Identifies 10 questions that dominated the 1990 WPA Conference at Portland, Oregon, part of a continuing dialogue over professional standards in writing instruction. Captures the voices of conference participants as they pose answers to the issues raised in the Wyoming Resolution and the Statement of Principles and Standards. (RS)

Teachers and administrators can help make sustainable educational improvements in high schools. By being systematically reflective about teaching and learning and seeing themselves collectively as agents of change in the interest of academic quality and excellence. The English teachers at Trenton Public School District, New Jersey, have created…

The use of portfolio assessment by composition instructors in the Department of English at the University of Missouri-Kansas City is described. Based on a survey of instructors, conducted in the spring of 1994, the paper examines: (1) who determines what goes into the portfolio, (2) how students are assessed throughout the term, (3) features…

Departments of English and English education need to integrate concepts of career education that are based on the theory that people are constantly in the process of developing ideas about themselves in relation to their careers. Although institutions of higher education have been slow to implement career education, in recent years English…

Reflects on several issues confronting an English department chair, including part-time faculty, adequate writing programs, curriculum reform, and resource allocation. (MM)

Describes a two-semester writing program that prepares English majors for professional writing careers in business or industry. (AEA)

Designing a senior seminar as a "capstone" course for English majors provided an educator the opportunity to devise a course that might provide the majors and anyone who teaches the course an experience of what Paulo Freire calls "liberatory education." According to the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education…

Describes how the English department at Western Washington University set out to revise the English curriculum as a participant in the MLA-FIPSE English Programs Curriculum Review Project. Shows how the faculty redesigned the curriculum, and asks tough questions concerning the best way to undertake such changes. (HB)

Argues that computer technology has decentered high school English teachers. Describes a private high school with full computer access for every student; addresses issues this raises in the English department; describes three cyber activities used in the author's American literature classroom; and discusses the advantages of this decentralization.…

Describes the strategies and tactics that made the author's search for a tenure-track job in English a success. Describes the tenure-track position at precisely the kind of institution where faculty members were supposedly not open to the kind of work he does: the English Department at Drew University, essentially a small liberal arts college in…

Involving graduate teaching assistants (GAs) in the development and implementation of rubrics has many benefits. GA involvement increases their sense of ownership of the rubrics and makes it more likely that they will regard the rubrics in a positive light. GAs have insights about the students whose work will be evaluated by the rubrics; and, as…

Reform of undergraduate education is sweeping the United States and the design of the writing major at Millikin University (Decatur, Illinois), is an example of this movement. The writing major was in need of reform because, in addition to the English major core of literature surveys, Shakespeare, and a course in the history of grammar and the…

Five universities in New York State (SUNY--State University of New York at Stony Brook, Syracuse, Cornell, Binghamton, and New York Universities--are involved in a 3-year project to better prepare graduate students to become teachers. The State University of New York, Stony Brook, English Department is providing graduate teaching assistants with…

Ways that colleges and universities provide opportunities for students to improve their writing are discussed in two essays and program descriptions. In "Reinventing the Rhetorical Tradition: Finding Ways to Revalue Writing," Patrick Hartwell and Greg Waters briefly describe activities at colleges that center around the rhetorical…

The home mission of the University English department is the teaching of reading and writing, and its foreign mission is the "converting" to a higher literacy of those outside the English department, especially those who teach English in the high schools and other subjects at the college level. Potential high school English teachers'…