Generally, cohorts or learning communities enrich higher learning in students. Learning communities consist of conventionally separate groups of students that meet together with common academic purposes and goals. Types of learning communities include paired courses with concurrent student enrollment, living-learning communities, and faculty…

Teaching service courses such as the first year composition courses and an introduction to literature is often a primary mission for English departments on campuses in the United States. Sometimes specific departments request specialized additional English classes such as Writing for Business, basic grammar courses, composition courses focused for…

English departments is not uniform. Many departments still exist with traditional notions of inquiry and curriculum and ignore community engagement or understand it in narrow ways. For a variety of reasons, writing courses and compositionists more easily than literature scholars and creative writers can embrace current concepts of community…

Literary criticism no longer aims to appreciate aesthetics, which is to study how humans respond to art. The problem plaguing the literary academy is that literature is reduced to an idea or a moral and theory has become institutionalized in literature departments and continues to be taught.

Syllabi from some 20 colleges and universities were reviewed with prominent English and literature departments and a discussion was held with a number of professors who teach literary theory. It is suggested that devolution and fragmentation of theory might be a survival strategy, an adaptation to the new realties of academic institutions.

The reforms of both literary studies and composition are essential if English department wants to remain integral to the liberal arts curriculum. English studies integrates work in literature, language studies and culture with horizontally writing instruction and not hierarchically.

Carolyn Miller's oft-cited "Humanistic Rationale for Technical Writing," published in 1979, tries to give technical communication faculty more cultural capital in English departments controlled by literature professors. Miller replaces a positivistic emphasis in technical communication pedagogy with rhetoric. She shows how technical knowledge is…

Maynard Mack, Emeritus Sterling Professor of English at Yale, discusses his pioneering work with the oral interpretation of literature in the graduate and undergraduate English classroom, making the point that such oral techniques need not be limited to the drama or speech departments. (Author/SJL)

Designed primarily for English faculty at two-year colleges in California, "Inside English" includes articles on instructional innovations and major curricular, administrative, and employment issues of concern to teachers in the field as well as information on the activities of the English Council of the California Two-Year Colleges (ECCTYC). The…

Designed primarily for English faculty at two-year colleges in California, "Inside English" includes articles on instructional innovations in teaching remedial writing, literature courses, and freshman composition, and on major curricular, administrative, and employment issues in the field. The four issues in volume 8 include the…