The introduction to Genres of Teaching outlines a new strategy to address the longstanding problem for education arising from the multi-paradigmatic state of learning theory – the unreconciled notions of learning pursued in the various branches of psychology. Prior strategies have sought a unification of learning theory, either by authorizing only one approach as valid, by integrating distinct theorizations, or by simply declaring learning to be a unitary construct, albeit complex and multifaceted. From a Kuhnian perspective, this imperative to unification reflects the struggle of all new sciences to achieve unity as needed to progress from the adolescent or preparadigm state to full scientific maturity. Instead, the "genres" strategy recognizes the distinct learning goals that motivate education, aligning each with its own independent theorization of learning. Shortcomings of our contemporary discourse about learning and teaching are reviewed through analysis of reform pedagogical models and traditional pedagogical models.

This final chapter examines changes that would be needed for teacher education to accord with the genres approach. Teacher practice across three genres of teaching entails substantially more theoretical knowledge and more demanding pedagogical expertise than is currently expected. A major goal of the genres approach is to shift teaching from a mimetic practice learned through enculturation into established pedagogical cultures to an intellectually grounded practice based in learning theory. This is achieved through a theory-to-practice sequence as is found in medical education. Divided into four phases, the proposed program structure encompasses a full undergraduate degree and a two-year master’s degree: Phase 1, learning theories and associated pedagogies; Phase 2, crossdisciplinary analysis and practice of individual pedagogies; Phase 3, coordinating multiple pedagogies; Phase 4, teaching internship.

Genres of Teaching is an approach to pedagogy that recognizes the distinct learning goals (skills, concepts, cultural practices) motivating teaching, aligning each with its own independent theorization of learning. This chapter provides an overview of the Crossdisciplinary Framework of learning goals, learning theories, and pedagogical methods that constitute the genres approach. A chapter addendum compares Thomas Kuhn’s well-known theory of scientific paradigms with his later work in this area and examines psychology as a preparadigmatic science.

This chapter examines the Story of Apollonius, King of Tyre as a revisionist shipwreck fiction that repurposes epic paradigms. The chapter reads the Cyrenean episode (chs. 11–24) as a sustained imitation – and critique – of Homer’s Phaeacia and Vergil’s Carthage. Unlike Odysseus or Aeneas, Apollonius resists narrative concealment and erotic distraction, instead reasserting his identity through skill, performance, and pedagogy. His learned character transforms a Phaeacian paradise into a classroom and converts a Didonian princess into a regina docta. The chapter argues that the novel appropriates the tropes of “bad” fiction to redefine the genre as morally and intellectually edifying. The text enacts a metaliterary defense of fiction, presenting Apollonius as an alternative heroic model who surpasses canonical predecessors in virtue and wisdom. The novel thereby mounts a serious challenge to the status of canonical epic, reimagining prose narrative as a vehicle for paideia. In this reading, the Story of Apollonius emerges not as an escapist tale but as a learned fiction that invites its readers to decode, critique, and ultimately embrace the educative potential of prose romance.

This chapter examines Allen Ginsberg’s life-long relationship to education through an exploration of his formative years in both high school and at Columbia University in New York, his founding of the Jack Kerouac School at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, with Anne Waldman as well as his work teaching at Brooklyn College, and finally the legacy of his writing as it continues to be taught. Ginsberg always had a scholarly disposition, and thus it comes as little surprise that he was an award-winning student in high school. This success continued into his Columbia years, though his education expanded outside the classroom to include a “Beat” underworld that introduced him to illicit substances and clandestine texts. While he left the university to pursue poetry, he reentered it later in life to teach, with Buddhism being a key component of his pedagogy, especially at Naropa. While not everyone was a fan of Ginsberg’s pedagogy, most found his heartfelt attempt to share his own thoughts, feelings, and ideas on his own favorite poets in the classroom to have been enlightening. This chapter concludes with a discussion of the problems and potential Ginsberg still holds as his controversial work enters the classroom today.

This chapter brings the book to a close by advancing an understanding of languaging as a relational, embodied, and political practice. Rather than treating language as a neutral vehicle for transmitting information, the chapter emphasises how languaging is deeply entwined with questions of identity, belonging, and power. It is shown to be simultaneously playful and precarious, resistant and creative, continually challenging static and purified notions of language. The chapter further develops the notion of pedagogical languaging as a way of reframing education in response to the radical cultural and communicative reconfigurations of the twenty-first century. Pedagogy, it argues, must move beyond the delivery of standardised curricula to become the intentional design of spaces where learners mobilise their full semiotic repertoires such as linguistic, embodied, cultural, and digital in dynamic, relational, and multimodal meaning-making.

Florence Price’s contributions to the keyboard literature range from pedagogical works for beginners, many of which she composed for her own students, to expansive multi-movement pieces that were written with the concert musician in mind. In addition to their varying levels of difficulty, variety also comes in the form of their stylistic influences. African American folk idioms are prevalent, as are the sound worlds of nineteenth century Romanticism and early twentieth-century chromatic experimentalism. As this chapter shows, Price’s keyboard music additionally sheds light on the influence of the publishing industry and the market for these works. Ultimately, however, Price’s keyboard output provides a window into her impetus as an educator and composer, and reveals Price the pianist and organist who frequently programmed her unpublished works in her own recitals and played for pleasure.

This chapter illuminates the deeper history of a Black concert music tradition that undergirded Price’s path. Part of a systemic response to de jure and de facto segregation, the Black concert music tradition became not only an alternative to the white mainstream; it also presented a multifunctional use of the concert stage: a space to perform old and new repertoires and educate audiences on Black music history. The intersection of Emancipation, establishment of colleges and universities for the formerly enslaved, Jim Crow laws, the institutionalization of music education, and the rise of a Black professional class laid the foundation for the development and cultivation of a community of Black composers, performers, teachers, and patrons – a community that Price actively participated in and contributed to.

What can one say about early theatre in the absence of virtually any evidence? After rejecting the idea of a uniformly “primitive” theatre, this chapter argues that we can look to the ways that theatre has long been used as a medium for five social activities and infer that it was used for similar purposes in the far-distant past. First is entertainment, an activity in its own right that can also support other social activities. Second is ritual, which can use theatre as a medium for telling its narratives or as an offering to the divine. Third is devotion, which focuses on the spiritual development of the participants themselves. Fourth is social commentary, the offering of observations about the world in which the performers and audiences live. And fifth is pedagogy, whose emphasis is explicitly on shaping the audience’s thoughts on sociopolitical issues, cultural heritage, and/or appropriate behaviors.

This chapter shares the effects of a multi-year project to integrate explicit pronunciation instruction into the curriculum of intermediate Spanish courses at a liberal arts undergraduate university. The pedagogical materials incorporate foundational linguistic principles, such as awareness of the expert unconscious knowledge of a speaker’s native language, an appreciation of the linguistic diversity present across cultures, and a scientific approach to creating and testing hypotheses about how a language works as part of L2 language learning. The authors and researchers found effects in L2 learning beyond the scope of these specific topics: students made connections from pronunciation to other areas of the grammar; students used their expert native language knowledge to recognize patterns in the L2; students demonstrated increased appreciation for dialectical diversity, including heritage speaker productions; and students demonstrated greater comfort with using the L2 more frequently and in more contexts. The chapter closes with a discussion of the benefits to instructors as well as some recommendations for how to incorporate linguistic foundations in other language classes.

This chapter engages with the scholarship of legal academics Upendra Baxi and Ratna Kapur. In conversation with the academics, I read two of their texts: ‘An Open Letter to the Chief Justice of India’ (OL) co-authored by Baxi and his colleagues Vasudha Dhagamwar, Raghunath Kelkar and Lotika Sarkar; and Subversive Sites: Feminist Engagements with Law in India (SS) co-authored by Kapur and her friend and colleague Brenda Cossman. I look at how, while addressing questions of gender, class and caste, the formation of the OL inhabited conversations between Baxi, his colleagues, a judge, and a tribal girl named Mathura, drawing on whose experiences the letter was written, in late-1970s post-Emergency India. I draw out from these conversations how Baxi shaped his role and responsibility in public life as a feminist law teacher and how, in doing so, he shaped mutual ties with his academic discipline of law. I locate my reading of Subversive Sites in the context of the legal academia from where Kapur and her co-author, Brenda Cossman, conceived the ideas and practices that informed the writing of their book. SS inhabited Kapur’s conversations in the early 1990s after the economic liberalisation of India, with her friend and colleague Cossman and the Indian women’s movement. Through these conversations, Kapur shaped her role and responsibility in public life as a post-colonial feminist legal scholar, and in doing so, formed mutual relations with her academic discipline of law.

This introduction offers an overview of the volume’s variety of literary critical approaches to reading William James, and its account of James’s equally various approaches to literature. We draw out some of the generative through-lines among these approaches and spell out some of their broader implications for how we read, teach, and respond to literature. In outlining the three sections of the book – Style, Influence, and Method – we show how James historically informs and prospectively transforms the way we think about the bedrock premises of literary study. As we contend, the persistent richness of James’s work and the ongoing relevance of literary study itself are rooted in similar commitments: For both, any critical investigation must synchronously value expression, edification, and application. Our volume foregrounds these stakes – the aesthetic, the transmissive, the practical – because together they comprise an ideal bridge between James and literary study, a mutual paradigm that we contend is fundamentally pedagogical in nature.

A key challenge in addressing race ideas and racialisation today lies in educating the public about race-related structural inequalities and exclusionary ideologies. Anti-racist educators employing Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) are increasingly rejecting so-called ‘colourblind’ and universalist views of racial harmony, to instead argue that racial inequality is rooted in institutions, ideologies, and norms, and possesses a certain permanence. From a critical realist perspective, the chapter argues that such explanations may overlook certain aspects of racism, overlooking the complex interplay between systems and lifeworld phenomena (Layder, 2018) in relation to global and transnational racial dynamics. Drawing from Layder’s Domain Theory, the chapter presents a CR-based alternative for the conceptualisation, design, and delivery of an English for Liberal Arts Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course in Japan created to raise awareness of the global sociology of race ideas and racialisation. The benefits of this critical realist-informed, well-situated, and culturally responsive course design are highlighted.

This concluding dialogue seeks to convert James’s discursive ideas about education into scenes of lived encounter – between teachers and students, bodies and minds, thinking and feeling – while honoring the possibilities for surprise that such encounters open. In this endeavor, we are also extending Stephanie Hawkins’s work, which reminds us of how James uses the term conversion – meaning “to turn with” or “turn together” – to describe the process through which we come into transformative relation with someone or something other than ourselves. James’s dialectical, often gradual process of “educational” conversion seems to us to offer useful correctives to many incumbent histories of the discipline that would rely on entrenched and reductive genealogies of authority. By reconnecting James’s understanding of conversion with his commitment to conversation, we aim to give living voice to the cluster of deeply felt relations that constitute the life practices we call “teaching” and “learning.”