Applying the complexities of literacy development and personal ethos to the teaching of composition, Zan Meyer Goncalves challenges writing teachers to consider ethos as a series of identity performances shaped by the often-inequitable social contexts of their classrooms and communities. Using the rhetorical experiences of students who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender, she proposes a new way of thinking about ethos that addresses the challenges of social justice, identity, and transfer issues in the classroom.

Goncalves offers an innovative approach to teaching identity performance theory bound by social contexts. She applies this new approach to theories of specificity and intersectionality, illustrating how teachers can help students redefine the relationship between their social identities and their writing. She also addresses bringing social activism and identity politics into the classroom, helping writers make transfers across rhetorical contexts and linking students' interests to public conversations.

Theoretical and practical, Sexuality and the Politics of Ethos in the Writing Classroom provides teachers of first-year and advanced composition studies with useful, detailed assignments based in specific identity performance. Goncalves offers techniques to subvert oppressive language practices, while encouraging students to recognize themselves as writers, citizens, and active participants in their own educations and communities.

Responding to a growing pedagogical paralysis in debates over the nature and status of composition studies as an academic discipline, Lisa Ede offers a provocative inquiry into the politics of composition’s place in the academy. The result is a timely and engaging reflection on the rhetoric, ideology, and ethics of scholarship and instruction in composition studies today.

Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location delves into some of the most vexing issues presently facing the field: its status in relation to English studies, the nature and consequences of the writing process movement, the uneven professionalization of composition teachers, and the widening chasm between theory and practice. Ede interrogates key moments and texts in composition’s evolution, from the writing process movement to Susan Miller’s Textual Carnivals, through the interpretive lenses of historical analysis, theoretical critique, feminist and cultural theory, and Ede’s own two decades of experiences as a teacher and writing program administrator.

Questioning the narratives of progress and paradigm shifts that inform the field’s highly regarded recent theoretical studies, Ede urges scholars to carefully reconsider these claims, to honor the roles of teachers and students as more than dupes of ideology, and to more fully acknowledge—and utilize—the differences between the practice of theory and the practice of teaching. As academic hierarchies of knowledge increasingly privilege scholarship over instruction, Ede warns researchers to be cognizant of the politics and power inherent in their own location in the academy, particularly when professing to speak for teachers and students. To that end, the volume’s conclusion advocates pragmatic avenues for change and proffers topics for future discussion and debate.

How do college writing teachers learn new ways to teach? Most current composition research focuses almost exclusively on student writers, ignoring the role the teacher plays in classroom development. Here is the first book to focus on college writing teachers and the ways in which they are affected by graduate rhetoric pedagogy courses.

Wendy Bishop observed teachers enrolled in a doctoral seminar, titled "Teaching Basic Writing," and then conducted case studies of five of those teachers in their college writing classrooms to investigate how their teaching practices changed and how their previous professional and personal histories influenced their ability to make those changes.