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Thursday, Oct. 24
Special Event 5:00pm-7:00pm--Watertown
Hotel, Montlake Room
Disciplinary Courses as Contexts for Writing
Joan Graham (University
of Washington, Interdisciplinary Writing Program)
****
9:00am-10:00
Welcome
Introductions and Announcements: Anis
Bawarshi (University of Washington)
Introduction, Keynote Speaker
Keynote Address:
What's Rhetorical About Composition? Valuing
Students (' Communication) in Assignments
David Russell (Iowa State
University)
Sessions (to be held at South Campus Center)
1a. Roundtable: Diplomatic Relations:
Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom
Teagan Decker, W. Todd Kaneko,
Jenny Wasicek, Steven Corbett, University of Washington
Ib. Panel: Using Multiple Assessment
Tools in Faculty Development
Robin Jeffers, Bellevue
Community College: “Rubric is not a Four-Letter Word”
Beth Kalikoff, University
of Washington, Tacoma: “‘And Toto, Too’: Learning from Student Assessment”
Rebecca Reed, University
of Washington, Bothell: “You Most Often Get What You Ask For: The Link
between Assignment and Student Product”
Ic. Panel: Expressivism(s), Rhetoric(s),
and the Debate over the Personal, Singular Self
Sidney I. Dobrin, University
of Florida: “Singular Is and Multiple Rhetorics”
Karen Surman Paley, Rhode
Island College: “’Expressivist,’ Where Art Thou?”
Susan Miller, University
of Utah: “Insides and Outsides: American Binary”
Id. The Acquisition and Disciplining
of Literacy
Darsie Bowden, DePaul University:
“Exterminating the Rat: Literacy, Rhetoric, and Control”
Kirk Branch, Montana State
University: “Disciplining Literacy in the History of Composition and English
Studies”
Philip Gaines, Montana State
University: “Students’ Acquisition of Academic Discourse and the Limits
of Analytic Pedagogies”
Ie. Writing, Literacy, and Discourse
in the Professions
Elizabeth Birmingham, North
Dakota State University: “Strict Discipline: Women, Absence, and the Discourse
of Architectural Studies”
David Overbey, Kent State
University: “The Impact of Technology on the Literacy of Meteorology”
Sandi Reynolds, Texas Women’s
University: “The Knowledge of Nursing: Teaching Writing to First-Year Nursing
Students”
Lunch Break 12:15-1:45
Session II 1:40-3:15
IIa. Roundtable: Genre, Materiality,
and Disciplinarity: Frames for Understanding Writing in the Academy
Angela Jones, Mercyhurst
College, Mary Jo Reiff, University of Tennessee,
Elizabeth
Rowse, Minnesota State University, Moorhead
IIb. Panel: Cutting the Apron Strings:
Changing Notions of Literacy in the Face of Standardization
Lauren Yena, Arizona State
University: “Rethinking Literacies and the First-Year Composition Course”
Jennifer Clary Lemon, Arizona
State U.: “Movin’ on Up?: Shifting Literacies and Critical Multiculturalism”
Micheal Callaway, Arizona
State University: “Piling Up and Competing: Multiple Literacies in the
Cultural Studies Composition Classroom”
IIc. Panel: Locating Composition in
Rhetoric, Locating Rhetoric in the World
Marlia E. Banning, Kent
State University: “An Ideoscape of Public Discourse, Popular Opinion, and
Political Correctness”
Onur Azeri, Kent State University:
“Nate, Rhetoric, and Possible Futures”
John Ackerman, Kent State
University: “Rhetoric and Public Imagination in Urban Renewal”
IId. Technology and Writing
Charles Hill, University
of Wisconsin, Oshkosh: “Reading Images: Teaching Visual Rhetorics in the
Writing Classroom”
Peter N. Goggin and Maureen Daly
Goggin, Arizona State University: “Disciplining Computers and Writing”
George Pullman, Georgia
State University: “Writing into the Future: Composition, Information Design,
and XML”
IIe.
Race, Rhetoric, and Resistance
Stacy Grooters, University
of Washington : “Imperial Rhetorics of Freedom in Progressive Pedagogies”
Matt Jackson, University
of Utah: “Discursive Disclaimers: Exploring How Whiteness Frames Academic
Writing”
Keith Miller, Arizona State
University: “Malcom X’s Alternative Literacy”
Session III 3:30-5:00
IIIa. Roundtable: Cyberspeak: The
Dynamics of the Student/Teacher Dialogue in Online Education or ‘What They
Can’t See Me Say Won’t Hurt Them”
Stephen Beatty, Diana Bowling,
Deirde Pettipiece, Timothy Ray, Arizona State University
IIIb. Panel: A Genre Approach to Academic
Argument
Irene Clark, California
State University, Northridge: “Academic Argument Beyond the Writing Class”
Martin Behr, California
State University, Northridge: “Narrative as Form of Evidence”
Janet Garufis, California
State University, Northridge: “The Genre of Crisis Rhetoric”
IIIc. Panel: Course as Conflict: Re-Thinking
Literature-and-Composition Pedagogy
Heather Easterling, University
of Washington: “Towards a Pedagogy of Problems: The Acts of Composition
and Literature”
Gary Ettari, University
of Washington: “Disparate Disciplines?: Student Responses to Reading in
a Composition Classroom”
John Webster, University
of Washington: “Teacher-Training and the Challenges of the Literature/Composition
Classroom”
IIId. Writing and Disciplinarity: History,
Responsibility, and Practice
Rebecca Moore Howard, Syracuse
University: “The Rage to Disciplinarity”
Judy Kirscht, University
of California, Santa Barabara: “The Enemy is Us: Breaking Through Our Own
Boundaries to Interdisciplinary Writing”
Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar,
Washington State University: “Playing the Blame Game: Why Discipline-Specific
Writing Instruction Isn’t Just the Responsibility of the Writing Center”
IIIe. Multiple Perspectives on Writing
and Identity
Rochelle L. Harris, University
of Nebraska, Lincoln: “What Happened to Your ‘I’?: Using Creative Non-Fiction
When Writing Becomes Critical”
Amy Reddinger, University
of Washington: “Genre and Dislocation: An Analysis of Homeless Shelter
Intake Notes”
Raúl Sánchez,
University of Utah: “The End of Identity and the Beginning of Writing”
****
Session IV 9:30-11:00
IVa. Roundtable: A Disciplinary (Mis)Match:
College Compositionists Training High School Teachers of Writing
Brad Benz, Adyan Farra, Shawn Fullmer,
Joal Lee, Chantey Pribble, Fort Lewis College
IVb. Panel: Evaluating the Effectiveness
of Genre: Classrooms, Institutions, and Communities
Peter Clements, University
of Washington: “Genre Analysis in the Composition Classroom: Looking Outward,
Looking In”
Amy Vidali, University of
Washington: “A Failed Genre? The Ineffectiveness and Intertextuality in
the Course Evaluation of the First-Year Composition Course”
Riki Thompson, University
of Washington: “Genre Analysis in the ‘Extracurriculum’: The Healing Journal
as the Site of Genre Evolution in a Discourse Community”
IVc. Panel: Cooking, Cleaning, and Sewing:
The Rhetoric of Households
Christine Norris, Purdue
University: “Domestic Rhetorics and Style in Eighteenth Century England”
Jennifer Courtney, Purdue
University: “Servant or Scientist? Rhetorical Constructions of Women in
Domestic Advice Literature”
Kate Agena, Purdue University:
“Rhetorics of Quilting: Academic Appropriations and Political Texts”
IVd. Defending, Teaching, and Assessing
First-Year Composition
Joseph Eng, Eastern Washington
University: “Assessment Politics in First-Year Composition: Assessment
Rubrics, TA Training, and Writing Program Administration”
Leigh Jones, University
of Arizona: “Points of Distinction: The Importance of Exigency and Vocabulary
in Effective Cultural Studies Writing Pedagogy”
Mark Waldo, University of
Nevada: “Saving First-Year Writing”
IVe. Intertextual Ecologies: Activity
Theory, Materiality, and Disciplinarity
Kimberly Emmons, University
of Washington: “(Un)Disciplining Discourse: Investigating Intertextuality
In/Through Genres”
Maureen Mathison, University
of Utah and Linn Bekins, San Diego State University: “Mediating Activity,
Mediating Disciplinarity”
Scott Stevens, California
State University, Fresno: “Rhetorical Ecology in Composition Studies”
Va. Roundtable: Tensions and Possibilities:
Supporting the At-Risk Student In and Beyond the Department
George Bauer, Brandy Parris, Richard
Mulcahy, Leah Spence, Brooke Stafford, University of Washington
Vb. Panel: Tutor Trouble: Territory,
Theory and Transgression
Sonia Apgar Begert, Olympic
College: “Tutor Tactics: The Writing Center as a Site of Pedagogical Production
and Resistance”
Catherine McDonald, University
of Washington: “Tensions in Tutor Training: The Rhetoric of Theory vs.
Practices in the Center”
Amberine Wilson, University
of Washington: “Practically Agreeing with Theory”
Vc. Panel: Dissolving Borders: Changing
Lines in the New (Media) University
Thomas Rickert, Purdue University:
“Bring the Noise: Writing Out the Corporate University”
Julie Woodford, Purdue University:
“Reconceiving the Corporate Writer: Transcending Instrumentalism”
Byron Hawk, George Mason
University: “Placing New Media: Or, Technology and the Shift from Writing
to Rhetoric”
Vd. The Place of Rhetoric in Composition
Fredel M. Wiant, University
of San Francisco: “The Place of Composition in Rhetoric”
Kevin Brooks, North Dakota
State University : “North Dakota is Everywhere: Disciplinary Lessons from
a Historical Study of Composition at two North Dakota Universities”
Ve.
Exploring and Reconceptualizing Writing Programs and English Studies
John Talbird, Virginia Crisco,
and Katie Stahlnecker, University of Nebraska, Lincoln: “Reconceptualizing
English Studies: An Interdisciplinay Vision
for Graduate Education”
Peter Vandenberg, DePaul
University: “Exploring the Great Divide: Composition, Creative Writing,
and the Emergence of ‘Writing Studies’”
Session I Abstracts
Ia. Roundtable: Diplomatic Relations: Peer Tutors in the Writing Classroom
This roundtable will begin by outlining the historical
tensions between writing centers and classrooms, writing centers’ traditional
insistence on autonomy, and what is at stake for students when the classroom/writing
center relationship changes. Speaker one will describe a program at the
UW English Department Writing Center which involves sending tutors into
writing classrooms to facilitate peer response groups. When tutors visit
the classroom, they take a risk: the tutor, once immersed in the unavoidable
hierarchy of the classroom, may become more teacherly , relinquishing the
unique qualities of peer tutoring. Ignoring the classroom, however,
can create a climate of misunderstanding and even mistrust. The speaker
will explain how this program attempts to avoid these pitfalls, while reaping
some unforeseen benefits. The peer response group facilitation project
has allowed the Writing Center to engage in a diplomatic mission, forging
ties to the classroom without compromising autonomy. Speakers two
and three will describe some of their experiences as tutor-facilitators,
focusing on whether or not they retained their writing center identity
and how students reacted to tutors in the classroom. They will show how,
at its best, this service casts tutors as emissaries, bringing writing
center pedagogy into the classroom. Speaker four will then focus on the
classroom informational visit, a more traditional form of writing center
diplomacy. He will describe his techniques for creating a collaborative
environment where a short speech is the norm.
This roundtable will initiate discussion revolving around
the nature of the writing center/classroom relationship: Now that most
writing centers have established their autonomy, should we now attempt
to forge ties with the classroom? On whose terms? Does the very nature
of the classroom predict tutor behavior? Or can tutors resist the hierarchy
of the classroom?
Ib. Panel: Using Multiple Assessment Tools in Faculty Development
[No description available]
Ic. Panel: Expresivism(s), Rhetoric(s), and the Debate over the Personal, Singular Self
This panel proposes to examine in depth the on-going conversation in composition about the position of what has been labeled “expressivism.” Presenter 1 critiques expressivism as over_simplifying the position of the writer and the writer’s experiences in larger discursive environments. Arguing that writing is more than a performance of the self, Presenter 1 considers the inflexibility of expressivist views of the author as singular self in writing environments that require an understanding of and navigation of the multiplicities of discourses, rhetorics, and literacies and argues instead for flexible, rhetorical view of the writer, whose writing is performed not by self but through unique, non-codifiable rhetorical moments. Presenter 2, then grapples with the knee-jerk acceptance of something called “expressivism,” based on both James Berlin’s use of the word “expressionism” in his taxonomy of the field of composition and Patricia Bizzell’s categories of inner and outer-directed discourse. This paper turns to material from an ethnographic study of writing courses taught in programs at Boston College directed by faculty who would be lumped under the category of “expressivist.” This paper will then examine the social and political complexities of some “personal” narratives, and the presenter will deconstruct the representation of so-called “expressivist” rhetoric as representing coherent, unified, and solitary selves. In the final presentation, Presenter 3 takes an oblique perspective on the current and growing divorce in composition studies between expressive and rhetorical perspectives on writing assignments, course conduct, teacherly subjectivity, and desired outcomes for students as certain kinds of people. That divorce, Presenter 3 explains, pits other tacit descriptors against each other and that these oppositions are now easily itemized and readily defended, on any side, as appropriate guides for at least the frequently required first-year writing course. This paper argues that this opposition is constitutive of deeply held American ambivalence about intellectualism, especially insofar as schooling in language rehearses American myths about populist/democratic access to class and economic standing. But the paper additionally looks at benefits to composition studies, the major cultural site of that ambivalence, of continuing hostility between these camps, a conflict recently intensified on personal grounds rather than their weakly argued theoretical precedents.
Id. The Acquisition and Disciplining of Literacy
Exterminating the Rat: Literacy, Rhetoric, and Control--Darsie Bowden
In Bellingham, Washington, a group of students ranging in age from ten to fifteen years are causing quite a stir in the local school district. The students publish a newspaper, which they call The Rat, that deals not only with school issues but also with local and national politics. They have an office in one of the students’ homes, hire student staff writers at 50 cents an article and up, set weekly publication dates, sell advertising to local businesses and distribute the paper free to fellow students and subscribers. For the past two years, the school district has tried to ban the newspaper, charging that distributing the paper to the district’s students violated school policy. Alerted by an article about The Rat in the local Bellingham newspaper, the ACLU has stepped in and threatened to sue the school district for violating students’ rights to free speech. The controversy is still being played out.
In this particular case, school officials objected to The Rat’s publication and distribution on the basis that school officials have little control over its content. They asserted that it is potentially harmful to give students of this age the kind of first amendment rights guaranteed to high school students and adults. But while this is arguably a concern for the courts, this case is not only about first amendment. It is also about the disjunction between school-sanctioned literacy and learning “outside.”
In my presentation, I will explore the distance between writing in school and writing outside it, arguing that this notion of institutional control is directly related to the current mania for testing, thus making it part of a disturbing trend in literacy education in this country. Through interviews with the staff, students, parents, ACLU attorneys, teachers, and school officials, I propose to unpack the issues involved, particularly public perceptions about the commodification and control of knowledge.
I will use this incident to argue that we radically rethink
the literacy instruction at all levels of literacy education—grade school
through post-secondary. It is not enough to incorporate “publication”
in the classroom (as many writing classrooms do) or to send students out
into the community through service learning. Rather, we need to be
more consistent about opening up the four walls of our school, legitimizing
student efforts at control—from the very early grades through the university.
In so doing, we will be far more effective at engaging our students in
the process of their own education in arenas that both the academy and
many people outside the academy: public debate, argument, critical thinking,
rhetoric, ethics, style, and preparation for students entering the marketplace.
Students' Acquisition of Academic Discourse and the Limits of Analytic Pedagogies--Philip Gaines
The current conversations about academic discourse‹its
nature, politics, socio-cultural significance, and pedagogical implications‹represents
nothing
less than a thorough-going critical examination of the
textual life of the academy‹its systems of values, rhetorical impulses,
and claims to power.
Some of the more influential and powerful rubrics include
conceptions of the discourse community, critiques of disciplinary rhetoric,
analysis of the
discursive conventions of the professions, and genre
analysis.
All of these models and more have greatly enhanced our
perspectives on the discursive dynamics of the academy and the professions.
A simplistic
account is to say that these methodologies examine the
language of disciplinary texts on many levels, from lexis to large-scale
discursive
form, and then abstract systems of description that focus
on such things as stylistic conventions, rhetorical structure, characteristics
of genre,
knowledge-making practices, socio-political assumptions,
and power relations. These descriptive systems can then be employed
as powerful
heuristics for ongoing analysis of academic and professional
discourse.
Such analytic systems can also be adapted as models for
teaching academic writing‹the result being what I call analytic writing
pedagogies. The idea
is to help students see how academic language practices
are guided by the genre characteristics or stylistic conventions or community
presuppositions
or rhetorical dynamics of academic disciplines and their
discourses so that they can participate in those language practices in
more informed and
effective ways. The stronger claim of analytic pedagogies,
however, is that students cannot be expected to competently write academic
discourse at all
without the understandings offered by such analytic systems.
One assumption is that most students enter the academic community substantially
helpless
and with little to build on for writing academic prose.
The answer offered is to apply an analytic rubric with its companion pedagogy
and thus lay a
foundation for learning academic writing.
It is this stronger case for analytic pedagogies that
I problematize in this paper. What I suggest is that the notion of a great
divide between students¹
primary language practices and the language practices
of the academy has been overstated, and I want to further suggest that
our students bring with
them to the academic writing task effective linguistic,
discursive, rhetorical, and communicative competencies that can be applied
directly to
the acquisition of academic discourse. Analytic
pedagogies, inasmuch as they are oriented toward looking at language, inevitably
involve a
distancing from language. This distancing, while
valuable and necessary for doing the kind of work that analytic systems
do, needs to be complementary
to a discovery process that depends on a non-analytic
and direct encounter with language‹an encounter that invokes intuitions
and competencies that
students already possess.
Ie. Writing, Literacy, and Discourse in the Professions
The impact of technology on the literacy of meteorology--David Overbey
Based on an observation of and interview with a meteorologist
as he prepared and delivered the evening weather forecast, this paper will
explain how technology has impacted the field of meteorology and in turn
transformed the types of literacy skills necessary for the production and
delivery of weather
forecasts. Specifically, weather forecasting mainly
involves accumulating, synthesizing, and presenting information from a
variety of technological networks. The meteorologist's own thoughts
about his job as well as his actions over the course of the observation
reveal that keeping up with technology, and being
able to access various technological information networks,
i.e. the National Weather Service, is the most important part of the job.
The importance of technological skills in the field has increased tremendously
since the arrival of the first weather computers in the mid 1980s.
Of particular consequence here
is how this technological change redefines how we think about literacy.
This study affirms, for example, multiple theories about literacy that
define it as a social practice, in which immersion in workplace settings
and membership to certain groups is paramount to being
literate (Schultz, 1997; Haas, 1994; Freedman et al.,
1994). The study also shows how the impact of technology has changed
the traditional role of reader and author, since the contemporary weather
forecast is really a hypertext (Baron, 1997). The meteorologist is
as much a reader of other texts as author of the forecast; as the subject
of the interview put it, his job is to "pass along...information."
The observation confirms this blurring of the boundary between readers
and authors in numerous ways, one
being an instance when the meteorologist altered his
forecast so it more closely fit with the recommendation from the National
Weather Service.
Finally, this paper will present
a theory of literacy as a technnology, a theory that argues that to understand
literacy we must understand how it works in conjunction with other technologies.
This theory is based on the findings discussed here that demonstrate how
the literate skills necessary to do weather
forecasting have changed as the technology in meteorology
has changed. In offering this definition of literacy as a technology,
this paper addresses Graff's argument that "literacy must be accorded a
new understanding--in a historical context." In other words, to think
of literacy as a technology enables us to think of how it has changed--like
technology in general--over time, why those changes have occured, and what
the consequences of those changes are.
The Knowledge of Nursing: Teaching Writing to First-Year Nursing Students--Sandi Reynolds
Because rhetoric is the integrating core for the study of human communication, education in rhetorical principles allows the student of any discipline to study and utilize the nuances of discourse that affect the informative, persuasive, exploratory, and expressive use of language, whatever the subject matter. For this presentation, I will summarize a course I designed to help nursing students understand the disciplinary discourse specific to healthcare writing as well as to satisfy a specific state goal, that of closing the gaps of success in nursing education. I will outline the specific assignments as well as student responses to those assignments and to the course in general. I will make suggestions for the future of such “writing across the disciplines” developments and discuss briefly the state of this movement at our university.
The course was adapted for several reasons. In her
2001 text, The Nursing Profession, Norma L. Chaska asserts that nursing
education must adapt to the current changes occurring in higher education.
These changes pivot around the concept that the paradigm under which we
are now operating calls for a focus on “achievement of desired outcomes”
rather than on process. Furthermore, Chaska states, “Nursing, like
all health care, needs a knowledge worker for the information-age.
A knowledge worker
nurse is one whose practice is grounded in skills associated
with (a) critical thinking and clinical judgment; (b) teamwork and communication;
(c) new technologies; and (d) leadership, management, and delegation” (144,
emphasis mine). Furthermore, in August 2001, the Texas Higher Education
Coordinating Board developed a plan for “closing the gaps in higher education.”
Goal Two of this plan includes closing the gaps in success by increasing
the number of successful graduates in several areas
including nursing and allied health. “Successful
graduates” should include those students who not only master the skills
required for competent nursing, but also the discourse required to represent
and advance the profession.
This discourse includes writing, a strand of communication
woven together with listening, talking, reading, and thinking. Writing
is a process that develops as we hear what others have to say, talk through
our own ideas with other writers, and read what others have written.
Writing and reading instruction leads to superior critical thinking skills.
I have discovered in the research for my dissertation, “Collaboration or
Subordination?: The Role of Rhetoric in the Conception of Primary
Healthcare Providers,” that the nursing community is being confined to
a subordinate position in large part because of what is being written both
about and by nurses. For example, Dr. Mary Mundinger’s article published
in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1994 raised the ire of primary
care physicians nationwide because she failed to consider her audience.
Similarly, the study published in the January 5, 2000, edition of JAMA
was ineffective in convincing the medical community of the validity of
the nurse practitioner movement due to the authors’ failure to anticipate
the intended audience’s objections. Had these authors been trained in rhetorical
principles such as purpose and audience, and had they received instruction
in the artistic appeals, these innovative pieces might have been more successful
in advancing the nurse practitioner
movement in particular, and the nursing profession in
general.
Session II Abstracts
IIa. Roundtable: Genre, Materiality, and Disciplinarity: Frames for Understanding Writing in the Academy
Presenters will explore the ways in which a focus on the materiality of language and the genres that contextualize language can reveal the relations and tensions between writing and disciplinarity. Specifically, presenters will address WAC/WID, first-year writing, literature and multidisciplinary courses from the following perspectives:
When WID courses privilege course content and text forms over disciplinary language use, they enculturate students into predetermined modes of thought. A truly liberating writing pedagogy should assume language as material, and should present language use—the disciplines' ways of shaping, trading, and sharing language--as the real course "content."
Genres mediate the material language interactions of disciplinary cultures and the social practices and beliefs that define a discipline. Because genres function both pragmatically and epistemologically—are both the familiar language interactions within disciplines and the frames for understanding and interpreting these communicative events—a genre approach can better integrate writing instruction and disciplinary knowledge. How can a genre approach help us re-envision learning to write and writing to learn?
First-year writing courses are considered pre-disciplinary, so their genres and language struggle to instantiate rhetorical actions. The arhetorical use of these genres in the past has stripped them of rhetorical force but not material consequence. Can first-year genres like analytical essays, argument papers, and research papers be reclaimed, perhaps by teachers reinvesting them with disciplinarity--the discipline of "academia"?
Although a genre approach has become increasingly accepted in rhetorical and composition studies, few critics have addressed what this approach means for other disciplines within the field of English studies. Literary study, in particular, continues to rely upon an older, static approach to genre. How, then, can applying contemporary genre theory to literature, particularly reinvigorate study in that field?
Without the direct constraints of a particular discipline
– in a multidisciplinary department – the traditional strictures of disciplinary
genres are to some degree relaxed. There is no automatic privileging of
one discipline or its genres over another. In this context of multiple
disciplines and multiple genres, how can contemporary views of genre help
us rethink multi-disciplinary contexts and integrate diverse writing activities?
IIb. Panel: Cutting the Apron Strings: Changing Notions of Literacy in the Face of Standardization
Hanging on to a Dream: Shifting Literacies and Critical Multiculturalism--Jennifer Clary Lemon
This talk will
contrast my experience teaching composition at an inner-city four-year
college in the city of Chicago and teaching on the same college's
suburban campus, with teaching at a large state university
in Arizona. Drawing on the work of Peter McLaren, The Chicago Cultural
Studies Group,
Thomas West, and others, I employ a stance of critical
multiculturalism in discussing these experiences of shifting interpretations
of literacies,
exploring and "engag(ing) the issues of cultural movements"
employed by these particular institutions in the creation of their first-year
writing
requirements (Chicago Cultural Studies Group 115; qtd.
in Goldberg Multiculturalism Cambridge: Blackwell 1994).
The overwhelming
majority of administrators and policy-makers on both urban, suburban, and
state campuses of these two particular institutions are
white. While teaching at the Chicago school, the "General
Studies" department, under which English classes are housed, had recently
changed the
first-year English curricula to a literature-based rather
than an argument/rhetoric-based one. This change resulted in confusing
students
while instituting a specific notion of "corrected" literacy,
based primarily on the politics of "whiteness" and the expectation of a
literacy not defined
by students' discursive communities, but by faculties'
ideas of "appropriate" literacy.
The college
in Chicago draws from a local population of students with low grade averages
and test scores. Most of students on the urban campus (88%)
are non-white. As quite a contrast, their suburban branch
contains roughly half of that (46%). Moving to teach at a large, State
university in the
Southwest, non-white student populations shrank by half
again, at about 20%. Each institution tailored their first-year requirement
to their ideas of
literacy based on the diversity of student populations:
On the urban Chicago campus, the curriculum switch to literature, best
represented by reading
essays by Joyce and Faulkner, had the urban campus students
struggling as they were given a glimpse of a dominant academic discourse
without first
being able to master the secondary discourse of writing
in the academy. As a contrast, the suburban students (the majority of which
were white) seemed
better equipped to make sense of the secondary discourse
of analyzing the canon in the English classes that I had taught.
More evident of the multiplicity of perceptions of literacy was at a state
institution, where an overarching rhetoric curriculum tries more successfully
to meet the demands of a huge first-year student body, and the
majority of whom function well within the discursive
space created for them by a first-year rhetoric-based program. Still noticeable,
however, was the
separation of "basic writers" from the more "traditional,"
eighteen-year old, white freshman. Through a move from urban, to suburban,
to state
institution, it seems that this "norm" is the force behind
the standardization of literacies in the first-year classroom by which
everything else, everything "other," is measured and
evaluated.
Multiple Literacies in the Cultural Studies Composition Classroom--Micheal Callaway
Bartholomae (1985) reminds us of the importance of learning
to speak the language of the university; however, now more than ever it
is important to
think of literacy in the plural. With that in mind,
we must ask ourselves what kinds of literacies are first year composition
students bringing to the
classroom? Reading the canon and participating
in a dialectical with peers is slowly but surly being replaced by sitting
in front of the television. More
students have become autodidacts with the ever-expanding
proliferation of mass media in society. They have visual literacy.
The ability to understand and
use images, including the ability to think, learn and
express oneself in terms of images; the ability to understand and produce
visual messages. However,
many of these students have not acquired the critical
literacy necessary to question the ways in which texts have been constructed
or the analyzing power
to deconstruct the messages that they assimilate into
their collective psyche.
This presentation will outline my experiences with a group
of first year composition students in an ENG 101 class. Cultural
studies allowed us to
really delve into the underlying issues in the media
that seem benign, but really are manipulative. While the presentation
will emphasize practice, a
disciplinary theoretical context will be provided to
situate the discussion regarding the impact of multiple literacies using
the work of scholars such
Paul Martin Lester, John C. Bean and Kenneth Burke.
The presentation will create a brief composite of problems some students
have when confronting the
multiple literacies that they encounter in the cultural
studies composition classroom and possible ways to heighten critical/analytical
skills.
IIc. Panel: Locating Composition in Rhetoric, Locating Rhetoric in the World
Our panel explores whether and how composition, as an industry in the university, might adapt to new directions in rhetorical, sociological, and discursive studies that assume and reflect a fragmented and shifting world. Our papers are influenced by research and theory on “fast capitalism” (Gee, Hull, & Lankshear, 1996), “disorganized capitalism” and its struggle over signs, space, and popular opinion (Lash & Urry, 1994), the cultural imagination (Anderson, 1982; Appadurai 1996), and the interrelationships among technology, media, and global constituencies (Bijker, 1995).
Appadurai (1996) suggests that the 21st century project for language specialists shifts to include research and pedagogy that endeavor to comprehend a rhetorical situation in terms of the distribution and connection of local and global resources, populations, and ideologies. He offers a framework that places discourse in the ebb and flow of different ‘scapes’ or formations that index cultural landscapes, electronic capacities for reproduction, and “ideoscapes” that comprise discursive strategies of the nation-state and its various counter-discourses. The panel will include (speaker #1) an analysis of the discursive limits produced by political interests, media and popular opinion that appear as a discourse on political correctness, (speaker #2) a critique of center-periphery models of linguistic expropriation and social enculturation that supports a rhetoric of “possible futures,” and (speaker #3) an empirical and theoretical account of the design and production of a neighborhood park that emphasizes sociotechnical change and the production of locality.
An Ideoscape of Public Discourse, Popular Opinion, and Political Correctness
This paper analyzes the discursive limits on composition classrooms designed to critically examine contemporary issues of popular culture and public discourse. The focus here is on classrooms that identify the popular terrain of opinion and everyday life as overtly ideological, political and therefore debatable. Any such cultural debate is invariably reframed by a discourse of political correctness, broadly deployed across mass media and public discourse. This paper defines the discourse through its history and display. Ultimately, the paper traces how the discourse of political correctness opens some doors while closing others in the composition classroom and on the larger stage of the university and intellectual life.
"Nate," Rhetoric, and Possible Futures
This paper critiques center-periphery models of linguistic expropriation and social enculturation, often exemplified by the “Nate” studies of Berkenkotter, Huckin, and Ackerman (1988) and their critiques (Prendergast, 1995) that reproduce a reductive and coercive view of outsiders and insiders in complex social networks. As a counter-theory, this paper explores the potential for “oblique strategies” (Schmidt, Eno) from musical composition to explore models of “new literacy” that may well contribute to “possible futures” argued for my proponents of multi-modality and interdiscursivity (e.g., New London Group, 1996).
Rhetoric and Public Imagination in Urban Renewal
This paper retraces the development of Orchard Community
Park through the design practices and decision and the constellation
of investments of the “relevant social groups” (Bijker, 1995)
who supported the development. Orchard Community Park is located
in a major, post-industrial city in US, and the design process and practices
reflect the will and imagination of the community but eventual give way
under the weight of global social affiliations and the “global flows” of
capital, work forces, and urban renewal policies. The paper
relies on a descriptive and qualitative study of landscape architecture
in an urban neighborhood to illuminate the “production of locality” (Appadurai,
1996).
Reading Images: Teaching Visual Rhetorics in the Writing Classroom--Charles A. Hill
Along with the ability to comprehend and critically analyze written texts, students today need the knowledge and skills necessary to accurately interpret and critically analyze visual images, as well. Much of the information that people are exposed to today is in visual form, and our students are being increasingly exposed to highly manipulated images meant to influence their beliefs, opinions, and behaviors. Just as we teach our students to analyze, interpret, and respond critically to verbal texts, we need to teach them to apply similar skills and attitudes to visual messages.
While calls for increased attention to visual aspects of communication are becoming commonplace, exactly which knowledge and skills students need to obtain in order to deal with visual messages is a matter of some debate. In my presentation, I will describe several types of visual literacy skills that we could teach students within our current curricular structures and argue for a core set of skills and knowledge that I believe are most critical. I will also describe some pedagogical methods that can help students become more informed, critical consumers of visual messages.
Of course, communication departments have been dealing with visual rhetoric for some time, but their coursework is often confined to the types of images encountered in the mass media. And instructors of technical and business writing have been teaching students to interpret, analyze, and create certain types of visuals for decades, though these courses do not generally include work on the critical examination of pervasive and influential cultural images. I will argue for an approach to visual rhetoric that includes and integrates these approaches and others.
General education writing courses cannot accomplish all of the goals of a visual rhetoric pedagogy; these courses are often already overburdened. However, because every text has important visual aspects, and because visual and verbal appeals often work together in tightly integrated formats, it is becoming anachronistic to continue to ignore issues of visual rhetoric in the writing classroom. I will describe some ways to incorporate visual rhetoric into general education writing classes as these courses are currently constructed, but I will also outline an alternative curricular structure, one that would facilitate the task of incorporating work on visual literacy and visual rhetoric more broadly into the undergraduate curriculum.
Disciplining Computers and Writing--Peter N. Goggin and Maureen Daly Goggin
In Technology and Literacy in the Twenty-First Century:
The Importance of Paying Attention, Cynthia Selfe issues a powerful call
for literacy educators when she states: “We must try to understand--to
pay attention to--how technology is now inextricably linked to literacy
and literacy education in this country” (24). In responding to her call,
our greatest challenge is likely to be how we will situate our thinking
and actions within a framework of theories and practices grounded in disciplinary
knowledge and tradition. The problem is that as an area of specialization
in writing studies more generally, it is not really clear what defines
and differentiates CMC (Computer Mediated Communication) writing specialists
from other scholars in writing studies apart from making the material technologies
of writing more visible. The question is whether a singularly narrow focus
on the materiality of technology offers a powerful enough exigency for
sustaining this field of study.
Accounts of other (especially failed) disciplinary endeavors
demonstrate that without strong theoretical frames and disciplinary mechanisms
for constituting and reconstituting objects of studies and scholarly problems,
the likelihood of demise is strong. And in the case of CMC, Selfe’s call
may be rendered silent. As this presentation will show, the field of Conflict
Resolution offers one powerful example and an instructive analogy. Conflict
Resolution emerged in the 1970s with all the trappings of a discipline
in the social sciences—a scholarly journal, graduate programs of study,
a professional organization—but was unable to define and thus sustain a
strong enough theoretical foundation and eventually fizzled out as a disciplinary
area of study. The fate of Conflict Resolution ought to serve as a cautionary
tale for our field; it raises the question of what theoretical grounding
is for computers and writing. The question is further problematicized because
there is little consensus about the disciplinarity of the larger field
of rhetoric and composition (Goggin “Disciplinary,” Authoring). Debates
continue about what constitutes our objects of study, our methodologies,
our discourses, and our theoretical terrain and even whether or not the
field may be rightly understood as a discipline (e.g., Olson; Sledd; Miller).
Given the unstable ground of rhetoric and composition, the problem of defining
disciplinary theory for computers and writing is made all the more difficult,
but all the more crucial, if we are to heed Selfe’s call.
In short, as an area of specialization, computers and
writing may be defined in its identity with communication technologies,
but it is not separate or immune from the politics of composition/writing
studies and the various philosophically located groups within the larger
field that jostle for recognition and dominance. Drawing on a larger study
of the field, this paper will show the competing and contradictory theories
of literate practice, a cacophony that challenges Selfe’s call. This presentation
will thus argue that before we can tackle the kinds of problems Selfe rightly
identifies as needing our attention, we need to examine the disciplinary
grounding of computers and writing.
Writing into the Future: Composition, Information Design, and XML--George Pullman
Many years ago Marshal Macluen asserted that the media
is the message, a memorable slogan that for many composition teachers,
myself included,
formulates an axiom of composition instruction: form
and content are inseparable. At the simplest level this means not splitting
the grade
between “ideas” and “expression”. At a more
complex level, it means believing that the expression “I know what I think;
I just can’t articulate
it” is nonsense—muddled writing is muddled thinking.
Recent developments in composition technology have begun to refine the
meaning of this axiom for
me, however. Desktop- publishing software and web-design
software, both now standard means of communicating writing, routinely separate
style and
content. To use these programs correctly means to design
a style sheet that affects the final appearance of the words but does so
indirectly. In MS
Word, for example, this means highlighting your title
and then choosing “Heading 1” instead of changing the font and the point
size directly. By
choosing “Heading 1” you are employing a style sheet.
On the other hand, by changing the font and the point size for that one
line you are subverting
the style sheet. (It is worth pointing out that
HTML is a markup language, not a formatting language, and that even though
we all do it, using tables
to create visually interesting layouts violates HTML
the way comma splices violate written English.) In a practical sense, learning
to differentiate
form from content when it comes to composition means
differentiating visual rhetoric from discursive rhetoric while teaching
both as critically
significant for anyone who would be a professional writer
or, as they are called today, a content provider. But at a theoretical
level the last
sentence points up an irony of composition instruction.
We are training people to be “content providers” but our content is from.
We teach patterns
of thought, figures of speech, and genres of writing.
We don’t teach “knowledge” in the sense of information about political
or legal or social
issues, although we do teach people how to acquire and
assess information. The content of composition is form. And if the
content of composition is
form, then it’s clear why we’ve always asserted that
form is inseparable from content. It’s not so much because they are but
rather because for us
they are. Teaching our students to see form and content
as inseparable, however, not only unhelpfully blurs the distinction between
markup and
layout, but hides the fact that being able to see the
form independently from the content is a critical composition skill.
The onset of XML offers us an intriguing way of addressing
this problem. And that, finally, is what this paper is about. I will explain
what XML is and
how it works, and then discuss one way in which it could
be used to teach writing in general by showing how it might be used to
teach argumentation.
The value of this approach is two-fold. It teaches an
important technical skill—how to make an XML document. And it also teaches
writers to separate
the argument from the argumentation—to see the topic
of “less is more”, for example, as a pattern that can be used in
nearly any argumentative situation
and not to hear any given expression of it as something
they either agree or disagree with. XML can teach people how to transcend
an argument by moving
from language to meta language.
Let me be more concrete by describing one small piece
of this application. XML allows you to make your own tag set. In
HTML you are limited to <title>
and <h1> and so on. But in XML you can have <topic
sentence> and <supporting details>. By having students mark an argument
for topic sentences, one
teaches the idea of a topic sentence and its relation
to the rest of a paragraph, but by marking them with XML one can then
choose to display them
and only them, hiding for a moment the supporting details
and revealing an outline of the argument. If this outline is compelling
as a syllogism like
argument, then one knows one has a well formed properly
arranged argument. If there are gaps, they should be rendered apparent.
This is just one example. Much more can be done. By designing
and Document Type Definition for argumentation, and marking up existing
arguments, one
can develop a data base of techniques and approaches,
improving our understanding of how real argumentation works.
IIe. Race, Rhetoric, and Resistance
Imperial Rhetorics of Freedom in Progressive Pedagogies--Stacy Grooters
In her ground-breaking work Masks of Conquest, Gauri Viswanathan
argues that the introduction of English literature into the curriculum
of Indian
universities in the early 19th century provided "a blueprint
for social control in the guise of a humanistic program of enlightenment"
(10). By
presenting the study of literature as a means for individual
growth and freedom, colonizers were able to mask their use of it as a tool
of
conquest. The endurance of such liberal-imperial
approaches is evident in later educational texts in which the liberal mask
"slips" and an
underlying colonial rhetoric is revealed. For example,
in R. W. Livingstone's _Defence of Classical Education_ (1917), his humanist
representation of education as a means for freeing his
(British) students from "the chains of their servitude" gives way to a
colonizing discourse.
Livingstone's descriptions of *thought* as "the great
solvent" that breaks down the world -- which the educated can then "remodel
and rebuild" -- and
*reason* as an "ardent desire [. . .] seeking to reshape
[life] in accordance with itself" echo imperial rhetorics of conquest
and
appropriation (100, 87). I would argue that for
Livingstone, liberty is less about the freedom *from* oppression and more
about the freedom *to*
oppress.
Although contemporary progressive educators would be quick
to distance themselves from the liberal humanism of Livingstone and others
-- arguing
that "liberatory" is not "liberal" and "humanistic" is
not "humanist" --many current discussions of feminist, radical, and developmental
pedagogies employ rhetorics of freedom similar to those
of liberal humanism. Do these rhetorics -- typically claiming to
focus on social,
rather than individual, freedoms -- also mask a colonizing
discourse? Is it possible for pedagogical discourse to enact an anti-imperial
rhetoric
of freedom? Should freedom even be a goal of education?
In this 20-minute paper, I draw on the framework established by David Spurr's
treatment of colonial discourse in _The Rhetoric of Empire_
in order to examine the ways these contemporary rhetorics of freedom re-enact
and
resist colonial discourses. Among the texts I examine
are bell hooks' treatment of feminist pedagogy, _Teaching to Transgress:
Education as the
Practice of Freedom_; Paulo Freire's most recent engagement
with radical pedagogy, _Pedagogy of Freedom: Ethics, Democracy, and Civic
Courage_; and
John Robert Shotton's discussion of education for social
justice in India, _Learning and Freedom_.
Discursive Disclaimers: Exploring how Whiteness Frames Academic Writing--Matt Jackson
“The history of madness would be the history of the Other...the history of order imposed on things would be the history of the Same.” Foucault, The Order of Things xxiv
This paper is an application of a discursive analysis
of Lucille Schultz’ award-winning book, The Young Composers: Composition’s
Beginnings in Nineteenth-Century Schools. In her book, Schultz points to
a shift in writing pedagogy from the general and abstract to the personal
and concrete, “from knowledge grounded in authority to knowledge grounded
in experience,” as a “democratization” of writing in public schools (96).
She limns out a relatively unknown part of composition history, “writing
the young teachers and their young composers into our history; to give
them voice” (165).
I will argue that the ways that Schultz writes her book,
following the conventions of academic scholarship very nicely, limns out
her historical findings in a way that fails to critically represent how
the history and foundation of composition practices are connected to our
present and future political problems, particularly where race is concerned.
I suggest that Schultz’s book serves as a powerful example of how the discourse
in, around, and through academic writing in the disciplines has historically
been and continues to be framed by whiteness.
The whiteness of academic discourse has produced an educational
milieu that is at best assimilative and at worst exclusionary and discriminatory.
This paper argues that we cannot continue to think about race and composition
education as we have; in order for us to transform our writing practices
and policies, a radical shift must take place in the framework that perpetuates
an “epistemology of whiteness”
A Foucaultian question asks, “Can ‘we’ look critically
at the messy, sprawling, chaotic elements of our past, present, and future
and ask how ‘our’ discourse has (not), does (not), and will (not) be better?”
Can we unlearn whitely ways in academic writing and search for new
ways to think and that might seem as though they were madness? This
is hard for us as writing teachers. We like nice neat patterns, routines,
conventions, lesson plans, handouts—things that make our jobs do-able with
time constraints, limited budgets, impatient students and less-than-understanding
administrators. However, I don’t think that radically transforming our
discipline and the joys that are supposed to be at the heart of education
are mutually exclusive, in fact I think they are hopefully intertwined.
Session III Abstracts
IIIa. Roundtable: Cyberspeak: The Dynamics of
the Student/Teacher Dialogue in Online Education or ‘What They Can’t See
Me Say Won’t Hurt Them”
IIIb. Panel: A Genre Approach to Academic Argument
During the 1960’s and 1970’s, when
Composition was being established as an academic discipline, the required
first year writing course tended
to emphasize personal or expressive writing as a means
of empowering previously marginalized student populations through the discovery
of
personal voice. Although this model persists at
a number of colleges and universities today, many first year writing courses
now focus on a
text genre that is often referred to as “academic
argument” a term used by Rose in 1983 to refer to an essay that requires
the “calculated
marshalling of information, a sort of exposition
aimed at persuading” (Rose 113). Rose’s essay maintains that all students,
even those labeled
remedial, need to gain familiarity with this type of
writing in order for them to do the work of the university and beyond.
This endorsement of academic argument as the primary genre for the first
year writing course is supported by the goals delineated in the January
2001 WPA Outcomes Statement for First Year Composition, in particular,
Rhetorical Knowledge (focus on purpose, the ability to
respond to the needs of different audiences), Critical Thinking, Reading,
and Writing,
Processes (including the collaborative and social aspects
of writing), and Knowledge of Conventions (genre conventions of structure,
paragraphing, tone, mechanics, and documentation). The
assumption behind these goals, presumably, is that strategies associated
with academic
argument are relevant to writing tasks in other settings
and therefore contribute to student success at the university.
This panel, titled “A Genre Approach
to Academic Argument,” will focus on how the recent reconceptualization
of genre theory can enable
both teachers and students to gain insight into academic
argument as it is presented in the first year writing class. Speaker
#1, in “Academic
Argument Beyond the Writing Class,” will use genre
theory to set the context for a study which examine how characteristics
associated with
the argument essay are viewed by faculty in other disciplines,
in particular English, Business, Engineering, and Geography at two
universities, one private, the other public. The study
emphasizes generic features of argumentation, such as the situation eliciting
the
production of a text, the presence of a clear thesis,
use of logical support, awareness of audience, and adherence to appropriate
text and
genre conventions. It also examines elements that are
often not associated with the “genre” of argument, such as the use of personal
narrative and the presence of a strong personal voice.
Speaker #2, in “Narrative as
Form of Evidence,” will use the personal narratives of minority autobiography,
in particular,
autobiographies of native Americans and Canadians, to
discuss how narrative can function as a type of “evidence” in academic
argument.
The word “evidence” in this context will be defined as
the acts by which language is used to create shared meaning and knowledge.
To address the
question of how narrative functions as evidence, this
presentation will invoke Bakhtin’s notion of “stylized discourse.” His
contention that
writers develop their individual style by absorbing “primary”
speech genres into “secondary” ones helps explain how narrative becomes
“stylized” as evidence in academic argument, enabling
writers to address the expectations of particular discourse communities.
Speaker #3, in “The Genre of Crisis
Rhetoric,” will examine how awareness of argument as a genre can
help students critique political
rhetoric, in particular the genre of crisis rhetoric,
as exemplified in President Bush’s responses following the events of September
11th, 2001.
Because one of the goals of an argument based first year
composition class is to acquaint students with the effects of biased language
on
readers and writers, identifying the generic elements
of crisis rhetoric can help students evaluate other forms of political
discourse
in a critical way. This presentation will suggest that
rhetorically analyzing the underlying arguments that are common to crisis
rhetoric,
and focusing attention on its generic features will foster
insight into the nature of the claims, enabling students to evaluate them
on their
own merit.
IIIc. Panel: Course as Conflict: Re-Thinking Literature-and-Composition
Pedagogy
Within the field of Composition, renewed attention to
reading as a critical practice of writing classrooms has revealed the varying
conceptions of “reading” that exist across the field of English studies,
and the often unexamined teaching practices that such conceptions produce.
While steps have been taken to make writing processes and practices more
explicit, the same has not been true of reading. This is perhaps
most evident in that mainstay of most composition programs, the writing-with-literature
course. While first-year writing classes are typically straightforward
workshops which focus on students’ writings as meaning-making texts, the
addition of a literary reader introduces a host of other disciplinary allegiances,
assumptions, and practices surrounding reading and writing. In this
scenario, students’ work becomes a subservient text, and no longer the
primary material of the course, and, as critic Wendy Bishop has remarked,
“reading” ceases to be a “complicated, interactive reception of texts,”
instead becoming a narrower process of consumption and storage .
This panel proposes to examine the writing-with-literature course as such
a site of disciplinary and pedagogical intersection between composition
and literary studies, ultimately re-framing its conflicts as productive
teaching and learning “problems.”
The first two speakers will address this course first
in terms of its larger genre, and then more locally by way of an extended
inquiry with one particular class of students. The first paper, “Towards
a Pedagogy of Problems: The Acts of Composition and Literature,” will begin
with a survey of scholarship, framing the current debate over reading in
both writing and literature courses, and then making the case for a productive
re-thinking of the writing-with-literature course as an explicit site of
disciplinary conflict via a thorough parsing of the diverse and often under-examined
practices of which it is constituted. The second paper, “Disparate
Disciplines?:Student Responses to Reading in a Composition Classroom,”
will examine the role of reading and writing in the writing-with-literature
course by presenting and analyzing student responses to questions about
their reading and writing practices. It concludes by theorizing the
role that an observed dialectical impulse could further play in courses
that use literature to generate student writing. The third speaker
will offer the perspective of both a literature specialist and long-time
supervisor of writing-with-literature novice instructors. His paper,
“Teacher-Training and the Challenges of the Lit.-Comp. Classroom,” will
first present and analyze different strategies and observed pitfalls of
using literary texts to generate expository writing, and finally comment
on the teaching and learning potential of a course re-framed according
to a pedagogy that makes explicit disciplinary tensions.
These very tensions have been the source of consistent
calls for the elimination of the writing-with-literature course; implicit
in this panel’s papers, however, is that such elimination would be a mistake.
The writing-with-literature course indeed asks different things of students
than other composition courses, but the difficulties therein usefully point
up pedagogical gaps. If we want students to engage constructively,
even recursively, with texts, including literary texts, we need to approach
reading with as much theoretical and practical consideration as we do writing.
As well, the range of practices signified by the terms “reading” and “writing,”
rendered newly explicit, will offer students the genuine opportunity to
engage with English as the diverse discipline it is.
IIId. Writing and Disciplinarity: History, Responsibility, and Practice
The Enemy is Us: Breaking Through Our Own Barriers to Interdisciplinary Writing--Judy Kirscht
For 20 years Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines scholars and teachers of composition have been seriously engaged in integrating the teaching and study of writing with the academic and professional disciplines. However, the academic edict that no one should step outside their field of expertise has prevented us from claiming the competence to have students actually engage in the thinking, research, and writing activities of other disciplines. David Russell, Chuck Bazerman, Carol Berkenkotter, and many others have argued convincingly that writing is shaped by the activities of those who use it; if we accept their arguments, we cannot understand or teach interdisciplinary material without understanding and teaching those activities. Susan MacDonald’s work underscores this; she finds students with incomplete understanding of the abstractive processes have difficulty in moving between data-driven discourse of the humanities and concept driven discourse of the social sciences, particularly if they have not manipulated data in the latter (431). All of this literature argues strenuously for including inquiry activities in courses that introduce students to the university. This paper examines one such course and argues that composition teachers do have the competence to engage their students in such cross-disciplinary activity, and that doing so can reveal much to both students and researchers about the intellectual leaps required for academic thinking and writing, the role of language in knowledge making, and the nature of genre.
The course recontextualizes familiar composition thinking/writing processes—invention schema, the modes, abstraction and inference skills, the elements of argument, diction and syntax—reuniting them with purposeful activity. Young, Becker, and Pike’s trimodal invention schema (particle, wave, and field), for example, returns to science (from whence it came), becoming ‘static,’ ‘dynamic,’ and ‘systemic’ observation skills. The purpose of such observation is to answer the basic questions: What is it? How does it develop? How does it function? –questions which provide a framework for inquiry that can be applied across science, social science, and humanities disciplines. That intimidating foreigner, the scientific method becomes simply the process of observing, hypothesizing, testing, revising, and observing once again, a cycle that gives a methodological foundation for inquiry and a process view of knowledge.
Further, specific disciplinary inquiry methods emphasize different aspects of the thinking process and therefore become excellent sites for practicing language skills appropriate to those processes. Science emphasizes observation and inference skills; expressing science therefore requires precise description and clarity of logical relationship. The multiple theories and methods of the social sciences illustrate the way theory shapes perception and selection, and the testing of theory demands the same observation inference skills employed in science. Combined, they emphasize the relationship of theory and data and shape the language of theoretical debate. Students enter the humanities with a far greater understanding of the interaction of perception, theory, and data, in all fields. Their close reading is more thorough, their interpretations more faithful to the text. Most importantly, these thinking and writing skills come to life spontaneously as part of the process of creating knowledge, and the genres take shape as their natural outgrowth— as expression of the researchers’ “ways of being” in Chuck Bazerman’s words (59).
This course has had a troubled and controversial career, largely because it was developed to train TAs, who in turn were trained in literature; new to teaching and unfamiliar with composition, they understandably found the addition of cross-disciplinarity too much to cope with. Many composition teachers, however, share this group’s unwillingness to venture outside the humanities and to use data other than texts in the classroom. For others, however, its rewards have been worth the controversy, for students; struggle with the material reveals the inner difficulties of 1) letting go of certainty, 2) accepting the restraints data puts on claims, and 3) letting theory and data impinge on personal belief. We have long tried to achieve, in our students, language that shows mastery of these processes with very little knowledge of the processes themselves. The course provides opportunity worth the risk of working outside our disciplinary fortress.
Playing the Blame Game: Why Discipline-Specific Writing Instruction Isn't Just the Responsibility of the Writing Center--Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar
Almost every institution of higher
education supports the idea of writing across the curriculum and in the
disciplines. What doesn't always get
support is the infrastructure to
see these programs become established, much less flourish. Too often
a small campus will try and alleviate WAC
problems in some predictable ways.
A WAC coordinator may be hired; a writing center may be created; a writing
"specialist" may be called in,
consulted, or hired full-time.
Tensions occur when budgets and other constraints require an institution
to dump all of the responsibility for
writing instruction on one person
or office. Given the state of the field, too often this work is asked
of non-tenured, junior faculty who are assumed
to have the time, energy and political
savvy to pull this off. This paper examines the problems facing one
institution where all writing issues are
being expected of the writing center,
whose staff, resources and support are not adequate to do the job.
Budget cuts often require schools
to hire only one person to handle writing problems and programs.
What I discuss are the problems that can occur when
all writing issues are placed into
the hands of the writing center. Faculty often complain when they
get papers or assignments whose
writing they consider sub-par.
Instead of working with their students themselves, faculty often falsely
expect the writing center staff to teach
their students how to write.
If the writing center is expected to provide all of the WID training on
campus, the author proposes that faculty be
required to work part of their
load as tutors in the writing center. The author reviews some of
the programs where this practice is taking place.
Composition theory supports the
premise that WID is most successful when faculty from all disciplines participate
in establishing shared values,
expectations and goals for writing.
What this paper will do is invite discussion of who is responsible for
WID or WAC by asking: where does
instruction takes place on campuses?
Who promotes and supports WAC? What expectations are placed on the
various offices dealing with writing
instruction? How much writing
instruction is done outside of English departments? Why can't faculty
be required to tutor in the writing
center? How can one person
survive implementing a WID program?
IIIe. Multiple Perspectives on Writing and Identity
What Happened To Your “I”?: Using Creative Nonfiction When Writing Becomes Critical--Rochelle L. Harris
Through my scholarly work in writing classrooms and in the fields of Critical Studies and Creative Nonfiction, I have been able to see that student writing, at times, becomes a vehicle for critiquing self, identity, and culture. The intersections between Critical Studies and Creative Nonfiction have not been studied in any great depth in the context of Rhetoric and Composition, yet the emphasis that both of these disciplines place on the “I” in writing and reading have important implications for compositionists. Increasingly, narrative, personal essay, and even research projects from a first-person perspective are the texts of choice in first-year writing and upper level writing courses. Teachers draw from expressivist, process and epistemological pedagogies to help students read and craft texts. My work with student writers reveals that these theoretical contexts for writing do not significantly account for the “I” in texts.
My conference presentation, a twenty-minute paper format,
takes up this aspect of writing in a Composition II class setting.
Specifically, my presentation looks at the ways in which a student, Jenny,
and a teacher, myself, drew from Critical Studies and Creative Nonfiction
to situate, interpret and make decisions about our texts and conversations
in a writing classroom. Jenny began a research project about a book
significant to her; she quickly found herself researching why she disliked
reading and writing and how this single book positively impacted the course
of her academic career. Then she discovered that this book had been
negatively critiqued by people she respected, a distressing and painful
discovery for her. Throughout her research process, I talked with
Jenny and responded to her drafts, not only trying to encourage her writing
and thinking but also trying to let her see she had choices in this text.
Jenny had to decide, in her words, either to “play it safe” or “go for
it” in her writing. Would she continue to try to think her way through
this difficult, critical moment? Or would she just ‘report’ on the
information she found, believe the book’s naysayers, and dismiss her own
experience with the book? Three questions arose for me in this negotiation:
· When does writing become critical work?
· How do teachers and students read and respond
to such writing?
· How can writing classes facilitate, or at least
make space for, that kind of work?
While my research is ongoing, I have come to some conclusions
about how composition teachers can provide students with support and response,
as well as facilitate sustained intellectual engagement with a writing
project, when assignments turn into unexpected (or expected) critical texts.
Those conclusions rest on the generative uses of genre, the kinds of relationships
students and teachers build in a classroom setting, and the kinds of inquiries
teachers ask their students to make through writing. Such writers
and scholars as Victor Villanueva, in Bootstraps, Anne Lamott, in Bird
by Bird, bell hooks, in Teaching to Transgress, and Amy Lee, in Composing
Critical Pedagogies, implicitly (and at times explicitly) study the critical
“I” in student texts, as well as in their own texts. Ultimately,
I provide a framework for understanding what can happen to the “I” in writing
by drawing from Critical Pedagogy and practitioners of Creative Nonfiction.
Genre and Dislocation: An Analysis of Homeless Shelter Intake Notes --Amy Reddinger
This paper examines the genre of “intake notes” that structures
the process of admitting addicted, abused and poor women into homeless
shelters. These notes are created as a result of the “intake interview”--
the moment of first meeting during which a woman becomes a client of the
institution. This power-charged transaction results in a one-page narrative,
relating both the client’s reported experiences as well as the staff member’s
impression of this woman. Drawing on Anis Bawarshi’s notion of institutional
genres as both rhetorical actions and recurrent situations (2000),
this study aims at exploring the discursive power transacted during this
specific rhetorical exercise. Particularly, it is the intake notes, and
their power to re-inscribe the very factors of identity which have created
the client’s homelessness, that is the subject of my inquiry.
This study focuses on two specific functions of the intake
notes: the way in which they construct the client of the institution; and
the way that they work to (re)construct the institution itself, and by
doing so, re-assert the genre’s necessity. These two concepts are closely
interrelated and interdependent.
Useful in examining the relationship between institutional
genres and identity is Carol Berkenkotter’s view of psychotherapy intake
notes as that which both establishes the patient as a subject in an institutional
system (mental health) and also begins to establish and construct an identity
for the client in a way that may influence the person’s view of themselves
(2001). This constructed view of self is closely linked to the institutions
simultaneous construction of its own identity. To explore the role
of intake notes in the (re)construction of the institution I will call
on Carolyn Miller’s use of exigence as social motive (1984), to interrogate
the complex relationship between the social need (homelessness), the response
(the institution) and the means of effecting change though discourse--primarily
through the construction of a “client.”
The establishment of rhetorical, institutionally-constructed
identities at the site of the shelter intake note that warrants further
exploration. Particularly within an institution that aims towards alleviating
the poverty, inequality and disempowerment of women, it becomes important
to explore these rhetorical acts as sites of potential recursivity.
Session IV Abstracts
IVa. Roundtable: A Disciplinary (Mis)Match: College Compositionists Training High School Teachers of Writing
We propose a 90 minute roundtable which addresses the disciplinary issues which arise when College Compositionists train English Education majors. Although many Rhetoric and Composition faculty have little or no experience teaching writing at the high school level, these university faculty members are often asked to train future high school English teachers in composition theory. Indeed, despite the fact that most may never teach writing at the college level, undergraduate English Education majors enrolled in composition theory courses are often asked to read various scholars -- Berlin, Lu, Hairston, Bartholomae -- whose work explicitly addresses the teaching of writing at the college level, the same work which apparently is also implicitly applicable to teaching writing in high schools. This raises important questions about the disciplinary differences between Rhetoric-Composition and English Education, and not only where the goals for the two disciplines are the same and different, but also how they are similar or different. For example, it is common for college compositionists to discuss academic rhetorics and disciplinary discourses found on campus, the same rhetorics and discourses which their composition students will encounter during their undergraduate careers, a laudable and important investigation. Yet, how does a university writing-in-the-disciplines model of teaching writing hold up in a high school classroom? How can, if at all, should future high school teachers integrate notions of the varying academic rhetorics into their high school classrooms? Our roundtable will address this disciplinary (mis)match and others, and how such issues are and might be mitigated.
As such, the roundtable will be composed of five people: two college professors engaged in training future high school English teachers and three former students who are now teaching in Colorado high schools. The focus of the roundtable will be the professors discussing their approaches to training future High School teachers of writing, and the student teachers contrasting what they learned in a composition theory course with what they see happening in their high school classes. The goals will be to promote a discussion which addresses the uneasy -- if fairly common -- disciplinary (mis)match of Composition-Rhetoric and English Education and then to engage the audience in a dialogue which considers ways to help better meet the needs of the two disciplines.
IVb. Panel: Evaluating the Effectiveness of Genre: Classrooms, Institutions, and Communities
Aviva Freedman (1993) claims that
the teaching of genres is a misguided project at best: that students
can master genres without explicit
instruction, and that such instruction
can actually hinder the acquisition of the tacit understandings that genres
embody; her conclusions, however,
are complicated by the paucity
of research that has adequately addressed the effectiveness of such instruction,
as well as the nature of the
learning process. This panel
investigates the problematics of teaching and learning genres, which opens
the door to a host of questions: How are
genres learned? Does the learning
of one genre transfer to other writing situations? What defines the success
or failure of a genre? This panel
will discuss these concerns by
framing them in terms of an underlying question: What makes genres effective
(or in-) as the rhetorical
formations through which we construct
and understand the way writing is learned, and the way it should be taught
in classrooms, institutions, and
communities? Furthermore, this
panel heeds the call to examine the composition produced outside the walls
of the classroom, what Anne Ruggles
Gere calls the "extracurriculum"
of composition, while at the same time problematizing this notion of "extracurriculum"
by conducting genre
analyses in the unexpected spaces
within, between, and beyond the composition classroom.
Genre Analysis in the Composition
Classroom: Looking Outward, Looking In The first speaker will discuss
the applicability of genre to the
composition classroom by presenting
data from an action research project. Specifically, the project examines
the use of genre analysis activities in
two sections of a freshman composition
course. It will be proposed, first of all, that the use of these
activities varied strikingly in theoretical
and pedagogical orientation one
section employing a "classical" notion of genre by emphasizing formal features,
and the other employing a New
Rhetorical notion of genre as social
action. Based on this proposal, artifacts from the course will be
analyzed for possible differential
effects, especially as they are
indicated by the students drafts of writing assignments, teacher commentary
on those drafts, assignment
sheets, in-class writings in short,
the interacting genres that constitute the composition classroom.
This analysis will focus on the effectiveness
of genre analysis in promoting
the critical reading of texts (in this case movie reviews), as well as
the negative transfer that can result from
using an outside genre as the basis
for an academic writing assignment. The speaker will suggest that
classroom genre analyses should focus
students attention at least as
much on the genres within the classroom as those outside it.
A Failed Genre? The Ineffectiveness
and Intertextuality in the Course Evaluation of the First-Year Composition
Course
In addition to the genres employed
in the classroom, students face a variety of institutional genres that
are linked to the composition course.
To evaluate the "effectiveness"
of such institutional genres, the second speaker will present findings
from a genre analysis of course evaluations
completed by first-year composition
students. The discussion will particularly focus on the handwritten portion
of the evaluation, paying
attention to both the evaluation
itself and over 300 student responses. The analysis reveals that
rather than focusing on the main issues of the
composition course in which they
were enrolled, writing and argument, the students focus on personal concerns
beyond the scope of the class and
elements of the class that are/were
unchangeable. Such responses question whether this institutional genre
is "effective" for those involved: the
students, the instructor, the Department,
and later, the Tenure Committee. In addition, as the composition courses
featured in the evaluations claim
to provide students with a handle
on "academic discourse" that will be useful in other contexts, what Slevin
calls "writing across the
curriculum," the second speaker
will also evaluate the degree to which the students employ the genre of
argument learned in the composition course in
the evaluations (where appropriate),
revealing the intertextuality of the composition course and the evaluation,
as well as the possible
transferability of the genre(s)
learned in the composition classroom.
Genre Analysis in the "Extracurriculum":
The Healing Journal as the Site of Genre Evolution in a Discourse Community
In moving beyond the composition classroom, the last speaker will present
the effectiveness, as well as the shortcomings, of genre for a non-traditional
discourse community that utilizes composition as a
discursive tool for emotional healing.
The discourse community of trauma survivors, working from the conceptual
framework of "imagined communities"
(Anderson: 1991) shares a common
goal of healing, as well as a language of recovery and healing, that is
diffused throughout texts and word of mouth.
The reader intends to create a
genealogy of the healing journal within this discourse community, considering
the journal as a cultural artifact (Miller 1994) to trace historically
and understand how this genre has come into being, as well as allowing
for other genres to come into existence as a compliment. Genre theory is
a useful tool to follow the evolution of the healing journal in both its
form and forum, from private written entries in diaries to public discourses
on the Internet. Through genre analysis of
this "extracurriculum", the speaker
responds to Geres call to examine composition produced outside the walls
of the classroom and into the
community.
IVc. Panel: Cooking, Cleaning, and Sewing: The Rhetoric of Households
Lynn Worsham argues in a recent JAC essay (19.3) that “the question of identity cannot be isolated from the question of history, the question of knowledge, and the struggle to produce the knowledge and practices appropriate to the discipline’s institutional and social warrant” (400). This panel will examine current and historical writings on household work to understand how women’s identities, work, and cultural worth have been constructed by theories of domesticity and institutionalized gender roles. We will argue that the way these sites have been read has been both gendered and classed, allowing some texts to be privileged over others as well as writing about domesticity to be valued over the work itself.
This the Boke of Cokery: Cookbooks
and the Belletristic Tradition
Speaker one will discuss the influence
of belletristic rhetoric on the evaluation of cookbooks in eighteenth-century
England. The speaker will argue that the use of belles lettres as a criteria
for evaluating the quality of cookbooks evaluated the status of food writing
in general but also privileged those books written by social elite, and
marginalized the writings of female and working-class cooks.
Managers and Maids: Rhetoric and
the Hierarchies of Housework
Speaker two will examine the recent
upsurge in housekeeping literature aimed at middle class audiences that
conceptualizes domestic work as aesthetic, intellectual, and moral. The
speaker will then juxtapose these rhetorical constructions housework with
the increase in hired domestic labor performed in middle class homes by
poorly paid, often minority, women. The speaker will suggest implications
of this tension and argue that despite highly commodified texts attempting
to stylize domestic work, actual labor remains entrenched in patriarchal
and classist traditions.
Rhetorics of Quilting: Academic
Appropriations and Political Texts
The metaphor of quilting has been
frequently invoked in academic discourse as a means of capturing a pattern
present in the way we view our world. Little attention has been given,
however, to the linking of fragments that occurs in the piecing of a political
quilt. This presenter will draw from theory, including work by Bourdieu
and Deleuze & Guattari, and the actual work and words of a group of
political quilters to explore the gap between the status of the quilting
metaphor and the object of the political quilt in a postmodern culture.
IVd. Defending, Teaching, and Assessing First-Year Composition
Assessment Politics in First-Year Composition: Assessment Rubrics, TA Training, and Writing Program Administration--Joseph Eng
While the writing portfolio has been widely adopted as an integral part of the composition curriculum as discussed in the professional literature, especially by Wolcott and Legg, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Edward M. White, and others, the application and efficacy of such as an exit measure for First-Year Composition is not fully explored. Nationally, many schools either have no exit measure or base the entire exit exam on a single writing sample (such as an argumentative piece); perhaps, the writing portfolio is not universally adopted as a holistic exit measure supported by trained scoring teams and detailed rubrics. A recent discussion thread on the WPA-L posted by an administrator from the California State University System solicited help in devising a scoring rubric tailored to the exit portfolio; local community colleges have exit portfolios based on anchoring portfolio samples but use no rubric. Further, discussions involving FYC exit assessment seldom explore the intricate relationship involving first-year composition curriculum, training of teaching assistants, and writing program goals. This presentation attempts to address some, if not all of the above, through the following:
1. Defining inherent problems regarding the English 101 exit exam of a mid-size composition program of 150 sections, supported by 28 TAs and 7 lecturers, at a regional comprehensive university
2. Introducing four different rubrics for different purposes
3. Introducing the pilot exit portfolio and sharing the results from one academic term
4. Introducing the new composition curriculum by combining both formative and summative assessments
5. Discussing program politics
This talk concludes by presenting new issues in TA and
staff training, composition curriculum, and pass rate. Questions
and comments from the audience will be entertained throughout this interactive
session.
Points of Distinction: The Importance of Exigency and Vocabulary in Effective Cultural Studies Writing Pedagogy--Leigh Jones
Cultural Studies is currently one of the most important influences on composition teaching approaches, particularly among graduate student teachers. The courses that many graduate students teach, as well as many of the first-year composition readers they use, reflect the influence of Cultural Studies on writing instruction and on the textbook market. I agree with James Berlin, John Trimbur, and David Leight who argue that Cultural Studies is an appropriate approach to teaching introductory composition courses because it addresses complex political and social realities that students and instructors face today. Yet, many graduate student teachers are left frustrated as they attempt to use Cultural Studies textbooks to teach writing and analysis. This frustration often stems from vaguely defined goals for using Cultural Studies in a writing class.
In this presentation, I will argue that in order for a
Cultural Studies approach to be an effective tool for analysis in a composition
classroom, it must 1) include a clear sense of political exigency, and
2) include a useful vocabulary for discussing complex social constructions
such as race, class, and gender. I will consider what theorists including
Stuart Hall, Guyatri Spivak, and Henry Giroux say about cultural studies
as an analytical and pedagogical tool, and I will examine the reasons why
many currently popular textbooks fail as Cultural Studies approaches to
reading and writing. Finally, I will propose ways that compositionists
in general, and graduate students in particular, might more effectively
teach by invoking a Cultural Studies approach.
Saving First-Year Writing--Mark Waldo
My twenty minute paper presentation will argue a defense of first-year composition courses and programs in the face of burgeoning writing requirements within the disciplines. Why is such a defense necessary? As I see the problem, for two reasons. First, composition courses usually operate out of a set of values for writing limited to a particular disciplinary community–composition studies. As a discipline, composition studies trains teachers in its own specialized language, and that language crosses the curriculum in a limited sense only. Yet these programs are often massive, expensive, and teach writing to students campus-wide. This situation creates hallway conversations between community-minded faculty members from, say, English and Biology, the Biology faculty member remarking that her students “don’t know how to write” or “don’t know how to write as I want them to.” These conversations and complaints are increasing, as awareness has grown that global writing programs do not meet local writing needs.
Second, when WAC programs develop out of acceptance of language differences between disciplines and engage faculty and students on their home turf, the amount of writing required of students may increase dramatically. At the University of Nevada, Reno, for example, ninety-six percent of the faculty require writing of their students in undergraduate classes. Sixty-seven percent require more writing than they did five years ago. (Percentages are drawn from a phone survey of 400 faculty at UNR.) This means to me that there is a great deal of writing being assigned on our campus and that our WAC program is having a positive impact. It also means that the Core Writing Program, a two semester writing requirement offered through the English Department, might be argued as unnecessary.
What must first-year writing programs (and by extension
graduate programs in rhetoric and composition) do, in the face of their
potential irrelevance? First-year writing programs must defend their
courses and pedagogy on their own terms. These are the only courses
on campus in which student writing becomes the text. They are the
only courses, or among the very few, which privilege writing over reading.
They are the only courses in which drafting and the sharing of drafts in
small groups becomes a major pedagogic activity. They are the only
courses, or among the few, in which the student’s personal experience can
become a legitimate subject matter for writing, and the development of
“authentic voice” a legitimate goal for learning. They are certainly
a more intimate and comfortable setting for nervous first-year students
than almost any other class. These courses will not teach students
to write biology, nursing, or even history; the faculty in those disciplines
must do that. But they are defensible on their own terms, and the
increasing success of many WAC programs makes a focused defense for first-year
writing more pressing.
IVe. Intertextual Ecologies: Activity Theory, Materiality, and Disciplinarity
(UN)DISCIPLINING DISCOURSE: INVESTIGATING INTERTEXTUALITY IN/THROUGH GENRES--Kimberly Emmons
Current work in genre and activity theory (e.g.,
Berkenkotter, 2001; Russell, 1997) has begun to imagine genres, rhetorics,
and literacies as plural formations, as entities that are best understood
in relation to larger systems of texts. In Carol Berkenkotter’s work,
the therapist’s genre of the initial assessment is analyzed as the recontextualization
of notes taken during the therapy session (which are, themselves, a recontexutalization
of the spoken genres of the interview). Thus, for Berkenkotter, the
initial assessment gains meaning through citing and reformulating previous
genres and by anticipating its place in future genre systems (e.g., insurance
claims processing). This recognition of the constitutive intertexutality
of genres should help us account for the heterogeneity of texts within
genre systems. Nevertheless, in Berkenkotter’s formulation, the recontextulaizations
occur within a closely aligned set of genres – the initial assessment is
indexed by its relation to the therapy session, to the meta-genre of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and to the material
requirements of insurance categories. The question that this paper
will ask, then, is whether this goes far enough in imagining the possibilities
of discursive travel. In other words, how can we account for the
interplay between genres or activity systems that address very different
exigencies?
When we move to theorizing writing, rhetoric, and
literacy in the plural, we need to account for the multiple activity systems
and social motivations that come into play in each moment of textual production.
As David Russell has recently argued, the need for this theorizing is amply
demonstrated in our own classrooms, where our object/motive is sometimes
misaligned with that of our students, leading to mutual frustration over
what is being taught/learned (“Writing It Up”). In response to such
frustration, this paper argues that we must investigate the interactions
among activity systems both inside and outside the academy. And further,
it argues that we must account for the ways that intertextual anticipation,
to use Berkenkotter’s concept, can cross disciplinary boundaries.
When we attempt to help students negotiate the rhetorics of our fields,
we must be aware of the potential for/of extra-disciplinary knowledge/discourse.
This paper will explore the potential of discursive
travel in/through genres and activity systems by examining a variety of
texts that circulate around women and depression in the United States.
The texts used in this study represent related but distinct activity systems:
National Institute of Mental Health pamphlets produced for public health
awareness, drug advertisements created to enhance consumer need, and memoirs
published to foster a sense of community connection. These texts
offer a chance to explore how information about depression is deployed
rhetorically and managed both within and across activity systems.
How, this paper will ask, do these related systems influence each other,
the generalized discourse on depression in this country, and, most importantly,
the women at whom they are ostensibly directed? This paper will argue
that our recent interest in plurality should be expanded to encompass a
mode by which discourse can travel across disciplinary/generic boundaries.
The freedom of such movement among non-academic texts like those examined
in this paper suggests that disciplinary knowledge consists not only of
interactions among sanctioned genres but of negotiations with other systems
of knowledge organization as well. In the end, theorizing this intergeneric
movement may potentially help us understand some of the tensions between
academic and professional writing practices, and it may lead to a clearer
picture of how/why genres shift and change over time/setting.
Session V
Va. Roundtable: Tensions and Possibilities: Supporting the At-Risk Student In and Beyond the Department
This 90-minute roundtable will address and present for discussion the following questions:
· What is the relationship between Writing Centers,
Academic Services, and Writing Programs?
· What are the individual contributions to learning
writing and how do they interact with one another?
· Do they (should they) all work from the same
goals? How are these goals arrived at?
· How can TA training approach this interrelationship
to make it more productive?
Our first panelist, a Writing Center Coordinator, will describe his goals for tutor training, focusing on the most often requested service, grammar instruction. He will briefly explore the issues of creating guidelines for grammar instruction, modifying teaching goals to suit learning capacities, and finding techniques such as modeling that work.
Our second panelist, a Writing Specialist, will explain her role in creating reading workshops for students in our program. She will address the problems of coordinating TA and workshop goals and scheduling, increasing student involvement, and involving tutors in the workshops.
Our third panelist, a Learning Specialist, will explain special difficulties posed by student athletes: socialization to the University environment, progress-monitoring methods, athletic versus academic consequences, and tutor training and availability.
Our fourth and fifth panelists, Writing Program Directors, outline their interactions with these other specialists and with Teaching Assistants. They will tie together the strands of the conversation, describing their roles in defining the goals of the program and as liaisons between the Teaching Assistants and Support Services, and suggesting methods of training TAs to help improve relations between these different groups.
Panelists will speak briefly (five minutes each) and each
will include in their talk a perspective of the ways in which they have
worked together, explaining various tensions that have arisen and how they
have been managed. They will then engage the audience in a discussion
of the issues at hand by posing questions (such as those listed above),
hearing questions, and moderating the conversation.
Vb. Panel: Tutor Trouble: Territory, Theory and
Transgression
The writing center is a territory where disciplinary conventions are reproduced and yet contested in triplicate: by the director, the tutor, and the student writer. Tutors inhabit the middle ground, a site between academic and student literacies (Harris). The multiple literacies they bring to their work in writing centers, as well as the inherent differences between writing centers at R1 institutions versus those with open admissions, necessarily complicate writing center discourse—and the lives of writing center directors. This panel argues that writing center theory can benefit from investigating sites of “tutor trouble,” where transgressions between theory and practice serve to clarify the work we do and the ways we think about it. Drawing on theories of genre, identity, and cultural consumption, a writing center director from a community college, an assistant from an R1 university, and a tutor discuss tensions between and among writing center theory and practice, directors and tutors, and the rhetorical practices of a variety of writing center sites. By examining writing centers as habitats where rhetorical practices replicate but also reshape the conventions they contain, the panel considers the transgressive tactics tutors use to maintain a sense of agency while being “disciplined” in and into writing center theory and practice, and addresses the exigencies that sites of trouble expose.
Speaker 1 examines the writing center as a site of pedagogical production and resistance. Drawing on cultural studies’ investigations of institutional production and consumption (especially Michel de Certeau's notions of institutional strategies for keeping people "in their place"—and the subsequent tactics everyday people employ to subvert them) to discuss peer tutors' resistance to theory and the transgressions (pedagogical and otherwise) which constitute their “poetic ways of ‘making do.’” By examining these transgressions in light of the tutors’ relative place in the power structure of the academy, it becomes clear that they must to a certain extent resist the practices imposed on them from above in order to maintain a sense of agency needed to enact the role of tutor at all.
Speaker 2 looks at a tutor training course curriculum as she conducted it in a community college and interrogates sites where the theory of writing center scholarship fails to articulate the needs of community college tensions. The rhetoric articulated in the virtual space of scholarship falls short of completely wording the reality of practices in community college writing centers. At a community college, the quality and quantity of tutor training curriculum has to be measured against concrete limits: limited time, funding, and literacies of both writing center interns as well as the students they serve. This contextualized experience introduces ambiguities that are vital to the discourse of writing center pedagogy.
Speaker 3 takes up the questions posed by Speaker 2 and dialogically responds to them from the rhetorical position of one of the tutors in the training program. She will evaluate the training program and posit her own interpretation of both the rhetoric of training and the experience of enacting it. Answering Elizabeth Boquet’s admonition that “conclusions are drawn about peer tutors, information is produced for peer tutors, but rarely are these things created by peer tutors. Tutors are often objectified and essentialized in the literature devoted to them. In this way, tutors are disallowed a voice in the literature that pertains most directly to them” (18), this tutor will speak to the issues raised by the director of the writing center and the instructor of tutor training.
Vc. Panel: Dissolving Borders: Changing Lines in the New (Media) University
It is a commonplace today that the university is in transformation.
New instruments of accountability are being put in place to bring the university
and its productions in line with market logics. Although the corrosive
effects of the market are often decried, especially in terms of humanities-based
scholarship, there are a great many new opportunities available to us especially
in the contexts of New Media. These prospects require a re-thinking of
what
scholarship and (post)disciplinarity can be, which in
turn necessitates a re-thinking of what the role of humanities-based scholarship
in the new university should be. As New Media disseminate throughout the
disciplines, often through various TAC, WAC, or WID programs and emerging
new inter/disciplinary minors, various lines that have defined the old
university—various disciplinary lines, the lines between education and
business, as well as the lines dividing rhetoric, writing, and communication—are
being changed, redirected, or retraced. This panel attempts to examine
these changes and lines of flight.
Presentation #1—"Bring the Noise: Writing Out the Corporate University"
In the postmodern university, new instruments of accountability
are evolving to coordinate the university with market logics. I will suggest
how we can successfully adapt while looking at new business-, media-, and
technology-savvy scholarship. I will discuss ways in which these
interdisciplinary examples dissolve barriers that divide
the academy from the public and business while extending the range and
kind of writing we produce.
Presentation #2—"Reconceiving the Corporate Writer: Transcending Instrumentalism"
Research in the Chicago job market indicates professional
writers must use new media in a far wider range of writing environments
than those addressed by professional writing curricula. Accordingly, I
am identifying areas outside professional writing that can provide new
and superior pedagogical models for transcending the instrumental approaches
to technology and
writing often shared in business and academic constructions
of the professional writer.
Presentation #3—"Placing New Media: Or, Technology and the Shift from Writing to Rhetoric"
In the new media university, the definition of "writing"
is changing. Is composing a web page writing? Is using a video clip as
evidence in an argument better writing than a written description of the
clip, if the actual clip makes the argument stronger? This suggests that
the move from writing to rhetoric in the context of multimedia may be necessary.
Consequently, I call for shifting from writing and technology programs
that serve other disciplines to the development of minors in Writing, Rhetoric,
and Multimedia that cross disciplinary lines.
The Place of Composition In Rhetoric--Fredel M. Wiant
The Call for Papers for this conference suggests
"The Place of Rhetoric in Composition" as an area of examination. In this
paper, I suggest that this phrasing limits both the study of rhetoric
and the study of composition. Rather, I propose that examining composition
as a field of rhetoric opens the door to a wider understanding of composition
in the academy and provides a ground for interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary
approaches to writing instruction.
First I define rhetoric and provide a very brief
historical review of the place of rhetoric in the academy with emphasis
on classical and medieval periods. The more recent history of the relationship
between composition studies and rhetoric has been well-documented (Berlin,
S. Miller, M. Goggin, Mathison, and many others) and rather than taking
time to review that history, I will make an annotated bibliography available.
The primary focus of this paper is an argument
that restoring rhetoric to the prominent position it once held and understanding
rhetoric as the foundation of intellectual activity will provide several
significant advantages for composition:
1) It will enhance the legitimacy of composition
as a discipline rather than an often-undervalued service course and/or
the neglected stepchild of another department. By emphasizing the academic
context of composition, it will also discourage the "anybody can teach
FY composition" attitude that often accounts for the low status of our
discipline.
2) It will provide an additional intellectual base
for relating composition to other fields such as science, the social sciences,
history, and philosophy; that is, it will provide a substantive academic
rationale for advocating writing across the curriculum.
3) It will provide a framework for designing team-taught
interdisciplinary courses. Consider, for example, a rhetoric of science
in which students examine the relationship off experimental laboratory
procedures to the composing process or a rhetoric of history class in which
students read and respond to historical documents in terms of audience
and purpose as well as historical impact.
4) It will initiate a multidisciplinary dialogue
that can lead to closer cooperation between composition programs and other
departments in teaching, assigning, and evaluating student writing.
North Dakota is Everywhere: Disciplinary Lessons from a Historical Study of Composition at two North Dakota Universities --Kevin Brooks
This presentation will challenge the widely held conception that North Dakota is synonymous with “nowhere,” and that in fact the first-year composition programs at the University of North Dakota and North Dakota State University are surprisingly representative of the disciplinary movements in composition over the past thirty years. After brief histories of composition at each institution, which draw on archival research, secondary sources about composition and higher education in North Dakota, and extensive interviews with faculty, lecturers, teaching assistants, and students, I will offer three lessons to the discipline:
1) Composition, as Richard Miller has recently argued, may never become “one nation,” but in order to make positive curricular or labor reforms, local practices need to be examined (or exposed) in the context of regional and national disciplinary practices. Successful curricular and labor reforms at UND and NDSU over the past 30 years have always been supported or catalyzed by national pedagogical or labor initiatives, and heterogeneity, rather than homogeneity, at the national level provides local programs with a wider array of reform strategies to draw on.
2) Composition programs should discipline themselves with a “ten-year rule” for rejuvenation. Richard Haswell, in Gaining Ground in College Composition, argues for a thorough and open rethinking of composition programs’ goals and practices every ten years, and the programs at both North Dakota institutions intuitively sought the same kind of regular reform. The successes and failures of the reforms at UND and NDSU, however, suggest that this process needs to become more formalized for programs, and more thoroughly apart of the departmental culture.
3) Composition programs would do well to begin or continue to put effort into developing vertical writing curriculums, writing minors, and writing majors as a supplement or alternative to the standard first-year courses. The North Dakota institutions are just now beginning to make this shift in focus, and in the process are adding additional composition faculty, which in turn holds the potential of strengthening the first-year curriculum and the graduate programs in rhetoric and composition.
These lessons are being articulated by other scholars
in other contexts, but by grounding them in specific institutional practices,
and by grounding them in North Dakota (nowhere/everywhere), I hope to convince
the audience that local practices are and should be thoroughly situated
in national practices, and that local histories are vitally important to
our national, disciplinary conversations.
Ve. Exploring and Reconceptualizing Writing Programs and English Studies
Reconceptualizing English Studies: an interdisciplinary vision for graduate education--John Talbird, Virgina Crisco, and Katie Stahlnecker
We have heard several calls recently to reconceptualize the profession and the curricula of English Studies around visions of a more productive relationship between rhetoric and poetics (Berlin, North, Scholes, Seitz). Considering that graduate school is often the site that initiates this split, we feel this is a logical place to begin the work of reimagining the possibilities of joining these polarized aspects of English Studies. Clearly, as James Slevin notes, the profession needs “to open up some curricular space within which our graduate students can learn about and participate in this critique of the profession” (qtd. in North Refiguring the PhD in English Studies, 75).
Through our work together as doctoral students, we too recognize this need for and the value of such critical participation. Over the past year, we have been fortunate enough to share several opportunities to engage in meaningful critique of certain facets of English Studies on both departmental and professional levels. We contend that these collaborative, critical moments have been instrumental to our development not only as graduate students but also as professionals in the field and should, thus, be made more available. Through this presentation, then, in which we plan to share our collaborative stories, we hope to illustrate the potential of graduate students as active participants in reshaping our profession. Specifically, we will first report on the collaborative work undertaken by six students and two professors in the process of creating a new course for the graduate program at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and our subsequent efforts to document this work in an article about English Studies collaboratively written for publication. Second, we will offer a set of situated reflections on the process of building a collective (but by no means univocal) understanding of the professionalization of graduate students and the curricula as well as the writing and reflection that has issued from it. Then, we will consider what general challenges we faced in enacting an interdisciplinary vision for graduate education; how this collaborative work erased disciplinary divisions, created new alliances and modes of inquiry, and structured new opportunities for scholarly work; and how collaboration became a means for reenvisioning graduate education and professionalization.
All of this work is significant precisely because it occurred
at the intersection of disciplinarity, knowledge, writing, socialization,
and graduate student education. Through our presentation, then, we
aim to offer a vision of graduate education that crosses the boundaries
of rhetoric and poetics to consider how PhD students, typically streamlined
into very narrow disciplinary areas, can, indeed should, find the value
in the blurring of those boundaries. Thus, we will offer a multi-vocal
text, which challenges (in form and function) traditional models of monologic/authoritative
learning in which one speaker or one text is identified as the locus of
knowledge. Ultimately, we hope to provide not only our reflection
on but also an *enactment* of graduate student professionalization as shared
intellectual inquiry.
Exploring the Great Divide: Composition, Creative Writing, and the Emergence of “Writing Studies”--Peter Vandenberg
Over the last decade, rhetoric and composition scholarship
has established a scholarly discourse to inform the teaching of what has
traditionally been called “creative writing”—student production of poetry,
short fiction, and literary non-fiction. Authors and editors such
as Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom, Mary Ann Cain, Lynn Bloom, Patrick Bizzaro,
Nancy Welch and others have produced books, essay collections, and articles
utilizing the disciplinary knowledge of rhetoric and composition in the
production of pedagogies for creative writing courses. Such theorizing,
for example, refigures belletristic composition as a social, rather than
personal enterprise; demonstrates the use of classical categories of invention
as topoi for writing verse; critiques and displaces the writing workshop,
the workhorse of conventional creative-writing pedagogy, with more collaborative
approaches. Most recently, a collection edited by David Starkey,
Teaching Writing Creatively, attempts to redirect this emergent discourse
back toward
mainstream writing pedagogy. In the introduction,
Starkey endorses what he calls a “polyculturalist” approach to writing
instruction constructed by “teacher-theorists who, over the years, have
actively cross-pollinated areas of writing that had once been isolated
from each other” (xiv).
This speaker will argue, however, that while the
synthesis Starkey and others endorse no doubt leads to interesting and
effective pedagogy, the growth in publishing about the teaching of creative
writing has yet to have a significant impact on the teaching or staffing
of creative writing courses in American universities; the deconstruction
of the creative writing/composition binary remains a largely theoretical
matter. Drawing on the historical work of D. G. Myers (The Elephants
Speak) and others, this speaker will show that this new discourse mostly
fails to address, let alone reconcile, underlying material-structural issues
that continue to divide composition and creative writing in most institutional
settings: the radically different approaches to training MFAs vs PhDs;
the differing standards for marketable expertise defined by most hiring
institutions (“creative” vs “scholarly” publications); the similarly bifurcated
expectations for promotion and tenure. And perhaps most important,
this discourse ignores the fierce desire for independence from scholarly
community that ironically binds many who teach creative writing.
These issues of separation and synthesis will be
firmly situated in the emergent “Writing Studies” movement, the origination
of undergraduate major programs in writing. This impetus toward curricular
change is perhaps best exemplified by Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing
Curriculum by Shamoon et al. This speaker will argue that in many
institutions creative writing faculty may offer more significant resistance
to Writing Studies curricula than the literature faculty that Shamoon et
al. address, particularly to the extent that such curricular change focuses
on public rather than personal, rhetorical rather than formal, useful rather
than aesthetically pleasing. The speaker will argue that a flexible
theoretical framework to unite composition and creative writing in a Writing
Studies major may be dependent on explicitly addressing the material partitions
between them.
updated Sept. 15, 2001