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The vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar's position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching, on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen's book is split into two halves -- yet both are derived from his work in the classroom.The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry -- all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.The second half of the book contains essays on Plato's dialogues -- primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras -- as a means to interrogate the position of teacher. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen's own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that prefigure the available positions for both "teacher" and "student" in contemporary education.What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each -- the "personal" and the "scholarly" -- from his position as teacher. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric.
Summary
In Writing/Teaching Paul Kameen brings together essays examining the process of teaching and ones that look at the figures of teacher and student in contemporary education using the writings of Plato and Socrates. Winner of the 2002 CCCC Outstanding Book Award
