What do you think?
Rate this book
Writing/Teaching: Essays Toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy
2001 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
"The vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar's position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching , on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen's book is split into two halves--yet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.
The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective "postscript." These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry--all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.
The second half of the book contains essays on Plato's dialogues--primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras--as a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagogues--Socrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen's own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both "teacher" and "student" in contemporary education.
What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each--the "personal" and the "scholarly"--from his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession."
"The vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar's position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching , on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen's book is split into two halves--yet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.
The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective "postscript." These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry--all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.
The second half of the book contains essays on Plato's dialogues--primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras--as a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagogues--Socrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen's own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both "teacher" and "student" in contemporary education.
What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each--the "personal" and the "scholarly"--from his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession."
270 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
2 people are currently reading
12 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
Read
November 13, 2008Lots of scholars love this book. As a reflective piece of writing on what it means to teach, it is an interesting read. However, those of us who come to the CWRL library as relatively inexperienced teachers and harried graduate students looking for a little help will not find it here.
I found the book to be on the self-indulgent side. For example, Part II of the book is devoted to one of the "significant voices" in the construction of the author's "teacherly position." It is imagined as a dialogue with Plato about teaching -- as a way for the author to call for a larger debate about what it means to teach.
Part I of the book is a series of Essays on the author's experiences in the classroom -- it examines his fears and his intellectual connundrums and the demanding mistress that is poetry.
I found the book to be on the self-indulgent side. For example, Part II of the book is devoted to one of the "significant voices" in the construction of the author's "teacherly position." It is imagined as a dialogue with Plato about teaching -- as a way for the author to call for a larger debate about what it means to teach.
Part I of the book is a series of Essays on the author's experiences in the classroom -- it examines his fears and his intellectual connundrums and the demanding mistress that is poetry.
Displaying 1 of 1 review