Teaching & Learning in Higher Ed.

I’m doing a survey on “antiracist reading.” If you teach or have taught writing at the college level in the US, I’d love to hear your views and experiences. If you know other college writing teachers, I’d love to hear from them, too. You can access the survey here or through the following URL: https://utampa.az1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_eswZnBRJlOQBmiq

Seeing, Recognizing, Understanding, Thinking, Assessing, and Acting in and about the World Cannot Be Separated from the Term “Reading” | A Conversation with Patrick Shannon

I spoke by email with with Patrick W. Shannon, Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Education, at Penn State, about his 2011 book Reading Wide Awake: Politics, Pedagogies, & Possibilities (New York, NY: Teachers College Press). I am grateful for and glad to share his in depth responses to my questions, starting with my final question which he answered first. CORRIGAN: Is there anything else you’d…

Reading as a Listener | A Conversation with Amy Lombardi

“We need to learn to listen and read and interpret messages more thoughtfully,” Amy Lombardi told me. A doctoral student at the University of California at Davis, Lombardi says such skills are “undervalued and need to be taught more.” In our conversation recorded below, we talk about Lombardi’s recent article “More Is More: Explicit Intertextuality in University Writing Placement Exam Essays.”…

Asking Students to Really Read Each Other’s Writing | A Conversation with Timothy Oleksiak

I spoke with Dr. Timothy Oleksiak, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts—Boston, about two of his essays, “A Queer Praxis for Peer Review” and “Slow Peer Review in the Writing Classroom,” recently out in College Composition and Communication and Pedagogy. In these essays, they present theory and practice for a pedagogical practice they call slow peer review, a…

What the Archives of Actual Classrooms Tell about the History of Teaching | A Conversation with Rachel Buurma and Laura Heffernan

In The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study Dr. Rachel Sagner Buurma, Associate Professor of English at Swarthmore College, and Dr. Laura Heffernan, Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida, turn to archives from the actual classrooms of major literary critics of the past century to see what the available course documents tell about the history of the…

Disagreeing with(in) Antiracism | A Conversation with Erec Smith

I sat down with Dr. Erec Smith, Associate Professor of Rhetoric and Composition at York College, to discuss his book A Critique of Anti-Racism in Rhetoric and Composition: The Semblance of Empowerment (Rowman and Littlefield 2019). While Erec, to be clear, opposes racism itself, he also opposes the forms of antiracism he believes constitute the current antiracism movement in writing studies. To…

Help Students Do Meaningful Work | A Conversation with Sherry Lee Linkon

I so enjoyed talking with Dr. Sherry Lee Linkon, Professor of English and Director of the Writing Program at Georgetown University, about her book, Literary Learning: Teaching the English Major (Indiana University Press, 2011). While our conversation will be especially relevant to those who teach literature, we discussed a range of broader pedagogical questions–including about the nature of…

White Teachers Are a Problem | A Conversation with Asao Inoue

“You are the problem . . . Your body perpetuates racism,” Dr. Asao Inoue told a group of his white colleagues earlier this year in his chair’s address at the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication held in Pittsburgh, titled “How Do We Language So People Stop Killing Each Other, Or What Do We Do About White Language Supremacy?” (see text, video, and slides). Professor and…

Becoming the Kind of Person Who Does These Things | A Conversation with Sheridan Blau

In our conversation below, Sheridan Blau and I discuss how education changes not just what a person knows and can do but who a person is. Learning carpentry makes someone the kind of person who measures, cuts, and builds things out of wood. Learning literature makes someone the kind of person who reads, thinks, talks, and writes about texts. Learning these things means becoming the kind of…

The Argument for Teaching Argument | A Conversation with Gerald Graff

A sense of failure when he first started teaching, Gerald Grafftold me in a phone conversation you can listen to below, a sense that he wasn’t reaching a majority of his students, that only ten or twenty percent ever seemed as fired up as he was, pushed him beyond literary studies into of thinking and writing about teaching and learning more broadly. In the decades that followed, he went on to…

Teaching Critical, Empathetic Reading in the Post-Truth Era | A Conversation with Ellen C. Carillo

In the past few years, Dr. Ellen C. Carillo, associate professor of English at the University of Connecticut, has emerged as a leading voice on teaching reading within writing studies—a topic that should be of interest to teachers of any discipline involving reading, writing, and critical thinking. Her books include Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for…

Why Are We Studying This?

Once as an English major in college, I raised my hand and asked my teacher, “Why are we studying this?” It was not immediately apparent to me how scansion—identifying patterns of stressed and unstressed syllables in lines of poetry—was useful or meaningful (or, frankly, even interesting). But since the class was being taught by a teacher who always stressed the deeper meanings and significance…

Conversation Is Where Teaching Changes| A Conversation with Nancy Chick

Dr. Nancy Chick, co-editor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, has just edited a new book to introduce folks to the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (SoTL), the movement within higher education encouraging professors from across the disciplines to research their own teaching. The short, lively, conversational chapters in SoTL in Action: Illuminating Critical Moments in Practice, written by…

We Do Not Teach Alone

I am happy to share that my essay, “The State of Scholarship on Teaching Literature,” recently appeared in one of my favorite journals: Pedagogy. In this post, I want to reiterate a couple points from it that I think apply to teaching across disciplines. (I also want to make available the study’s data.)

My essay assesses the state of scholarship in teaching literature by analyzing how scholarly…