Teaching English in the Two-Year College - Volume 36, Issue 4, 2009

Working with and learning from veterans reveals a wide range of inclusive opportunities that composition instructors might use to facilitate transformations of service-related experiences into effective compositions.

This article considers the emotional and psychological complexities of responding to personal narratives when the focus is war.

An assignment for teaching English in a time of war.

This essay discusses how firsthand accounts of American soldiers can help literature students appreciate how the combat trauma and homecoming experiences of today’s soldiers parallel the stories of Homeric heroes.

This article explores the impact of a memoir about the Iraq War, written by a student in a creative writing class, on a teacher and students.

Reflecting on teaching in a time of war, I realize that all of my education, all of my teaching, indeed, all of my life has been “in a time of war” and that I have been constantly influenced by war, rumors of war, fears of war.

This article focuses on audio-recording our thoughts while responding to student writing as a form of reflection-in-action.

This essay describes a week-long thematic overview of poetry, essays, and stories and recommends a variety of proven discussion questions and paper assignments.

This article describes a process of peer evaluation that is aimed at developing students’ sense of audience and at elevating the status of peer reviewers, whose opinions on successful writing are too often viewed as less trustworthy than those of their instructors.

Classroom ideas.

Reviewed are: A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, by Byron Hawk, Reviewed by Brian Ray Community; College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy, by John S. Levine, Susan Kalter, and Richard L. Wagoner, Reviewed by Keith Kroll; Designing Writing Assignments, by Traci Gardner; Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units, by Peter Smagorinsky, Reviewed by Nancy Lawson Remler; Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, by Laura R. Micciche, Reviewed by Tim N. Taylor