Composition, Pedagogy & the Scholarship of Teaching: Crosscurrents

How do composition teachers document their teaching? What types of documentation work best? Teaching portfolios, course portfolios, philosophy statements, classroom observation? How can these materials provide essential testimony about our classrooms and our achievements, not just to ourselves and our colleagues but to faculty supervisors, tenure and promotion committees, deans, and provosts?

Documenting our work as teachers offers a rich and productive means for reflection, analysis, and self-assessment of professional progress. Composition, Pedagogy & the Scholarship of Teaching explains how to create these kinds of teaching materials, while offering a sophisticated array of perspectives and materials for developing and maintaining them. In this outstanding collection of essays and resources, tenured and tenure-track composition faculty, writing program administrators, and graduate students outline a variety of concrete strategies that make the teaching portfolio a powerful tool for assessing professional strengths and weaknesses reviewing programmatic and curricular questions reflecting on individual professional development meeting institutional goals and mandates documenting teaching for professional review and job applications.

Best of all, the book is supplemented by specialized web resources (visit www.heinemann.com/minter-goodburn): syllabi, course materials, and other kinds of information that are an intrinsic part of the professional development of practicing, college-level composition teachers. Not only can these examples serve as models for your own teaching documentation, they can also refine your notions of how best to represent your teaching practice as you become part of the discipline-wide discussion on documenting post-secondary teaching.