College Composition & Communication - Volume 58, Issue 2, 2006

This article examines the connection between religion and literacy efforts on behalf of girls and young women in the early nineteenth-century United States by looking at the rapid proliferation of Catholic convent academies and the anti-Catholic sentiment that spurred the growth of proprietary academies, such as those of Mary Lyon and Catharine Beecher. It also examines how religious rhetoric influenced the curriculum in both Catholic and proprietor schools.

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not only that reliance on the legibility associated with familiar subject positions motivates student resistance in the composition classroom but, moreover, that our interest in securing self-presentations as teachers may motivate everyday interactions that work to maintain the status quo.

This is a written version of the address Judith A. gave at the CCCC meeting in Chicago on March 23, 2006.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series “an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.