When Writing Teachers Teach Literature: Bringing Writing to Reading

What happens when the teaching of literature and the teaching of writing intersect? How does instruction change when teachers apply composition theory and practice to the study of literature? In Art Young and Toby Fulwiler's collection of essays, twenty-three teachers of writing describe their experiences teaching literature, revealing some remarkable ideas and results.

When Writing Teachers Teach Literature shows how college English instructors apply composition strategies such as writing to learn, the composing process, collaborative learning, and portfolio assessment to literature. The contributors, all reflective practitioners, discuss how they teach literature and what it means to them. They examine:

• What writing teachers do differently when they teach literature
• How their approach differs from that typically taken by literature teachers
• What happens to the learners and texts when composition pedagogy is applied to literary study.

In brief interchapters contributors focus on professional and student texts as well as the learners who create them. Each demonstrates that the best teaching is the transmission not just of knowledge, but of the means and satisfactions of creating that knowledge.

These essays confirm the value of new voices in the canon and the classroom, of diverse theoretical perspectives that merge with interactive pedagogical practices, and especially of the emergence of writing along with reading as the central business of English studies.

ART YOUNG is Campbell Chair in Technical Communication, Professor of English, and Professor of Engineering at Clemson University. In addition to coordinating Clemsons writing across the curriculum program, he teaches courses in composition theory and pedagogy, technical writing, and Victorian literature. Young serves as a consultant and WAC workshop director to over fifty schools and colleges.TOBY FULWILER directs the writing program at the University of Vermont, where he also teaches composition and literature courses. Editor of The Journal Book (1987), Fulwiler is also author of College Writing: A Personal Approach to Academic Writing, Second Edition (1997) and coeditor, with Art Young, of Programs That Work: Models and Methods for Writing Across the Curriculum (1990) and Writing Across the Disciplines: Research into Practice--all published by Boynton/Cook.