The assumption, of course, was that composition journals by definition were dedicated to issues of teaching. But while composition as a field has been more concerned with theorizing teaching than have the various fields of literary or linguistic study, journals like College Composition and Communication are devoted to the scholarship of rhetoric and composition and not to teaching, any more than Victorian Studies is. Thus Pedagogy aims to broaden the critical discussion of teaching across English studies. Articles that are now spread throughout many journals and hence are often overlooked can here achieve concentrated force and be given the critical examination they deserve. We believe strongly that such a forum is vital to English studies.
Pedagogy is that way.
Although much of her argument could be applied across disciplines, Gallagher teases out the implications of her theory by using the relatively new field of African literature as an illustration. Her article is important because it refuses to come to an either-or answer and instead grapples with the range of theoretical and practical considerations the teacher faces when composing a syllabus. In doing so, he diverts our attention from what we teach in our English courses to how we teach it. In the updated version Linkin surveys the impact of feminist and historicist literary theory on teaching in the field of British Romanticism. Whereas many articles in this issue focus on a subdiscipline of English studies, Bleich offers a truly interdisciplinary, utopian vision of teaching the range of texts, genres, issues, questions, and conflicts subsumed in the concept of language use.