The CEA Forum (College English Association, Texas Digital Library - TDL E-Journals)
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Metaphors We Innovate By: Graduate Students Transforming a Writing Community through Networked Experiences
No full textDrawing on the unique perspective and experiences of each author, we describe in detail various elements of what we have come to call the Writing Resource Initiative (WRI), a label given to a set of interconnected projects tied to way writing is studied, taught, learned, and lived at our institution. More specifically, the WRI is a student-led, collaborative effort aiming to enhance the visibility of writing and rhetoric at a large midwestern research university. The purposes and structure of the WRI are evolving, but there are two primary goals at present: (1) to support various initiatives taking place within a newly structured writing program and (2) to forge meaningful relationships with campus partners beyond the writing program itself
Toward Writing in the Disciplines through Critical Thinking
No full textThis article proposes the Metaheuristic Analysis Activity as a form of critical analysis class exercise to supplement research-based assignments in college writing courses. It argues for using critical analysis to train students toward learning how to write in the disciplines for academic success
Melodic Expressions: Empowering First-Year Writers through Songwriting
No full textThis article examines how using songwriting in the first-year composition class inspires students to begin utilizing their unique ideas and perspectives when crafting original texts. Moreover, it maintains that songwriting places emphasis on content, while encouraging students to craft the concise, detailed texts associated with academic writing. In particular, the forthcoming discussion highlights three specific songwriting assignments that can be implemented in the first-year writing course, as well as the in-class activities and writing prompts that help inform the subsequent assignments
Writing about Writing at the Two-Year College: Why Composition Instructors Need to Consider “Introduction to Writing Studies” at the Two-Year College
No full text"Writing about Writing at the Two-Year College" explores the how and the why of using Downs and Wardle\u27s pedagogy with students at the two-year college, which is both open-enrollment and career-focused in nature. My intention in this article, however, has less to do with the how of WAW for two-year college students than the why. Why (or why) is WAW a suitable pedagogy for two-year college composition? What about two-year colleges and their student populations should those seeking to adapt WAW consider? These are the questions I take up in this article
Fumbling Toward Narrative?: Charles Dickens\u27s _Sketches by Boz_ (1836-39) in the Literature-Film Adaptation Course
No full textIn this essay, I discuss my use of Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1836-39) in my undergraduate Victorian literature and film class as a way of expanding the possibilities for teaching film with literature. Dickens’s first published book, Sketches by Boz, First Series (1836) is an anthology of essays, articles, journalistic ephemera, and short stories Dickens wrote as early as 1833 for a variety of periodicals. Sketches’s unfamiliarity to my students and its very strangeness as a book has the effect of destabilizing assumptions they might bring to a literature and film course, signaling from the outset that we will not proceed lockstep through a series of book-vs-adaptation comparisons with fidelity to the book providing the underlying metric. Moreover, Sketches by Boz in a film and literature course can provide a useful way of introducing students to film’s early history and discussing the issues it raises. The tentative, uneven process by which Dickens’s fragmentary journalistic sketches of the 1830s yielded to the full-length, sprawling novels for which he is famous furnishes a useful analogue to the process by which the early, fragmentary, non-narrative film entertainments of the 1890s would yield to such narrative works as Le Voyage dans la Lune (A Trip to the Moon) (1902) and The Great Train Robbery (1903), initially, and, later, the feature-length narrative films of D. W. Griffith—analogous historical arcs I like to call “fumbling toward narrative.” Generically indeterminate and often metanarrative while straddling the material formats of periodical journalism and published books, Dickens’s Sketches sets us up as a class for conversations about genre, narrative, and material media—ultimately allowing us to question the desirability of narrative in literature or in film
Comic Book Project as a Tool for Teaching Multimodal Argument and Fostering Critical Thinking Skills: Implications for the L2 Writing Classroom
No full textOne of my major responsibilities as Director of ESL Writing Program at Case Western Reserve University was to place incoming international students in the appropriate writing class based on their placement essay each fall. Overseeing the placement of 150-170 second language (L2) students in a few days was overwhelming and daunting at times, but it gave me a better sense of L2 students’ challenges in academic writing. The placement essay prompt aimed to gauge students’ academic reading and writing skills by asking them to make an argument based on a reading excerpt. Incoming freshmen were asked to summarize, respond to an excerpt and support their argument using their own experience, content from the passage or their general knowledge. It was not easy for native-English speaking students to respond to the essay prompt, but L2 students in particular struggled at various stages of the writing process. While some had trouble understanding the text, others had difficulty writing a coherent and well-organized essay. Many students engaged the text to some extent and incorporated interesting ideas into their essays, but most relied heavily on personal experiences and failed to produce well-developed arguments supported by effective evidence
Editor\u27s Note
No full textThis document contains the Editor\u27s Note for this issue of The CEA Forum
Hearing the Silences: Engaging in Rhetorical Listening in the ESL/ELL Composition Classroom
No full textThis paper contributes to a recent revisionist body of scholarship on silence in the classroom. I discuss my attempts to listen to the silences in my ESL writing classroom in order to answer the question of why some students remained silent. I explain the approach I took to answering this question, designing an assignment geared at uncovering students’ perspectives on silence in the classroom. I document some of the changes I made, based on what I learnt both about my students and about me, as I read through their responses. Overall, in this essay I suggest through an ethnographic approach, that there are many benefits to be gained when one listens to the silences in the classroom. I end however by noting some of the limitations in using silence as a pedagogical tool, especially when applied in a Caribbean second language context in Puerto Rico
Teaching Dorothy Allison\u27s Bastard Out of Carolina in the Age of the Trigger Warning
No full textThis paper reviews the debate over the use of trigger warnings when teaching sensitive material and discusses the importance of teaching difficult texts in light of troubling subject matter. The argument is that trigger warnings may provide students with the opportunity to manage their stress and anxiety when encountering material that may be disturbing or even traumatic. This paper also illustrates the value in teaching texts involving complex issues, such as Dorothy Allison\u27s Bastard Out of Carolina. It also outlines a variety of effective strategies for teaching Allison\u27s novel along with her memoir, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure. It does not seek to provide a definitive answer to the trigger warning question, but to add to the conversation with a specific example in a specific cultural context