The CEA Forum
Winter/Spring 2007: 36.1
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Table of Contents
Commentary: Reflections on Teaching Freshman Composition: No Ordinary Autumn / Elly Williams (read more)
Articles
Elizabeth Fleitz / Profits over Process: AP English and the Decline of Writing Instruction
By reducing all knowledge to things that can be answered by “A,” “B,” “C,” or “D,” what message are we sending our students? What beliefs will former AP students most likely hold about English studies: that of a critical, writing-intensive exploratory process, or that of a single test score? ~ (read more)
Richard C. Gebhardt / Field Fragmentation and Non-Major Literature Courses
English departments and their faculty should give more thought to classes and teaching for undergraduates who take a few literature courses and who do so for reasons quite different from those which motivate English majors ~ (read more)
Rich Miller / Constructing a Writer's Voice: Ethos, Tim Cahill, and the Jonestown Massacre
Cahill is also an aesthetic writer who is not afraid to incorporate literary allusions or provocative social and psychological commentaries on what motivates people to act as they do. He is an author unafraid to expose his mind at work in experiencing and relating the particulars of a situation, and this is exciting ~ (read more)
From the Classroom
William Thelin and Wendy Carse / Disrupting Fairy Tales and Unsettling Students
Without knowing it at the time, we had ventured into the crucial area where academic knowledge threatens the certainty of the models students had previously constructed ~ (read more)
Lisa Beckelhimer, Ronald Hundemer, Judith Sharp, William Zipfel / Problem-Based Composition: The Practical Side
PBL requires we shift the type of control we exercise in the classroom. We need to become coaches (sometimes referees!) and resource people without becoming template-makers ~ (read more)
Special Section: Empathy and Ethics
Nancy Dixon / Introduction (read more)
Nancy Dixon / The “I” of the Storm: Teaching English and Helping Students and Instructors Cope in Post-Katrina New Orleans
Students had lost their entire homes; some even lost family members and friends. We all knew people who were still missing since the flood. But we had to get to work ~ (read more)
Kathryn A. Flynn / The Storm of the I: Cultivating Empathy through the Choice of a Single Word
Empathetic living is vitally bonded to language as a powerful determiner of communal empathetic perspective ~ (read more)
Murray McCowen Sellers / Spanning the Gulf: Empathy, Dialogue, and Harmony in Exploring Literature of Diversity
No matter how small our classroom space or how few our students, I'm sure that all of us have, at times, perceived a kind of gulf—between our students and ourselves, between our students and each other, even within our individual students as they can be separated from the true nature of their own thoughts and feelings. And yet, there are those magical times when that gulf seems virtually nonexistent ~ (read more)
Aimee Berger and Kate Cochran / Covering (Up?) Katrina: Discursive Ambivalence in Coverage of Hurricane Katrina
While Hurricane Katrina's devastating appearance on the physical landscape of the Gulf Coast held the potential to disrupt the visual and narrative landscape created in the post-Reagan U.S., and to open up difficult, long-overdue discussions about race and class in the U.S. in short order, the dominant discoursesoon reverted to familiar patterns ~ (read more)
Elizabeth Sturgeon / “Where's the Love?”: The Ethics of Empathy in Abu Ghraib
Finding their own voice among other discordant voices is the toughest aspect of writing the Abu Ghraib essay, and these oral activities are vital opportunities where students begin to explore alternative perspectives, figuring out for themselves what they really think and believe on their journey to developing a public voice that grounds their academic essay ~ (read more)
Spencer Dew / Ethics, Interpretation, and Pedagogy: Martin Buber and the Undergraduate Literature Classroom
These are moments of authentic encounter, open and honest, risky, always unique and immediate and exclusive ~ (read more)
Peter M. Carriere / Levinas, Ethics, Pedagogy, and the Face
Just how does this happen; how does the I become infinitely responsible for the Other? How does the instructor become infinitely responsible for the student? ~ (read more)
Betty Hoskins / Ethics and Empathy in the Writing Center
We always look at the assignment, the paper or report, or the personal statement, but we are always thinking of the person behind the writing ~ (read more)
Carole Pelttari / Empathy, Ethics, and Writing Instruction
Before the act of writing, nothing tangible exists; however, in each stage, from planning to drafting, to revising and beyond, a new essence takes shape, a tangible something is constructed ~ (read more)
Darrell Fike / It's Written on their Faces: The Rhetoric of Empathy
What happened next, though, was even surprising to me: in learning to respond to Janet in a way that would generate meaningful revisions of her work I learned that I needed to revise my own responding style ~ (read more)
Reflection
Kathleen N. Monahan / The Iceberg Principle: Discovering the Self in Poetry
The lessons of art, philosophy, literature and history are not simply quaint accounts “of cabbages and kings.” These disciplines live because they speak to us, sometimes in new and unexpected ways, of things we know—of love and disappointment, confusion and grief ~ (read more)
Carol Bliss / Micro-Communications: Building and Developing Empathy and Respect in Today's Multicultural Society
As students become more aware of the importance and impact of empathic words, signals, gestures, and behavior, positive styles of interaction can evoke closer connections, greater rapport, and build better collaboration both in and outside of the classroom ~ (read more)
Anne Bratach Matthews / Autoethnographies and Ethics: Stories from the “Other” Side
My aim in having students write autoethnographies is explicitly political: to change power relations between those who have historically told the story and those who have historically been told by someone else's story; sometimes the story someone else tells is also what one tells oneself ~ (read more)
Susan Friedman / Changing the Subject: Using First-Person Narratives in the College Classroom to Foster Self-Study, Well-Being, and Empathy
A crucial step to achieving self-awareness through self-writing is for the writing subject to view herself as a subject created by and through discourse ~ (read more)
Debra H. Matthews / Not Looking Away: The Homeless Journal
The Homeless Journal also actively engages the students in the writing process, and for the week that we complete the assignment, it changes the atmosphere in the classroom ~ (read more)
Joyce Meier / Mission and Monastery: Empathy, Ethics, and the Challenges of Two Community-Based Courses
Examining our own motives for taking on this work, our attitudes toward our community partners, and our sameness and difference from them, is an essential part of this work. Unearthing the sources of our attitudes, our difference(s) also sensitizes us to interconnecting and systemic forms of oppression ~ (read more)
Michael Eckert / “A Peace That Lasts”: Notes toward a Pedagogy of Peace
As a teacher, I believe that the local level—the classroom in which I meet my students—is the place where I can be most effective in promoting global peace and justice, even while I teach students how to write essays and read literature ~ (read more)
Announcement: The James R. (Dick) Bennett Award for Literature and Peace
Columns
Colin Irvine / Making Lemonade: An Assistant English Professor's Perspective on the Profession
And while trying to sneak a peek at what the guy on my left was writing (I think I was hoping to see some mechanical errors so that I might feel superior and somehow relevant), I realized with a rush of dread (accompanied appropriately by a “little turbulence”) that hadn't really thought about how I was actually going to teach ~ (read more)
Reviews
Christine Denecker / Review of New Directions in the Analysis of Multimodal Discourse edited by Terry D. Royce and Wendy L. Bowcher
Angela Zimmann / Review of Revisionary Rhetoric, Feminist Pedagogy, and Multigenre Texts by Julie Jung (read more)
Deborah McLeod / Review of Defying the Odds: Class and the Pursuit of Higher Literacy by Donna Dunbar-Odom (read more)
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Editors' Note
We are pleased to present a special section of this issue of The CEA Forum which emerges from our last conference in New Orleans, “Empathy and Ethics.” I'm sure many of us had a similar experience at that gathering: so many wonderful papers, so little time. It is a privilege to be able to run revised and expanded versions of those works here, so that we might all benefit from the insight and experience of our colleagues.
Members who wish to send submissions for consideration to The CEA Forum should feel free to review our guidelines, available here.
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