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At 06:30 PM 2/19/99 -0500, you wrote: >By the way, thanks to all who have responded so far to this query; they are >helpful leads for my internet research. I just came home from the library >at Ohio State and was noticing in the MLA biblio. the lack of materials >about writing instruction in Canada. It's as if "writing" only meant >published poetry and fiction etc., not the writing that students do. > > Well, if I'm not mistaken from my limited experience, institutional consciousness of rhetoric and composition *is* fairly new to Canada. Perhpas the original Inkshedders will object to that characterization, but as late as 1993(?) a U of T professor told me there was "no rhetoric in Canada." O.K. I'm considering the source (one of the three (or is it four?) "Harvards of the North"), but it's still a telling example. One could hardly tell this from all the jobs for compositionists available in Canada this year, but I wonder if this sudden awakening is driven by pragmatic *rather than* academic or intellectual concerns. The two needn't be in conflict but the rising obsession with on-line, interactive, and virtual/distance education based on absolutely no solid pedagogical models while clearly designed to maximize institutional income suggests that pragmatics are the driving force in some Canadian as well as US institutions.