Fiction Commons^™

Unbalancing Acts: Plagiarism As Catalyst For Instructor Emotion In The Composition Classroom, Ann E. Biswas

Ann E. Biswas

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

Freedom Is A Good Book And A Sugar High, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

This is a creative nonfiction piece about reading literature with an inmate.

Familiar Strangers: International Students In The U.S. Composition Course, Elena Lawrick, Fatima Esseili

Fatima Esseili

This chapter presents selected findings from our study of a well-established ESL writing program at a U.S. university with a large population of international undergraduate students. The study was conducted in all 13 writing sections. The instruments included demographic data from university registrars; one instructor survey, administered at the end of the semester; and two student surveys, one administered at the beginning of the semester and one at the end. The instructor survey response rate was 100% (13 teachers); the student survey response rates were 82.5% (161 students) and 88% (171 students), respectively.

The reported findings inform five areas: an …

Training Graduate Assistants, Bryan Bardine

Bryan Bardine

This article was featured in the journal's '4Sites Post-secondary' section. Overall, the goals for summer training are threefold:

• TAs need to become familiar with each other.
• TAs need to be knowledgeable about the material.
• TAs should be somewhat at ease in a classroom environment.

Hermann Hesse’S 'Siddhartha' As Divine Comedy, Bryan Bardine

Bryan Bardine

Comedy has always been more difficult to define and pin down than tragedy. Part of the difficulty may be that comedy is, by its very nature, more protean than tragedy: comedy often takes delight in breaking the rules. Moreover, tragedy has been so memorably described in The Poetics that Aristotle may have unintentionally molded the shape of tragedy through the ages. There are different kinds of tragedy, to be sure, but they are usually variations of a similar theme and form. Perhaps because Aristotle's treatise on comedy has been lost, comedy was left free to develop in numerous ways. In …