Forging a Pedagogical Community

This collaboratively written essay offers an account of a group of graduate students preparing to teach a literature course at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. The students, guided by their professor, Dale Bauer, immerse themselves in current debates about teaching by reading Patrick Allitt's I'm the Teacher, You're the Student, Shari Stenberg's Professing and Pedagogy, Paul Kameen's Writing/Teaching, Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe, and one textbook, Mariolina Salvatori and Pat Donahue's The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. The essay references a range of additional writing on the college and university classroom—including works by bell hooks, Ira Shor, Jane Tompkins, and Elaine Showalter. The essay includes excerpts from teaching statements the students composed as they worked through the current debates in literature pedagogy.