Setting the table: composition in the last half of the twentieth century / Deborah Coxwell-Teague and Ronald F. Lunsford -- Writing, language, and literacy / Chris M. Anson -- ESL composition as a literate art of the contact zone / Suresh Canagarajah -- Occasions, sources, and strategies / Douglas Hesse -- A grade-less writing course that focuses on labor and assessing / Asao B. Inoue -- A guiding question, some primary research, and a dash of rhetorical awareness / Paula Mathieu -- "Talkin' bout fire don't boil the pot" : putting theory into practice in a first-year writing course at an HBCU / Teresa Redd -- The activity of writing: affinity and affect in composition / Alexander Reid -- Beyond text and talk: a multimodal approach to first-year composition / Jody Shipka -- Working through theory in a community college composition classroom / Howard Tinberg -- For the love of language: a curriculum / Victor Villanueva -- Looking into writing-about-writing classrooms / Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs -- Attempting the impossible: designing a first-yeat composition course / Kathleen Blake Yancey -- A cornucopia of composition theories: what these teachers tell us about our discipline / Deborah Coxwell-Teague and Ronald F. Lunsford
Responding to a widespread belief that the field of composition studies is less unified than it was in the late twentieth century, the editors have asked twelve well-known composition theorists to create detailed syllabi for a first-year composition course and then to explain their theoretical foundations. Each contributor discusses the major goals and objectives for their course, its major assignments, their use of outside texts, the role of reading and responding to these texts, the nature of classroom discussion, their methods of responding to student writing, and their assessment methods. Their twelve essays provide a window into these teachers' classrooms that will help readers, teachers, and writing program administrators appreciate the strengths of unity and diversity in rhetoric and composition as a field. The editors frame the twelve essays with an introductory chapter that identifies key moments in composition's history and a concluding chapter that highlights the varied and useful ways the contributors approach the common challenges of the first-year composition course. -- From publisher's website
