As a college literature teacher, the goal of the author is to enable students to create their own meaning from their encounter with a text, respecting the text's sources, limits, contexts, and possibilities as well as their own. Fostering this creative response is among the greatest challenges and rewards of the profession. While teaching EN102:…

Following her return to the classroom after a two-year administrative absence, Kathleen Thornton--the Director of Undergraduate English Advisement and a lecturer at the University of Albany, New York--was struck by the language her undergraduate students used to discuss the stories of authors such as Edgar Allan Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne. While…