Argues that the Allan Blooms of the right and the Harold Blooms of the left are equally culpable for inculcating and perpetuating a pedagogical psychopathology which edifies (or brutalizes) students and teachers "for their own good," and creating an air of rarefied mystification surrounding language use and interpretation. (RS)

Argues that digressiveness enables the effective writer to avoid the limitations of the small thesis statement and to explore freely thought and experiences. Describes several kinds of digression, including: Platonic thesis; structural; the example "digressio"; figurative; modification; monistic; allusive; and Dali. (RS)

Describes an approach to encourage freshman writing students to think about rhetorical situations in economic terms (as a transaction between interested parties), leading to a clearer understanding of the rhetoric behind writing. (SR)

Describes the use in the classroom of students' phone messages and casual notes to illustrate the relationship between composition class and writing in students' daily lives, that writing defines itself according to the purpose and audience of each task, and that they already know a great deal about writing. (SR)

Describes a graphic technique using concentric circles to increase student comprehension of narrative essays. Argues that the method will help students identify events, relationships, and the significance of narrative essays. (RS)

Evaluates four writing samples from each student in several freshman composition courses. Finds that students did not perform consistently from one assignment to the next. Suggests that knowing how well a student performs on one writing task says very little about how well the student is likely to perform on other writing tasks. (RS)

Presents six essays (resulting from a feminist pedagogy research group to pursue the relationship between feminism and composition teaching) which offer individual teaching narratives from the first-year composition classroom. Focuses on two key problematics: difference and authority. (SR)

Argues that students need to learn how to articulate their thinking in a public arena and that the English classroom is a useful place for such public interaction. Describes a "town meeting" method of including public speech into writing courses that provides help toward reaching these objectives. (HB)

Discusses and compares two recent books on American higher education: "The Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, and "Lives on the Boundary" by Mike Rose. Develops a view which synthesizes those of Bloom and Rose. Considers this view as comparable to that of Paul Goodman. (HB)

Assists students in recognizing rhetorical situations and in participating actively by instituting semester-long anonymous correspondences between unacquainted students in separate sections of freshman composition. Notes that students achieved greater sensitivity to rhetorical situations and an awakening of resistance. (MG)

Argues that liberatory pedagogy requires for its practical and pedagogical implementation a deeper understanding of the profound psychological responses it may invoke in students. Asserts that it is not enough to demonstrate that the thought of society is ideologically informed; students must rise to a critical self-consciousness. (PRA)

Describes various writing center issues and how they were foregrounded through the institution of a campuswide portfolio evaluation in the first-year writing program at the University of Southern California in fall of 1990. Shows the effect of the adoption of portfolio evaluation on the writing center's activities. (HB)

Recounts an imaginary conversation between "literature" and "composition" concerning the writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) movement. Suggests that literature instruction pays no heed to WAC and overlooks writing purposes other than literary ones. Argues that literature and composition proponents should both support a broader…

Argues that electronic mail and other forms of computer networking do not ensure equality. Explores the kinds of exclusions that still occur on synchronous networks. Describes certain kinds of network discourse as "classroom terrorism." Provides examples from actual classroom settings. (HB)

Presents a wide-ranging personal and intellectual conversation with Peter Elbow regarding the development of his widely accepted ideas that have shaped the field of modern composition practice, and the on-going development of his philosophy as a teacher. (NH)