In the last 15 years, writing center scholars have increasingly called for more evidence to validate writing centers' practices. Work by Paula Gillespie (2002), Neal Lerner (2009), and Isabelle Thompson et al. (2009) underscore this need. Missing from these discussions, however, is a thorough understanding of the past and current research…

This article examines an established course on Popular Culture which is framed within the general educational model in an English-medium university. The article is organized into three parts: the underlining educational rationale for general educational courses, the course description, and the students' perspectives of their learning experience.…

Using the case of a secondary English department in Ontario, Canada, this article examines the constraints that academic departments face in transforming themselves from communities of practice into learning communities. This distinction between a community of practice and a learning community has taken on heightened importance as increasing…

Student resistance to critical thinking emblematic of a liberal arts curriculum is often painfully obvious in freshman writing classes that impose a process-based approach to writing and thinking. Criminal justice students, like their peers in other majors with strong vocational orientations, often resist taking any more than the required liberal…

The emergent field of translation studies is still struggling to find a home in American universities in a time of severely strained budgets and overextended departments. Drawn to the issue, by the experience of a successful inaugural introductory course at the University of Alabama, these authors have found that a fruitful place for translation…

Reading through news-media clippings about James Wood, one might reasonably conclude that "pre-eminent critic" is his official job title. In fact, Wood is a staff writer for "The New Yorker" and a professor of the practice of literary criticism at Harvard University. But at a time when there is much hand-wringing about the death of the…

This study yields a broader understanding of the "development of rhetorical instruction in the American college" (Gold 15) by focusing on the composition programs at two little studied universities. This dissertation addresses the descriptions of composition courses as these appear in the course catalogs of two different kinds of…

Heuristics are deeply-held, tacit knowledge structures connected to our feelings. A heuristic study explores a phenomenon crucial to the researcher's self-discovery (Moustakas, 1990). Like me, many undergraduate composition instructors feel both fear and hope at the crossroads of composition and technology. Technology and composition shape one…

Hong Kong's universities have been attracting non-local students to diversify the overall student mix and enhance internationalism in higher education. Mainland Chinese students have become the largest non-local student source in this Western-style higher education sector. The diversity of student body together with the promotion of multicultural…

This exploratory, qualitative research explored the extent that course syllabi in the Departments of English in 13 public and 9 private universities in Taiwan reflect the inclusion of syllabus components to promote learning as recommended in the literature in the United States. Research questions included: what components can be inferred from the…

Many teachers have known of (or been members of) departments in which all of the potentially successful chairs--after having proven themselves by running subunits or graduate programs--have decided to devote themselves solely to research or teaching, and to leave department administration to whoever is willing to do it or whoever can be talked…

Undertaken during a period when changes in the assessment of English in public examinations at 16+ were becoming embedded in classroom practice, this comparative research explores where poetry is located within the newly aligned examination assessment frameworks of New Zealand and England. It comments on how these frameworks are locally…

This article reports on the use of a text-based verbal protocol (Afflerbach, 2000) situated within individual interviews to elicit secondary English teachers' perspectives on new literacies (Albers & Harste, 2007; Coiro, Knobel, Lankshear, & Leu, 2008). Ranging significantly in their teaching experience and comfort with new media and…

Educators have known for generations the significance of teaching youngsters to read, but have turned their collective attention in only the past decade or so to the state of inadequate reading in high schools. The view is alarming by many accounts and has led national organizations to urge high school principals to add yet another responsibility…

This essay discusses our failed attempts at the College of Charleston to sustain a Writing Studio course. Specifically, we explain how the failure of our Studio course revealed underlying problems in the department concerning the formation of writing program policy, the role of adjunct faculty, the oversight of our first-year writing curriculum,…