The business and technical writing teachers at Iowa State University conducted a public relations campaign within their English department to gain respectability, understanding, and acceptance from their English department colleagues. Their campaign included examples of student work, lists of their course objectives, and explanations of business…

Describes how college instructors might make the move toward building community and fostering collaboration rather than working in isolation. Provides an autobiographical account of how two English teachers began such a journey. (HB)

Notes that it is not easy to help students enter into ongoing dialogues on ethics in both school-based and more immediate environments, ask students to consider ethics on both personal and social planes, and require students to write and reflect to stave off the disembodiment of culture. Describe a course that helps students to see rhetoric and…

Discusses a fundamental desire of many literature teachers: "teaching out," meaning the hope of imparting to students the fact that words and forms and images have a peculiar power to explain and move. Describes a variety of possible ways by which English teachers might succeed at "teaching out," including community education…

Considers the importance of "teaching the past" in the English classroom, including older texts. Disagrees with the notion that teaching the past is in trouble. Discusses recent trends in literary studies, especially cultural studies, and their possible effect on teaching the past. Gives advice for making older texts appealing in the…

Outlines five stops that can strengthen technical writing courses and programs within departments of English. (HOD)

Describes one school's plan for mixed-ability teaching that utilizes the knowledge, skills, and experiences of all English department members by providing an integrated and coherent curriculum pattern.

Addresses the question of what graduate students should know about fields of English in which they are not specializing. Finds the best answer is to teach "the classics." Illustrates with the example of a course on "The Faerie Queene" and "Paradise Lost," to show students how to work with texts and what can be…

Explores contradictory purposes for writing instruction: the business world wants writers to obtain predetermined results, yet composition theorists see writing as a way to help students learn about themselves. Suggests teachers help students analyze their potential professions by focusing on the way writing invents those professions. (MS)

Explores and puts to rest the misconceptions that faculty members from English as well as other disciplines hold about teaching writing. Makes suggestions that may help English teachers who want to establish an institution-wide program of writing gain the cooperation of other departments. (HTH)

Considers the tension between deterministic social construction and individual autonomy of the subject in the act of reading literary texts. Develops a critical reading pedagogy that takes into account the balance between those two extremes of the dialectic of reading praxis. Illustrates the pedagogy with two concrete examples. (HB)

Discusses the central issues regarding the formulation of a technology policy within college English departments. Examines the way that such a policy affects the teaching and research carried out in computer-supported environments. Provides extensive data concerning the support of computer-using faculty members. (HB)

Describes the difficulties of defining basic writers and basic writing. Argues that Michel Foucault's concept of the "author function" is applicable to academic and literary discourse and shows how it serves to organize curriculum and define the object of study in English departments. (HB)

A graduate student who was the only composition person in a two semester teaching seminar experienced the dilemma of defining and establishing that identity in the midst of a classroom struggle between cultural studies and literary theorists on one side and creative writers on the other. The factious teaching seminar mirrored the fact that English…

Considers how one composition instructor's methods of assigning student writing tasks and then responding to those texts was altered by various works written by composition scholars. Outlines 10 of the major achievements of composition research over the past 30 years. (HB)