Defining risk communication as the "interactive process of exchange of information and opinion among individuals, groups, and institutions,...involving multiple messages about the nature of risk," this Digest argues that risk communication has much to offer instructors of cultural studies composition who want to revive students' sense of…

One composition instructor's purpose is to address, or perhaps, re-dress, the balance of the relationship between teacher and student using a dialogic framework that provides for reciprocity. Her aim is to provoke, to seduce (persuade through passion), and to awaken their incipient sense of wonder at the world and the language that creates this…

The first reading assignment one educator gives his first-year composition students helps answer their questions about what college work will be like. For this reason, he gives them Neil Postman's "Amusing Ourselves to Death" to read, a book which shows that the late 20th century is undergoing a vast epistemological shift, moving from…

Courtroom scenes in literature seem to have a special magic with students (probably because of all the trials seen on television, fiction or non-fiction). Students in a composition and literature course at the University of Nebraska, after reading Thomas Hardy's "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," wrote "closing arguments" for either…

After an introduction by James L. Marra explaining the Intellectual Heritage Program at the College of Art and Sciences at Temple University (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania), this paper presents four brief faculty essays describing various techniques that the writers use in their classes in the program. The techniques discussed in the paper are…

A naturalistic study of 21 college students (at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania) writing research papers provides detailed analyses of the roles that notetaking, planning, goal-setting, and revising play in students' approaches and examines whether these "high investment" reading and writing processes lead to higher quality…

An exercise in ghostwriting--a process where the reader completes a section of the text in the reader's head based on clues in the text--was used in freshman composition and upper-level composition classes to get students to concentrate on their reading processes. In this assignment, a short story was chosen from which different portions of the…

Focusing on the importance of helping students to be aware of diverse viewpoints and customs, and to understand their own cultural heritage, this paper discusses how multicultural awareness is addressed in an introductory literature class and a composition class. The paper's first section introduces the basic elements in multicultural education,…

With rare exceptions, the assignment of a research paper elicits groans from students and sighs from their teachers, or worse. While the research paper became a fixture in composition textbooks and classrooms by the 1940s, its origins can be traced to fundamental changes in the American academy after the Civil War. The language of the term paper…

Nine years ago, many parents protesting the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment (commonly referred to as the Hatch Amendment) accused the schools of invading student privacy in sex and drug education classes, in counseling sessions, and in English classes. Some parents testifying at hearings conducted by the United States Department of Education…

A close reading of two nineteenth-century composition textbook prefaces reveals that teachers of that period attempted to rename and refocus the content and practice of composition to meet the imagined needs of real students, who were also frustrated and struggling. From the perspective of a twentieth-century composition teacher, William Swinton's…

Composition classrooms are the place to talk specifically about the rhetoricity of writing in academic disciplines. Students can use personal experiences to understand what it means to see themselves as aggressive or passive participants of various institutions. Too often students do not understand themselves as having any authority, but are…

Composition pedagogy that challenges students to reflect on their participation in discourse communities reveals an attempt by teachers to balance disciplinary concerns with the realities of students' worlds. Such a pedagogy consists of students repositioning themselves in relation to the various discourses which comprise their own ways of…

A study explored academic writing from the students' side of the desk, examining how different tasks and writing situations influenced students' approaches. The study used interviews and process logs to examine how 13 college freshmen interpreted writing assignments in a variety of courses (sociology, engineering, and literature) and how these…

In this article, the author compares the arguments of Susan Swartzlander, Diana Pace, and Virginia Lee Stamler (1993) who note the contradiction between the "shockingly unprofessional" practice of asking students to write about their personal traumas in writing courses and the common occurrence of such assignments with Jeffrey Berman…