Working Theory Critical Composition Studies for Students and Teachers

Subjects:

• Education » Higher Education
• Education » Educational Foundations
• Anthropology » Linguistics
• Education » Multicultural Education

Reviews:

• I found Judith Goleman's book to be a provocative rendering of the intersection between two necessarily related fields:theory and composition.
  —
  NACADA Journal

• Endorsement From
  David Bartholomae
  University of Pittsburgh: Working Theory is a very impressive piece of work. As a profession, we don't know how to read student essays, for example, to make them interesting, notable, complex - even though they represent a massive cultural project, the organized production of hundreds of thousands of readers and writers, all in the name of English. In this context, Goleman's book will be a powerful and useful intervention in Composition Studies. Working Theory is an impressive and, for its use of classroom materials, original work.
• Endorsement From
  Lilia Bartolome
  Harvard University: Judith Goleman's book Working Theory: Critical Composition Studies for Students and Teachers is not only timely, but it also unveils the ideology that informs the false dichotomy between theory and practice. Working Theory is must reading for all Reading and Writing teachers who want to transcend the technicism of their own field.
• Endorsement From
  Patricia Bizzell
  College of the Holy Cross: What can critical educators hope to accomplish? Goleman approaches this question carefully and thoroughly, exploring the work of major theorists such as Freire, Bakhtin, and Fish, and articulating a concept of specific discursive analysis that offers cautious promise to empower students and teachers together as critical subjects of history.
• Endorsement From
  Paulo Freire
  Pontificia Universidade Catolica
  Sao Paulo, Brazil: Working Theory speaks directly to the ever-present hidden theory in practice by effectively showing how to unveil practice in the sense of acquiring knowledge or recognizing in it the theory that is minimally or not yet perceived. Judith Goleman also challenges us to think about practice or theoretical task or theoretical practice.

Table of Contents:

• Foreword by Paulo Freire
• Series Foreword by Donaldo Macedo
• Acknowledgments
• Working Theory: Introduction
• Reading and Writing: Working the Dialectic since Marx
• Toward Internally Persuasive Discourse Effects: Working Bakhtin's Theory of Language
• Working the Relations between Academic Discourse and Subjectivity: A Cautionary Tale
• How-to-Hope in Stanley Fish: Foundationalism Reworked
• Epilogue: Working the "Specific Reality of Discourse"
• Works Cited
• Index