Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations

Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse. By Michael J. Zerbe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Paula Comeau Although several rhetoricians have outlined numerous reasons why science writing needs to be addressed within the humanities, few have described how instructors can incorporate science writing into their classrooms. In Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse, Michael Zerbe effectively argues that teaching science literacy and the rhetoric of science is the responsibility of the entire university, and, moreover, he offers pedagogical approaches for meeting this responsibility. A key event that triggered this call for improved science literacy was Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), which attempted to illustrate the differences in intellectual capacity among different people and how the plight of a few people directly influences the paths of the majority. Zerbe describes the response to the book’s research and statistics as both “immediate and heated,” as it implied that people of certain races were somehow intellectually inferior (1). The public’s inability to refute the questionable science presented in The Bell Curve made the state of science literacy a front and center http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Duke University Press

Science in the Writing Classroom: Interdisciplinary Rhetorical Explorations

Download PDF
8 pages

Loading next page...
 
/lp/duke-university-press/science-in-the-writing-classroom-interdisciplinary-rhetorical-L6eaQoem0o
Publisher
Duke University Press
Copyright
Copyright 2011 by Duke University Press
ISSN
1531-4200
eISSN
1533-6255
DOI
10.1215/15314200-2010-028
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse. By Michael J. Zerbe. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Paula Comeau Although several rhetoricians have outlined numerous reasons why science writing needs to be addressed within the humanities, few have described how instructors can incorporate science writing into their classrooms. In Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse, Michael Zerbe effectively argues that teaching science literacy and the rhetoric of science is the responsibility of the entire university, and, moreover, he offers pedagogical approaches for meeting this responsibility. A key event that triggered this call for improved science literacy was Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray’s The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (1994), which attempted to illustrate the differences in intellectual capacity among different people and how the plight of a few people directly influences the paths of the majority. Zerbe describes the response to the book’s research and statistics as both “immediate and heated,” as it implied that people of certain races were somehow intellectually inferior (1). The public’s inability to refute the questionable science presented in The Bell Curve made the state of science literacy a front and center

Journal

Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture – Duke University Press

Published: Jan 1, 2011

There are no references for this article.