"'Can I Take 'Em to the Bridge'? Class, Student, Instructor As Performers”

Here is the abstract submitted to the conference with our application: The bridge of a song is a contrasting piece of music; it’s a device that ties together the different parts of a song, just as a bridge joins bodies of land. What if we consider the notion of performance in the composition classroom as a bridge? Then performances by all of its players--instructor, student, and the class as a whole--are bridges that connect those players together and strengthen the bonds among them, thereby advancing the teaching and learning of rhetoric and composition. Our panel will therefore take you all to the bridge by exploring performance by those players.