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Posts Tagged ‘Teaching’

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Doug Brent on Reinventing WAC (Again)

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Information Design, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on March 9, 2011 at 5:38 pm

Allen Mendenhall

Doug Brent’s “Reinventing WAC (Again)” argues that WAC pedagogy complements the first-year experience and the related first-year seminar, which shares WAC’s goal of interactivity and cross-disciplinarity.

The author describes the direction that first-year seminars have taken, paying special attention to how they have initiated students into research discourse and culture.  He suggests that these seminars, like WAC pedagogy, emphasize process- and inquiry-based teaching methodologies.

First-year seminars—and in particular the academic-content seminar as opposed to the thematic seminar—are styled to facilitate student participation and engagement.  They encourage students to generate and not just absorb knowledge.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Being John Hagerty

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Creative Writing, Legal Education & Pedagogy, Legal Research & Writing, Pedagogy, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication on November 18, 2010 at 8:08 pm

It’s early on a Tuesday morning when I walk into John’s classroom, a cup of coffee in my hand, my too-heavy bag draped over my shoulder.  I gain the nearest desk and sit down.

Outside the leaves are beginning to change, and a cool air whistles through a crack in the window.  “Smells like football season,” I think, even though the room is choked with chalk and dust.  Inside the classroom the students stare at me, the new guy, the stranger, and they look away when I acknowledge their glances with my own.

I probably look funny in this desk on which I’ve arranged various papers: John’s syllabus, his assignments, his pop-quiz for the day.  I’ve been up since 5:00 a.m., reading and rereading my students’ essays, so I’m not a little fatigued when class begins and John introduces me as “a new teacher” and “a lawyer.”  I smile and mutter “hi.”  I even manage half a wave.

John passes out the pop-quizzes, and the students, slightly panicked, seem to forget that I’m in the room.  How nice it is to be sitting here watching students take a quiz rather than taking one myself.   Read the rest of this entry »

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Signs Taken For Truths

In Arts & Letters, Communication, Legal Research & Writing, Literary Theory & Criticism, Rhetoric, Rhetoric & Communication, Semiotics on October 24, 2010 at 5:45 pm

Recently I was reading Erika Lindemann’s book A Rhetoric for Writing Teachers (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).  I was preparing for class and needed some inspiration from someone far smarter. I found that inspiration in Lindemann’s chapter “What Do Teachers Need to Know about Linguistics?”  I won’t go into how I used that chapter for class but would like to expand on what Lindemann calls “graphic conventions” (62).

Focusing on the “role language plays in composing, especially at the writing and rewriting stages,” Lindemann argues that writing instructors need a greater facility with English linguistics to understand the composition process—specifically, to understand how students select and appropriate diction (60).  This premise leads Lindemann into a discussion of alphabets and symbols with linguistic values (62).

Lindemann’s claims about how matters of taste are always braided with “our assumptions about what language should and shouldn’t be” are interesting, but this post discusses what language might be.

Language can become a vehicle for discovering “truth.” Literature, made up of language, can become, to employ Kenneth Burke’s phrase, equipment for living.  By “truth” I don’t necessarily mean moral truth.  I mean physical truth.  Language is a system of meaning that makes truth—the referent—intelligible even if it only signifies or stands in the place of reality.  Read the rest of this entry »