Previously published articles on the teaching of writing and the future of higher education by text2cloud, ready for download. (Just click on the article title to begin download.)
Reading_in_Slow_Motion
Essay discussing teaching reading in the Age of Distraction. Includes assignments and examples of using Google Docs and Diigo to move the private acts of reading and writing into public, collaborative spaces.
The Coming Apocalypse
We are fortunate to be living through the greatest change in human communication in human history.
How will the paradigm shift in human communication change what happens in the classroom?
Perchance to Dream
Looking away from the dead and dying is how we roll.
Reflections on celebrity deaths in relation to books by Julian Barnes, Pauline Chen, and David Rieff.
Our Future Donors
If one is genuinely interested in improving both the working conditions of writing teachers and the quality of instruction undergraduates receive, it’s important to ask where the money will come from the support such improvements.
What’s the future of publicly-funded higher education? What role should faculty play in fundraising?
A Writing Programs Assets Reconsidered
Is teaching writing as a contingent laborer really analogous to being enslaved? Is pursuing a career in research, scholarship, or administration really like running a plantation?
What value does a Writing Program create? What value does a Writing Program have for a university?
Arts of Complicity
Far from being powerless, as teachers who have years of experience in this frequently capricious and indifferent system for distributing social privilege, we are actually very well positioned to assist our students in acquiring the skills necessary for persisting in the ongoing project of navigating life in a bureaucracy.
What is the teacher’s job? To overturn the class structure? To train students for future employment? Are these the only choices?
The Nervous System
If the decision to end one’s life is the most important decision of one’s life, then how do we gain access to the line of thinking, the chain of events, the preliminary acts and feelings that lead to such an action?
Education serves both as a culture’s nervous system and a system for teaching us when and where to be nervous.
Fault Lines in the Contact Zone
In the uncharted realms of teaching and studying in the contact zone, the teacher’s traditional claim to authority is thus constantly undermined and reconfigured which, in turn, enables the real work of learning how to negotiate and to place oneself in dialogue with different ways of knowing to commence.
How should a teacher respond when offensive writing is submitted in class?