Mental Imagery, Psychology, and Rhetoric: An Examination of Recurring Problems

The parallel debates on mental imagery in contemporary psychology and classical rhetoric have led to its marginal status in composition studies

JAEPL, Vol. 10, Winter 2004-2005

Essays Lynn Z. Bloom. The Seven Deadly Virtues. The university stifles most creative writers except the most intrepid—even reckless, the good along with the bad—in the process of teaching them to write according to the conventions of the academy in general, and their specific disciplines in particular. David L. Wallace. Shallow Literacy, Timid Teaching, and Cultural Impotence. Any attempt to move to a deeper notion of literacy in our theory and pedagogy must—among other things—involve us facing our own self interest and expecting disruption in our own classrooms, departments, and universities. Roben Torosyan. Listening: Beyond Telling to \u27Being\u27 What We Want To Teach. In response to a culture of polarized argument, this paper shows a way to provide people with practice at deep listening and understanding. The author examines ways in which self-disclosure about problems of dialog may be an ideal means for teachers or leaders to show people alternate ways of being in the world of meaning making. Patricia Webb and Zach Waggoner. Analyzing Dominate Cultural Narratives of Religious Plurlaism: A Study of Oprah.com. This essay analyzes Oprah.com, the website for multimedia mogul Oprah Winfrey, to examine the tensions between dominate religious ideologies and pluralism in America. Matthew I. Feinberg. Critical Geography and the Real World in First-Year Writing Classrooms. By helping students confront the ideologies that shape their physical and cultural experiences, critical geography in first year writing classrooms may be one means of collapsing the perceived distance between the classroom and the real world. Hildy Miller. Image into Word: Glimpses of Mental Images in Writers Writing. This essay uses thought samples and interviews to show ways writers use mental imagery in non-creative writing task. Ed Comber. Critical Thinking Skills and Emotional-Response Discourse: Merging the Affective and Cognitive in Student-Authored Texts through Taxonomy Usage. This essay discusses a taxonomy designed to help students identify emotive-response discourse in their evolving texts, a process that joins emotion and cognitive to foster critical thinking. Helen Walker. Connecting. JoAnne Katzmarek—Thoughts Like Flying Grouse Steven L. VanderStaay—I\u27m With You, Huck Irwin Ramirez Leopando—A Moment of Connections Christopher Sweet—The Brightening Glance Howard Wolf—Personal Teaching Reviews W. Keith Duffy. Memoirs of Soul: Writing your Spiritual Autobiography. (Nan Phifer, 2002). Elizabeth Vander Lei. A Communion of Friendship: Literacy, Spiritual Practice, and Women in Recovery. (Beth Daniel, 2003). Marian MacCurdy. Writing To Save Your Life. (Michele Weldon, 2001)

JAEPL, Vol. 12, Winter 2006-2007

Essays Lynn Z. Bloom and Carla Hill. High Stakes Gambling in the Master Class High Stakes Gambling in the Master Class explores some of the unarticulated intangibles in a relationship between Master Teacher and Honors Student (who collaborated in writing this essay), calculated to produce a distinguished honors thesis, sometimes out of thin air, gambling, playing the hunches that will allow a gleam in the eye to metamorphose into gold on the page. Judith Beth Cohen. The Missing Body—Yoga and Higher Education. Using her own yoga practice as a basis, this author argues for more bodily involvement in learning and offers several exercises she has used to accomplish this. Carolina Mancuso. Bodies in the Classroom: Integrating Physical Literacy. This essay, based on research in Masters level classrooms for education students enrolled in a Graduate Literacy Program, addresses issues of mind-body-spirit teaching and learning.. Hildy Miller. Writing Aphrodite: Imagining a Rhetoric of Desire for a Feminist Writing Course. Reaching back to the post-Jungian goddess feminism of decades past, this essay shows how the mythical figure Aphrodite can serve as an image for an alternative rhetoric of desire in a contemporary feminist writing class. Stephanie Paterson. Lashing Out at \u27Intellectuals\u27 : Facing Fear on Both Sides of the Desk. The author identifies stages in working through a personal attack in a student\u27s composition. Turning toward conflict in a teacher researcher stance is a creative, self-renewing way to conduct the ongoing (often unexplored) intellectual-emotional work of writing teachers. Rich Murphy. McLuhan\u27s Warning, Frye\u27s Strategy, Emerson\u27s Dream. McLuhan\u27s Warning, Frye\u27s Strategy, Emerson\u27s Dream argues the vital function of literary writing in the academy. The essay maps a road from the warnings of catastrophe by Marshall McLuhan to Emerson\u27s dream of all American citizens being poets through the writing strategies of Northrop Frye. It is argued that what one learns through literary writing is especially important during the crises that are ongoing in the West. Susan A. Schiller . Uniting Creativity and Research; A Holistic Approach to Learning. The academy needs to move closer to a holistic form of education, one that values creativity and research equally. Helen Walker. Connecting. Danina Garcia —Message from a Student Writer. Libby Falk Jones—Anger in the Teaching Life Ryan Skinnell —Connections of a First-Year Teacher Lee Roecher —Guiding the Passion. Louise Morgan —Emails to Blow Off Steam. Reviews Mary Pettice. Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition. (Ed. Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc, 2004). Kerrie R. H. Farkas. Writing at the End of the World . (Richard Miller, 2005). Edward Sullivan. Field Notes on the Compassionate Life: A Search for the Soul of Kindness. (Marc Ian Barasch, 2005). Brad Lucas. (Re)Writing Craft: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies. (Tim Mayers, 2005)

JAEPL, Vol. 8, Winter 2002-2003

Essays Charles Suhor. James Moffett\u27s Lit Crit and Holy Writ. In one of Moffett\u27s final presentations, he traced parallels between literary criticism and the study of scripture from various traditions. He explained the development of his Points of View spectrum as a response to his high school teaching experiences and presented an updated version of the spectrum. Gina Briefs-Elgin. Something to Have at Heart: Another Look at Memorization. After tracing the history of learning by heart, this essay explores its advantages and suggest that we restore this time-honored practice which can enrich our students\u27 relationships with words and books and empower their personal lives. Christopher C. Weaver. The Rhetoric of Recovery: Can Twelve Step Programs Inform the Teaching of Writing? The article examines the spiritual dimensions of recovery programs and explores some of the ways the rhetoric of these programs as well as the structure of twelve step meetings may illuminate the nature of composition classes and particularly of peer writing groups. Brenda Daly. Stories of Re-Reading: Inviting Students to Reflect to Their Emotional Responses to Fiction. Although most literature courses teach students to focus on textual analysis, this essay argues that students should be given opportunities for exploring their emotional responses to the text. Devan Cook. Successful Blunders: Reflection, Deflection, Teaching. Often we expect students\u27 experience with assignments to reflect our own or those of previous students, but we may blunder when we base our teaching on past successes. By deflecting such assignments and constructing unexpected identities, students and instructors alike learn and teach. Terrance Riley. The Accidental Curriculum. True learning—learning which results in some permanent cognitive change—is far too unpredictable to be controlled by format curricular designs. The formal curriculum of English studies is valuable largely as a stage setting for educational accidents. Robbie Clifton Pinter. The Landscape Listens—Hearing the Voice of the Soul. This essay offers a view of Mary Rose O\u27Reilley\u27s radical listening, applying it to the classroom as a way for teachers and students to learn to their lives. Helen Walker. Connecting. Lisa Ruddick—We Are the Poetry Kathleen McColley Foster—Becoming a Professional: A Coming of Age Narrative from the 4C\u27s Chauna Craig—Writing the Bully Steven VanderStaay—Discipline 101 Meg Peterson—To Live Wildly Linda K. Parkyn—Coming Full Circle Reviews Nathaniel Teich. Reading, Writing, and Rising Up: Teaching About Social Justice and the Power of the Written Word. (Linda Christensen, 2000). Hepzibah Roskelly. Everyone Can Write: Essays Toward a Hopeful Theory of Writing and Teaching Writing. (Peter Elbow, 2000). Emily Nye. Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin. (Frank Farmer, 2001). Dennis Young. Teaching With Your Mouth Shut. (Donald L. Finkel, 2000)

JAEPL, Vol. 15, Winter 2009-2010

Essays Peter Elbow - Reflections from a Grateful Guest Editor Sheridan Blau - Believing and Doubting as Hermeneutic Metbod: Reading and Teaching Paradue Lost Tim Doherty - Lessons from tbe Believing Game Anne Ellen Geller - The Difficulty of Believing in Writing Across the Curriculum Shelly Sheats Harkness, Catherine Pullin Lane, Sue Mau, Amber Brass - The Believing Game in Mathematics: Stories in a Discipline of Doubt Judy Lightfoot - Saying Yes to Freestyle Volunteering: Doubting and Believing Clyde Moneyhun - Believing, Doubting, Deciding, Acting Irene Papoulis - A Refiection on Habitual Belief and Habitual Doubt Stephanie Paterson - Friday Writes: An Exercise in the Believing Game Donna Strickland - Before Belief: Embodiment and the Trying Game Peter Elbow - A Highly Incomplete Bibliography Reviews Julie J. Nichols - Meaning and The Evolution of Consciousness: A Retrospective on the Writing of Owen Barfield Charles Suhor - The Great Transfonnation: The Beginnings of Our Religious Traditions Charles Suhor - The Chalice and the Blade Edward Sullivan - The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance Connecting - Helen Walker Andrew Statum - The Question Vic Kryston -Conflict Resolution Jie Li - Teaching with Accent Dominique Zino - Space Joonna Smitherman Trapp - Composition Class 7:45 A

JAEPL, Vol. 9, Winter 2003-2004

Essays Kilian McCurrie. Spiritual Identities, Teacher Identities, and the Teaching of Writing. Through a case study, this article examines the ways teacher identity and spiritual identity intersect in the teaching of writing. By showing that a teacher\u27s pedagogy is prodoundly informed by a basic spiritual disposition, the author offers a view of teaching that is often neglected in studies of teacher identity. Robert Root. The Experimental Art. Nonfiction is an experimental art, as contemporary examples make clear, and writing teachers need to show students both how meaning arises from writers\u27 experiments with material and also how form from writers\u27 experiements at representing meaning. Candance Walworth. Engaged Buddhism & Women in Black: Our Grief Is Not a Cry for War. This paper explores principles, practices, and manifestations of engaged Busshism in the United States. It includes a personal narrative based on the author\u27s participation in Women in Black (a silent, symbolic protest against war) and classroom stories based on the author\u27s experience teaching at a Buddhist-inspired university. Laura Milner. Compos(t)ing Loss: Transformation in the Telling. Using composting as a metaphor, this author examines the transformative protential in writing about and bearing witness to stories of loss, particularly the death of a parent. Cristina Vischer Bruns. Encounters: Relationship in the Study and Teaching of Literature. While trends in the teaching of literature of the last few decades may seem at odds with one another, the thread that can weave them together is a recognition of relationship among readers, text, author, and other readers. Kia Jane Richmond. An Unspoken Trust—Violated. Reflecting on our decisions in the classroom, both when we are honest with our students & when we are not, can offer teachers opportunities for growth and change. Carolyn L. Piazza and Christine Jecko. Multiple Forms of Prewriting in Elementary Writing Literature. Multisensory prewriting invitations (creative visualizations, art, music, dreams, and mediations) affect writing fluency and idea generation in the first draft writing of elementary students. W. Keith Duffy. Community, Spirituality, and the Writing Classroom. From a spiritual perspective, this article critiques the concept of community as defined by scholars of rhetoric and composition; the author suggests that our experience of community in the writing classroom cab be enhanced if we strike a balance between doing and being. Helen Walker. Connecting. Jim Super—Fearless Pamela Hartman—English? I\u27d Rather Read A Book Nancy Myers—B Andrea Siegel—Walking the Talk, Breathing the Breath Traci L. Merritt—The Day Jenny Died Susan A. Schiller—Touched by the Spirit in AEPL Topics Wilma Romatz—On the Delicate Art of Teaching Reviews Dale Jacobs. The Energy to Teach (Donald H. Graves, 2001) Stan Scott. Writing with Elbow (Pat Belanodd, 2002) Sue Hum. Unfolding Bodymind (Brent Hocking, Johnna Haskell, Warren Linds, 2001) Lita Kurth. The Unconscious (Athony Easthope, 1999

JAEPL, Vol. 7, Winter 2001-2002

Morris Berman tells the story of his maternal grandfather, who, when he was five years old in 1883 or 1884, was sent to a Jewish elementary school in Belorussia. On the first day of class, the teacher startled the young boy by taking each child\u27s slate and smearing the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet—aleph and beys—on it in honey. His grandfather\u27s first lesson consisted of eating the letters off the slate. The symbolism of this act is complex, Berman muses, but central to the ritual is the belief that what is real must be taken into oneself, ingested: we literally eat the other, take it into our guts, and as a result are changed by it (267-68). A similar, although usually unspoken, belief continues to weave through literacy teaching in this century, in this country. Writing and reading, all acts of rhetoric, involve communication by the signs of consubstantiality, the appeal of identification, Kenneth Burke writes in A Rhetoric of Motives, and identification is hardly other than a name for the function of sociality (Attitudes 144). The quintessential word man who saw in language the poetic function of making, resonating to the original sense of the term poiesis, Burke tied our language and our making to our bodies. We are, after all, symbol-using animals, a definition that gives equal weight to body and language ( Definition 3-9). The lure of language is that it offers us the means to bridge our separations from one another; we can become consubstantial, of one substance. We can engage, and through that engagement we can write and read for tolerance and contemplation (Rhetoric xv). The seven articles in this issue honor the call of engagement, of identification for tolerance and contemplation, through sense-able teaching: teaching with the senses to the senses. We open with W. Keith Duffy who, in Imperfection: The Will-to Control and the Struggle of Letting Go, finds in a spiritual balance the ability to embrace the essential role of imperfection in the writing classroom. By engaging with our paradoxical and mixed-up natures, we can unite in meaningful ways. Randall Popken in Felt Sensing of Speech Acts in Written Genre Acquisition explores the necessary engagement of student writer and multiple texts as a means to evolve a felt sense of a new genre. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin\u27s concept of felt sense, Popken traces the connection between the development of a physical, tacit sense of genre knowledge and the development of rhetorical expertise in that genre. While Popken shapes the growth of rhetorical expertise, Caroline Mancuso shapes the rhetorical value of growing pains in Teacher Growing Pains. By acknowledging and attending to growing pains, what Dewey calls the travail of thought required to evolve a new perspective, readers and writers can grow in wholeness individually and in community, Mancuso argues. The sense of growing into new thinking by allowing it to enter our souls is the focus of Dennis Young\u27s A Poetics of Student Writing. The poetics of Young\u27s title refers to the soul-making, aesthetic dimension of student writing, a process that can be enacted only when we are actively involved with the making. Through an examination of student texts, Young promotes a poetic basis of mind in which students and teachers can foster an awareness of their own soul work. The necessity of engagement if further underscored by Dale Jacobs in Being There: Revising the Discourse of Emotion and Teaching, who argues that a teacher must be fully engaged in the classroom to create an atmosphere that fosters a student\u27s intellectual, emotion, and physical growth. Inviting us into his experience of learning of to listen deeply to his students, Jacobs teaches us how to enact that same deep listening in our own literacy classrooms. Central to engagement is the quality of unity, a dissolution of a dualistic mind set. Marilyn Middendorf tackles the issues of dualism directly in Discredited Metaphors of Mind Limit Our Vision. Middendorf claims that metaphors of mind steeped in dualistic, hierarchical imagery undermine our effectiveness in the classroom. She offers us a different vision of mind based on the materialism of current neurological theories of the mind, a version that explodes the mechanic sender-receiver, information transfer model of communication for a one that foster the engagement of dialogic communication. The cognitive and somatic learning involved in dressage serves as the start for effective teaching for Lorie Heggie in Flow, Centering, and the Classroom: Wisdom from an Ancient Friend. Drawing on her experience in learning how to center while engaged in classical riding, Heggie explores how such experience enables her to center in her writing classroom and how such experience enables her to help her students center as well. This physical-intellectual process, Heggie argues, requires our immersion in the task at hand so that we are one with the task, drawn into the marvelous current of flow. We are symbol-using animals who find in language the means of identification, of consubstantiality, and the need for it. Can we do less in our classrooms that teach sense-ably for engagement? In the spirit of sense-able teaching and the importance of the myriad faces of engagement, we introduce a new section: Connecting. Consisting of teacher narratives and edited by Helen Walker, each contribution serves to connect us more fully to our students\u27 growth and our own

Reviews

Lisa Langstraat. The Epistemic Music of Rhetoric: Toward the Temporal Dimension of Affect in Reader Response and Writing. (Steven B. Katz, 1996). Linda T Calendrillo. Images in Language, Media, and Mind. (Roy F. Fox, Ed., 1994). Judith Bradshaw-Brown. The Tao of Teaching. (Greta Nagel, 1994). Frances Jo Grossman. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. (Anne Lamott, 1994

JAEPL, Vol. 13, Winter 2007-2008

Essays Bell Hooks. Writing for Reconciliation: A Musing Devan Cook. The Value of Mutual Respect: What We Learn from Student Complaints . This essay discusses the emotional labor of teaching and the ways writing programs can support that work. Elizabeth Gardner, Patricia Calderwood, and Roben Toroysan. Dangerous Pedagogy Using data primarily drawn from undergraduate psychology classes, we reflect upon what humane but dangerous pedagogy illustrates about our teaching and our students\u27 learning. Karen Surman Paley. Applying Men and Women for Others to Writing about Archeology. This essay explores one archeology professor\u27s pedagogy of caring during a summer field study of a former state school and orphanage. Elizabeth Oakes and others. Reading Othello in Kentucky. Members of a graduate Shakespeare class at Western Kentucky University discuss Otherness in the context of Othello and national perceptions of Kentucky. Rachel Forrester. The Not Trying of Writing. A very spiritual not trying, or non-work, is at the heart of composition. Eudora Watson, Jennifer Mitchell, and Victoria Levitt. The Other End of the Kaleidoscope: Configuring Circles of Teaching and Learning. To reflect on and participate in reconsideration of convention in academic discourse, this essay presents three voices in three genres. Helen Walker. Connecting. Steven DeGeorge —The Things They Bring to School . Johanna Rodgers —Translating Authority Jeremiah Conway —Emily\u27s Cave Reviews Kabi Hartman. Writing With, Through and Beyond the Text: An Ecology of Language. (Rebecca Luce-Kapler, 2004) Caleb Corkery. African American Literacies Unleashed: Vernacular English and the Composition Classroom. (Arnetha F. Ball and Ted Lardner, 2005) Joel Kline . Race, Rhetoric, and Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. (Adam J. Banks, 2006) Terri Pullen Guezzar. Why Is Corporate America Bashing Our Public Schools? (Kathy Emery and Susan Ohanian, 2004

JAEPL, Vol. 11, Winter 2005-2006

Essays Kami Day. We Learn More Than Just Writing. In a composition class, students learn a great deal more, for good or ill, than just strategies for writing. This article shows that, as students and teachers learn to recognize and value their own inner teachers, they can also develop relationships with each other that nourish their spirits as well as their intellects. Gina DeBlase. \u27I Have a New Understanding\u27: Critical Narrative Inquiry as Transformation in the English-History Classroom. This case study highlights what roles classroom discussion and activity around literature, history, and society play in developing one student’s understanding of complex social issues, and what ways of talking and thinking develop over time. Geraldine DeLuca. Headstands, Writing, and the Rhetoric of Radial Self-Acceptance. By emphasizing the importance of patient practice as an end in itself, yoga offers a model teaching and learning writing that can help students move forward in a context of self-acceptance and find the sources of their own talents and values. Sue Hum. Idioms as Cultural Common Places: Corporeal Lessons from Hokkien Idioms. This essay uses idioms, especially Hokkien idioms, to counter the western predisposition of separating mind and body, arguing that they underscore the mind-body shift that occurs with the acquisition of academic discourses. Laurence Musgrove. What Happens When We Read: Picturing a Reader’s Responsibilities. A graphic representation of reading as a process enables students to respond more fully and responsibly to literature by attending to what they contribute to the act of reading, what the world to the text can offer, what kinds of responses are available to them, and what they can do to make sure they have responded as thoughtfully as possible. Alexandria Peary. Mindfulness, Buddhism, and Rogerian Argument. Use of Buddhist mindfulness practices with Rogerian argument highlights Roger’s ideas of empathy and conscious listening which help develop a rhetorical imagination in the student. Stan Scott. Poetry and the Art of Meditation: Going Behind the Symbols. Combining reader-response theory with spiritual teachings, this article explores how reading poetry may serve as an introduction to the art of meditation. Helen Walker. Connecting. Louise Morgan—Street Science: An English Teacher’s Introduction to Street Life. Amy Wink—\u27In the Middle of Difficulty Lies Opportunity\u27— Albert Einstein Marcia Nell—The New Partnership Gergana Vitanova—Negotiating an Identity in Graduate School as a Second Language Speaker. Judy Huddleston—A Cat in the Sun: Reflections on Teaching. Reviews Edward J. Sullivan. Ken Wilber: Thought as Passion. (Frank Visser, 2003). Gabriele Rico. A Way to Move: Rhetorics of Emotion and Composition Studies. (Ed. Dale Jacobs and Laura R. Micciche, 2003). Megan Brown. Living the Narrative Life: Stories as a Tool for Meaning Making. (Gian S. Pagnucci, 2004). Kim McCollum-Clark. Personally Speaking: Experience as Evidence in Academic Discourse. (Candace Spigelman, 2004)