In their breakthrough anthology of women’s rhetoric, Available Means, Kate Ronald and Joy Ritchie presented the first comprehensive collection of women’s rhetorical theory and practice from the third century B.C. to 2001. With that expansive gathering of women’s rhetoric, they raised questions about gender, difference, and the rhetorical canon, challenging the most long-standing definitions of rhetorical theory itself. With this remarkable and groundbreaking volume, Teaching Rhetorica, they ask well-known scholars in the discipline of composition studies to consider the next important question that this new body of women’s rhetoric poses: How does the study of gender inform writing instruction in the post-secondary classroom?
In Teaching Rhetorica important thinkers such as Andrea Lunsford, Lisa Ede, Krista Ratcliffe, Wendy Hesford, Eileen Schell, Kathryn Flannery, and Nancy Welch extend their study of feminist rhetorical theory and practice to the classroom. Their wide-ranging essays reexamine theories, practices, and pedagogies in light of expanded understandings of rhetoric, gender, race, and transnational perspectives, and, as a consequence, they revise our understandings of teaching and learning.
Teaching Rhetorica presents the diversity of practices scholars have developed as they have taught Rhetorica and demonstrates Rhetorica’s potential for scholars, teachers, and students. The strategies that emerge are innovative and surprising, and in their surprise they offer a penetrating glimpse of minds, careers, and disciplines verging on a new paradigm. The contributors to Teaching Rhetorica help us discover how the expanding body of Rhetorica is changing conceptions of theory, pedagogy, and professional practice.
