A Note from the Associate Editor

Who reads books about teaching? Where are they read and discussed? How do these books shape the classrooms of graduate students and faculty? In this issue of the journal, we approach these questions through the work of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign pedagogy collective. Guided by Professor Dale Bauer, this group of fifteen graduate students prepared for teaching a literature course at the UIUC by immersing themselves in current discussions about teaching.

The students in this graduate course on teaching read five books: 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. In their collaboratively written essay, the students reference a range of other writing on the college and university classroom—including works by bell hooks, Ira Shor, Jane Tompkins, and Elaine Showalter.

Their essay elaborates, in their own words, a "rhetoric of teaching," using excerpts from teaching statements they composed as they worked through the current debates in literature pedagogy. Bauer asks her students to write a critical review as well, and we include two of those full-length reviews: Merton Lee's discussion of Elizabeth Ellsworth's Places of Learning: Media, Architecture, Pedagogy (2005) and Melissa Tombro's assessment of Steven Mailloux's Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006). We offer the voices of these students, a remarkable testimony, as one set of answers to the questions about who reads new books on teaching—and how those books are used.

Readers of Pedagogy have come to expect both single-author and roundtable reviews of new books in the field. We offer this reviews section as one alternative to the standard format—one among many possible ways to account for recent books in the field—in this case, books that are making a difference as graduate students wrestle with the ongoing discussion about teaching this journal seeks to foster. We welcome your suggestions about other ways to answer the questions we pose here. Who reads books about teaching? Where are they read and discussed? How do these books shape the classrooms of graduate students and faculty?