This volume explores mindfulness and other contemplative approaches as strategic tools for cultivating anti-oppressive pedagogies in higher education. Research confirms that simply providing students with evidence and narratives of economic, social, and environmental injustices proves insufficient in developing awareness and eliciting responses of…

The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered.…

Discussions about sports continue to permeate the news and political realms and may prove to be a useful but underutilized tool to teach difficult subjects like race, gender, and sexuality. However, most scholarly work on sport focuses on a specific systemic inequality within a sport and/or how an issue affects sport and thus are sociological in…

International students with low academic English proficiency face challenges with reading their course materials and writing assignments. Their challenges are exacerbated during remote learning, as they remain in their home countries, immersed in their home languages, which may be quite distant from academic English. To investigate the effects of…

Contemplative education courses and academic programs emerging in universities across the United States and internationally have a unique opportunity to help students gain both self-awareness and an awareness of how the self is situated in a larger context. Research utilizing meditation in higher education shows promise in strengthening stress…

Background: This study involved a bicoastal project between four composition classes, two in California and two in Pennsylvania. The focus was on how students read, write, and converse about ethnic and spiritual distinctiveness and the role of writing in identity development. Purpose: The researchers exercised a variety of methods (diverse…

Each of the four core composition units discussed in this paper presents its own set of challenges to both student and teacher. As writing teachers at mid-sized state universities, the authors offer four pedagogical approaches to exploring student identity through composition, literature, and rhetoric. One of the main goals is to allow new…

Describes a technique in which students describe themselves through metaphors or similes and asks them to explain the comparisons they made. Discuses additions and extensions to the basic activity. Discusses a similar exercise in which students sought out poems that had a speaker that the student thought was like him/herself, and then wrote poems…

Recent discussions of teaching composition in the context of cultural studies have begun to consider the condition of the writing subject in society, yet these discussions construct student-writer S(s)ubject(ivitie)s at the poles of modernist-identity and postmodern-difference binary opposition that is politically problematic. The identity of the…

There are several variables at work in any piece of writing and some combinations of these variables can cause serious problems for some students. The first area where two of these variables occur is in the notion of what a college education is. The subject matter to be learned is one variable in what education means, and the second variable is…

Describes a many-faceted class activity involving readings, small group and class discussions, and writing an essay. Notes that, in the essay, the students first think and write about the names people have called them and/or their culture and then rename themselves, thereby gaining personal and political power. (SR)

Describes an exercise that addresses a number of developmental issues in a family and parenting class. The exercise requires students to write a semiautobiographical personal letter. Reports that students responded favorably to this exercise, suggesting a number of beneficial outcomes. Recommendations for instructors are provided. (KO)

Richard Gambino's "Blood of My Blood" was of help to a writing instructor coming to terms with the role that her Italian ethnicity played in her life and education. Gambino's understanding of the inner tensions experienced by an individual who must negotiate between two cultures has helped the instructor in teaching working-class and…

Three students in an autobiography class--an African-American, a woman, and a gay man struggling to come out--used their writing to both affirm their places in the world and envision another place. Having reviewed her early educational experiences as an African-American, Holly focused her essay back to her present college days and her attempts to…

Postmodernism claims to shatter the mirage of essentialism by denying the image of a unified self. The result, it asserts, is the freedom to assume a new kind of authority, signified in the image of the "subject position." It assumes, further, that because the writer is capable of multiple selves, he or she will perforce manifest…