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This article explores the emphasis on reading instruction in the classical pedagogical technique of imitatio. It briefly surveys scholarship in literary and composition studies to trace a short history of this pedagogy before turning to contemporary descriptions of reading pedagogy and showing how imitatio interacts with such practices.

Educational theorists emphasize the importance of creating a classroom environment that encourages positive or productive student resistance to dominant social discourse. This article revisits work in critical pedagogy, feminism, and composition by focusing on the challenges of teaching a first-year writing course on the theme of masculinity. The gender imbalance of this class, with a majority of male students, combined with the course theme, contributed to an environment that raised unanticipated questions, which prompted the reconsideration of the intersections of critical, feminist, and composition pedagogies. In this class, the dynamics worked against a process of critical inquiry and reflection and instead often reified dominant view-points and social positions, specifically with respect to gender. This article concludes with evidence of how practices in composition studies, especially student-instructor conferences, helped to redirect some of the reactive resistance encountered in the classroom.

This review examines Susan Miller's Norton Book of Composition Studies in the context of the undergraduate writing major. Miller's anthology provides a thorough snapshot of the field of composition, representing the impressive scope of composition studies with 101 unabridged works of composition history, research, theory, and practice. Although this anthology was compiled to support instruction in both undergraduate and graduate classes, the reviewers suggest that undergraduates and some graduate students may require more contextual information about the collected works to better understand the major themes, issues, struggles, and successes of the field.

This review essay places Local Histories in the context of recent books and studies examining the wide variety of composition and rhetoric courses and pedagogical practices that existed in nineteenth-century America. The book has two general foci as represented in its split title: Local Histories , or microhistories of institutions, curricula, and figures; and Reading the Archives of Composition, an extended look at several hitherto unexamined archival sources and their associated projects. The editors identify three central purposes for their book: to challenge the “Harvard narrative,” which, they claim, places the origin of “composition” at Harvard and other elite Eastern colleges; to offer several alternative “microhistories” from various institutional sites, and to document, interpret, and interrogate specific archival holdings and the nature of archival work in composition. While the reviewers find the challenges to “the Harvard model” as history and historiography overstated, overall, they find the collection important for its studies of diverse sites and its attention to less visible figures: teachers who acted as early innovators, and students whose written compositions, informal diaries and letters offer new lenses for making history. The authors of various chapters who unveil their documentary and archival work in process, disclosing both finds and gaps and offering their developing understandings of the archive as construct, perform a valuable service to future scholars of composition studies.

In this article we focus on new methods of multimodal digital research and teaching that allow for the increasingly rich representation of language and literacy practices in digital and nondigital environments. These methodologies—inflected by feminist research, new literacy studies, critical theory, and digital media studies—provide teacher-scholars a promising set of strategies for conducting research and for representing students' work and our own scholarship in digital contexts.

This article examines the disappearance of the student as a site for theoretical investigation. It considers the ramifications of this development for the disciplinary self-identification of composition studies and for a larger understanding of pedagogy as self-reflexive praxis.

“You cannot represent a field if you ignore half of it,” wrote John Lovas (2002: 276), our late dear colleague. John was referring to an odd state of affairs in composition studies: the work of those who do most of the teaching of basic writing and first-year composition in this country — community college faculty — is rarely represented in our field’s most visible scholarly publications. John had done his research

It has become something of a commonplace to assert that composition, perhaps more than any other aspect of English studies, has its scholarly endeavors firmly rooted in pedagogy. Because of those roots, we expect that compositionists will write about pedagogy; we also expect — almost without saying so—that no composition pedagogy will gain general acceptance without initial and continuing scrutiny by the field’s best scholars. Yet most composition teachers can reach up to their office shelves and find at least one popular, mass-market textbook, designed explicitly for a first-year writing course, that also explicitly professes the teaching of an American multiculturalism as a central pedagogical goal. As a multicultural literature specialist in my earlier scholarly life, I would like to cheer “hurrah!” and count this a victory. As a compositionist, program administrator, and teacher-educator, however, I find myself wondering whether these textbooks and curricula are getting the necessary scholarly scrutiny. When did we agree that—beyond making our textbooks represent diverse views to better reflect our diverse students—we should also teach multiculturalism as a disciplinary focus in first-year writing courses? And when did we decide how this should best be done? In the pages that follow, I argue that the field of composition studies, rather surprisingly, has not so agreed: we have not vetted multiculturalist pedagogies and their implications as carefully as we need to. To help ground further discussion, I begin by defining multiculturalism as distinct from diversity

I had the good fortune to realize my dream of becoming a teacher of writing just when composition studies was emerging from places I came to think of as “basements.” In the symbolically and actually feminized sites where I first taught, all instructors were cast as “the women,” whatever their sex. We were definitely not the people upstairs, teaching and writing about literature and interpretive theory. But those of us lucky enough to teach where we were provided the time to read and to write — time and other resources that many teachers of composition never have — did have some purchase on moving up. Again, the “up” has been symbolic; actual status, achieved by publishing and compensated for by offices with windows and job security, has been rare. With or without time for reflection and the writing that usually follows from it, people in composition have had to be apprentices. In a field whose earliest arguments were built on a contrast between old and new, bad and good teaching, those who began their careers when I did repeatedly meet themselves in various mirrors. We often see our earlier practices as open to criticism, if not as altogether forgettable. With even more luck, we may forget in public. When I was invited to join an MLA 2000 panel that the Division on the Teaching of Writing had planned so that composition theorists might address “how I teach writing,” I happily saw my chance. I have taught basic writing, first-year, or upperdivision writing classes almost continuously since the sixties: as a child graduate student toddling around the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill