English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Teaching White Papers Through Client Projects

Russell Willerton — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 15:08:47 PDT

White papers are increasingly prevalent in business and professional settings. Although textbook resources for white paper assignments are limited, a white paper assignment completed for a community client can provide a learning experience that students enjoy and that strengthens ties between the university and the community. This article describes a way to approach the white paper assignment in a communications-focused course and identifies resources to support white paper assignments.

A Call for Action: Building Bridges Between Literacy In School and Out

Jeffrey D. Wilhelm et al. — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 08:32:07 PST

The Politics of Boredom and the Boredom of Politics in David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

Ralph Clare — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 13:54:14 PST

This essay explores the theme of boredom in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King. The Pale King treats boredom as a complex and varied phenomenon, thus recovering and furthering a latent theme of Infinite Jest, and sets the characters’ experiences of boredom in the larger context of postindustrial life and the transformations brought about by neoliberal economic policy. Ultimately, The Pale King reveals the ties between personal, cultural, and political boredom, considers the troubling implications of these ties, and suggests that the ability to pay attention comprises one way to resist postmodern boredom and to counteract its greater societal effects.

Your Loss Is Their Gain: The Corporate Body and the Corporeal Body in Richard Powers's Gain

Ralph Clare — Fri, 08 Feb 2013 11:37:45 PST

This essay explores the inverse relationship between the corporate body and the corporeal body in Richard Powers's Gain. The novel's careful anatomy of corporate and American history demonstrates that as the corporation (considered a “person” by law) gains rights, the individual is stripped of them. Notwithstanding the novel's fantasy of a sovereign subject able to resist this biopolitical incorporation, Gain makes it clear that in the neoliberal age the corporate body has narrowed its “responsibility” to increasing shareholders' profits, while the subject's responsibility for her newly “privatized” body has expanded with troubling implications.

Experience Over All: Preservice Teachers and the Prizing of the 'Practical'

Anne Elrod Whitney et al. — Thu, 24 Jan 2013 15:38:33 PST

Anyone who has worked with preservice teachers has occasionally felt the vehemence of their desire for more “practical” material and less (or, sometimes, no) material they deem “theory.” By “theory” they seem to mean not only theory in the classic sense but also any evidence from research, discussion of ethics or socioeconomic issues or policy, or other aspects of the context for teaching. By “practical” they seem to mean concrete activities that they can use in the classroom the next day with little or no modification or reflection. Tensions between theory and practice permeate the work of English teacher education, reaching into every area of our work all the way down to course organization and the methods texts we choose (Barrell, 1996; Smagorinsky & Whiting, 1995). “Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it,” we have heard a preservice teacher remark to her classmate. These attitudes are ones we notice most as students enter our programs, most likely inherited from a wider prejudice against “over-theoretical” education programs spread via mass media reporting on education issues and at times by teachers themselves, and as students begin to engage their coursework in earnest these attitudes do soften. Yet as they approach their first field experiences, preservice teachers do seem hungry to know exactly how to teach—and if we know how, they seem to plead, why won’t we just tell them?

Maneuvering the Labyrinth of University Affiliation: A Symposium

R. M. Berry et al. — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:53:48 PST

This Page Intentionally Left Blank: Janet Holmes Formats Dickinson

Jonathan Morse et al. — Wed, 19 Dec 2012 15:41:27 PST

As they are currently appearing in poetry journals, the pages of Janet Holmes' The ms of my kin look almost entirely blank. Floating in the emptiness of each page, however, are a few fragments of verse by Emily Dickinson.

Functional Underpinnings of Diachrony in Relative Clause Formation: The Nominalization-Relativization Connection in Northern Paiute

Tim Thornes — Tue, 18 Dec 2012 10:49:29 PST

The present paper explores the grammatical formation and synchronic variation of relative causes in the Northern Paiute (Western Numic; Uto-Aztecan) language, as determined by their functional and grammatical connections to nominalization. We find support for several hypotheses from the literature regarding the development of syntactic complexity along a paratactic-to-syntactic pathway. An approach that seeks functional explanations for diachronic developments helps to make sense of the data, particularly in connecting nominalization to relativation not as one of several available strategies for relative clause formation, but as part of the same complex functional and grammatical domain.

Langston Hughes's Counterpublic Discourse

Jeff Westover — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 14:41:41 PST

In the Whitmanesque "Let America Be America Again," Langston Hughes adopts an oratorical voice in order to define the goals of American democracy and rally his readers to a multiethnic vision of economic and political justice in the midst of the Depression. He also adopts a more private voice that conflicts with the official public one in order to articulate the fundamental contradiction of systematic racial injustice in a reputedly democratic nation. Hughes addresses a heterogeneous audience that includes not only "the Negro," but also "the poor white," "the red man driven from the land," and the recent immigrant. (1) Nevertheless, in "Let America Be America Again," Hughes retains his keen sense of the outsider status forced upon African Americans throughout the history of the United States. In his poem, Hughes deploys a dual discourse in order to express the contradictory meanings of America and to enrich those meanings with a sense of the word's critical possibilities. In doing so, he constitutes multiple publics, projected readerships that correspond to real and diverse audiences over time. I inquire initially into the principles of a dialogic theory in which the American ideal opposes the public practice of the nation's democracy. And by then testing the theory against the historical and contemporary criticism on the Hughes radical poetry of the thirties, I situate the theory as a fresh way of reading the most recent two campaigns for the American presidency.

Negotiating Conflicting Rhetorics: Rancheras and Documentary in the Classroom

Dora Ramirez-Dhoore — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 10:51:12 PST

As a young teenager, I remember sitting in the back seat of my parent's car, rolling my eyes at the noise coming from the radio speakers. On the airwaves being sent directly from Texas and Florida and behind the overbearing static sound, I could make out the TAN, TAN of the ending of the rancheraⁱ song my father was singing and enjoying. My mother would be next to him singing and whistling along, ignoring the static sound that was louder than the music and that would invariably give my teenage self a headache.ⁱⁱ My sister and I, two teenagers growing up in a small town in Eastern Oregon and adoring European bands like Duran Duran, Depeche Mode, and The Cure would complain, or should I say whine about the "music" our parents were so willing to hold on to even through the static.

Before the West was West: Rethinking the Temporal Borders of Western American Literature

Amy T. Hamilton et al. — Wed, 28 Nov 2012 14:44:03 PST

On the morning of February 10, 1676, the townspeople of Lancaster, Massachusetts, woke to chaos when the loosely allied Narragansett, Nipmuck, and Wampanoag tribes attacked their frontier village. The battle, which resulted in twelve colonists dead and twenty-four captured, was merely one maneuver in what is now known as King Philip's War, a late-seventeenth-century conflict between the English colonists in New England and the neighboring Native American tribes. The raid on Lancaster, while not a decisive skirmish in the war itself, led to the production of one of the best-known literary texts in early US history: Mary Rowlandson's The Sovereignty and Goodness of God, first published in 1682. Without this slender book, it is possible that many contemporary literary scholars might never have heard of the battle at Lancaster; because of it, we have one of the most startling and earliest accounts of English colonial experience, one that blends frontier violence, wilderness travel, and Indian captivity.

What New Writing Teachers Talk About When They Talk About Teaching

Heidi Estrem et al. — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 16:05:44 PDT

As a discipline with academic roots in pedagogy (Harris 1996), composition studies has fostered increasingly visible and structured programs to mentor new writing instructors. Several recent essay collections compile examples of programs, thoughtfully theorized approaches, and careful explorations of how to best support and nurture new instructors of first-year writing (see, for example, Pytlik and Liggett 2002; Ward and Perry 2002). It is now common that new college writing teaching assistants (TAs) participate in at least one pedagogy seminar designed to guide them through their initial teaching experience and provide an introduction to composition studies (see Dobrin 2005). Additionally, individual accounts of new instructors like those by Wendy Bishop (1990), Elizabeth Rankin (1994), and Sally Barr Ebest (2005) help provide a rich context for further research on the pedagogical development of new writing instructors.

Writing Lab Reports

Roger Munger — Wed, 03 Oct 2012 12:57:34 PDT

Scientists and engineers spend a significant portion of their professional lives writing, because communicating ideas in writing is central to the process of creating and publicizing knowledge. Lab reports are one important way they communicate the results of their work. Adding new knowledge to a field is the collective effort of many people, each contributing small pieces of information and building on the work of others. Although scientists and engineers might work alone or in small groups in a lab, if they want to contribute to their fields, they must convince readers that their findings are valid. For this reason, the ability to write clearly and persuasively is both necessary and valued in the sciences and engineering.

How Educators Use Policy Documents: A Misunderstood Relationship

James E. Fredricksen — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 14:55:53 PDT

As an English educator and co-director of a National Writing Project site, I have had many conversations with colleagues and educators who are anxious about the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) being adopted in so many states throughout the nation. The anxiety comes in many forms, ranging from "What do the CCSS mean for what and how I have to teach?" to "What does the drafting and implementation processes of the CCSS suggest for how people view me as a professional?" to "Are the CCSS really any good?" and so on. As I listen to all the people I work with - preservice teachers, experienced teachers, teacher educators, curriculum coordinators, writing project directors and fellows - I keep returning to one major issue that I think is behind a lot of the concern. More specifically, I continue to wonder how educators actually use and develop policy documents (e.g., standards) in their day-to-day work. The assumption seems to be that teachers read the policies and then implement them; however, any teacher who has worked with standards documents knows that this process isn't quite as clear-cut as the above assumption. It is this gap between how assumptions about educators use policy documents and how teachers actually use those policy documents. I sense this is the source for a lot of the anxiety I hear in the voices of the many educators I respect and work with.

Talking About Teaching: Establishing Trust Amidst Uncertainty

James E. Fredricksen — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:38:16 PDT

Faced with a day-to-day job that is filled with uncertainty, teachers have to make countless decisions and judgments (Floden & Clark, 1988). Increasingly, it seems, we teachers are asked to not only make those decisions amidst uncertainty, but we are asked to explain and justify those decisions to others.

For instance, within our profession we are asked to explain to our colleagues why we do what we do as a way to learn from one another; this may involve such approaches as Teacher Research (Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 1999; Zeichner & Noffke, 2001), Teacher Learning Communities (Lieberman & Miller, 2008; Cochran-Smith & Lytle, 2003; McLaughlin & Talbert, 2001), and more "public" teaching, which confronts some oft-held "simplistic assumptions and represent[s] the complexities of teaching" (Hatch, 2005, p. 2).

Building Conscious Competence: Reading Our Students, Sharing Our Practice

James E. Fredricksen — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:26:24 PDT

When I first began teaching middle school students in the early 1990s, it took at least three years and multiple readings of Nancie Atwell's (1987) In the Middle for me to finally muster the courage to change my classroom culture to one of a reading and writing workshop. Looking back on it now, I can see that it was not just fear that held me back, but also a lack of vision and collegiality. That is, I did not have access or opportunity or time to watch writing workshops conducted by other teachers, largely because I did not know anyone, other than Atwell and Linda Rief (1992), who were leading and organizing classrooms in this way. Once I took the leap, though, there was certainly tweaking and revising and reframing to do, but there was no turning back - because creating a classroom culture where reading and writing and talking about reading and writing allowed me to listen to and learn from my students. It is this listening to and learning from students that changed my conversations with my colleagues from one in which we had talked about what students could not do to a conversation about what students could do. Moreover, a reading and writing workshop provided my students and me with opportunities to talk about the choices we made when we read and wrote. We had to articulate our logic and reasoning, and articulating the thinking behind my pedagogical choices was something that my conversations with colleagues sorely lacked.

Tapping the Power: Writing to Learn Language, Content, and Process

Jim Fredricksen et al. — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 15:10:02 PDT

When we think about the role writing can play in helping our students learn, we often have to remind ourselves what we believe about learning and what we want students to learn.

For us, learning is when people engage in the meaningful and meaning-making practices of the communities they participate in. This might be when they participate in a club or a sport or a performance; it might be when they are with their family or friends; it might be when they participate in their religious or social organizations. In schools, we think of learning in terms of disciplinary communities. That is, in science classes, we consider the scientific community; in art and music classes, we envision the community of artists; in mathematics courses, we focus on mathematicians, and so on. Of course, we are aware that these are not the only communities students participate in, and that many out of school communities provide social status for them among their peers, within their towns, within on-line communities, and more.

Reading "Moments of Being" Between the Lines of Bach’s Fugue: Lyric Narrative in Virginia Woolf's "Slater’s Pins Have No Points"

Cheryl Hindrichs — Tue, 01 May 2012 12:05:51 PDT

"The tune began; the first note meant a second; the second a third. Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged. On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gathering some on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending; all enlisted." (Between the Acts 220)

This epigraph provides an adroit map for reading Virginia Woolf’s lyric narrative experiments, particularly her short story "Moments of Being: Slater’s Pins Have No Points." It captures Woolf's fondness for a fugue's exposition: one note's call prompts the answer of an other. It expresses Woolf's interplay of form and content. Here, as throughout her work, Woolf evokes metaphors of surface ("flower gathering") and depth ("descending to wrestle with the meaning") in order to give them a twist, privileging their productive tension rather than opposition. Woolf's tune is the synthesis of these various rhetorical levels and the complex harmonies of multiple auditors. Moreover, her auditors are not mere passive receivers of the tune, but active participants who create the tune in their listening: "ourselves went forward [. . .] all comprehending; all enlisted" (220). That this line from her last novel strikingly reflects the form and themes of many of Woolf ’s works, particularly her short fiction, To the Lighthouse, and The Waves, attests to the centrality of lyric narrative—and the exemplary model of the fugue—in Woolf's oeuvre, from 1919 to 1941.¹ As Patricia Laurence has noted, the rhythm of the fugue as "an aspect of feeling and form" has been "largely unexplored in Woolf's work" (239). Woolf's rhythm, according to Laurence, is an "undertow in language and might be defined as being composed of auditory, visual, or thematic counterpoint with different dimensions of mind and the novel being played off against one another in varying combinations" (240). This "undertow," an alternate or counterposing progression to a conventional narrative progression, might also be defined as the lyric departures of her narrative experiments.

Late Modernism, 1928-1945: Criticism and Theory

Cheryl Hindrichs — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:24:41 PDT

In contrast to the well-established body of criticism on early modernism in 20th-century literature, late modernism has only belatedly appeared in the critical discourse. This article presents a survey of criticism on thirties writing and writing between the World Wars in order to suggest that the early success of Auden Generation criticism narrowed the scope of the critical field. Since the late 1990s, a critical reassessment of writing between the late twenties and late forties has facilitated the emergence of late modernism. Combining cultural and historical assessment with attention to the period’s plurality of aesthetics, these contributions are vital to the theorization of late modernism beyond the dyadic model of the Auden Generation and to an analysis of late modernism that examines the conceptual work these texts perform in relation to modernist and postmodernist modalities. Drawing together the approaches of recent theorists of late modernism, this article concludes by offering an alternative framework for mapping a plurality of late modernist writers, one that examines late modernist poetics in relation to historical contexts.

The Journey is the Destination: The Place of Assessment in an Activist Writing Program

Linda Adler-Kassner et al. — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 14:57:04 PDT

LOCAL CONTEXT Eastern Michigan University is a comprehensive university of about 24,000 (about 22,000 of whom are undergraduates). Our students typically come from southeastern Michigan and northwestern Ohio. They come to EMU for a variety of reasons--proximity to their homes, cost (we're fairly inexpensive, as colleges and universities go), friends who have come here before, or because they want to be teachers and we're well-known as a "teacher training" school. (EMU started as the Michigan Normal School in 1849.)

When we were both at EMU, we were director and associate director of first-year writing, respectively. (Linda remains director of first-year writing.) The first-year writing program actually "hosts" two first-year courses (English 120, Composition I: Reading and Writing the College Experience and English 121, Composition II: Research and Writing the Public Experience) and one second-year course (English 225, Writing in a Changing World). Overall, we run about 190 courses a year in the program. About 100 of those (give or take) are sections of English 121, which is also the required, general education writing course on our campus. About 97 percent of all incoming students take the course.

Our dynamic criteria mapping (DCM) work is linked to a programmatic assessment of English 121. In 2003, we surveyed students at the beginning and end of the course to determine their degree of confidence in their learning outcomes. We also asked them to comment on the usefulness of English 121 with respect to future coursework. We learned a lot from the results about what students thought was working--the results were generally very positive--and about where to focus professional development efforts in the first-year writing program.