The CEA Forum
Winter/Spring 2008: 37.1
Contents
Margaret E. Johnson / Silenced by Religion: Reflections on Situations from College English
In encouraging our students to share their personal experiences, including religious ones, in classroom contexts—through discussion and writing—it seems we are potentially achieving the free and open participation of each student and the validation of each student's experience and beliefs, though at the same time placing students in moments of potential conflict or discomfort.
Pamela Bourgeois / New Voices: Enduring Basic Writing
New Voices allows our students to see concretely that they are readers and writers. The students are repositioning themselves not merely as consumers of knowledge, but as producers of it.
Jeffrey Buchanan / Reading and Understanding: Tim O'Brien and the Narrative of Failure
As a form for telling a teaching story, narratives of failure can be remarkably productive because, like O'Brien's storytelling, they suggest alternative values, values like comprehensiveness and seriality, values that resist and elide the heavy-handedness of an educational apparatus and that draw attention to their own institutional, disciplinary, or methodological constitution.
The librarian asked the student to show her how he had been searching. From the library homepage, he clicked on the link for Periodical Locator, a resource used to find periodical titles and holdings, and proceeded to type his topic—the meaning of life—into the search box. Needless to say, he was exceedingly frustrated with his lack of results.
Matthew A. Fike / Teaching Doctor Faustus through the Ars Moriendi Tradition
The main task is to have students discuss the doctor in terms of the five deathbed temptations. As they move through this exercise, it is important for them to remember the convergence of the art of dying well and the art of living well.
Tom Getz / We Are What We Say We Eat: What's on the Menu in the Poetry Classroom?
The purpose in focusing on poetic food is to combine a pedagogy with an ethics. To accomplish this, we need to emphasize the importance of reading with the mouth and ear—speaking and listening—as a way of actualizing and animating the relationship between mind and body and spirit, in other words, as a way of becoming more whole.
Colin Irvine / Making Lemonade: An Assistant English Professor's Perspective on the Profession
Colin Irvine is on hiatus...watch for future columns!
Book Reviews
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