Academic Development Program students face a special challenge. Within a few short weeks, they must hone their reading, writing, and speaking skills while scrambling to adjust to life in college. Usually, pre-freshmen enrolled in the Academic Development Program are not familiar with the demands of academic reading, writing, and oral response. For…

Circa 1984 early practitioners in the composition field imagined a potential blossoming of early efforts in computers and writing that subsequent developments in the field have lost sight of. The expense of developing personal programs, the emergence of word processing software that incorporated many of the mechanical aspects of spelling and style…

Being "unfailingly conscious" of one's subject position (and performing it in a formal writing assignment) are the tenets of "initiation pedagogy," the intertextual analysis behind D. Bartholomae and A. Petrosky's "Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts," and their subsequent composition textbook "Ways of…

As the Internet is becoming more and more of a commonplace technology in the Western world, many communication programs have begun to offer technology-related communication courses. Usually, these classes require students to create a Web site. A good Web site, however, requires more than colored text, a few graphics, and a few links. This paper…

An instructor of an advanced composition course (adapted from one taught by James Seitz at the University of Pittsburgh) at the University of California Riverside took her students through a series of reading and writing assignments that asked them to "engage in a wide variety of prose styles and...consider what style suggests about language,…

The issue of personal writing is hotly contested in composition studies. Some believe that personal writing has no place in academic writing. In a discussion with Peter Elbow regarding personal versus academic writing, David Bartholomae argues that "academic writing is the real work of the academy." Elbow, on the other hand, argues that…

An instructor is interested in the ways that ethical inquiry can shed light on theoretical and practical concerns that are raised by composition's interest in postmodernism and cultural studies, specifically in whether difference can be negotiated while still allowing for rhetorical agency. Inquiry into ethics and composition can offer a new…

When teachers work to create empathy that transfers or translates the experience of the other into an experience an individual has had, they promote a kind of egotism that dismisses the other or that reduces the other to the category of the self. The key problem with empathy of this sort is that the focus is not on the other, but on the self. The…

In the many different stages of the writing process, teachers of composition need to be sensitive toward cultural differences which may exist between them and their students. Large numbers of foreign students participate in writing courses in American colleges, and research indicates that the minority student population will increase sharply in…

A series of five writing assignments that focus on the critical thinking skills needed for the intelligent reading of political articles that appear in newspapers and popular magazines was developed for use in a political science course at Oakton Community College (Illinois). Each of the assignments begins with a lesson that teaches the specific…

For a growing student demographic, college is not an intellectual or residential destination; rather, it is an intellectual errand. Students are, in the most existential sense, "already gone." For commuter students, academia is "unsituated." That is, they experience academia as moments scattered throughout a day or week. In…

What astounds one writing teacher is what her students do with the reflective writing portion of a portfolio assignment, where they are instructed to use reflective writing to bring together their portfolio submissions into one cohesive unit. The class members first discuss the assignment, look at abandoned portfolios from previous semesters, and…

Administrators at both state-funded and tuition-driven private institutions are now adhering to a bottom-line approach to education. In many cases, budget-minded administrators refuse to move forward on any educational initiative until this question is addressed: "What are you doing to encourage retention?" It is becoming clear that…

Student-professor conferencing and students' increased self-reflection are two of the unexpected benefits of portfolio assessment. While self-reflection is a key component of meaningful conferencing, it is also clearly evinced in the students' rationale statements. These written reflections address the relevance of students' work to course…

Critical pedagogy is fundamentally and ultimately linked with critical literacy. There can be no liberation of self or other without tools or language to perform counter-readings of dominant texts that serve the interests of power. Paulo Freire and Donaldo Macedo's work has, for some time, been a cornerstone for critical literacy, a model of…