And Now, a Word from Our Sponsors ...

Regina M. Buccola
Assistant Professor of English
Roosevelt University
E-mail: rbuccola@roosevelt.edu

Toward the end of each semester, I hold individual conferences with my composition students after they have received feedback on drafts of their final projects from their peer reader. In one such conference, held at the end of a course focused on the media, a student lamented: "I can't even read the back of my cereal box in peace anymore!" I smiled: success. In the course in question, Introduction to the Research Paper at the University of Illinois at Chicago, students had been asked to examine the family trees of the various corporate media outlets to which they are daily exposed. In tandem with learning how to gather and present information in their own projects, they studied how media outlets gather and filter information within the framework of the multi-national corporations who serve as their "parents," issuing both permission slips and allowances. The students were shocked at the widespread incest in corporate print, web-based and broadcast journalism.

I have taught two freshman-level college composition courses that used media analysis as the starting point for developing semester-long research projects: the course mentioned in the first paragraph of this essay, "Politics, Politics," which tracked the 1996 presidential campaign, and a second that explored the challenges posed for the First Amendment by the development of the worldwide web and legislation proposed to govern its use, "First Things First." If I were teaching this course in spring semester 2002, I would focus on the ways in which the new mandates emanating from the Office of Homeland Security and the CIA in response to the events of 9-11 may impinge on civil rights and liberties. Like Thomas Fox (1990), my ultimate goal in all such courses is "for students to develop the habit of posing problems, the habit of critically questioning their experience" (45). Even if that means that they are rendered unable to look at the back of their boxes of Wheaties without critical eyes.

When preparing to teach, I look at what other instructors have done both formally (published pedagogical articles) and informally (syllabi and other teaching materials accessible on line, including those of my colleagues). I consider this pedagogical research, in light of the latest research in areas that interest me, and then allow these ideas to simmer with my own thoughts about my particular teaching situation and my particular students. I hope that readers of this essay will use it as the first step in that process, mining it for what is useful for and applicable to your own teaching circumstances.

As Lisa Ede (1991) notes: "[O]ver the past twenty-five years we have amassed a considerable body of theoretical, historical, pedagogical, quantitative, and qualitative research on the teaching of writing" (119). Citing only those aspects of this vast body of research that have had the greatest impact on her own work, Ede lists: "studies of the composing process, of invention and revision, of the relationship of cognitive development and writing, of basic writing, of the role of audience in discourse, of the impact of computers on writing, of assessment, of the writing-reading relationship, of style, of collaborative learning and writing, of rhetorical theory, and of the history of writing instruction" ("Teaching"119). The question that Ede raises in response to this super-abundance of information is; how does one choose among the sea of competing pedagogical strategies for writing instruction?

The most basic response, of course, is to choose those that seem most appropriate for the community of students that you teach, and that are most compatible with your own ideologies and personal style. While Ede (1991) is careful to caution that instructors not hide behind the reductive dodge that a particular pedagogical strategy "works best for me and my students," (125), she does acknowledge the importance of identifying the classroom audience, for the benefit of both the instructor and the student writers. She notes:

It is in this spirit that I offer the following description of two situations in which I successfully integrated media into the composition classroom. Before I begin, a word from my sponsors -- a word about the specific circumstances under which these courses were conducted.

English 161: Introduction to the Research Paper:

As I have already mentioned, I taught this course at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), a large research institution situated just outside the heart of Chicago's business and commercial district, the Loop. During the period in question, the late 1990s, UIC had begun to attract increasing numbers of students from out of town, but still retained vestiges of its former identity as one of the commuter schools of choice for students from the greater Chicagoland area. The children of the city's substantial immigrant population were well represented at the school, many of them first generation college students. A typical classroom would have a disparate cast of characters ranging from a woman who had been airlifted out of the former Yugoslavia on a U. N. plane who was still developing her English skills, to an 18-year-old from Cincinnati living away from home for the first time, to a Vietnam veteran just getting around to pursuing his educational goals.

The composition program at UIC is a tightly run ship. Graduate students (who carry a great deal of the teaching load) complete a course in composition pedagogy before they ever enter a classroom, and there is a firm mandate to maintain consistency across the hundreds of sections of composition that are offered each term. The Introduction to the Research Paper is a topics course. The goal of each course is to provide students with sufficient background on a topic chosen by the instructor that they are able to conduct independent research and write a thorough, documented essay that defends a clear thesis position. Students enrolled in this course, therefore, learn about a particular topic, the research process, and the proper way to write and document a research paper. In both of my courses, I chose the general topic of print and broadcast media as they are the primary vehicles by which we learn about and make sense of the world around us.

In essence, the course is divided in half. During the first part of the semester, students become acclimated to the existing research on the topic through assigned readings. For the remainder of the course, the students work to conduct their own research and develop their contribution to the intellectual conversation into which they have been introduced during the initial portion of the semester.

While many instructors use a reader of some kind for the first portion of the course, I opted instead to ask that my students read, on a rotating basis, articles on the topic addressed in our course in a variety of print news publications. They began with the most recent issues of local newspapers: the Chicago Tribune, the Sun-Times, the Reader (a free weekly with a strong tilt to the left) and Streetwise (a publication produced and sold by Chicago's homeless). Next, we moved on to coverage of the specific issue that we were treating in each course in a wide array of news periodicals, ranging from the weekly and conservative to the monthly middle of the road, and the radical quarterly. Among the many publications that I recommended students examine were: Mother Jones, The Progressive, Harper's, Utne Reader, The Nation, World Press Review, Time, Newsweek, U. S. News and World Report, The Atlantic Monthly, The American Spectator, The American Prospect, The Weekly Standard, The New Republic, and New Perspectives Quarterly. The proliferation of large, chain bookstores with impressive periodicals departments, like Barnes and Noble and Border's, makes teaching a course using these materials easy even in small to mid-sized cities.

Working from the Director of Composition, Ann Feldman's, position that summary, analysis, synthesis and argument are the main steps on the journey toward the research paper, I put my students on teams to conduct these exercises with the sources that they read. Each week, the teams read periodical coverage of the same issue (i.e. -- the presidential campaign, or the Communications Decency Act) in pre-selected periodicals with different political perspectives. The teams then prepared summaries of the articles and we discussed these summaries collectively, moving toward critical analysis of the content as a group. Teams that had been assigned a conservative journal for the first such assignment were rotated to a more liberal one for subsequent assignments, and vice versa. They then moved into analysis of the argument in their group, using a worksheet that asked them to identify the thesis, the main pieces of evidence used to support it, and the origins of those pieces of evidence (i.e. -- primary research, interviews, scientific experiment results reported elsewhere and now provided as secondary materials, statistics, etc.). Finally, students were asked to read articles on the same topic in sources with variant perspectives individually. They then had to prepare a synthesis -- what common information could they glean about this topic even though they had read treatments of it based in different assumptions and biases? Such exercises reveal to students the ways in which the same basic information can be manipulated to create a wide array of impressions, and tends to make them a bit more conscientious about how they use their own source materials when writing their final projects. This dissection of the structure of various pieces of research-based writing also helped students to learn from the inside out how to construct an argument of their own.

The composition courses that I teach are structured on the process model. I frequently use Lisa Ede's Work in Progress as a core text to model the writing process. I start at the end of the book, first working with students through the third part of the text, which addresses the reading process, academic assignments and audiences, analysis and argument. Then we go back through the first part of the book, which deals with writers as readers, and, finally, the second part of the book which walks students through the various components of the research paper writing process: invention, drafting, and revising for content, structure and style. Ede provides information about how to conduct a library search and reproduces the research projects of several students in their entirety, from the brainstorming stage through drafting to final version, with instructor and peer comments included. There is also a section on formal documentation in her book, so it offers students a solid overview of the entire process of producing a piece of research-based writing.

Assignments and Exercises

Group Work

All students in the class are assigned to groups that analyze the primary texts read each week. Each group is asked to report on how information is presented in the text or texts that they examined, considering issues such as bias, presentation of both textual and visual information, and any visible relationship between the financial support of the publication and the way that information is covered (or not). In addition, each group prepares a "family tree" of the publication they have been assigned, tracing each source back to its parent corporation. The results are presented in class, along with discussion of how these corporate origins seem to impact the information presented.

As a companion to the comparative analysis of print resources that students did in groups, I also assigned teams to analyze on-line publications. Though I did not have this precise assignment in my possession when I originally taught this course, I very much like the way that Writing in an Electronic World presents such a project: "Using search engines and links from other sites, investigate media resources of a single country other than the United States. Be sure to include underground media, alternative media, and low-tech media. Write a review of the issues addressed over a specified period of time" (Kolko et. al. 421). The incorporation of an international perspective can be quite eye opening for students. I remember the amazement with which I read British accounts of the American War for Independence while studying abroad as an undergraduate. Of course, they did not depict it as the true, good, and just battle for freedom that I had grown up studying. In a recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, Anthony Collings (2001) modeled the sort of comparative work that students would do in completing an assignment such as this one. He compared the coverage of the war in Afghanistan by the (objective) BBC with that of (biased) American counterparts (CNN comes in for particular censure). It might even be helpful to distribute an article such as this to students, to show them a completed version of this type of analysis and critique.

To facilitate discussion of such assignments, I teach, if possible, in a classroom wired for mobile PC use. I can then demonstrate for students how to investigate the validity of web-based resources by going to some of the sites that they have visited in completing an assignment such as this and discussing their analyses of them as a group. I also use the remote connection to take them to some of the many on-line writing labs, such as the excellent site maintained by Purdue University, at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/workshops/hypertext/ResearchW/index.html.

I have not yet had the opportunity to use Writing in an Electronic World in a composition classroom, but I fully intend to do so. It covers many cutting-edge technologies that can be used for research and writing, and addresses complex questions associated with using them. For instance, the editors explain that the same protocols one uses to determine the validity of print sources can and should be applied to evaluation of internet resources:

As I point out to students, there is nothing stopping me from putting up a web site filled with beautiful photographs of the Mayan ruins that I saw on a trip through Mexico, but I am not an expert on these structures or the civilization that produced them. I would not want anyone visiting such a site to use it as a resource for a scholarly project.

Finally, I incorporate analysis and critique of the broadcast media into my courses as well. Based on the topic of the course, I show clips from documentary films, popular films and/or special news reports in class. CNN, NPR, Dateline, 20/20, and 60 Minutes are all good resources for this sort of exercise. We discuss the way that information is conveyed visually and verbally, and watch the program all the way through to the credits, to see what they reveal to us about the funding of the project and any possible hidden agendas. In the case of television programs, I also include any and all advertisements or announcements of funding sources.

I have also had great success with the incorporation of creative works into my courses, such as Oliver Stone's fictionalized documentary, The People vs. Larry Flynt, and Anna Deavere Smith's Twilight: Los Angeles, a performance art piece televised on PBS that treats the incidents surrounding the Rodney King beating. We discuss the ways in which their composition also involved research followed by conscious processing and manipulation of the data that research process revealed.

Smith could not effectively manipulate the narrative of what happened in the aftermath of the Los Angeles Police beating of Rodney King were she not aware of the chronology and nature of the events that unfolded. She needed to be a good researcher. Her familiarity with the conventions of dramatic structure, television news narratives and documentary-style reporting enabled her to creatively use these conventions to create an entirely different entity: a piece of political performance art. With both this video and The People Vs. Larry Flynt, students were again placed in teams to do research about the actual events on which the performance and film were based (IBIS and First Search are good databases with which to begin such research). I gave this assignment after they had begun analyzing print sources, but before we had been to the library for an introduction to available resources. I used these fact-finding missions as the assignment on the day that the students went to the library tour and orientation. They then reported on their findings to the class.

Finally, since the average college student does nothing that is not set to music, from roller blading across campus listening to a walkman, to driving across town playing CDs in the car stereo, to waking up in the morning (or early afternoon) to a clock radio, I also include radio news and music programs as well as the recording industry in the course. In one exercise, I played a radio news broadcast from tape in class three times. The first time, students simply listened to it; the second time, they wrote down key words from it; and the third time they recorded their impressions of the tone of the report. We then discussed how these various impressions were conveyed. In the first half of the semester, I also asked students to bring in the typed up lyrics to their favorite song. We then analyzed and discussed these lyrics as a piece of writing. What is the point? How is it conveyed? What stylistic devices does the writer employ (i.e. -- alliteration/assonance, rhyme, metaphor)?

Lad Tobin (1994) suggests that, as the writing process movement evolves into the new millennium, "we need to consider not only new computer technologies (such as multimedia workstations, notepads that can transform written notes or spoken words to word-processed text, new software for long-distance collaborative writing) but also the way that popular media (such as television, rock music, and movies) continue to transform and shape contemporary American culture" (10-11). In my course focused on First Amendment issues, the class studied such technology (i.e. -- the Communications Decency Act and its implications for e-mail communication and the development, posting and visiting of web sites) in addition to using it in developing their own research. Obviously, students made use of the internet to conduct research, but a student also showed a film clip during his project presentation, and another student passed out song lyrics and compiled a statistical survey of the incidence of obscenities and adult situations in country music (high) versus the likelihood of country music tapes and CDs to be labeled "Parental Advisory: Explicit Lyrics" as compared to rap music with similar attributes (extremely low, by comparison). I suggested that the latter student join a newsgroup devoted to the topic of freedom of expression in music during her research process. Professional sources that she "met" in this on-line environment proved helpful to her in developing the survey methodology she employed in conducting her primary research on the comparative incidence of parental advisory labeling.

The student who showed the film clip underwent an interesting transformation over the course of the semester; at the outset, he was perennially tardy and determined to exude a too-cool-for-school air of impatience and ennui. By the week of his presentation, he was seeking me out to arrange for A/V equipment and arriving early to make sure that his video materials were properly cued. I think, quite simply, he responded well to grappling with admittedly challenging material -- a response that I find often in my courses. In their evaluations, students typically identify me as "tough, but fair." Though they may complain about the workload as deadlines loom, I find that students actually respond well to tough expectations, when their resulting work is fairly assessed, taking the difficulty of the task at hand into consideration.

Project Presentations

Students were required to deliver 10-minute project presentations prior to submission of the first draft of their research project to the instructor, and the penultimate submission of a revised draft for their peer reader. On the day of their presentation, students submitted an initial proposal and outline of the final project to the instructor, and delivered an oral report to the entire class. The student audience was asked to fill out a critique sheet for the presentation, designed to help the student-writer develop their first full draft of the project. The students learned a great deal from one another about the topics that their classmates were working on, gained valuable examples of how to (or not to, as the case may be) organize and present the results of their own research, and experienced writing for and speaking to a specific audience with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints.

Drafts

Students submitted drafts of their projects at three key junctures: a first full draft of the project, presented to the instructor only; a thorough revision of the draft, presented to team of peer readers; and a third draft at the end of the semester, when students met with the instructor for a private conference as they completed final revisions. All drafts were submitted with the final version of the project. Like many composition theorists who espouse process pedagogy, I find the submission of all drafts an important affirmation to students that all of their work "counts", and a crucial means of assessing the seriousness with which they have approached the circular process of research, writing, and revising.

Deep Background

My initial inspiration for the first of these courses that I taught, "Politics, Politics," came one morning as I conducted my daily ritual of preparing my breakfast tea and checking e-mail while listening to NPR. One of the stories on this particular morning was a critique of the coverage that had been provided thus far of the1996 presidential campaign by "the media." I was fascinated by the extent to which the report seemed to consider "the media" a noxious purveyor of half-truths, blatant bias, and misleading "facts," and seemed simultaneously to exclude National Public Radio, the media source for this media critique, from this category.

Ted Gup (2001) points out that, "The very concept of media is insulting to some of us within the press who find ourselves lumped in with so many disparate elements, as if everyone with a pen, a microphone, a camera, or just a loud voice were one and the same" (B12). I think this is the spirit in which the report I heard years ago on NPR was prepared, and I do not disagree -- it is just as unwise to put Peter Jennings and Jerry Springer in the same league as it is to surmise that "the media" is a bastion of pure, unadulterated truth. This is a concept that no journalist worth their salt would dispute, but most consumers of mass media still do, in fact, treat press coverage of everything ranging from matricide to international military conflict as "fact."

The only "fact" about the media, in Gup's view, is "that it is difficult to make meaningful statements even about the print portion of the press. The differences between The Wall Street Journal and the supermarket tabloid The National Enquirer nearly defy comparison. There is no U. S. media system, and no hegemonic conspiracy" (B12). As a former journalism major myself, I completely agree with Gup, and I hope that it will be clear that, in placing "the media" under the microscope in my courses, I encouraged students to carefully examine the individual cells that make up what is popularly perceived to be a monolithic entity.

I agree that the media is not a monolithic structure, and in my courses I sought to help students understand the complexity of information exchange and dissemination. The class evolved into both a research and writing community. We, as a group, became politically motivated media critics, joining our voices to the larger socio-political writing community. The students learned to write and orally deliver their own work by giving presentations based on their final projects. One of the reasons that I had them work together in rotating small groups was so that they could familiarize themselves to some extent with the people in their class, and more readily address them as a defined audience with clear biases, goals, and interests.

Process Pedagogy

Tobin (1994) provides a working definition for what the writing process has come to mean in composition studies: "an emphasis on the process, student choice and voice, revision, self-expression. But most of all it has come to mean a critique (or even outright rejection) of traditional, product-driven, rules-based, correctness-obsessed writing instruction" (emph. orig. 5). Tobin notes that the writing process movement has been criticized by those who feel that it is too focused on personal writing and not sufficiently grounded in research (6-7). Tobin disputes that this is, in fact, true of the writing process movement, and I would, too. My course required a great deal of research since it was devoted to "The Research Paper." I find that, like writing, research is a process. In fact, the respective processes of research and writing are dialogic: the idea of what one wishes to write about leads one to do research, which in turn leads one to write, which, in its own turn, provokes additional questions that require further research [1].

I talk very frankly with my students about my own research and writing process, and encourage them to join in these discussions [2]. I first conduct research on line via the university library's homepage; then I gather the material that I have located, read it and fill the pages with post-it notes on passages to which I want to refer with written notes about what to do with that material; type up the resulting patchwork of research and commentary; print it out; use an elaborate numbering system to re-organize the paragraphs along with copious marginalia of additional material to add; re-type and re-print; and then use a bizarre, almost hieroglyphic system of arrows, asterisks, stars and squiggles to edit. I often bring in an essay of my own at each of the various stages of this process and pass it around. Like similar reproductions of drafts in books such as Ede's Work in Progress, I find this tangible reminder that research and writing is a messy process reassuring to students. I think that they often feel that their various research and writing quirks are signs of incompetence, rather than what they are: concrete evidence of the non-linearity of the research and writing process.

Free writing is commonly associated with process pedagogy, but, because the students in my courses branch out into their own individual research fairly early in the semester, there are few free writing prompts that seem viable to assign the whole group. Instead, I encourage students to journal throughout their research and writing process. This helps them keep track of their research and the evolution of their own ideas. When it seems appropriate, I will sometimes offer students the opportunity to submit these journals for potential extra credit points. This is not required, but it is one of many ways that people who are somewhat reserved can enhance their class participation grade. It also provides me with another point of entry in assessing student work and how it has been developed. This is not automatic extra credit; I expect to see careful documentation of sources and clear effort for students to earn these points (usually no more than 5 points are possible). These requirements should not come as a surprise to anyone in the course, either. One of the key points that we discuss in talking about the writing process is the importance of carefully documenting sources -- of quotes, certainly, but also of ideas.

Politics, Politics

Thomas Fox (1990) emphasizes the importance of seeing students as people and allowing oneself, as the instructor, to be seen as a person as well. He maintains that, "For social experience to play a central role in writing classrooms, writing teachers need to conceive of the relationship between social backgrounds and students' classroom behavior. Crucial to the concept of interaction is to conceive of students as agents, not only actively constructing context, but also actively constructing, exploiting, concealing, resisting their backgrounds" (emph. orig. 20). The goal of such pedagogy is to "repair the damage done by educational practices that divide students from their backgrounds," a goal that seems all the more urgent to me now, as affirmative action all but disappears from the education and employment landscapes.

Fox describes how he offered full disclosure of his political leanings early in his composition course, arguing that it built student confidence to be "in a classroom with a teacher with expertise, experience, and authority -- but one who is above all a person like them, with a history, goals, and politics" (47). My firm commitment to materialist feminist ideology motivates me to offer full disclosure of my personal background and biases in all of the courses that I teach, not just the composition courses. However, it took me several years to come around to this way of thinking. I remember the pride that I felt in 1992, when a student from one of my composition courses ran breathlessly up to me at an independent party political rally and said, "I thought you were a Republican!" I was pleased with my chameleon-like ability to so successfully play devil's advocate in class discussions that she had been unable to discern my true political leanings.

I have a background in theater, and I have now come to understand that it does my students no good for me to "perform" my way through the tricky, bias-laden terrain of the issues that often come up in the context of a writing course. I am, despite my best efforts to disperse authority in the classroom, ultimately the most important member of their audience, and I do them a disservice if they do not have the opportunity to at least hazard a guess as to my reaction to their topic, and their means of addressing it. I can hardly fault students for failing to consider their audience if a significant member of that audience has been role-playing for most of the semester.

Since I am, as their assessor and guide in the research and writing process, in a position of authority over the students in my courses, I encourage them to explore the nature of that authority just as they explore the authority of the sources that they use in conducting their research. When we discuss the means of discerning a source's validity, I permit my students to make me a guinea pig -- I allow them to ask me anything that could reasonably be construed as relevant to my authority to teach them to develop and write research papers. I talk to them about my eclectic professional background [3] at some length in these discussions, not only to establish my authority, but also to demonstrate the wide range of career options that are available to people with degrees in the humanities. I then point out at the end of this discussion that even this dialogue has included a word from the sponsors of the course they are taking, the College of Arts and Sciences. As a employee of that college, it is in my best interests to secure as many majors as possible, and I have subtly tried to do so. I also point out that this is not deliberate "advertising" -- I am not literally being paid to do it. It is something that I really do consider to be true, but I also have vested interests in believing it to be true.

Like Tobin, Fox rejects the idea that a pedagogy respectful of students as researchers, writers and people is bunny foo-foo: "The point is not that anything goes in an interactive classroom or that it's fine not to finish the assigned work, but that students can and do make sense, provided they are given the opportunity and encouragement to do it, and provided they know their explanations will be treated with respect, as creations of people with important histories, experiences, and backgrounds" (23).

Drawing heavily on Paulo Freire's work in The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, Fox advocates, "an activist pedagogy, one that seeks understanding and change, not just understanding" (37). This was the goal of the version of this course that I taught entitled, "Politics, Politics." The course met for eight weeks in the summer prior to the 1996 presidential elections. We examined media coverage of the presidential campaigns from a wide array of sources, written from a broad swath of political perspectives. I know full well the political malaise that infects not only most college students, but most Americans. I wanted this course to inspire students to take an active interest in their government. At the very least, I hoped that it would make them vote. I had an agenda for this course that went well beyond: teach students how to research and write an argumentative essay; I wanted to make them active participants in the political process.

On assessment of student work, Fox succinctly notes, "Evaluative comments, positive or negative, not only appropriate the text, but also obscure the students' understanding of their own intentions" (39). This is part of the reason that I required group work and presentations as well as individual presentations before I ever issued any response to my students' project ideas. I wanted them to get as much feedback as possible on their topic ideas and research goals from their peers before they heard anything from me. I did not want to act as a censor, or the origin of the "right" way to go about doing their project so that they would keep the possibilities as wide open as possible for as long as possible. I permitted the class to run the discussion of each student's project report, and encouraged those who either did not want to or did not have time to offer verbal feedback during class to write their comments down and give them to the student who had given the report to which they were responding. Presentations were also required not because (as I think some students were firmly convinced) I like torturing those who do not enjoy public speaking but so that the students would become familiar with one another, and develop a sense their audience. I also try very hard to make it really true that I am not their sole audience.

Conclusion

I had a great deal of fun teaching both of these courses, and I learned a great deal, too. There are several required courses that appear regularly in my teaching load. Whenever I hear an instructor lamenting about how boring it is to keep teaching the same thing over and over again, I point out that it has probably become boring for their students, too. Incorporating contemporary issues as discussed and disseminated in cutting-edge communications technologies is an excellent way to both help your students prepare for active participation in the world around them, and to remain a helpful guide for them on their journey.

References

The Craft of Research, Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

Ede, Lisa. "Reading the Writing Process." Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1994. 31-43.

---. "Teaching Writing." An Introduction to Composition Studies. Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate, eds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. 118-134.

Feldman, Ann. "Guidelines for English 161." (handout) University of Illinois at Chicago, 2001.

Fox, Thomas. The Social Uses of Writing: Politics and Pedagogy. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1990.

Gup, Ted. "'Media' Means So Much, It Means Nothing." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 23 November 2001: B12.

The People vs. Larry Flynt. Per. Woody Harrelson, Edward Norton and Courtney Love. Dir. Oliver Stone. Culver City, CA: Columbia TriStar Home Video, 1997.

Smith, Anna Deavere Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992. New York: Anchor / Doubleday, 1994.

Twilight, Los Angeles. By Anna Deavere Smith. Prod. Anna Deavere Smith and Ezra Swerdlow. Dir. Marc Levin. Offline Entertainment and Thirteen/WNET. Alexandria, VA: PBS Home Video, 2001.

Tobin, Lad. "Introduction: How the Writing Process Was Born -- and Other Conversion Narratives." Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 1994. 1-14.

Writing in an Electronic World: A Rhetoric with Readings. Beth E. Kolko, Alison E. Regan and Susan Romano, eds. New York: Addison Wesley Longman, Inc., 2001.

Endnotes

[1] For an excellent analysis of the research and writing processes as dialogic, see The Craft of Research, Wayne C. Booth, Gregory G. Colomb and Joseph M. Williams, eds. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

[2] Lisa Ede discusses the importance of exploring her own writing process to her composition pedagogy in "Reading the Writing Process," Taking Stock: The Writing Process Movement in the 90s. Lad Tobin and Thomas Newkirk, eds. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook Publishers, Inc., 31-43.

[3] This background includes stints as a grant writer for the Illinois Humanities Council, an intern in the Education Department of Chicago Shakespeare Theater, a staff member in the corporate communications department of a Fortune 500 company, and an overseer of ad service on the web version of the Chicago Tribune and its spin-off, web-only publication, Metromix.

Academic Exchange Extra invites reader response to any writings in this issue--especially articles advancing the scholarly debate of issues raised.

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