A RhetNet SnapShot Reply:
Essay-a-Saurus

All the improvements you note (meta-rhetorical skills, liberalization, and authentic learning) are things that contribute in important ways to the process by which the people who enter our classrooms as students leave them as adults. But as a writing teacher, I'd also like to be able to measure the effectiveness of my course in terms of improvements in students' ability to work with written language in good-sized chunks. And as a teacher of rhetoric, I'd like to have my students write in and for a variety of situations and communities. I like the idea of setting up a classroom that takes advantage of the audience potential of the students as intended readers, but I'm not sure that that's enough of a challenge to be the core of the whole semester's rhetorical practice. Still, I'd like to learn more about the logistics/mechanics of the course you teach.