Content area
Full text
A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
Gary Tate, Amy Rupiper, and Kurt Schick, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. 256 pp. $22.95 (paper). ISBN 01 95125363.
In A Guide to Composition Pedagogies, twelve essays both map and narrate-- through the authors' experiences-some of the major pedagogies that shape current composition teaching and research. Designed with teaching assistants and new teachers of writing in mind, this collection should help serve as an antidote to TA-preparation that too often introduces graduate students and instructors to the field of composition studies through a "what works pedagogy" of pieced-together assignments and in-class activities. To their credit, the editors have consciously worked against this inoculation method of new teacher preparation, one driven more by catch phrases than by a robust study of pedagogies. Moreover, in the competitive field of teacher preparation handbooks, this collection stands apart from books like The Writing Teachers Sourcebook (Oxford 1999) and Cross Talk in Comp Theory (NOTE 1997)-which are collections of reprints-by containing original essays that are personal, not so much in that they include narratives (though several do), rather because each chapter is imbued with the author's personal investment in a particular theoretical/pedagogical stance. Similar to the organization ofA Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966 (Prentice Hall 1997) but broader in its scope, each chapter focuses on one pedagogy. In this way, the table of contents evokes the scope of composition's pedagogical influences: from process pedagogy, expressivism, and rhetorical pedagogy to cultural studies and critical and feminist pedagogies. Also included are pedagogies informed by their sites of practice such as community service learning, writing across the curriculum (WAC), writing centers, basic writing, and technology-rich classrooms.
The authors-who were clearly chosen for the ways in which the trajectory of their teaching/scholarly work intersects with a particular pedagogyoutline key assumptions and theoretical...