This article explores the practices and pedagogies of six literacy teacher educators with a critical stance. In this qualitative research study, three semi-structured interviews were conducted with each participant over a three-year period. They were able to negotiate a critical stance into their teacher education courses in several ways: using an…

The Saturday morning acting class in the Pearson Hall auditorium at Miles College boasts the school's highest attendance all year. The teacher, actress Robin Givens, was a lure few students--and others from surrounding areas--could resist. Some came to learn about their prospective field from a professional. Others were there for pointers to…

This paper introduces creative pedagogical techniques for exploring theory in the undergraduate classroom. Using criminal justice and criminological theories as a primary example, it describes a technique that professors from any theory-driven discipline can use to engage students through popular music, from hip-hop to musical theater in order to…

In this paper we suggest that narrative representations that seemingly fail to reach an audience as intended may engage the audience in more meaningful ways. We use reader response theory to explore how an audience's responses to a conference narrative presentation made available a multiplicity of interpretive frameworks and narratives to the…

Recently the author has been including in her undergraduate seminars Jean-Jacques Rousseau's "Letter to d'Alembert on the Theatre" (1758), the most provocative essay on the arts ever written. It is about the unintended effects of theater--which, for Rousseau, stands in for all of the arts--on an audience. The essay is an impassioned rebuttal to…

In this essay, the author suggests that performance studies--a large and varied body of work that takes the fluidity of self and the relationship between word and action as its central concepts--offers theories and methodologies for writing teachers to use to help students construct discoursal identities. Although the performative screen offers…