The CEA Forum (College English Association, Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
Not a member yet
180 research outputs found
Sort by
Queer & Nondemagogic Pedagogy in the Classroom
No full textThis work considers the antecedents (theoretical and practical) that lead to the development of a nondemagogic classroom practice. The impact of queer theory and queer pedagogy is explored, along with a classroom accounting of using these tenets to create a safe space for student intellectual development
Peer Review and the "Non-Specialist Reader": Strategies for Developing Audience Awareness in the Writing for the Health Professions Classroom
No full textThis article addresses how peer review workshops can be used to help student-writers gain a greater sense of audience awareness. Drawing from my experiences teaching a Writing for the Health Professions class, I argue that such workshops transform what might be seen as a pedagogical challenge – students’ differing areas of study – into a unique opportunity for developing rhetorical skills as each student learns to write for individuals who may know very little about his or her area of expertise
Introduction: English Classrooms as Social Spaces: Using Collaboration to Foster Student-Centered Learning
No full textPerhaps one of the most persistent challenges we face as English instructors is finding ways to engage students from a variety of discipline-specific backgrounds not only with writing assignments but also with each other in the classroom. Because many of the classes we teach are general education requirements or general electives, open to students of all majors, the student make-up of the classroom can vary greatly. Sometimes this situation can have the unfortunate consequence of segmented classrooms where alienated students do not bother to learn even the names of their peers. No matter who enrolls in our classrooms, though, the central goals for all English classes—composition, professional and technical communication, creative wring, introduction to literature—remain similar: we want to foster critical and creative thinking and the skillful use of language and genre knowledge. We want students to build an understanding of themselves as writers who compose as part of a chain of discourse for an audience. Finally, we want students to learn that writing and knowledge can never be made productively in isolation, a belief perpetuated by the myth of the solitary author-genius
Proceedings: People Not Like Us: Re-Imagining Jonestown & the Peoples Temple
No full textThis paper addresses the author\u27s creative work on the tragedy in Jonestown
The Science of Writing: Experimenting with Peer Review at a STEM University
No full textBased on perceived student resistance to peer review, we conducted a study to lessen this resistance and demystify the writing process for STEM students. While many composition theorists advocate for peer review in the classroom, its application at a STEM institution remains underexamined. To foster student engagement with peer review, we implemented a variety of strategies, most notably assessment, peer review templates, and cross-class peer reviews. We found these strategies resulted in greater engagement and confidence in the peer review process, as well as a recognition that it\u27s an essential component of writing
Footnoting Edward Jenner: Using Textual Editing to Teach Information Literacy
No full textInformation literacy has become one of the most essential skills we teach undergraduates. One highly effective way of teaching this skill is to put students in the active role of the mediator by asking them to produce a critical edition of an existing, open-access text. The process of inserting explanatory footnotes, writing introductory material, or creating an appendix of cultural contexts teaches research skills for interacting with a wide range of primary and secondary texts. Furthermore, critical editing foregrounds questions of audience and purpose that are essential to metaliteracy. This article discusses a footnoting assignment I designed for an undergraduate humanities course in which we read Edward Jenner’s 1798 pamphlet on vaccination against smallpox, An Inquiry into the Causes and Effects of the Variolae Vaccinae. I developed a sequence of three research assignments that asked students to use online annotation software to create an edited version of Jenner’s text aimed at their fellow students. In the first assignment they worked in groups to define key terms, identify the main points of Jenner’s argument, and pose critical questions about the text. In the next two assignments, students conducted independent research in nineteenth-century periodicals to discover the popular debates surrounding smallpox and Jenner’s work and then used their research to insert explanatory footnotes into Jenner’s text
Composing Compassion
No full textIn this column, the author reflects on her approaches to teaching writing and the role of Composition in her own reality beyond the classroom. She attempts to connect academic and non-academic spheres by illuminating how what we do in Composition relates to a mindset of compassion, inclusion of others around us, and a strong human focus that reaches beyond the classroom. Further, Rioux argues that Composition asks us to be compassionate as we must, in order to be effective compositionists, explore rhetorical spaces and differing contexts and place ourselves within these. This approach resonates with the importance of examining situations, persons, things, etc. from a perspective that is different from our own. As writing oftentimes requires us to envision an audience (a person, situation, entity, etc.) the practice of writing itself allows and forces us to envision things beyond what we know, therefore resembling a mindset similar to the one we need when seeking to be compassionate
Teaching with Paratext: Rereading Roald Dahl’s “Lamb to the Slaughter” in the Literature Classroom
No full textIn this age of PDFs and free e-texts, literature gets separated from its initial context, perhaps even devoid of context all together. Taking Roald Dahl’s most anthologized short story “Lamb to the Slaughter” as its object of study, this article proposes a pedagogy that embraces the return of paratextual material to the literature classroom. Through a close reading of Dahl’s story and an account of the paratextual material surrounding its initial publication in Harper’s Magazine in 1953, the study of paratext can offer students a more complex and culturally textured understanding of a text, one that often expands and illuminates their own emplaced reading practices—i.e. practices situated in, reflective of, and partly determined by not just the particular cultural-historical moment of a story’s publication, but also by their own emplacedness as readers in the twenty-first century
YA Fiction and Intermediate Composition
No full textThis essay makes a case for including novels in general-education composition courses on occasion, arguing that the identificatory posture of the reader of fiction can be useful. In this case, Sherman Alexie’s Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian was used in a literacy unit. Short quotations from student work included