Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture current issue

A Note from the Editors

Holberg, J. L., Taylor, M. — 2008-09-03

Guest Editor's Introduction: Teaching to the Choir

Schneider, B. — 2008-09-03

Teaching Circles: Supporting Shared Work and Professional Development

Marshall, M. J. — 2008-09-03

This essay describes and critiques the creation and evolution of Teaching Circles, small groups of teachers meeting regularly to discuss curriculum and pedagogy, as a vehicle for teacher development in the composition program at the University of Miami. Included in the essay are comments from several of the full-time lecturers who participated in these discussion groups as both members and leaders. The essay makes visible the competing tensions inherent in fostering professional development through such a structure, especially the complications involved in turning lecturers into teacher educators as they take on responsibility for mentoring beginning teachers. The essay and the comments from the lecturers note the challenges inherent in making such an institutional structure productive over time and suggest that sustained critical reflection, willingness to revise, and attention to the scholarship of teaching teachers are important components of keeping any structure of professional development relevant.

Writing Program Administration and Faculty Professional Development: Which Faculty? What Development?

Willard-Traub, M. K. — 2008-09-03

The author considers faculty development and its potential relationship to the ethos of collaborative practice modeled both by critical (Freirean) pedagogy and by interdisciplinary research. As a primary concern for any academic administrator, faculty development is not only a teaching moment but also an opportunity for reciprocal exchange, learning, and knowledge production, allowing participants to challenge the received wisdom of their fields and to come to a more rhetorical understanding of their identities. The collaborative construction of new knowledge and an emerging understanding of identities are examined in the context of two professional development and administrative contexts: the assessment by faculty of the writing of entering, first-year students and a collegewide, first-year experience (learning-community) initiative.

The In-House Conference: A Strategy for Disrupting Order and Shifting Identities

Daniell, B., Davis, L., Stewart, L., Taber, E. — 2008-09-03

The first-year writing program at Kennesaw State University has found its in-house conference (IHC) to be an important venue for faculty development. Based on the assumption that teachers actually know what they are doing, the IHC invites teachers of all ranks to propose a presentation on a selected topic and then to present those papers at conference sessions that other teachers attend. The IHC invites part-time faculty into the community, generates intellectual conversation about teaching across the lines of rank and hierarchy, allows the conversation to continue long after the conference since participants can see each other daily, and invites reflection on and modification of teaching. The success of the IHC serves as a reminder that some faculty development should be discipline-specific and local. In addition, the IHC asks teachers of writing to actually write themselves and allows them the opportunity for scholarship. The professional development that the IHC offers is not, however, limited to a writing program but can be used to stimulate intellectual engagement across the English department and, beyond that, to other departments across the university.

Rhetoricians, Facilitators, Models: Interviews with Technology Trainers

Sidler, M. — 2008-09-03

With the importance of online research, writing, and communication, computers are increasingly vital to instruction within the humanities. To help prepare teachers and administrators who engage with computerized instruction, this article examines faculty development through the lens of technology training by reporting on issues and concerns expressed by twelve technology trainers in a series of interviews. The interviewees provided their experiences and advice, including ways to approach institutional challenges, faculty participation, and pedagogical integrity. Most importantly, the author argues that technology training is a complex rhetorical activity involving a strong sense of kairos, context, and audience.

The Dynamics of Teacher Development: Negotiating Where We Stand

Kinzy, D., Minter, D. — 2008-09-03

This essay explores the underlying dynamics that inform postsecondary English teacher development efforts. In particular, it argues for a more expansive understanding of "context" in order to emphasize the inevitability of conflict and the productive potential of surfacing the meaningful contextual differences of our teaching lives. Such differences include varying philosophies of teaching and learning, competing motivations and expectations for participation in teacher development, and differing institutional teaching contexts where very different values might inhere. The essay offers strategies for engaging such differences with a view toward discerning collective (as well as individual) commitments. Such an orientation toward teacher development is crucial in the current climate, where plans for reform increasingly locate the work of remaking higher education outside of postsecondary classrooms. The kind of postsecondary teacher development work this essay calls for, then, seeks to support teachers' growth as agents of educational change.

Interdisciplinary Work as Professional Development: Changing the Culture of Teaching

Mullin, J. A. — 2008-09-03

This article explores, through the lens of a WAC faculty developer, how it is difficult to maintain disciplinary neutrality when developing any program; both teaching and learning can easily become codified through the lens of one person, field, or group. By using the work of, among others, Krista Ratcliffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Bartholomae, I make a case for working differently with stakeholders: collaborating within a discipline and including students in faculty development plansas both learners and mentors. If we mutually examine our definitions ("teaching," "learning," "writing," "students") and engage in rhetorical and reflective listening, we can move away from a model of teaching as rules, templates, and regulations; we can begin to engage our own assumptions along with those of our students, changing together the very definitions that constrain the evolution of our own mutual development.

The Rhetorical Situation: Examining the Framing of Professional Development

Schneider, B. — 2008-09-03

This article considers why, in the wake of Ernest Boyer's work, the promise of a transformation of university teaching has not been broadly realized and what that implies for faculty development projects. It discusses the assumptions that place the professional development of teaching outside of disciplinary boundaries, both literally and figuratively, and considers the consequences of that placement. It then turns to the scholarship of teaching and learning, considering what it offers to and implies about the disciplinary practices it proposes to transform. In response to this examination, the essay proposes that the Boyer Report attempted to alter teaching by arguing that teachers and the systems that support them needed to change, an argument that failed to convince college faculty to change. The article concludes with the proposal that the real exigence facing college faculty is that the way students raised in a culture saturated in electronic media learn is dramatically different than the way people learned a generation ago. That shift in learning is the exigence that requires a transformation of teaching.

Writing Centers and Cross-Curricular Literacy Programs as Models for Faculty Development

Bergmann, L. S. — 2008-09-03

The books under review here envision models of professional development not as episodes of developing skills or training faculty to conform to changing laws, rules, and pet projects of administrators, but rather as collaborative processes of education and reflection that encourage faculty to rethink their practices. They draw on research in composition theory and pedagogy, suggesting that more effective learning takes place when teachers trust learners to consider their own need for knowledge, invite learners to devise variations and applications of received knowledge, and resist keeping things simple to be sure they are correct. Applying different focuses, these books consider how to put teacher-learners at the center of the process of their own professional development. Jeffrey Jablonski argues that the expertise developed in composition studies needs to be recognized and respected in initiatives to implement Cross-Curricular Literacy programs. The writers of The Everyday Writing Center consider how, in the midst of increased professionalization, to maintain the serendipitous—even carnivalesque, at times—learning and teaching that the intimate and nonhierarchical space of a writing center can foster. And the collective wisdom in The Writing Center Director's Resource Book surveys the current state of writing center theory and practice, providing a reflective guide for developing the expertise of writing center administrators, who are (or could be) leaders in campus faculty development efforts.

Cautionary Tales: Ideals and Realities in Twenty-First-Century Higher Education

Donahue, T. — 2008-09-03

It has become increasingly clear that U.S. faculty cannot afford to remain insular about global issues in teaching and the forces that are shaping them. At the same time, our desire to address or resist those issues, to join in or to find alternatives, needs to be contextualized. The three edited collections reviewed here address globalization of higher education in Australia, writing instruction in higher education in the United Kingdom, and interdisciplinary collaboration in U.S. higher education. The three bring different perspectives to current U.S. discussions of internationalization and interdisciplinary work in higher education and allow us to better understand issues in other cultures and disciplines while critically examining our own through new lenses.

Faculty Development in English Studies: An Overview of Resources and a Suggested Sequence

Blalock, G. — 2008-09-03

This overview of resources for faculty development initiatives in Englishstudies proposes a specific framework and sequence for faculty development work and identifies and annotates key resources. It proposes that the sequence for should take place within the theoretical framework of the learning paradigm, introduces faculty to the science of learning and teaching for significant learning, engages faculty in the scholarship of teaching and learning, and focuses on ways to create and maintain communities of practice and knowledge. Work on this overview initiated the development of an interactive Web-based clearinghouse devoted to the ongoing gathering and sharing of faculty development resources.

Contributors

2008-09-03