Language Learners in the Content Areas: A Research-into-Practice Guide for Educators seeks to provide guidance to classroom teachers, staff developers, and test-item designers who want to improve ELL assessment outcomes, particularly in the areas of math, science and social studies. The first two chapters of the book establish the background for the discussion of content-area assessment for ELLs, examining several important characteristics of this rapidly growing student population (as well as critical legislation affecting ELLs) and providing a description of various forms of assessment, including how ELL assessment is different from the assessment of English-proficient students. Important assessment principles that educators should use in their evaluation of tests or other forms of measurement are provided.
Other chapters review ELL test accommodations nationwide (because, surprisingly, most teachers do not know what they can and cannot allow) and the research on the effectiveness of these types of accommodations. The book analyzes the characteristics of alternative assessment; it discusses three popular alternative assessment instruments (performance assessment, curriculum-based measurement, and portfolios) and makes recommendations as to how to increase the validity, reliability, and practicality of alternative assessments. The book proposes fundamental assessment practices to help content area teachers in their evaluation of their ELL progress.
Significant modifications in education legislation since the publication of the first edition have necessitated this new volume, which includes updated EL demographics as they relate to the Common Core Standards and Every Student Succeeds Act and revised state-by-state test accommodation information. New to this edition is information about the assessment of language arts (in addition to math, science, and social studies). The Second Edition also features new research-based recommendations for large-scale and classroom-based assessments.
Like the previous edition, the first two chapters of the book establish the background for the discussion of content-area assessment for ELs, examining several important characteristics of this rapidly growing student population and providing a description of various forms of assessment, including how EL assessment is different from the assessment of English-proficient students. Important assessment principles that educators should use in their evaluation of tests or other forms of measurement are provided.
Other chapters review EL test accommodations nationwide (because, surprisingly, most teachers do not know what they can and cannot allow) and the research on the effectiveness of these types of accommodations. The book analyzes the characteristics of alternative assessment and makes recommendations as to how to increase the validity, reliability, and practicality of alternative assessments. The book proposes fundamental assessment practices to help content area teachers in their evaluation of their students’ progress. Two extensive appendixes outline TESOL Proficiency Standards and academic vocabulary for the content areas.
Although fraught with politics and other perils, teacher evaluation can contribute in important, positive ways to faculty development at both the individual and the departmental levels. Yet the logistics of creating a valid assessment are complicated. Inconsistent methods, rater bias, and overreliance on student evaluation forms have proven problematic. The essays in Assessing the Teaching of Writing demonstrate constructive ways of evaluating teacher performance, taking into consideration the immense number of variables involved.
Contributors to the volume examine a range of fundamental issues, including the political context of declining state funds in education; growing public critique of the professoriate and demands for accountability resulting from federal policy initiatives like No Child Left Behind; the increasing sophistication of assessment methods and technologies; and the continuing interest in the scholarship of teaching. The first section addresses concerns and advances in assessment methodologies, and the second takes a closer look at unique individual sites and models of assessment. Chapters collectively argue for viewing teacher assessment as a rhetorical practice.
Fostering new ways of thinking about teacher evaluation, Assessing the Teaching of Writing will be of great interest not only to writing program administrators but also to those concerned with faculty development and teacher assessment outside the writing program.
Assessment in the Second Language Writing Classroom is a teacher and prospective teacher-friendly book, uncomplicated by the language of statistics. The book is for those who teach and assess second language writing in several different contexts: the IEP, the developmental writing classroom, and the sheltered composition classroom. In addition, teachers who experience a mixed population or teach cross-cultural composition will find the book a valuable resource. Other books have thoroughly covered the theoretical aspects of writing assessment, but none have focused as heavily as this book does on pragmatic classroom aspects of writing assessment. Further, no book to date has included an in-depth examination of the machine scoring of writing and its effects on second language writers.
Crusan not only makes a compelling case for becoming knowledgeable about L2 writing assessment but offers the means to do so. Her highly accessible, thought-provoking presentation of the conceptual and practical dimensions of writing assessment, both for the classroom and on a larger scale, promises to engage readers who have previously found the technical detail of other works on assessment off-putting, as well as those who have had no previous exposure to the study of assessment at all.
In Assignments across the Curriculum, Dan Melzer analyzes the rhetorical features and genres of writing assignments through the writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Presenting the results of his study of 2,101 writing assignments from undergraduate courses in the natural sciences, social sciences, business, and humanities in 100 postsecondary institutions in the United States, Assignments across the Curriculum is unique in its cross-institutional breadth and its focus on writing assignments.
The results provide a panoramic view of college writing in the United States. Melzer's framework begins with the rhetorical situations of the assignments—the purposes and audiences—and broadens to include the assignments' genres and discourse community contexts. Among his conclusions is that courses connected to a writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative ask students to write more often, in a greater variety of genres, and for a greater variety of purposes and audiences than non-WAC courses do, making a compelling case for the influence of the WAC movement.
Melzer's work also reveals patterns in the rhetorical situations, genres, and discourse communities of college writing in the United States. These larger patterns are of interest to WAC practitioners working with faculty across disciplines, to writing center coordinators and tutors working with students who bring assignments from a variety of fields, to composition program administrators, to first-year writing instructors interested in preparing students for college writing, and to high school teachers attempting to bridge the gap between high school and college writing.
The audience—the community of readers who will use the texts a writer produces—must be an important influence on the writer for his or her work to be effective.
Robert Brooke and John Hendricks examine the difficult task of teaching "writing for an audience" in a classroom where students know that the teacher, not the addressed audience, assigns the grade.
The authors describe in detail a particular writing class, taught by Brooke and observed by Hendricks, that attempted to teach writing for an audience. By combining the experiences from their study with student reactions to the class, they draw some conclusions about the dynamics of teaching writing and about learning in general.
The myths examined in this book are:
- Authentic texts are inaccessible to beginners.
- Authentic texts cannot be used to teach grammar.
- Shorter texts are more beneficial for language learners.
- Activating background knowledge or making a word list is sufficient to prepare students for authentic texts.
- Authentic texts can be used to teach only listening and reading.
- Modifying or simplifying authentic texts always helps language learners.
- For learners to benefit from using authentic texts, the associated tasks must also be authentic.
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