How can college composition instructors teach students to value emotion as a form of knowledge?
How are emotion and reason related?
In the book Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, rhetoric scholar Laura Micciche asks the question, “Why should writing classrooms be sanctioned as spaces where emotions are ‘taught’, and what does it even mean to teach emotion?” This website positions some important rhetoric of emotion scholars in conversation with one another per their own answers to the above question.
The scholars you'll read about on the following pages explain the feminist and ethical stakes of pedagogies that intervene in the meaning of emotion. They offer ways to think about the role of emotion in the development of student writers' critical inquiry skills and address how to teach emotion ethically in a college composition classroom.
But first, what is emotion? And why should writing instructors care? Read on.