Teaching Cross-Racial Texts: Cultural Theft in The Secret Life of Bees

Laurie Grobman

White author Sue Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees employs stereotypes of African Americans and problematically appropriates features of Black writing. Nevertheless, this book is worth teaching, not only because it has acquired much cultural capital but also because it offers students a way to examine relationships between whites and Blacks in American literature and culture.

Object Lessons:  Teaching Multiliteracies through the Muesum

John Pedro Schwartz

The author calls for incorporating into English classes what he calls museum-based pedagogy, arguing that it enables the teaching of multiple literacies: verbal, visual, technological, social, and critical.  In part, this pedagogy consists of classroom instruction that enables students to understand the persuasive nature of museum displays—the ways in which digital technology mediates, powerful interests influence, social agents negotiate, and multimodal texts communicate meaning.  Moreover, this pedagogy has students evaluate a local museum; they argue the need to redesign it to represent better both the subject matter and the community’s needs, and they realize their proposal in virtual form using multimedia technology.  The author analyzes a particular course he taught that included both these activities.

Stepping Outside the “Ladies’ Department”: Women’s Expanding Rhetorical Boundaries

Lisa Shaver

Study of the weekly Methodist newspaper Christian Advocate from its inception in 1826 to 1832 reveals that Methodist women came to assume important, public, and rarely acknowledged rhetorical roles.  More precisely, women moved beyond the confines of the newspaper’s “Ladies’ Department,” the back-page space to which “women’s concerns” were initially consigned. Through charting women’s migration in the Christian Advocate, the author argues that religious activities enabled women to emerge from the domestic sphere and engage in social activism that contravened accepted gender norms.

Review:  Re-Telling the Composition-Literature Story

Laura Brady

Reviewed are Composition and/or Literature: The End(s) of Education, edited by Linda S. Bergmann and Edith M. Baker, and Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction:  First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars, edited by Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris.

Review: Historicizing Rhetorical Education

Patricia Harkin

Reviewed are Archives of Instruction: Nineteenth-Century Rhetorics, Readers, and Composition Books in the United States  by Jean Ferguson Carr, Stephen L. Carr, and Lucille M. Schultz; The Knowledge Contract: Politics and Paradigms in the Academic Workplace by David B. Downing; and Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles-Lettres by Hugh Blair, edited by Linda Ferreira-Buckley and Michael S. Halloran.