This pioneering study of African American students in the composition classroom lays the groundwork for reversing the cycle of underachievement that plagues linguistically diverse students. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom approaches the issue of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) in terms of teacher knowledge and prevailing attitudes, and it attempts to change current pedagogical approaches with a highly readable combination of traditional academic discourse and personal narratives.

Realizing that composition is a particular form of social practice that validates some students and excludes others, Arnetha Ball and Ted Lardner acknowledge that many African American students come to writing and composition classrooms with talents that are not appreciated. To empower and inform practitioners, administrators, teacher educators, and researchers, Ball and Lardner provide knowledge and strategies that will help unleash the potential of African American students and help them imagine new possibilities for their successes as writers.

African American Literacies Unleashed asserts that necessary changes in theory and practice can be addressed by refocusing attention from teachers’ knowledge deficits to the processes through which teachers engage information relevant to culturally informed pedagogy. Providing strategies for unlearning racism in the classroom and changing the status quo, this volume stresses the development and maintenance of a real sense of teaching efficacy—teachers’ beliefs in their abilities to connect with and work effectively with all students—and reflective optimism—teachers’ informed expectations that all students have the potential to succeed.

In Mutuality in the Rhetoric and Composition Classroom, David L. Wallace and Helen Rothschild Ewald point out the centrality of rhetoric in the academy, asserting the intimate connection between language and knowledge making. They also stress the need for a change in the roles of teachers and students in today’s classroom. Their goal is mutuality, a sharing of authority among teachers and students in the classroom that would allow everyone an equal voice in the communication of ideas.

Arguing that the impetus to empower students by engaging them in liberatory and emancipatory pedagogies is simply not enough, Wallace and Ewald seek to “help readers identify, theorize, and work through problems faced by teachers who already value alternative approaches but who are struggling to implement them in the classroom." It is not the teacher’s job merely to convey a received body of knowledge, nor is knowledge a prepackaged commodity to be delivered by the teacher. It is “constituted in the classroom through the dialogic interaction between teachers and students alike.”

Wallace and Ewald see mutuality as potentially transformative, but they “do not believe that the nature or that transformation can be designated in advance.” Rather it is located in the interaction between teachers and students. Wallace and Ewald look at how the transformative notion of mutuality can be effected in classrooms in three important ways: reconstituting classroom speech genres, redesigning the architecture of rhetoric and writing courses, and valuing students’ interpretive agency in classroom discourse. Mutuality in alternative pedagogy, they assert, is neither a single approach nor a specific set of valued practices; it is a continuous collaboration between teachers and students.

In this innovative volume, Kristie S. Fleckenstein explores how the intersection of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy in the classroom can help students become compassionate citizens who participate in the world as they become more critically aware of the world. Fleckenstein argues that all social action—behavior designed to increase human dignity, value, and quality of life—depends on a person’s repertoire of visual and rhetorical habits. To develop this repertoire in students, the author advocates the incorporation of visual habits—or ways of seeing—into a language-based pedagogical approach in the writing classroom. According to Fleckenstein, interweaving the visual and rhetorical in composition pedagogy enables students to more readily perceive the need for change, while arming them with the abilities and desire to enact it.

 The author addresses social action from the perspective of three visual habits: spectacle, which fosters disengagement; animation, or fusing body with meaning; and antinomy, which invites the invention of new realities. Fleckenstein then examines the ways in which particular visual habits interact with rhetorical habits and with classroom methods, resulting in the emergence of various forms of social action.  To enhance the understanding of the concepts she discusses, the author represents the intertwining relationships of vision, rhetoric, and writing pedagogy graphically as what she calls symbiotic knots. In tracing the modes of social action privileged by a visual habit and a teacher’s pedagogical choices, Fleckenstein attends particularly to the experiences of students who have been traditionally barred from participation in the public sphere because of gender, race, or class.  The book culminates in a call for visually and rhetorically robust writing pedagogies.

In Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom, Fleckenstein combines classic methods of rhetorical teaching with fresh perspectives to provide a unique guide for initiating important improvements in teaching social action. The result is a remarkable volume that empowers teachers to best inspire students to take part in their world at that most crucial moment when they are discovering it.