College English - Volume 73, Issue 1, 2010

Through an account of how his own students analyzed Ira Sher’s short story “The Man in the Well,” the author calls for teachers of literature to value and attend to their classes’ misreadings rather than replace them with corrective interpretations. He argues that probing these misreadings enables one to see the limits imposed by any single correct understanding and to glimpse the richness of the potential text.

Through an ethnographic investigation of how two different groups form biliterate relationships in the quest for legal immigration papers, the author examines how literacy and assimilation function in light of the changing writing demands of contemporary immigrant life.

In facing policymakers who are pressuring us for objective assessment of our programs, we should not assume that a narrow set of traditional scientific methods and conventions will guarantee acceptance of our knowledge claims. Nor should we assume that our methods and methodologies that fall outside those tight boundaries will be unfairly treated. Rather, we need to have at our disposal the full range of what we know and how we know it as we engage with such policymakers, who—like the rest of us—are sometimes moved in mysterious ways.