Emotional Literacy and Engagement

Introduction When approaching a curriculum for the first time, especially one designed by someone else, there are going to be things that don’t mesh with students, the rest of the curriculum, or an individual’s teaching style. Implementing the Fall 2018 English 101 curriculum at Western Washington University allowed me to deeply consider my own teaching […]

Accountability is Never Out of Style

Citation:  Takayoshi, Pamela, Elizabeth Tomlinson, and Jennifer Castillo. “The Construction of Research Problems and Methods.” Practicing Research in Writing Studies, ed. by Katrina M. Powell and Pamela Takayoshi, Hampton Press, 2012, pp. 97-121. Summary:  In this chapter, Takayoshi, Tomlinson, and Castillo explore how researchers make decisions and how a practice of ongoing, guided, critical self-reflection can improve research processes in the field […]

Different Values

For some of my students, the struggle with writing is dependent upon the context. Some folks really struggled with the literacy narrative but excelled with the research proposal. More of the students found the literacy narrative challenging than found the research-centered writing. In fact, many of them did not manage to bring their narratives out […]

Solidarity

I keep coming back to the same idea: each person as the expert of their own life. Only the individual can say what they feel, want, need, what’s best for them, why, and who they are. To apply this to the question of the most powerful impact of a first-year writing course (or any course, […]

On Not Betraying Poetry

Citation Farber, Jerry. “On Not Betraying Poetry.” Pedagogy: Critical approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 15, no. 2, 2015, pp. 213-232, Web. Summary In this article, Faber addresses the decline in appreciation for poetry within the United States, explores potential reasons for the decline, and proposes some methods by which to engender […]

Preparing Graduate Students for Academic Publishing

Citation Söderland, Lars, and Jaclyn M. Wells. “Preparing Graduate Students for Academic Publishing: Results from a Study of Published Rhetoric and Composition Scholars.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, vol. 18, no. 1, 2017, pp. 131-156, Web. Summary In this article, Wells and Söderlund attempt to shed light on how faculty […]

Expectations

English 101 as I’m experiencing it now is dramatically different from my English 101 course as an undergrad, which was essentially a literature survey, more on how to think about reading than how to think about writing. I have been considering this shift in my own expectations as well as the expectations of my students. […]

Who are writers?

While we were catching up over the weekend, a friend asked me, “have you told anyone to ‘write drunk, edit sober’ yet?” We got a good chuckle out of it but the question was on my mind when I chose “Writers are Mythical, Magical, and Damaged” by Teri Holbrook and Melanie Hundley as one of the […]

Karaoke Bar

This might be simplistic and silly, but the first thing that came to mind when I read the prompt for our second blog post was a karaoke bar. Maybe it’s just because I love karaoke, but I’m going with it. In this scenario, I’m the host (side note: my favorite karaoke host is Master Moose); […]