Re Visioning Composition Textbooks
Conflicts of Culture, Ideology, and Pedagogy
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Explores the cultures, ideologies, traditions, and the material and political conditions that influence the writing and publishing of textbooks.
Description
An exploration of the sometimes tenuous relationship between textbooks and the discipline of composition and rhetoric, (Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks critically scrutinizes the culture of textbooks from the vantage point of scholars and teachers. It examines a variety of textbooks including: standard rhetorics, handbooks, cross-cultural anthologies, readers, technical textbooks, and argumentation textbooks. Different perspectives are used to discuss the cultures, ideologies, traditions, and the material and political conditions that influence the writing and publishing of these works. Contributors raise challenging questions about the relationship between textbooks and the cultures which produce them, the discipline of which they are an indispensable part, and the classrooms in which they are to have their most tangible effects on teaching and learning.
Xin Liu Gale is Assistant Professor of Writing and English at Syracuse University. She is the author of Teachers, Discourses, and Authority in the Postmodern Composition Classroom, also published by SUNY Press. Fredric G. Gale is Associate Professor of Writing and English at Syracuse University. He has coedited several books and is the author of Political Literacy: Rhetoric, Philosophy and the Possibility of Justice, also published by SUNY Press.
Reviews
"(Re)Visioning Composition Textbooks intelligently addresses a significant issue in the profession. From the time of Adam and Eve before the fall until recently, the profession ignored the problematics of textbooks. Now we are beginning to take the theory, effectiveness, economics, and politics of textbooks seriously. " — Ross Winterowd, Professor Emeritus, University of Southern California