Editors' Introduction

As we write this introduction, it is the end of another academic year, and we are surrounded by papers that need responding to, by exams that need correcting, and by what seem to be the million other tasks that always need doing at the end of a term. Summer—with its promise of travel, of a space for other kinds of work (academic and not), of time for rejuvenation—is almost here. If we could just get these last few things done! So you will forgive us, we hope, if this is not our longest introduction. We all know that some semesters are longer than others—this would not be a truthful journal devoted to teaching if we did not occasionally acknowledge the exhaustion we feel after some terms are over.

You, our readers, though, will have received this issue at the beginning of the new academic year. And if you are like us, you will have found that the lassitude of the spring has given way to the anticipation of the fall. Much of our own excitement each fall comes from facing a new class, thinking and rethinking about things we have taught for years, about new things we will teach for the first time, about the new students we will meet and the students with whom we will have the opportunity to continue our conversations from previous terms. We hope that this issue of Pedagogy will be part of that invigorating reentry into another school year.

In putting this issue together, we were struck by how well all the articles in it fulfilled the journal's mandate, set forth on the masthead, both to make connections across subfields of English studies and to provide "spirited and informed debate from a multiplicity of positions and perspectives." Brenda Jo Brueggemann and Debra A. Moddelmog, for example, discuss the commonalities between their pedagogical approaches as shaped by disability studies and queer theory; Kevin Brooks examines the relationship between genre studies and hypertext; Barbara B. Duffelmeyer brings the work of critical pedagogy to bear on computer-enhanced composition classrooms; and Benton Jay Komins, Adam Knee, Sharon L. Mazer, David G. Nicholls, and Stephanie C. Palmer investigate what Mazer describes as how pedagogically we can "engage with the dialectic between the global and the local on a daily basis." These articles all provide not only new ways of thinking about the individual subjects under examination but, more important, exciting models of scholarly hybridity.

Finally, Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori, maintaining the provocative tradition of "spirited and informed debate" that the previous commentaries in this journal have established, critiques the notion that the scholarship of teaching is a relatively new endeavor and goes on not only to survey its history but, significantly, to suggest concretely a future for what she calls "pedagogy as reflexive praxis."

We hope that this issue of Pedagogy will give you new ways, then, of thinking "reflexively" and "practically." Happy teaching. We'll talk again at the end of this term.