ABSTRACT
I attended a conference on college teaching in May of 1995 at which Rita Silverman, a professor of teacher education at Pace University, gave a workshop on case-based learning. When I was asked if I would attend, I demurred. I was skeptical of a case-based approach for a number of reasons. As an English professor teaching writing at the undergraduate and graduate level, I felt pretty sure that I was already providing my students with ways to produce and critique, rather than simply receive, knowledge. Moreover, I associated case-based learning not only with schools of education but also with law and medicine, postsecondary schools that had traditionally been associated with the lecture, the one-way street in which students learned and teachers taught, schools in which case-based learning was a much more radical departure from tradition than it would be for a compositionist whose field had, for the last thirty-five years, been looking for ways to engage students in actively participating in the construction and critique of new knowledge.
