Conceding Composition
Conceding Composition

Author: Ryan Skinnell

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2016-09-01

Total Pages: 203

ISBN-13: 1607325055

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First-year composition became the most common course in American higher education not because it could “fix” underprepared student writers, but because it has historically served significant institutional interests. That is, it can be “conceded” in multiple ways to help institutions solve political, promotional, and financial problems. Conceding Composition is a wide-ranging historical examination of composition’s evolving institutional value in American higher education over the course of nearly a century. Based on extensive archival research conducted at six American universities and using the specific cases of institutional mission, regional accreditation, and federal funding, this study demonstrates that administrators and faculty have introduced, reformed, maintained, threatened, or eliminated composition as part of negotiations related to nondisciplinary institutional exigencies. Viewing composition from this perspective, author Ryan Skinnell raises new questions about why composition exists in the university, how it exists, and how teachers and scholars might productively reconceive first-year composition in light of its institutional functions. The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition’s transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.

Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity
Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity

Author: Rita Malenczyk

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2018-04-02

Total Pages: 315

ISBN-13: 1607326957

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Edited by four nationally recognized leaders of composition scholarship, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity asks a fundamental question: can Composition and Rhetoric, as a discipline, continue its historical commitment to pedagogy without sacrificing equal attention to other areas, such as research and theory? In response, contributors to the volume address disagreements about what it means to be called a discipline rather than a profession or a field; elucidate tensions over the defined breadth of Composition and Rhetoric; and consider the roles of research and responsibility as Composition and Rhetoric shifts from field to discipline. Outlining a field with a complex and unusual formation story, Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity employs several lenses for understanding disciplinarity—theory, history, labor, and pedagogy—and for teasing out the implications of disciplinarity for students, faculty, institutions, and Composition and Rhetoric itself. Collectively, the chapters speak to the intellectual and embodied history leading to this point; to questions about how disciplinarity is, and might be, understood, especially with regard to Composition and Rhetoric; to the curricular, conceptual, labor, and other sites of tension inherent in thinking about Composition and Rhetoric as a discipline; and to the implications of Composition and Rhetoric’s disciplinarity for the future. Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Elizabeth H. Boquet, Christiane Donahue, Whitney Douglas, Doug Downs, Heidi Estrem, Kristine Hansen, Doug Hesse, Sandra Jamieson, Neal Lerner, Jennifer Helene Maher, Barry Maid, Jaime Armin Mejía, Carolyn R. Miller, Kelly Myers, Gwendolynne Reid, Liane Robertson, Rochelle Rodrigo, Dawn Shepherd, Kara Taczak

Writing Changes: Alphabetic Text and Multimodal Composition
Writing Changes: Alphabetic Text and Multimodal Composition

Author: Pegeen Reichert Powell

Publisher: Modern Language Association

Published: 2020-04-01

Total Pages: 351

ISBN-13: 1603294759

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Writing Changes moves beyond restrictive thinking about composition to examine writing as a material and social practice rich with contradictions. It analyzes the assumed dichotomy between writing and multimodal composition (which incorporates sounds, images, and gestures) as well as the truism that all texts are multimodal. Organized in four sections, the essays explore • alphabetic text and multimodal composition in writing studies • specific pedagogies that place writing in productive conversation with multimodal forms • current representations of writing and multimodality in textbooks, of instructors' attitudes toward social media, and of writing programs • ideas about writing studies as a discipline in the light of new communication practices Bookending the essays are an introduction that frames the collection and establishes key terms and concepts and an epilogue that both sums up and complicates the ideas in the essays.

Upsetting Composition Commonplaces
Upsetting Composition Commonplaces

Author: Ian Barnard

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2014-10-15

Total Pages: 194

ISBN-13: 0874219477

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In Upsetting Composition Commonplaces, Ian Barnard argues that composition still retains the bulk of instructional practices that were used in the decades before poststructuralist theory discredited them. While acknowledging that some of the foundational insights of poststructuralist theory can be difficult to translate to the classroom, Barnard upends several especially intransigent tenets that continue to influence the teaching of writing and how students are encouraged to understand writing. Using six major principles of writing classrooms and textbooks—clarity, intent, voice, ethnography, audience, and objectivity—Barnard looks at the implications of poststructuralist theory for pedagogy. While suggesting some evocative poststructuralist pedagogical practices, the author focuses on diagnosing the fault lines of composition's refusal of poststructuralism rather than on providing "solutions” in the form of teaching templates. Upsetting Composition Commonplaces addresses the need to more effectively engage in poststructuralist concepts in composition in an accessible and engaging voice that will advance the conversation about relations between the theory and teaching of writing.

Weathering the Storm
Weathering the Storm

Author: Richard N. Matzen Jr.

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-08-15

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 160732895X

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Weathering the Storm assesses the socioeconomic and political conditions that have surrounded the rise of independent writing programs (IWPs) and departments. Chapter contributors look at the institutional conditions and challenges that IWPs have faced since the 1980s with a focus on enduring the financial collapse of 2008. Leading writing specialists at the University of Texas at Austin, Syracuse University, the University of Minnesota, and many other institutions document and think carefully about the on-the-ground obstacles that have made the creation of IWPs unique. From institutional naysayers in English departments to skeptical administrators, IWPs and the faculty within them have surmounted not only negative economics but also negative rhetorics. This collection charts the story of this journey as writing faculty continually make the case for the importance of writing in the university curriculum. Independence has, for the most part, allowed IWPs to better respond to the Great Recession, but to do so they have had to define writing studies in relation to other disciplines and departments. Weathering the Storm will be of great interest to faculty and graduate students in rhetoric and composition, writing program administrators, and writing studies and English department faculty. Contributors: Linda Adler-Kassner, Lois Agnew, Alice Batt, David Beard, Davida Charney, Amy Clements, Diane Davis, Frank Gaughan, Heidi Skurat Harris, George H. Jensen, Rodger LeGrand, Drew M. Loewe, Mark Garrett Longaker, Cindy Moore, Peggy O’Neill, Chongwon Park, Louise Wetherbee Phelps, Mary Rist, Valerie Ross, John J Ruszkiewicz, Eileen E. Schell, Madeleine Sorapure, Chris Thaiss, Patrick Wehner, Jamie White-Farnham, Carl Whithaus, Traci A. Zimmerman

Policy Regimes
Policy Regimes

Author: Tyler S. Branson

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2022-04-20

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 0809338475

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Engaging education policy from kindergarten to college Author Tyler S. Branson argues that education reform initiatives in the twentieth century can be understood in terms of historical shifts in the ideas, interests, and governing arrangements that inform the teaching of writing. Today, policy regimes of “accountability” shape education reform programs such as Common Core in K-12 and Dual Enrollment in postsecondary institutions. This book reopens the conversation between policy makers and writing teachers, empirically describing the field’s institutional/historical relationship to policy and the ways teachers work on a daily basis to carry out policy. Federal and state accountability policy significantly shapes classrooms before teachers even enter them, but Branson argues the classroom is where teachers leverage disciplinary knowledge about writing to bridge, partner with, support, and sometimes resist education policies. Branson deftly blends policy critique, archival analysis, and participant observation to offer the first scholarly treatment of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Washington Task Force as well as a rare empirical study of a dual enrollment course offered in a high school. This book’s macro-and-micro-level analysis of education policy reveals how writing teachers, researchers, and administrators can strengthen their commitments to successfully teaching their students across all levels of education, while deepening their understanding of the ways education policy helps—and hinders—those commitments.

A Shared History
A Shared History

Author: Amy J. Lueck

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2020-01-06

Total Pages: 274

ISBN-13: 0809337436

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In the nineteenth century, advanced educational opportunities were not clearly demarcated and defined. Author Amy J. Lueck demonstrates that public high schools, in addition to colleges and universities, were vital settings for advanced rhetoric and writing instruction. Lueck shows how the history of high schools in Louisville, Kentucky, connects with, contradicts, and complicates the accepted history of writing instruction and underscores the significance of high schools to rhetoric and composition history and the reform efforts in higher education today. Lueck explores Civil War- and Reconstruction-era challenges to the University of Louisville and nearby local high schools, their curricular transformations, and their fate in regard to national education reform efforts. These institutions reflect many of the educational trends and developments of the day: college and university building, the emergence of English education as the dominant curriculum for higher learning, student-centered pedagogies and educational theories, the development and transformation of normal schools, the introduction of manual education and its mutation into vocational education, and the extension of advanced education to women, African American, and working-class students. Lueck demonstrates a complex genealogy of interconnections among high schools, colleges, and universities that demands we rethink our categories and standards of assessment and our field’s history. A shift in our historical narrative would promote a move away from an emphasis on the preparation, transition, and movement of student writers from high school to college or university and instead allow a greater focus on the fostering of rich rhetorical practices and pedagogies at all educational levels. As the definition of college-level writing becomes increasingly contested once again, Lueck invites a reassessment of the discipline’s understanding of contemporary programs based in high schools like dual-credit and concurrent enrollment.

Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research
Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research

Author: Maureen Daly Goggin

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2018-04-01

Total Pages: 416

ISBN-13: 1607327392

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In the course of research, most scholars have known moments of surprise, catastrophe, or good fortune, though they seldom refer to these occurrences in reports or discuss them with students. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research reveals the different kinds of work scholars, particularly those in rhetoric, writing, and literacy, need to do in order to recognize a serendipitous discovery or a missed opportunity. In published scholarship and research, the path toward discovery seems clean and direct. The dead ends, backtrackings, start-overs, and stumbles that occur throughout the research process are elided, and seems that the researchers started at point A and arrived safely and neatly at point B without incident, as if by magic. The path, however, is never truly clear and straight. Research and writing is messy. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research features chapters from twenty-three writing scholars who have experienced moments of serendipity in their own work—not by magic or pure chance but through openness and active waiting, which offer an opportunity to prepare the mind. Serendipity in Rhetoric, Writing, and Literacy Research illustrates the reality of doing research: there is no reliable prescription or one-size-fits-all manual, but success can be found with focused dedication and an open mind. Contributors: Ellen Barton​, ​Zachary C. Beare​, ​Lynn Z. Bloom​, ​Jennifer Clary-Lemon​, ​Caren Wakerman Converse​, ​Gale Coskan-Johnson​, ​Kim Donehower​, ​Bill Endres​, ​Shirley E. Faulkner-Springfield​, ​Lynée Lewis Gaillet​, ​Brad Gyori​, ​Judy Holiday​, ​Gesa E. Kirsch​, ​Lori Ostergaard​, ​Doreen Piano​, ​Liz Rohan​, ​Ryan Skinnell​, ​Patricia Wilde​, ​Daniel Wuebben

Writing Democracy
Writing Democracy

Author: Shannon Carter

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2019-08-14

Total Pages: 298

ISBN-13: 0429889933

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Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era calls on the field of writing studies to take up a necessary agenda of social and economic change in its classrooms, its scholarship, and its communities to challenge the rise of neoliberalism and right-wing nationalism. Grown out of an extended national dialogue among public intellectuals, academic scholars, and writing teachers, collectively known as the Writing Democracy project, the book creates a strategic roadmap for how to reclaim the progressive and political possibilities of our field in response to the "twilight of neoliberalism" (Cox and Nilsen), ascendant right-wing nationalism at home (Trump) and abroad (Le Pen, Golden Dawn, UKIP), and hopeful radical uprisings (Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring). As such, the book tracks the emergence of a renewed left wing in rhetoric and activism post-2008, suggests how our work as teachers, scholars, and administrators can bring this new progressive framework into our institutions, and then moves outward to our role in activist campaigns that are reshaping public debate. Part history, part theory, this book will be an essential read for faculty, graduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in composition and rhetoric and related fields focused on progressive pedagogy, university-community partnerships, and politics.

Institutional Ethnography
Institutional Ethnography

Author: Michelle LaFrance

Publisher: University Press of Colorado

Published: 2019-06-15

Total Pages: 168

ISBN-13: 1607328674

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A form of critical ethnography introduced to the social sciences in the late 1990s, institutional ethnography uncovers how things happen within institutional sites, providing a new and flexible tool for the study of how “work” is co-constituted within sites of writing and writing instruction. The study of work and work processes reveals how institutional discourse, social relations, and norms of professional practice coordinate what people do across time and sites of writing. Adoption of IE offers finely grained understandings of how our participation in the work of writing, writing instruction, and sites of writing gives material face to the institutions that govern the social world. In this book, Michelle LaFrance introduces the theories, rhetorical frames, and methods that ground and animate institutional ethnography. Three case studies illustrate key aspects of the methodology in action, tracing the work of writing assignment design in a linked gateway course, the ways annual reviews coordinate the work of faculty and writing center administrators and staff, and how the key term “information literacy” socially organizes teaching in a first-year English program. Through these explorations of the practice of ethnography within sites of writing and writing instruction, LaFrance shows that IE is a methodology keenly attuned to the material relations and conditions of work in twenty-first-century writing studies contexts, ideal for both practiced and novice ethnographers who seek to understand the actualities of social organization and lived experience in the sites they study. Institutional Ethnography expands the field’s repertoire of research methodologies and offers the grounding necessary for work with the IE framework. It will be invaluable to writing researchers and students and scholars of writing studies across the spectrum—composition and rhetoric, literacy studies, and education—as well as those working in fields such as sociology and cultural studies.