This article explores how college instructors can use William Blake's unique pairing of image and text -- what W.J.T. Mitchell calls "composite art" -- to encourage students to think and write about the dynamic interplay of image and text in modern communications. Opening with an anecdote of teaching Songs of Innocence and of Experience…

A central objective of many writing courses is to prepare students to effectively communicate in their personal, professional, and public lives, but writing instruction can seem disconnected from contemporary societal practices that constitute civil public discourse. This project aims to explore the connections between instructors' perceptions and…

To challenge resistance to required literature courses, instructors quiz students regularly on the readings; they also require examinations that ask students to define key terms, to answer background questions focused on authors and dates, to identify key passages by author/title/speaker, and to explain the thematic significance of each quotation.…

Since writing in the disciplines (WID) is focused on learning how to write formal documents of a professional register, it is important to note that each field or discipline has its own style, structure, and format when it comes to writing, and most composition courses seldom facilitate the transfer of these specialized skills in the classroom.…

This article presents an effective model for a manageable interdisciplinary project that shows students the connections among art, English, and other disciplines; gives composition students an external audience for their writing; and emphasizes the importance of research in the process of creating arguments and art. This interdisciplinary project…

This essay describes a method of teaching a very challenging anthology piece: Laura Kipnis's "Love's Labors" (chapter 1 of her 2003 "Against Love: A Polemic"). The method, although designed for a critical thinking course, should also provide resources for those who teach Kipnis's work in writing courses. Using…

In this article, the author explains how a writing center can be a potential host for housing writing instruction across the disciplines. She recommends writing centers act as hosts for various faculty development opportunities throughout the semester, and states that these centers can also hold faculty development resources and collaborative…

My experience working with first year writers in courses designed to teach critical thinking and composition has introduced me to a mass of young adults who are anxious when it comes to effective written communication in a college classroom. Not only are they troubled about how to write to an audience of college professors, but they are also…

As 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…

During the fourth year of Amy Phillips' teaching assistantship in the spring semester of 2008, she was asked to teach a 300-level advanced writing course in which she was given the creative freedom to design the syllabus, choose the textbooks, craft all assignments, and organize the course content. However, there was one stipulation: the course,…

Although arguments about the personal essay in the writing classroom have been taking place since before composition studies even existed as an academic field, the author thinks that in light of a renewed interest in autobiographical writing in the academy and in popular culture, it is important to take another look at this type of writing.…

Much of Debra Matthews' teaching experience has been with apprehensive writers, and while teaching freshman English to primarily nontraditional students, she found that the students were often nervous about the writing process. The students acknowledged that they felt threatened by the evaluation process, and some were intimidated by the writing…

The author has been tutoring and teaching writing for fifteen years, but has discovered that few people outside of academia know what it is that she does. Despite the rise in composition graduate programs and the improving market for composition specialists, even within the university, faculty from other disciplines frequently have vague notions…

Discussions of English department identity and mission more often center on the undergraduate major curriculum than on classes for general-studies and other non-major students. In such courses, though, educators have an opportunity to touch the intellectual lives of far more people than they do in courses for majors. The author argues in this…

For several years a number of instructors at the University of Cincinnati have experimented with the concept of problem-based learning (PBL) in their composition courses. The concept, rooted as it is in Socratic method and the hands-on problem-solving advocated by John Dewey, is not new, and though some of its applications may call for adjustments…