Explores how all types of fiction yield insights for educational theory and practice. Drawing on curriculum theory, literary analysis, psychology and feminism, the author argues that fiction has great teaching power as it connects readers with their alliances within themselves.

How We Work is a collection of essays by writers from across the disciplines on the ways they produce work. Each writer offers a description of the processes and quirks of putting thoughts into form. Some of the essays are humorous, confessing to the ways writers confront the terror of the blank page. Others are helpful, offering hints and analyses. All give personal reflection on how creating is both horizontal and vertical, involving the writer with places, sensual experiences, and other bodies, as well as with other parts of the self. Deliberately interdisciplinary and...

The book's basic thesis is that learning, like living, is comedic. Comedy instructs through metaphor - seeing likeness between opposites - and in reading everything as text. The book thereby revisions education as Comedy. It suggests that the subjects of all assignments must connect with the subjective reader. Accordingly, it includes student writings, personal memoirs, dreams, poems, myths, journals, and artwork - as well as critiques of mainstream writing and teaching. From classwork with Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor, assignments are offered to prod students into...