This article reports on one university's experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed "MonsterComp," including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures,…

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers' compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic…

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power, to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as…

In this essay, the author explains how teaching assistant (TA) unions work to the benefit not only of the graduate students who are their members but also of the writing programs that employ them. While university administrations understand unions to be bothersome at best and forces of evil at their worst, unions are essential to the maintenance…

Describes a classroom visitation program of English teacher evaluation at Wichita State University. (DD)

Author feels that the profession does not respect college composition because it does not respect the people who teach it", and offers recommendations for upgrading the faculty teaching composition. (Author/SP)

Contributors discuss the following topics: (1) holistic reading in the composition class, (2) the teaching assistant as apprentice, and (3) the status and functions of college faculty adjuncts. (HTH)

Analyzes 208 comments written at the end of student papers by 10 teaching assistants at Penn State. Analyzes a second sample containing end comments written earlier at other universities. Identifies 16 primary genres, falling into 3 groups: judging genres, reader response genres, and coaching genres. (PA)

Contains the English Council of California State University's statement of principles, responding to the 1989 CCCC statement developed in response to the Wyoming Resolution. Discusses (1) teaching, service, and research in rhetoric and composition; (2) the status of teaching assistants; (3) the status of lecturers and part-time faculty in…

Discusses similarities between graduate students in English and undergraduate students in English courses with regard to their resistance to difficult texts. Describes the reflexive position of those who perform the dual roles of teacher and student, especially teaching assistants. (HB)

Discusses an in-depth interviewing process designed to encourage teaching assistants and other teachers of writing to reflect on the ways their histories with writing affect the way they teach composition. Finds that this process initiates a forum for continued discussion about the teaching of writing. (RS)

As composition teachers, we need to learn to stop evaluating the student writer's values and assumptions, and rather evaluate what he does working from those assumptions. (JH)

Presents five articles (by administrators, faculty, graduate students, and writing center personnel) written in response to the "Progress Report from the CCCC Committee on Professional Standards" as well as the "Statement of Principles and Standards for the Postsecondary Teaching of Writing." (SR)

Ten graduate students in English attack their graduate (M.A. and Ph.D.) experiences which they consider to be narrow and demeaning. They point to intellectual, financial, and personal difficulties which beset them, as well as petty, unnecessary rigors and delays to which they are subjected and which often prolonged graduation. They speak of…

This article links failed reform to failed education through a case study of an annual collaborative revision of a program textbook in the Composition Program at the University of California at Irvine. Review of successive editions of the program's "Student Guide to Writing at UCI" reveals a progressive retreat from the program's…