Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 30, Issue 1, 2002

Journals can be effective in cultivating formal discourse while respecting cultural differences.

In her 1981 novel Obasan, the Japanese Canadian writer Joy Kogawa recounts the saga of the internment and relocation of Japanese Canadians during and after the Second World War by juxtaposing the "factual" historic telling against the personal, "fictional" telling. This experimental approach opens multiple and diverse pathways to us as instructors of literature.

Should instructors in two-year colleges be involved in research? If so, how important is such research in advancing the work of community colleges in a new century?

Pedagogical triangulation is a threefold method for teaching that involves a holistic approach to classroom collaboration. The specific elements of pedagogical triangulation are described, along with the results of applying this approach in a first-semester college English class.

Composition teachers can obtain a better understanding of the challenges facing ESL students by writing in their own second language and reflecting on the experience.

While active learning strategies enable students to grasp important concepts, they also help students become enthusiastic and confident writers and interpreters of literature.

Oral interpretation courses, designed to be about communication, can serve as a site for thinking about what meanings writers communicate, as well as how interpreters become communicators in larger social discourses through interactions with written texts.

Reviews four books: Listening Up: Reinventing Ourselves as Teachers and Students, by Rachel Martin; Disturbing the Peace, by Nancy Newman; Let Them Eat Data: How Computers Affect Education, Cultural Diversity, and the Prospects of Ecological Sustainability, by C. A. Bowers; Assessing the Portfolio: Principles for Practice, Theory, and Research, by Liz Hamp-Lyons and William Condon.