Reviewed by James J. Schramer 
  Youngstown State University 

Imagine yourself at the end of the summer returning to campus and the first of a year-long series of department meetings. As the meeting breaks up, two of your colleagues—one of them an ardent scholar, the other an equally ardent teacher—get into a squabbling match about the direction in which the department is going or should go. 

The argument grows heated and personal. “You’re nothing but a pedagogue,” sneers the scholar.  The teacher snaps back, “And you’re just a pedant.” Of course, in our departments such name calling would never surface. 

However, if you’re wondering who has the upper-hand in the argument and what the differences, if any, between the terms “pedagogue” and “pedant” might signify, this book will prove useful. It also addresses a very serious question: Why, at a time when universities are calling for faculty and departments to renew their commitment to teaching, does pedagogy remain a pejorative term? 

As Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori explains, this book grew out of her confusion when, as a foreign graduate student in an English department, she expressed an interest in pedagogy and found herself dealing with well-meaning advisors and fellow students who cautioned her against using a term that might label her as a “School of Education person” (7). 

Later, when she began to concentrate her research and teaching in the area of composition, she learned that while her “interest in pedagogy” was valued, this valuation “signified one thing to compositionists and something else to literary theorists” (8). Now, as “a member of a department of English . . . that does make teaching and the teaching of teaching its business,” Salvatori calls our attention to “the questionable rationales that historically have allowed English departments to look at teacher preparation with suspicion, derision, and condescension” (6). . . . 

. . . Salvatori sidesteps some of the gender-based implications of the pejorative connotations of pedagogy, but, in the “Intermezzo” between Parts Two and Three, she confronts some of the race-based components of defining pedagogy as belonging to the realm of the practical rather than the theoretical. 

 In summarizing how the process of educating African Americans in the 1880s became part of the debate over pedagogy’s place in American society, Salvatori observes that Booker T. Washington’s “support of the professional ideal and W. E. B. DuBois’s well-known opposition to it in the name of an academic and scholarly ideal could provide an important lens through which to reexamine which conditions seem to call for and to justify that opposition” (170). Unfortunately, none of the works in the documents section of the “Intermezzo” are by Washington or DuBois. . . .