front cover of Generation Vet
Generation Vet
Composition, Student Veterans, and the Post-9/11 University
Sue Doe
Utah State University Press, 2014

Institutions of higher education are experiencing the largest influx of enrolled veterans since World War II, and these student veterans are transforming post-secondary classroom dynamics. While many campus divisions like admissions and student services are actively moving to accommodate the rise in this demographic, little research about this population and their educational needs is available, and academic departments have been slower to adjust. In Generation Vet, fifteen chapters offer well-researched, pedagogically savvy recommendations for curricular and programmatic responses to student veterans for English and writing studies departments.

In work with veterans in writing-intensive courses and community contexts, questions of citizenship, disability, activism, community-campus relationships, and retention come to the fore. Moreover, writing-intensive courses can be sites of significant cultural exchanges—even clashes—as veterans bring military values, rhetorical traditions, and communication styles that may challenge the values, beliefs, and assumptions of traditional college students and faculty.

This classroom-oriented text addresses a wide range of issues concerning veterans, pedagogy, rhetoric, and writing program administration. Written by diverse scholar-teachers and written in diverse genres, the essays in this collection promise to enhance our understanding of student veterans, composition pedagogy and administration, and the post-9/11 university.

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Genre Explained
Frequently Asked Questions and Answers about Genre-Based Instruction
Christine M. Tardy, Nigel A. Caplan & Ann M. Johns
University of Michigan Press, 2023
The idea of teaching writing through genres—rather than, say, through prescriptive forms, templates, and rhetorical modes—is intuitively appealing. Yet many teachers have questions, and they are absolutely right to ask them: What are genres? What is genre-based instruction? What do students write if they don’t write essays? Isn’t it easier to teach and learn five-paragraph essays? What’s the role of language in genre teaching? And many more. These are all excellent questions and ones that new and experienced teachers alike have also struggled with. This book sets out to tackle some of the most common questions that teachers, teacher educators, and administrators may have when moving toward a genre-based teaching approach.
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Genre-Based Writing
What Every ESL Teacher Needs to Know
Christine M. Tardy
University of Michigan Press, 2019
In Genre-Based Writing, author Christine Tardy defines genre and genre-based writing instruction and the five principles of a genre-based pedagogy. She then explains how to design genre-based writing activities. By discussing the genre-related practices and social and rhetorical aspects of genre, she is able to outline strategies for exploring rhetorical moves and playing with genre form in the classroom. In addition, the book provides general tips for bringing a genre approach into the writing classroom as well as several application activities and specific suggestions for classroom tasks.
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Goal-Driven Lesson Planning for Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages
Marnie Reed and Christina Michaud
University of Michigan Press, 2010
This book is more than a collection of activities or ready-made lesson plans to add to a teaching repertoire. Instead, Goal-Driven Lesson Planning is intended to empower teachers and help them create a principled framework for their teaching—a framework that will shape the varied activities of the ESL classroom into a coherent teaching and learning partnership. After reading this book, teachers and prospective teachers will be able to articulate their individual teaching philosophies.
 
Goal-Driven Lesson Planning shows readers how to take any piece from English language materials—an assigned text, a random newspaper article, an ESL activity from a website, etc.—and use it to teach students something about language. Readers are walked through the process of reflecting on their role in diagnosing what that “something” is—what students really need—and planning how to get them there and how to know when they got there in a goal-driven principled manner.
 
This book has chapters on the theory of setting specific language goals for students; how to analyze learner needs (including an initial diagnostic and needs-analysis); templates to use when planning goal-driven English language lessons; explicit instruction on giving corrective feedback;  how to recognize and assess student progress; and the mechanics and logistics that facilitate the goal-driven language classroom.
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Going North Thinking West
The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction
Irvin Peckham
Utah State University Press, 2010
A long-time writing program administrator and well-respected iconoclast, Irvin Peckham is strongly identified with progressive ideologies in education. However, in Going North Thinking West, Peckham mounts a serious critique of what is called critical pedagogy—primarily a project of the academic left—in spite of his own sympathies there.
            College composition is fundamentally a middle-class enterprise, and is conducted by middle-class professionals, while student demographics show increasing presence of the working class. In spite of best intentions to ameliorate inequitable social class relationships, says Peckham, critical pedagogies can actually contribute to reproducing those relationships in traditional forms—not only perpetuating social inequities, but pushing working class students toward self-alienation, as well.
            Peckham argues for more clarity on the history of critical thinking, social class structures and teacher identity (especially as these are theorized by Pierre Bourdieu), while he undertakes a critical inquiry of the teaching practices with which even he identifies.
            Going North Thinking West focuses especially on writing teachers who claim a necessary linkage between critical thinking and writing skills; these would include both teachers who promote the fairly a-political position that argumentation is the obvious and necessary form of academic discourse, and more controversial teachers who advocate turning a classroom into a productive site of social transformation.
            Ultimately, Peckham argues for a rereading of Freire (an icon of transformational pedagogy), and for a collaborative investigation of students’ worlds as the first step in a successful writing pedagogy. It is an argument for a pedagogy based on service to students rather than on transforming them.
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The Golden Shovel Anthology
New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks
Peter Kahn
University of Arkansas Press, 2019
“The cross-section of poets with varying poetics and styles gathered here is only one of the many admirable achievements of this volume.”
—Claudia Rankine in the New York Times


The Golden Shovel Anthology celebrates the life and work of poet and civil rights icon Gwendolyn Brooks through a dynamic new poetic form, the Golden Shovel, created by National Book Award–winner Terrance Hayes.

An array of writers—including winners of the Pulitzer Prize, the T. S. Eliot Prize, and the National Book Award, as well as a couple of National Poets Laureate—have written poems for this exciting new anthology: Rita Dove, Billy Collins, Danez Smith, Nikki Giovanni, Sharon Olds, Tracy K. Smith, Mark Doty, Sharon Draper, Richard Powers, and Julia Glass are just a few of the contributing poets.

This second edition includes Golden Shovel poems by two winners and six runners-up from an international student poetry competition judged by Nora Brooks Blakely, Gwendolyn Brooks’s daughter. The poems by these eight talented high school students add to Ms. Brooks’s legacy and contribute to the depth and breadth of this anthology.
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Guerrilla Theory
Political Concepts, Critical Digital Humanities
Matthew Applegate
Northwestern University Press, 2020
Guerrilla Theory examines the political, ontological, and technological underpinnings of the guerrilla in the digital humanities (DH). The figure of the guerrilla appears in digital humanities’ recent history as an agent of tactical reformation. It refers to a broad swath of disciplinary desires: digital humanities’ claim to collaborative and inclusive pedagogy, minimal and encrypted computing, and a host of minoritarian political interventions in its praxis, including queer politics, critical race studies, and feminist theory.

In this penetrating study, Matthew Applegate uses the guerrilla to connect popular iterations of digital humanities’ practice to its political rhetoric and infrastructure. By doing so, he reorients DH’s conceptual lexicon around practices of collective becoming, mediated by claims to conflict, antagonism, and democratic will.

Applegate traces Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s radical democratic ingresses into network theory, the guerrilla’s role in its discourse, and concerns for the digital humanities’ own invocation of the figure. The book also connects post- and decolonial, feminist, and Marxist iterations of DH praxis to the aesthetic histories of movements such  as Latin American Third Cinema and the documentary cinema of the Black Panther Party. Concluding with a meditation on contemporary political modalities inherent in DH’s disciplinary expansion, Guerrilla Theory challenges the current political scope of the digital humanities and thus its future institutional impact.
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