In Reclaiming the Rural: Essays on Literacy, Rhetoric, and Pedagogy, editors Kim Donehower, Charlotte Hogg, and Eileen E. Schell bring together a diverse collection of essays that consider literacy, rhetoric, and pedagogy in the United States, Canada, and Mexico. The essays move beyond the typical arguments for preserving, abandoning, or modernizing by analyzing how rural communities sustain themselves through literate action. The contributors explore the rhetorics of water disputes in the western United States, the histories and influences of religious rhetorics in Mexico, agricultural and rural literacy curricula, the literacies of organizations such as 4-H and Academia de la Nueva Raza, and neoliberal rhetorics. Central to these examinations are the rural populations themselves, which include indigenous peoples in the rural United States, Canada, and Mexico, as well as those of European or other backgrounds.
The strength of the anthology lies in its multiple perspectives, various research sites, and the range of methodologies employed, including rhetorical analyses of economies and environments, media, and public spaces; classroom-based research; historical analysis and archival work; and qualitative research. The researchers engage the duality between the practices of everyday life in rural communities and the practices of reflecting on and making meaning.
Reclaiming the Rural reflects the continually changing, nuanced, context-dependent realities of rural life while acknowledging the complex histories, power struggles, and governmental actions that have affected and continue to affect the lives of rural citizens. This thought-provoking collection demonstrates the value in reclaiming the rural for scholarly and pedagogical analysis.
For more than four decades, the dominant model for pedagogy and research in the field of composition has been a how-centered process approach to writing instruction, which involves studying the writing that students produce to expose the various stages of their writing process. By looking at notes, outlines, and multiple drafts, often presented by students together in the form of a portfolio, instructors can identify unproductive habits that students may have and provide techniques that help them improve their writing. In this groundbreaking volume, Kyle Jensen critiques traditional how-centered process instruction and presents a sound, practical methodology by which portfolios and online writing archives—digital interfaces that expose the marks of revision writers make during composition—might be employed to develop theories about what writing is: how it occurs, functions, circulates, creates meaning, and forms its subjects. Offering online writing archives as a way to envision a transdisciplinary approach to writing studies, Reimagining Process does not abandon the prevailing concepts of process pedagogy but rather casts them in wider contexts to conceive new ways of teaching and studying writing.
When it was first published in 1989, Susan Miller’s Rescuing the Subject: A Critical Introduction to Rhetoric and the Writer established a landmark pedagogical approach to composition based on the importance of the writer and the act of writing in the history of rhetoric. Widely used as an introduction to rhetoric and composition theory for graduate students, the volume was the first winner of the W. Ross Winterowd Award from JAC and is still one of the most frequently cited books in the field.
This first paperback edition includes a new introductory chapter in which Miller addresses changes in the field since the first edition, outlines new research, and surveys positions she no longer supports. A new foreword by Thomas P. Miller assesses the proven impact of Rescuing the Subject on the field of rhetoric and composition.
Situating modern composition theory in the historical context of rhetoric, Miller notes that throughout the eighteenth century, rhetoric referred to oral, not written, discourse. By contrast, her history of rhetoric contends oral and written discourse were related from the beginning. Taking a thematic rather than chronological approach, she shows how actual acts of writing comment on both rhetoric and composition.
Miller also asserts that contemporary composition study is the necessary cultural outcome of changing conditions for producing discourse, describing the history of rhetoric as the gradual and unstable relocation of discourse in conventions that only written language can create. She maintains teachers and historians of rhetoric must recognize that the contemporary writing they analyze and teach demands their attention to a “textual rhetoric” that allows theorizing the writer as always symbolically a student of situated meanings.
"Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But unlike many other writers, what intellectuals have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with."
What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, a textbook for the undergraduate classroom, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it.
“Like all writers, intellectuals need to say something new and say it well. But for intellectuals, unlike many other writers, what we have to say is bound up with the books we are reading . . . and the ideas of the people we are talking with.”
What are the moves that an academic writer makes? How does writing as an intellectual change the way we work from sources? In Rewriting, Joseph Harris draws the college writing student away from static ideas of thesis, support, and structure, and toward a more mature and dynamic understanding. Harris wants college writers to think of intellectual writing as an adaptive and social activity, and he offers them a clear set of strategies—a set of moves—for participating in it. The second edition introduces remixing as an additional signature move and is updated with new attention to digital writing, which both extends and rethinks the ideas of earlier chapters.
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