The CEA Forum (College English Association, Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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180 research outputs found
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Salvaging the Subject: Restoring Voice in Writing Pedagogy
No full text"Salvaging the Subject" argues that current practices in writing pedagogy, particularly the privileging of a disembodied prose style, can marginalize the voice of the individual student and force her to adopt a more "objective" persona. By considering the Elbow/Bartholomae debate and by examining some writing textbooks\u27 treatment of the rhetorical appeals, this essay suggests that writing pedagogy can and must be at once theoretically sophisticated and yet still "expressive" and "embodied.
Exploring Instructor Perceptions of and Practices for Public Discourse in First-Year Writing Courses
No full textWhile students entering college are exposed to a variety of novel discourses, many writing instructors feel a growing need to develop students who can engage in civil public discourse, a rhetorical tradition now seen as crucial in our contemporary public sphere. For this project, public discourse is defined as any communicative act that takes place in the public sphere and is about issues that impact wide demographics; ideally, public discourse would aim to be respectful, logical, participatory, and truthful. Through a mixed methods approach using surveys, interviews, and artifact analysis, our research provides a unique examination of the relationship between instructor perceptions of the role of public discourse in first-year writing compared to their practices. Our data shows a gap between instructor belief and practice, illuminating a problematic relationship between implicit and explicit expectations of the applicability of student learning in the classroom to the public sphere
Charles Dickens’s Audience in the Twenty-First Century: Service Learning and ‘Hunted Down’
No full textThis essay demonstrates that by reading a little-known Dickens detective story, “Hunted Down,” in its original serialized context, and then performing a dramatic reading of that story to a community partner, students better understood Dickens in his own time and in ours. “Hunted Down” tells a story of professional sacrifice for the sake of saving lives, written in part for the self-serving purpose of earning money and widening personal appeal. Through close reading the story as a serial, learning about the financial agreements Dickens made with his publishers in the United States, editing the story into a script to be read before a live audience, and advertising it to a community partner in need of companionship, students felt empowered. They better understood Dickens’s logic that we can lift ourselves by lifting others, and in so doing, recognized the value of the arts
Situated Interpretation: Teaching Shakespeare with Live Performance
No full textDespite the popularity of performance approaches to teaching Shakespeare, teaching and teaching with live theatrical productions of Shakespeare and other drama remains a curiously examined convention in Shakespeare pedagogy and literature pedagogy generally. This article begins to address this gap by presenting an approach to a Shakespeare On Stage course, the type of course where students read multiple plays and then see live performances of them. I present an approach developed around the concept of performances as "situated interpretations"--that is, interpretations of the play mediated by critical and performance traditions as well as current artistic and cultural contexts. I then describe how this theory informs specific elements of course design and lesson planning. Ultimately, this article encourages more discipline-wide discussion of how we teach and teach with live performance, and encourages further dissemination of pedagogical and logistical tips and advice, which can make it easier for more teachers to bring live theatre into their course planning
Teaching English Literature Survey as a Writing Course--Online
No full textThis article advocates teaching online literature survey courses as writing courses. Focusing on writing-to-learn strategies and samples of student writing, the piece shows that such writing-centered pedagogy helps students to discover personal connections to the readings and, consequently, to find motivation for close critical reading as well as for formal academic writing. The article also contextualizes this pedagogy in the long debate in English studies on the place of literature in writing courses and, particularly, the place of writing in literature courses
Inspiring Empathy: Story Exchange and the Postcolonial Novel
No full textReading the postcolonial novel Nervous Conditions by TsiTsi Dangarembga, my English majors explored characters who experience a double bind as they navigate two conflicting cultures, in this case, British colonial rule and their native Shona traditions. My course incorporated an experiential and reflective learning component by asking students to pair with our international students on campus to share stories of assimilation and conflict from their past. The course required a final portfolio of reflective writing asking students to integrate characters\u27 experiences from the novel as well as those discussed in the story exchange. The course was modeled on the Narrative 4 project implemented across the nation and beyond to help inspire empathy among people who have experienced conflict
Teaching Voice as a Method of Close Listening
No full textThe digital era has reinvigorated voice, both written and spoken, allowing for renewed opportunities when teaching voice in the classroom. Becoming attuned to voice means listening and recognizing embodiment, which opens up certain pedagogical and philosophical discussions. This article follows two avenues in that regard: the continuing presence of expressivism in Composition Studies and phenomenological approaches to listening and the public sphere. Finally, in thinking about broader cultural and discursive concerns, this article offers classroom activities that use voice as a tool that is inventional, expressive, rhetorical, and ethical
Writing about Multilingual Writing and Adaptive Transfer in an FYC Course
No full textThrough excerpts of student essays written for a first-year composition (FYC) course designed for students for whom English is a second or additional language (L2 students), this essay shows that a writing-about-writing (WAW) approach to college composition instruction encourages L2 students to draw upon the language knowledge they have gained through their experiences traversing diverse cultural contexts as they prepare to communicate in new academic and professional contexts
Four Perspectives on Teaching Jeannette Walls’s Memoir, The Glass Castle
No full textThis essay suggests approaches to teaching a college-level Common Book, Jeannette Walls’s _The Glass Castle_, in a freshman seminar called “The Human Experience: Who Am I?.” The memoir proved to be an excellent fit with the course’s thematic approach to the self, and a range of approaches will help instructors and students approach Walls’s material. Dylan Thomas’s “Poem on His Birthday,” from which she takes her epigraph, sparks extended literary comparison. The Walls family is considered in terms of depth psychology (particularly the dynamics of the shadow). An in-class exercise on literary formalism helps students unpack the memoir’s intricate themes and images. Ten topics suggest directions for a paper assignment, and the conclusion presents an in-class writing exercise to cap off a unit on the memoir. Overall, the essay is designed as a resource to aid instructors in constructing their own lesson plans on _The Glass Castle_