Book Description

This collection of essays brings together Mary Louise Pratt's original essay, the 10-year-old "Professing in the Contact Zone," with 14 responses that interpret, extend, and challenge Pratt's work. The essays examine how contact zone dynamics play out in various pedagogical spaces. Following an introduction by the editor, essays in Section I, Spaces, are: (1) "First Contact: Composition Students' Close Encounters with College Culture" (Paul Jude Beauvais); (2) "Multiculturalism, Contact Zones, and the Organization of English Studies" (Patricia Bizzell); (3) "Contact Zones: Composition's Content in the University" (Katherine K. Gottschalk); (4) "Frontiers of the Contact Zone" (Thomas Philion); (5) "Safe Houses and Sacrifices: Filling the Rooms with Precious Riches" (Daphne Key). Essays in Section II, Clashes and Conflicts, are: (6) "Fault Lines in the Contact Zone" (Richard E. Miller); (7) "Reconstitution and Race in the Contact Zone" (Robert D. Murray); (8) "'Can't We All Just Get Along?' When a College Community Resists the Contact Zone" (Diane Penrod); (9) "Contact, Colonization, and Classrooms: Language Issues via Cisneros's 'Woman Hollering Creek' and Villanueva's 'Bootstraps'" (Mary R. Harmon). Essays in Section III, Community, are: (10) "Teaching in the Contact Zone: Multiple Literacies/Deep Portfolio" (Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson); (11) "Writing Centers as Linguistic Contact Zones and Borderlands" (Carol Severino); (12) "Teaching in the Contact Zone: The Myth of Safe Houses" (Janice M. Wolff); (13) "Contact Zones in Institutional Culture: An Anthropological Approach to Academic Programs" (Carole Yee); and (14) "Telling Stories: Rethinking the Personal Narrative in the Contact Zone of a Multicultural Classroom" (Jeanne Weiland Herrick). Contains an afterword "On the Teacher's Zone of Effectivity" (Richard E. Miller). (NKA)