The CEA Forum (College English Association, Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Thomas Merton Goes to Class: Pedagogy on the Borders of the Short Story
No full textOur thesis is more finely tuned to Thomas Merton (1915-68) the writer, more specifically, the poet/artist/writer and thinker. These are the components of the “Merton†voice. Merton senses the quality of innocence as the sine qua non of the poet or writer’s vocation: “His art depends on an ingrained innocence which he would lose in business, in politics, or in too organized a form of academic life†(Raids 156). Simply put: Merton would lose his voice in some work; he would find a way to use his prophetic voice in others. Clearly then, knowing well the ways of the world, its newness and its sins as they touched him personally, Merton claims the monastery as his megaphone, as providing and sustaining that innocence he so explicitly requires as necessary for clear thinking and good writing, clear communication. However, Conjectures marks a turn, a change in Merton’s voice in this neatly thought-through process
Student-Centered Designs of Pan-African Literature Courses
No full textA student-centered teaching methodology is an essential ingredient of a successful Pan- African literary course. Using such an approach, I combine reading assignments with journals, film presentations, and lectures in a productive learning environment in which I play the role of invisible facilitator of intellectual exchange. My method incorporates a variety of Pan-African literary and historical works that help students understand the relations between Blacks of Africa and the Diaspora
Debunking "You Want Fries with That?": Designing Courses to Bridge the Gap between Degree and Career
No full textBecause we believe it is better to show our students than to tell them that they learn more from active experience, we have designed selected courses within our rhetoric and writing program to offer them guidance and to help them conceive of their major in the form of different careers, both academic and nonacademic, before they hit the job market, careers that exist in the local economy and that make use of their rhetorical and literary skills. These courses include our capstone course, the senior seminar, and two internship courses. In what follows, we present the design and benefits of these courses
which work to help students find careers that our rhetoric majors and minors may not envision otherwise. These courses help them bridge the gap between being a student and a professional
Playing for Keeps: Using Nabokov to Teach Composition
No full textIf I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it the other way around. I ought to be able to reverse-engineer what I do in my literature classes and come up with a way to use Nabokov’s distancing techniques in my composition classes as a means of probing the limitations of familiar models of representation, of helping students come to an understanding of the ways in which too great an adherence to convention can betray the sense of what they hope to convey in their writing
Journey into Light: Developing Better Questions Together through Qualitative Assessment
No full textAs my colleagues have indicated, the thrill and value of qualitative assessment is that it let us loose to speak and dig into the questions that we had to keep silenced during rubric-based assessment. It allowed us to value our many questions about student writing and pedagogy. As we voiced our questions and discussed them vigorously we began to understand that the process could help each of us in refining course structure, pedagogy and assignments in the Transitional English classroom and in the college composition courses that follow
Disrupting Determinism: Classroom Design as a Technology
No full textThis section articulates classroom design as a technology. However, by technology I do not simply mean the ways in which technology is used in the writing classroom, but that the classroom space itself functions as a technology. Like Katherine Fredlund and Vanessa Cozza, I too will be discussing the design of the classroom; however, unlike them I will focus my analysis on design through the lens of technology. By viewing classroom design through the lens of technology, I hope to unveil the underlying ideologies in classroom spaces. Furthermore, by taking a substantive view of these classroom spaces, I hope to show the ways in which these spaces dominate the individual pedagogical practices. This view of the classroom will emphasize that these classrooms have been constructed—engineered—and therefore new paths can be found to change the way in which the physical classroom space limits interaction and pedagogy. Through this articulation, I will conclude by looking at ways to disrupt, decenter and democratize these static classroom environments and ultimately investigate new practices so that writing instructors can take back control
Paperless Writing in World Literature I: Can Students See the Forest without Writing on the Trees?
No full textElectronic writing offers the opportunity to be creative, impromptu, personal, even improper—unstructured, in other words—while academic writing traps them, catches them up in, an impersonal, uncreative, unimaginative, structured, mechanical—and perhaps even ultimately noncommunicative—experience