Left Margins

Cultural Studies and Composition Pedagogy

Edited by Karen Fitts & Alan W. France

Subjects: Cultural Critique
Paperback : 9780791425381, 369 pages, July 1995
Hardcover : 9780791425374, 369 pages, July 1995

Alternative formats available from:

Table of contents

Preface
Karen Fitts and Alan W. France

Part I: Appropriating Pedagogy

1. Who Writes in a Cultural Studies Class? or, Where is the Pedagogy?
Henry A. Giroux

2. Politics, Writing, Writing Instruction, Public Space, and the English Language
Alan Kennedy

Part II: Expropriating the Powers of Language

3. Teaching "Myth, Difference, and Popular Culture"
Joseph C. Bodziock and Christopher Ferry

4. Gravedigging : Excavating Cultural Myths
Colleen M. Tremonte

5. Constructing Art & Facts: The Art of Composition, the Facts of (Material) Culture
Paul Gutjahr

6. Recovering "I Have a Dream"
Keith D. Miller, Gerardo de los Santos, and Ondra Witherspoon

Part III: (Re)Writing Cultural Texts

7. Making and Taking Apart "Culture" in the (Writing) Classroom
Kathleen Dixon

8. Monday Night Football : Entertainment or Indoctrination?
Todd Sformo and Barbara Tudor

9. Pee-Wee, Penley, and Pedagogy, or, Hands-On Feminism in The Writing Classroom
Christopher Wise

Part IV: Practicing Rhetorics

10. Feminists in Action: How to PracticeWhat We Teach
Rae Rosenthal

11. Teaching Rhetoric as a Way of Knowing
Peter J. Caulfield

12. Freirean Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and the Initiation of Students to Academic Discourse
Raymond A. Mazurek

13. Teaching the Conflicts about Wealth and Poverty
Donald Lazere

Part V: Teaching for Social Change

14. Pedagogy, Resistance, and Critique in the Composition Class
Adam Katz

15. The Pedagogy of Pleasure 2: The Me-in-Crisis
Mas'ud Zavarzadeh

16. Contested Terms, Competing Practices: Language Education and Social Change
Mary Beth Hines

17. Teaching Against Racism in the Radical College Composition Classroom: A Reply to a Student
Robert Andrew Nowlan

18. A Ratio Studiorum for the Postcolonialist's Classroom
John C. Hawley, S. J.

Part VI: Rereading, Rethinking, Responding

19. Empty Pedagogical Space and Silent Students
Gary Tate

20. The Dilemma of Oppositional Pedagogy: A Response
Gerald Graff

Counterstatements
Colleen M. Tremonte, Paul Gutjahr, Kathleen Dixon, Christopher Wise, Peter J. Caulfield, Raymond A. Mazurek, Adam Katz, Mary Beth Hines, John C. Hawley, S. J.

Post/face
Karen Fitts and Alan W. France

Afterword
Richard Ohmann

Contributors

Notes and References

Index

This book examines the cultural politics of knowledge in composition classrooms and presents classroom strategies that develop students' awareness of their own ideological subjectivities.

Description

Left Margins offers an inside view of the cultural politics of knowledge in college-level composition classrooms. The basic question this book raises is whether or not we can continue to represent the writing process apolitically as the work of autonomous individuals recording their experiences or realizing their private objectives. Readers will get a front-row, classroom perspective on the confrontation between politically engaged writing teachers and largely resistant students, between critical pedagogy and the orthodoxies of American culture at the end of the twentieth century. The book presents classroom strategies that develop students' awareness of their own ideological subjectivities.

Karen Fitts is Assistant Professor in the Writing and Media Department of Loyola College. Alan W. France is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at West Chester University.

Reviews

"I think this book would be extremely useful to any instructor who is struggling with how to devise new pedagogical methods that reflect the shift in critical and educational theory of the last few decades. " -- Irene Ward, Kansas State University