The CEA Forum (College English Association, Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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180 research outputs found
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Cross-Examining Bigotry: Using Toulmin\u27s Argument Model and Huckin\u27s CDA to Interrogate Overt and Covert Racist Arguments
No full textThomas Rickert warns of the dangers of “pedagogies that seek the disruption and politicization of hierarchies of power and privilege, especially in terms of race, class, and gender” because they can “nevertheless produce new forms of power and privilege that in turn produce new resistances, further alienate already cynical students, and (re)produce the possibility of violence” (165). However, for those students who are not in the majority, interrogations of people’s attitudes about race, class, and gender can prove empowering and can, to borrow from Rickert’s own argument, generate jouissance. Moreover, critical thinking is fundamental to good writing, and the ability to decenter one’s perspective and therefore understand one\u27s opposition is central to sound argumentation. In this article, the author shares a unit in which composition students are taught the analysis protocols developed by Stephen Toulmin (the Toulmin Argument Model) and Thomas Huckin (Critical Discourse Analysis) in order to expose the logical fallacies, invalid warrants, and authorial manipulations found in various racist texts, including Anne Moody\u27s _Coming of Age in Mississippi_
Keeping Up with the Standards: What One English Professor Learned From Taking Every Standardized Exam in His Discipline
No full textDuring the summer and fall semester 2012, I took on a project to take every standardized exam our English majors take. Thus, I signed up for and took the GRE General Test, the Praxis Content Area Exam (English Language, Literature, and Composition: Content Knowledge), the Senior Major Field Tests in English and Writing, and the GRE Subject Exam in Literature. My goals in taking the exams varied by the exam, but one overriding goal was consistent: I wanted to see what these exams are actually like, so I can help students prepare for them. When students talk to me about graduate school or a career in teaching, they often ask about one of these exams. However, I had not taken either the GRE General or Subject Exam since the mid-1990s, and I had no idea how or how much the exams had changed since then. When students asked about the Praxis, I was forced to draw on what I had heard from colleagues and students who had taken it. In each case, I was at least partially ill-informed, and taking the exams seemed like the best way to truly understand what our students needed to do to prepare for these tests. What I found is that changes to the GRE General Exam make it much more reflective of the type of thinking required in graduate school, while both the Subject Exam and Praxis have not kept pace with changes in English graduate studies or high and middle school teaching, respectively
Empowering Nonsense: Reading Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky†in a Basic Writing Class
No full textBasic writing and reading students are scared. More than the unfamiliar places, faces, new methods and serious consequences of it all, they are afraid of words. Even if they successfully complete remediation, move on to English 101 and advance to upper courses in other disciplines, our students often face monstrous texts, which they have precious few skills to decipher. The ability to read aright is essential in upper level literature and writing classes, not only because readings provide content that students need to prove they understand, but also because reading model texts allows them to learn by example. In writing courses, we assign readings because they show how it is done when done right. This process does not only mean that readings offer them approaches to structuring a text, they also teach style, tone, vocabulary, correct spelling, syntax, grammar, idioms. In class, we take time to help students uncover all of these wonders and try to mold them into independent readers and deliberate writers, but the lonely, too-short single semester we are allowed with them is never enough to make them truly self-sufficient
In a Basic writing course, “Jabberwocky†teaches vocabulary, reading skills, and literary literacy. Furthermore it teaches self-esteem because it allows students to lower their defenses, relax into learning and build upon their strengths. Students in remediation are not only scared, they are also angry and frustrated because they were placed in remediation and told too many times their writing and reading skills are incompetent. Introducing a Nonjudgmental Awareness initiative in college remediation courses is just as important as it is for ELL courses. Using “Jabberwocky†as part of this program is a clear and natural choice, as it is filled with empowering creativity of thought and process
On Writer’s Block: A Study of Disciplinary Negotiations in the Faculty Office and Classroom
No full textThis reflective essay investigates why writer’s block affects novice and expert writers on a continuum—from students in first-year writing seminars to teachers of writing, paying particular attention to the shared experiences of this pair of practitioners. I begin by focusing on my own experiences as a blocked writer making a disciplinary shift from literary to writing studies after receiving my doctorate in comparative literature from the University of Chicago. By setting a literature review of writer’s block against a close-reading of a student case of writer\u27s block in a first-year writing seminar, I illuminate how the difficulties of becoming an expert writer are shared by beginners and professionals as they are socialized into new disciplines. Through our students\u27 work, we can see the complex disciplinary and rhetorical practices needed to enact scholarly moves, and we can better empathize with their and our own struggles with writing, particularly when we begin new projects or cross over into unfamiliar disciplinary terrain
Thinking/Feeling: Emotion, Spectatorship, and the Pedagogy of Horror
No full textWhen teaching horror films, where the primary texts are created to frighten and disturb their audiences, instructors often find it challenging to find pedagogical strategies that are at once effective and responsible. For students not accustomed to horror, the shocking nature of the texts can sometimes be difficult to handle, while even the horror fans in one’s classroom, once provoked by new critical approaches and theories, may find themselves newly unsettled even by well-known texts. Since many students have been trained to regard emotional engagement and rational thought as mutually exclusive, particularly in the context of formal education, they often perceive the emotional impact of horror as an impediment to critical analysis. In this essay I will offer practical strategies for helping students to identify, codify, and contemplate their emotional relationships to horror films, and to use those insights in aid of critical, historical, and thematic analysis, both in their written work and in classroom discussion. I will detail assignments and class activities developed while teaching junior-level film and media studies classes on “Horror and the Fantastic†in the Department of English at Texas Tech University, and explain how these exercises allowed students to contemplate their own experiences of spectatorship, and those of fellow audience members, allowing them to intellectualize a given text without disregarding the importance of feeling
The Strategy Use of Struggling Readers in the First-Year Composition Classroom: What We Know and How We Can Help Them
No full textOne key difference between successful and struggling college readers is their use of strategies. The former can understand challenging texts due to their knowledge of how to apply a diverse range of strategies. In contrast, the latter are frequently unaware of when and how to utilize strategies, and, as a result, often cannot comprehend assigned texts. Problematically, research on successful and struggling college readers’ strategy use has rarely taken place in the context of first-year composition. Thus, first-year writing instructors have few tools they can use to meet the needs of the many at-risk students who populate their classes. The following article attempted to help instructors better serve their students by examining the strategic differences between successful and struggling readers in first-year composition courses. The participants filled out a quantitative reading survey called the Metacognitive Assessment of Reading Strategies Inventory (MARSI), along with a demographic profile. The results showed significant differences between the groups overall and on the MARSI’s subscales. In addition, successful readers used seven individual strategies significantly more than struggling readers. Explanations for these results are offered, as are pedagogical recommendations for first-year writing instructors
