New Release Books by Lil Brannon

"The public classroom is a place where ideas can be engaged, interrogated, argued for, and investigated without fear of reprisal and in the spirit of inquiry- every idea can be questioned and critiqued, even the teacher's." -Michelle Comstock, Mary Ann Cain, and Lil Brannon Creating public space allows diverse voices to be heard and engaged. It enables all participants to explore the contradictions, coherences, and conflicts of their identities in relation to one another. Drawing on multidisciplinary research, Michelle Comstock, Mary Ann Cain, and Lil Brannon explore what counts as research in composition, discuss whose voices matter, and demonstrate how teachers can foster and support diverse classroom perspectives. Composing Public Space: highlights and critiques the problems of privatizing public debate encourages teachers to engage with students in investigating assumptions and ideas provides models and methods for working toward collective action to resist privatization. Teaching must foster genuine inquiry, critical thinking, and the oral and written representation of individual and collective identities. Composing Public Space invites you to take a stand and make a case for the creation of public space and collective civic engagement in every classroom.

C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon are at their best when they are being polemical. - Composition Studies This is a book for parents, teachers, and students who believe they have a right to share in the making of American educational policy. Its theme is the goals and means of critical (also called liberatory) pedagogy, specifically of reading and writing instruction in schools and colleges. The book examines "representation" in the school world, how things are named in that world, who has authority to do the naming (and who doesn't), how different educational "stories" cast parents, teachers, and students in active or passive roles, and what rationales underlie the differences. Drawing on their twenty years each as composition teachers and writing program administrators, the authors critique alternative definitions of "literacy" in particular, ranged across the American political spectrum, in order to offer a way to examine the rhetoric of the literacy debate.

Presents a variety of lessons and activities to help students create a daybook to help them organize their thoughts.

The argument of this book is that the earliest tradition of Western rhetoric, the classical perspective of Aristotle and Cicero, continues to have the greatest impact on writing instruction--albeit an unconscious impact. This occurs despite the fact that modern rhetoric no longer accepts either the views of mind, language, and world underlying ancient theory or the concepts about discourse, knowledge, and communication presented in that theory. As a result, teachers are depending on ideas as outmoded as they are unreflectively accepted. Knoblauch and Brannon maintain that the two traditions are fundamentally incompatible in their assumptions and concepts, so that writing teachers must make choices between them if their teaching is to be purposeful and consistent. They suggest that the modern tradition offers a richer basis for instruction, and they show what teaching from that perspective looks like and how it differs from traditional teaching.

This is a writing text based on how real writers write, treating writing and revising as essentially the same thing. The book focuses on the choices writers make as they find and shape their meanings from an initial idea in their journals or freewriting, through drafting and receiving responses from peers and teachers, to the final publishable form. Writers Writing shows all drafts (from journal entries to finished published pieces) that students and professionals have written; includes a chapter on journals that shows not only how writers have used their initial tentative observations and perceptions in their work but also how they have used their journals to chart their writing processes; demonstrates how students can become better readers of their own texts; shows how peer writing groups can help a writer generate ideas and revise a text; shows students how to use teacher' comments in revising their texts; illustrates the choices that writers make in re-envisioning their work; gives strategies for getting started and trying out different ways of saying something.