264 books match the query 'Composition' and 30 start with c

cover of Case for Critical Literacy: A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Case for Critical Literacy

A History of Reading in Writing Studies

Alice S. Horning

Utah State University Press, 2024

The Case for Critical Literacy explores the history of reading within writing studies and lays the foundation for understanding the impact of this critical, yet often untaught, skill. Every measure of students’ reading comprehension, whether digital or analog, demonstrates that between 50 and 80 percent of students are unable to capture the substance of a full discussion or evaluate material for authority, accuracy, currency, relevancy, appropriateness, and bias.
 
This book examines how college-level instruction reached this point and provides pedagogical strategies that writing instructors and teachers can use to address the problem. Alice Horning makes the case for the importance of critical reading in the teaching of writing with intentionality and imagination, while sharing glimpses of her own personal history with reading and writing. Horning provides the context for understanding what college faculty face in their classrooms and offers a history of critical literacy that explains why, to date, it has mostly neglected or ignored the diverse statuses of students’ reading challenges.
 
The Case for Critical Literacy explores actionable options to better meet students’ literacy needs. College and university faculty, especially writing instructors, will benefit from an understanding of what has happened in the field and what needs to change.
 
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cover of Centros y Programas de Escritura en América Latina: Opciones teóricas y pedagógicas para la enseñanza de la escritura disciplinar

Centros y Programas de Escritura en América Latina

Opciones teóricas y pedagógicas para la enseñanza de la escritura disciplinar

Estela Inés Moyano

University Press of Colorado, 2023

Emerging from more than two decades of work in Latin America, this edited collection explores the implementation of reading and writing programs and centers in Central and South America. Reflecting the multiplicity of theories and gazes that underlies research and practice in teaching and learning to read and write in academic contexts, the contributors to this volume consider how these theoretical and methodological alternatives have contributed to the design and implementation of teaching and learning strategies that address the needs of students, faculty, and institutions while also working with (and around) the resources available in each institutional setting. Centros y Programas de Escritura en América Latina offers insights for those concerned with contributing to students’ education to improve their academic reading and writing, and, ultimately, to a more equitable university experience for all.
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cover of Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices: Innovating Teaching across Disciplines

Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices

Innovating Teaching across Disciplines

edited by Angela Glotfelter, Caitlin Martin, Mandy Olejnik, Ann Updike & Elizabeth Wardle

Utah State University Press, 2022

Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices demonstrates that it is possible for groups of faculty members to change teaching and learning in radical ways across their programs, despite the current emphasis on efficiency and accountability. Relating the experiences of faculty from disciplines as diverse as art history, economics, psychology, and philosophy, this book offers a theory- and research-based heuristic for helping faculty transform their courses and programs, as well as practical examples of the heuristic in action.
 
The authors draw on the threshold concepts framework, research in writing studies, and theories of learning, leadership, and change to deftly explore why faculty are often stymied in their efforts to design meaningful curricula for deep learning and how carefully scaffolded professional development for faculty teams can help make such change possible. This book is a powerful demonstration of how faculty members can be empowered when professional development leaders draw on a range of scholarship that is not typically connected.
 
In today’s climate, courses, programs, and institutions are often assessed by and rewarded for proxy metrics that have little to do with learning, with grave consequences for students. The stakes have never been higher, particularly for public higher education. Faculty members need opportunities to work together using their own expertise and to enact meaningful learning opportunities for students. Professional developers have an important role to play in such change efforts.
 
WAC scholars and practitioners, leaders of professional development and centers for teaching excellence, program administrators and curriculum committees from all disciplines, and faculty innovators from many fields will find not only hope but also a blueprint for action in Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices.
 
Contributors: Juan Carlos Albarrán, José Amador, Annie Dell'Aria, Kate de Medeiros, Keith Fennen, Jordan A. Fenton, Carrie E. Hall, Elena Jackson Albarrán, Erik N. Jensen, Vrinda Kalia, Janice Kinghorn, Jennifer Kinney, Sheri Leafgren, Elaine Maimon, Elaine Miller, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Jennifer J. Quinn, Barbara J. Rose, Scott Sander, Brian D. Schultz, Ling Shao, L. James Smart, Pepper Stetler
 
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cover of Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives

Changing of Knowledge in Composition

Contemporary Perspectives

Lance Massey and Richard C Gephardt

Utah State University Press, 2011

Lance Massey and Richard Gebhardt offer in this collection many signs that composition again faces a moment of precariousness, even as it did in the 1980s—the years of the great divorce from literary studies. The contours of writing in the university again are rapidly changing, making the objects of scholarship in composition again unstable. Composition is poised to move not from modern to postmodern but from process to postprocess, from a service-oriented "field" to a research-driven "discipline." Some would say we are already there. Momentum is building to replace "composition" and the pedagogical imperative long implied in that term with a "writing studies" model devoted to the study of composition as a fundamental tool of, and force within, all areas of human activity.

Appropriately, contributors here use Stephen M. North's 1987 book The Making of Knowledge in Composition to frame and background their discussion, as they look at both the present state of the field and its potential futures. As in North's volume, The Changing of Knowledge in Composition describes a body of research and pedagogy brimming with conflicting claims, methodologies, and politics, and with little consensus regarding the proper subjects and modes of inquiry.

The deep ambivalence within the field itself is evident in this collection. Contributors here envision composition both as retaining its commitment to broad-based, generalized writing instruction and as heading toward content-based vertical writing programs in departments and programs of writing studies. They both challenge and affirm composition's pedagogical heritage. And they sound both sanguine and pessimistic notes about composition's future.

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cover of Changing the Subject: A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy

Changing the Subject

A Theory of Rhetorical Empathy

Lisa Blankenship

Utah State University Press, 2019

Changing the Subject explores ways of engaging across difference. In this first book-length study of the concept of empathy from a rhetorical perspective, Lisa Blankenship frames the classical concept of pathos in new ways and makes a case for rhetorical empathy as a means of ethical rhetorical engagement. The book considers how empathy can be a deliberate, conscious choice to try to understand others through deep listening and how language and other symbol systems play a role in this process that is both cognitive and affective.
 
Departing from agonistic win-or-lose rhetoric in the classical Greek tradition that has so strongly influenced Western thinking, Blankenship proposes that we ourselves are changed (“changing the subject” or the self) when we focus on trying to understand rather than simply changing an Other. This work is informed by her experiences growing up in the conservative South and now working as a professor in New York City, as well as the stories and examples of three people working across profound social, political, class, and gender differences: Jane Addams’s activist work on behalf of immigrants and domestic workers in Gilded Age Chicago; the social media advocacy of Brazilian rap star and former maid Joyce Fernandes for domestic worker labor reform; and the online activist work of Justin Lee, a queer Christian who advocates for greater understanding and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in conservative Christian churches.
 
A much-needed book in the current political climate, Changing the Subject charts new theoretical ground and proposes ways of integrating principles of rhetorical empathy in our everyday lives to help fight the temptations of despair and disengagement. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and teachers of rhetoric and composition as well as people outside the academy in search of new ways of engaging across differences.
 
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cover of Civic Engagement in Global Contexts: International Education, Community Partnerships, and Higher Education

Civic Engagement in Global Contexts

International Education, Community Partnerships, and Higher Education

Jim Bowman

Utah State University Press, 2021

This volume examines the role of writing, rhetoric, and literacy programs and approaches in the practice of civic engagement in global contexts. Writing programs have experience in civic engagement and service learning projects in their local communities, and their work is central to developing students’ literacy practices. Further, writing programs compel student writers to attend to audience needs and rhetorical exigencies as well as reflect on their own subject positions. Thus, they are particularly situated to partner with other units on college campuses engaged in global partnerships.
 
Civic Engagement in Global Contexts provides examples and evidence of the critical self-reflection and iteration with community partners that make these projects important and valuable. Throughout its thirteen chapters, this collection provides practical pedagogical and administrative approaches for writing studies faculty engaging with global learning projects, as well as nuanced insight into how to navigate contact zones from the planning stages of projects to the hard work of self-reflection and change.
 
Partnerships and projects across national borders compel the field of rhetoric and composition to think through the ethics of writing studies program design and teaching practices. Doing this difficult work can disrupt presumptive notions of ownership that faculty and administrators hold concerning the fields involved in these projects and can even lead to decentering rhetoric/composition and other assumptions held by US-based institutions of higher education. Civic Engagement in GlobalContexts will be useful to instructors, advisors, and project managers of students in faculty-led project learning in overseas settings, international service learning through foreign study programs, and foreign study itself and to faculty members introducing civic engagement and community-based learning projects with foreign students in overseas institutions.
 
Contributors: Olga Aksakalova, James Austin, Maria de Lourdes Caudillo Zambrano, Rebecca Charry Roje, Patricia M. Dyer, Tara E. Friedman, Bruce Horner, Kathryn Johnson Gindlesparger, Adela C. Licona, Ian Mauer, Joyce Meier, Susan V. Meyers, Sadia Mir, Stephen T. Russell

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cover of Coding Streams of Language: Techniques for the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data

Coding Streams of Language

Techniques for the Systematic Coding of Text, Talk, and Other Verbal Data

Cheryl Geisler

University Press of Colorado, 2020

Coding Streams of Language is a systematic and practical research guide to coding verbal data in all its forms—written texts and oral talk, in print or online, gathered through surveys and interviews, database searches, or audio or video recordings. The thoughtful, detailed advice found in this book will help readers carry out analyses of language that are both systematic and complex. Situating themselves in the relatively new line of mixed methods research, the authors provide guidance on combining context-based inquiry with quantitative tools for examining big picture patterns that acknowledges the complexity of language use. Throughout Coding Streams of Language, exercises, points for discussion, and milestones help guide readers through an analytic project. As a supplement to the book, YouTube videos demonstrate tools and techniques.
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cover of Collaborations and Partnerships in User Experience

Collaborations and Partnerships in User Experience

Joy Robinson

University Press of Colorado, 2026

Effective UX work is necessarily complex and challenging—and necessarily collaborative. Drawing on their extensive collective experience, the contributors to this edited collection offer valuable insights and practical guidance for UX professionals seeking to navigate the complexities of collaborative work and create effective, user-centered products and services. Collaborations and Partnerships in User Experience focuses on the importance of building and nurturing relationships, fostering open communication, and ensuring that all partners benefit from collaborative efforts. The chapters in the collection offer theoretical frameworks, case studies, and lessons learned from successful (and sometimes unsuccessful) collaborative projects. They also explore the challenges that can arise in UX collaborations, such as differing priorities, vocabularies, and institutional structures, as well as the strategies employed to overcome these hurdles and achieve meaningful outcomes.

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cover of Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change

Community Is the Way

Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change

by Aimée Knight

University Press of Colorado, 2022

How can we design for equity and justice in our community partnerships? This field guide offers a vision for enacting social justice with community partners. Working from a community’s resources and strengths toward the goal of building its internal capacity, this book considers how actions such as grassroots activism, decolonization efforts, co-resistance movements, and social change initiatives can support reciprocity and mutuality. Community is the Way provides examples of concrete, situated action grounded in disciplinary knowledge and extensive fieldwork. Reflecting on her experiences operating a community writing program, author Aimée Knight argues that the equity-based approach described in this book requires a commitment to interrogating how power, oppression, resistance, privilege, penalties, benefits, and harms are built into the systems we seek to change. Knight offers a community-led approach that builds bridges of understanding and support and charts a path toward transformative change.
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cover of Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change

Community Is the Way

Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change

by Aimée Knight

University Press of Colorado, 2022

How can we design for equity and justice in our community partnerships? This field guide offers a vision for enacting social justice with community partners. Working from a community’s resources and strengths toward the goal of building its internal capacity, this book considers how actions such as grassroots activism, decolonization efforts, co-resistance movements, and social change initiatives can support reciprocity and mutuality. Community is the Way provides examples of concrete, situated action grounded in disciplinary knowledge and extensive fieldwork. Reflecting on her experiences operating a community writing program, author Aimée Knight argues that the equity-based approach described in this book requires a commitment to interrogating how power, oppression, resistance, privilege, penalties, benefits, and harms are built into the systems we seek to change. Knight offers a community-led approach that builds bridges of understanding and support and charts a path toward transformative change.
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cover of Community Listening: Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities

Community Listening

Stories, Hauntings, Possibilities

Jenn Fishman

University Press of Colorado, 2025

Generating more questions than it answers, Community Listening invites readers to learn about listening that is deeply enmeshed in specific community sites, stories, and relations. Contributors bring their lived experience as listeners in, to, and alongside the communities whose praxes they surface in chapters that enrich and complicate the deep interrelationship of listening and storytelling. Affirming that storytelling is the vessel through which community listening is made, unmade, and remade, the stories in this collection probe what it means to listen from community vantages and to bring such listening into academic conversations. Collectively, the contributors to this multidisciplinary collection advance scholarship that has community as the locus of iterative knowledge seeking and sharing.
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cover of Composing Music: A New Approach

Composing Music

A New Approach

William Russo

University of Chicago Press, 1988

A remarkably practical guide to composing for beginners that teaches you how to write music by diving in and doing it
 
Aimed at those who have some knowledge of music but not formal training in composition, this concise introduction to composing starts right in with a brief composition exercise, then proceeds step by step through a series of increasingly complex and challenging problems, gradually expanding the student's musical grammar.
 
The book includes blank music score pages for you to use for exercises and experiments. In addition to covering various styles of contemporary music, including both pop and classical genres, Composing Music addresses the challenge of setting words to music, writing minimalist compositions, and more. 

Composing Music is the perfect introduction to writing music of all sorts for engaged beginners.
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cover of Composing Place: Digital Rhetorics for a Mobile World

Composing Place

Digital Rhetorics for a Mobile World

Jacob Greene

Utah State University Press, 2022

Composing Place takes an innovative approach to engaging with the compositional affordances of mobile technologies. Mobile, wearable, and spatial computing technologies are more than the latest marketing gimmick from a perpetually proximate future; they are rather an emerging composing platform through which digital writers will increasingly create and distribute place-based multimodal texts. Jacob Greene utilizes and develops a rhetorical framework through which writers can leverage the affordances of these technologies by drawing on theoretical approaches within rhetorical studies, multimodal composition, and spatial theory, as well as emerging “maker” practices within digital humanities and critical media studies, to show how emerging mobile technologies are poised to transform theories, practices, and pedagogies of digital writing.
 
Greene identifies three emerging “modalities” through which mobile technologies are being used by digital writers. First, to counter dominant discourses in contested spaces; second, to historicize entrenched narratives in iconic spaces; and third, to amplify marginalized voices in mundane spaces. Through these modalities, Greene employs Indigenous philosophies and theories that upend the ways that the discipline has centered placed-based rhetorics, offering digital writers better strategies for using mobile media as a platform for civic deliberation, social advocacy, and political action.
 
Composing Place offers close analyses of mobile media experiences created by various artists and digital media practitioners, as well as detailed overviews of Greene’s own projects (also accessible through the companion website: www.composingplace.com). These projects include a digital “countertour” of SeaWorld that demonstrates the ways in which the attraction is driven by capitalism; an augmented reality tour of Detroit’s Woodward Avenue; and a mobile advocacy project in Jacksonville, Florida, that demonstrates the inequitable effects of car-centric public infrastructure. Ultimately, by engaging with these theoretical frameworks, rhetorical design principles, and pedagogical practices of mobile writing, readers can utilize the unique affordances of mobile media in various teaching and research contexts.
 
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cover of Composing Research: A Contextualist  Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition

Composing Research

A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition

Cindy Johanek

Utah State University Press, 2000

Cindy Johanek offers a new perspective on the ideological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and the theories of knowledge that inform them. With a paradigm that is sensitive to the context of one's research questions, she argues, scholars can develop less dichotomous forms that invoke the strengths of both research traditions. Context-oriented approaches can lift the narrative from beneath the numbers in an experimental study, for example, or bring the useful clarity of numbers to an ethnographic study.

A pragmatic scholar, Johanek moves easily across the boundaries that divide the field, and argues for contextualist theory as a lens through which to view composition research. This approach brings with it a new focus, she writes. "This new focus will call us to attend to the contexts in which rhetorical issues and research issues converge, producing varied forms, many voices, and new knowledge, indeed reconstructing a discipline that will be simultaneously focused on its tasks, its knowledge-makers, and its students."

Composing Research is a work full of personal voice and professional commitment and will be a welcome addition to the research methods classroom and to the composition researcher's own bookshelf.

2000 Outstanding Scholarship Award from the International Writing Centers Association.

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cover of Composition Commons: Writing a New Idea of the University

Composition Commons

Writing a New Idea of the University

Jessica Yood

Utah State University Press, 2024

The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public.

Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement.

The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.
 
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cover of Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy

Composition and Cornel West

Notes toward a Deep Democracy

Keith Gilyard

Southern Illinois University Press, 2008

Composition and Cornel West: Notes toward a Deep Democracy identifies and explains key aspects of the work of Cornel West—the highly regarded scholar of religion, philosophy, and African American studies—as they relate to composition studies, focusing especially on three rhetorical strategies that West suggests we use in our questioning lives as scholars, teachers, students, and citizens.

In this study, author Keith Gilyard examines the strategies of Socratic Commitment (a relentless examination of received wisdom), Prophetic Witness (an abiding concern with justice and the plight of the oppressed), and Tragicomic Hope (a keep-on-pushing sensibility reflective of the African American freedom struggle). Together, these rhetorical strategies comprise an updated form of cultural criticism that West calls prophetic pragmatism.

This volume, which contains the only interview in which Cornel West directly addresses the field of composition,sketches the development of Cornel West’s theories of philosophy, political science, religion, and cultural studies and restates the link between Deweyan notions of critical intelligence and the notion of critical literacy developed by Ann Berthoff, Ira Shor, and Henry Giroux. Gilyard provides examples from the classroom to illustrate the possibilities of Socratic Commitment as part of composition pedagogy, shows the alignment of Prophetic Witness with traditional aims of critical composition, and in his chapter on Tragicomic Hope, addresses African American expressive culture with an emphasis on music and artists such as Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, Aretha Franklin, and Kanye West.

The first book to comprehensively connect the ideas of one of America's premier scholars of religion, philosophy and African American studies with composition theory and pedagogy, Composition and Cornel West will be valuable to scholars, teachers, and students interested in race, class, critical literacy, and the teaching of writing.

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cover of Composition and Literature: Bridging the Gap

Composition and Literature

Bridging the Gap

Edited by Winifred Bryan Horner

University of Chicago Press, 1983

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cover of Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times

Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times

Rachel McCabe

Utah State University Press, 2023

Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times poses critical questions of representation, accessibility, social justice, affect, and labor to better understand the entwined future of composition and rhetoric. This collection of essays offers innovative approaches for socially attuned learning and best practices to support administrators and instructors. In doing so, these essays guide educators in empowering students to write effectively and prepare for their role as global citizens.
 
Editors Rachel McCabe and Jennifer Juszkiewicz consider how educators can respond to multiple current crises relating to composition and rhetoric with generosity and cautious optimism; in the process, they address the current concerns about the longevity of the humanities. By engaging with social constructivist, critical race, socioeconomic, and activist pedagogies, each chapter provides an answer to the question, How can our courses help students become stronger writers while contending with current social, environmental, and ethical questions posed by the world around them? The contributors consider this question from numerous perspectives, recognizing the important ways that power and privilege affect our varying means of addressing this question.
 
Relying on both theory and practice, Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times engages the future of composition and rhetoric as a discipline shaped by recent and current global events. This text appeals to early-career writing program administrators, writing center directors, and professional specialists, as well as Advanced Placement high school instructors, graduate students, and faculty teaching graduate-level pedagogy courses.
 
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cover of Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse

Composition and the Rhetoric of Science

Engaging the Dominant Discourse

Michael J. Zerbe

Southern Illinois University Press, 2007

Composition and the Rhetoric of Science: Engaging the Dominant Discourse calls for instructors of first-year writing courses to employ primary scientific discourse in their teaching and for rhetoricians of science to think about teaching scientific discourse as a literacy skill. Author Michael J. Zerbe argues that inclusion of scientific discourse is crucial because of this rhetoric’s status as the dominant discourse in western culture.
The volume draws on Lyotard, Žižek, Foucault, and Althusser to argue that while important theorists such as these have recognized the dominance of scientific discourse, rhetoric and composition has not—to its detriment. The textillustrates that scientific discourse remains a miniscule part of the enterprise of rhetoric and composition and thus the field is not fulfilling its mission of providing students with the writing and reading skills they need to live and work in a science- and technology-dependent society.
Zerbe provides an analysis of science popularizations and demonstrates how these works can be used to contextualize primary scientific research. He also presents three pedagogical scenarios, each built around a carefully chosen, accessible example of scientific discourse, that demonstrate how articles from scientific journals can be used in writing courses.
Only by gaining a meaningful fluency in this discourse—one that is not offered by science textbooks—can a more sophisticated scientific literacy be assured. Composition and the Rhetoric of Science effectively explores the relatively limited amount of work done in rhetoric and composition on scientific discourse and questions this state of affairs. Zerbe presents for the first time cultural studies and science literacy as gateways for incorporating scientific discourse into first-year writing courses.
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cover of Composition in the Age of Austerity

Composition in the Age of Austerity

Nancy Welch

Utah State University Press, 2016

In the face of the gradual saturation of US public education by the logics of neoliberalism, educators often find themselves at a loss to respond, let alone resist. Through state defunding and many other “reforms” fueled by austerity politics, a majority of educators are becoming casual labor in US universities while those who hang onto secure employment are pressed to act as self-supporting entrepreneurs or do more with less. Focusing on the discipline of writing studies, this collection addresses the sense of crisis that many educators experience in this age of austerity.

The chapters in this book chronicle how neoliberal political economy shapes writing assessments, curricula, teacher agency, program administration, and funding distribution. Contributors also focus on how neoliberal political economy dictates the direction of scholarship, because the economic and political agenda shaping the terms of work, the methods of delivery, and the ways of valuing and assessing writing also shape the primary concerns and directions of scholarship.

Composition in the Age of Austerity offers critical accounts of how the restructuring of higher education is shaping the daily realities of composition programs. The book documents the effects and implications of the current restructuring, examines how cherished rhetorical ideals actually leave the field unprepared to respond effectively to defunding and corporatizing trends, and establishes points of departure for collective response.

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cover of Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change

Composition in the Twenty-First Century

Crisis and Change

Edited by Lynn Z. Bloom, Donald A. Daiker, and Edward M. White

Southern Illinois University Press, 1997

The essays in this book, stemming from a national conference of the same name, focus on the single subject required of nearly all college students—composition.

Despite its pervasiveness and its significance, composition has an unstable status within the curriculum. Writing programs and writing faculty are besieged by academic, political, and financial concerns that have not been well understood or addressed.

At many institutions, composition functions paradoxically as both the gateway to academic success and as the gatekeeper, reducing access to academic work and opportunity for those with limited facility in English. Although writing programs are expected to provide services that range from instruction in correct grammar to assisting—or resisting—political correctness, expanding programs and shrinking faculty get caught in the crossfire. The bottom line becomes the firing line as forces outside the classroom determine funding and seek to define what composition should do.

In search of that definition, the contributors ask and answer a series of specific and salient questions: What implications—intellectual, political, and institutional—will forces outside the classroom have on the quality and delivery of composition in the twenty-first century? How will faculty and administrators identify and address these issues? What policies and practices ought we propose for the century to come?

This book features sixteen position papers by distinguished scholars and researchers in composition and rhetoric; most of the papers are followed by invited responses by other notable compositionists. In all, twenty-five contributors approach composition from a wide variety of contemporary perspectives: rhetorical, historical, social, cultural, political, intellectual, economic, structural, administrative, and developmental. They propose solutions applicable to pedagogy, research, graduate training of composition teachers, academic administration, and public and social policy. In a very real sense, then, this is the only book to offer a map to the future of composition.

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cover of Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity

Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity

Rita Malenczyk

Utah State University Press, 2018

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

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cover of Conceptions of Literacy: Graduate Instructors and the Teaching of First-Year Composition

Conceptions of Literacy

Graduate Instructors and the Teaching of First-Year Composition

Meaghan Brewer

Utah State University Press, 2020

Addressing the often fraught and truncated nature of educating new writing instructors, Conceptions of Literacy proposes a theoretical framework for examining new graduate student instructors’ preexisting attitudes and beliefs about literacy. Based on an empirical study author Meaghan Brewer conducted with graduate students teaching first-year composition for the first time, Conceptions of Literacy draws on narratives, interviews, and classroom observations to describe the conceptions of literacy they have already unknowingly established and how these conceptions impact the way they teach in their own classrooms.
 
Brewer argues that conceptions of literacy undergird the work of writing instructors and that many of the anxieties around composition studies’ disciplinary status are related to the differences perceived between the field’s conceptions of literacy and those of the graduate instructors and adjuncts who teach the majority of composition courses. Conceptions of Literacy makes practical recommendations for how new graduate instructors can begin to perceive and interrogate their conceptions of literacy, which, while influential, are often too personal to recognize.

 
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cover of Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol 2: Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice

Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol 2

Emerging Theoretical and Pedagogical Practice

Diane Kelly-Riley

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment.
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cover of Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol. 1: Technical and Political Contexts

Considering Students, Teachers, and Writing Assessment, Vol. 1

Technical and Political Contexts

Diane Kelly-Riley

University Press of Colorado, 2024

The editors and authors in this edited collection, available in two volumes, consider the increasing importance of students’ and teachers’ lived experiences within the development and use of writing assessments. Presenting key work published in The Journal of Writing Assessment since its founding in 2003, the collection explores five major themes: technical psychometric issues; politics and public policies shaping large scale writing assessments; automated scoring of writing; fairness; and the lived experiences of humans involved in assessment ecologies. The books also provide reflections from leading writing assessment scholars who examine how these themes continue to shape current and future directions in writing assessment.
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cover of CounterStories from the Writing Center

CounterStories from the Writing Center

Frankie Condon

Utah State University Press, 2021

CounterStories from the Writing Center gathers emerging scholars of colour and their white accomplices to challenge some of the most cherished lore about the work of writing centres. Writing within an intersectional feminist frame, this volume’s contributors name and critique the dominant role that white, straight, cis-gendered women have played in writing centre administration as well as in the field of writing centre studies. This work will shake the field’s core assumptions about itself.
 
Practicing what Derrick Bell has termed “creative truth telling,” these writers are not concerned with individual white women in writing centres but with the social, political, and cultural capital that is the historical birthright of white, straight, cis-gendered women, particularly in writing centre studies. The essays collected in this volume test, defy, and overflow the bounds of traditional academic discourse in the service of powerful testimony, witness, and counterstory.
 
CounterStories from the Writing Center is a must-read for writing centre directors, scholars, and tutors who are committed to antiracist pedagogy and offers a robust intersectional analysis to those who seek to understand the relationship between the work of writing centres and the problem of racism. Accessible and usable for both graduate and undergraduate students of writing centre theory and practice, this work troubles the field’s commonplaces and offers a rich envisioning of what writing centres materially committed to inclusion and equity might be and do.
 
Contributors: Dianna Baldwin, Nicole Caswell, Mitzi Ceballos, Romeo Garcia, Neisha-Anne Green, Doug Kern, T. Haltiwanger Morrison, Bernice Olivas, Moira Ozias, Trixie Smith, Willow Trevino
 
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cover of Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses

Cripping Labor-Based Grading for More Equity in Literacy Courses

Asao B. Inoue

University Press of Colorado, 2024

Writing in response to recent work by Kathleen Kryger, Griffin X. Zimmerman, and Ellen C. Carillo, Asao B. Inoue offers an expanded and compassionate discussion of labor-based grading, a practice that involves negotiating a set of classroom agreements with all of the students in a course to determine how much labor will be expected of students and how it will be accounted for or identified to earn particular final course grades. Inoue focuses his exploration of labor-based grading by asking, “How can labor-based grading evolve so that it addresses the concerns around inequitable access to or expectations of labor that students with disabilities, neurodivergencies, illnesses, or limited time in the semester may face?” The result is a thoughtful re-examination and re-thinking of labor-based grading in writing courses.
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Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom

Angela Laflen

Utah State University Press, 2025

Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroom provides a timely and essential framework for integrating data literacy into multimodal composition pedagogy. Angela Laflen demonstrates that in an era dominated by big data and AI, the need to understand how to work with data is no longer limited to scientists and mathematicians. Instead, data literacy has become a crucial skill for participating in democratic society.
 
At the heart of Laflen’s approach is critical data storytelling—a practice that equips students with the skills to understand, interpret, and ethically communicate with and about data through various multimodal formats. By teaching students to make informed decisions as data storytellers, Laflen addresses the ethical implications of working with data while offering practical strategies for reading and analyzing data stories. This approach empowers both students and teachers to engage critically with data as a tool for learning and communication. It also highlights how multimodal composition has yet to fully account for the central role of data in shaping contemporary communication and argumentation.
 
By focusing on the ethical and rhetorical dimensions of data storytelling, Critical Data Storytelling in the Composition Classroompresents a pedagogical approach that prepares students for the challenges of working with data in a rapidly evolving digital landscape. This flexible, adaptable model for teaching critical data literacy is of great interest to writing instructors, scholars in rhetoric and composition, and educators who seek to prepare students for the demands of a data-driven world.
 
 
 
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cover of Cross-Language Relations in Composition

Cross-Language Relations in Composition

Edited by Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda

Southern Illinois University Press, 2010

Cross-Language Relations in Composition brings together the foremost scholars in the fields of composition, second language writing, education, and literacy studies to address the limitations of the tacit English-only policy prevalent in composition pedagogy and research and to suggest changes for the benefit of writing students and instructors throughout the United States. Recognizing the growing linguistic diversity of students and faculty, the ongoing changes in the English language as a result of globalization, and the increasingly blurred categories of native, foreign, and second language English speakers, editors Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, and Paul Kei Matsuda have compiled a groundbreaking anthology of essays that contest the dominance of English monolingualism in the study and teaching of composition and encourage the pursuit of approaches that embrace multilingualism and cross-language writing as the norm for teaching and research.

The nine chapters comprising part 1 of the collection focus on the origins of the “English only” bias dominating U.S. composition classes and present alternative methods of teaching and research that challenge this monolingualism. In part 2, nine composition teachers and scholars representing a variety of theoretical, institutional, and professional perspectives propose new, compelling, and concrete ways to understand and teach composition to students of a “global,” plural English, a language evolving in a multilingual world.

Drawing on recent theoretical work on genre, complexity, performance and identity, as well as postcolonialism, Cross-Language Relations in Composition offers a radically new approach to composition teaching and research, one that will prove invaluable to all who teach writing in today’s multilingual college classroom.

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cover of Cruel Auteurism: Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition

Cruel Auteurism

Affective Digital Mediations toward Film-Composition

bonnie lenore kyburz

University Press of Colorado, 2019

bonnie lenore kyburz' reflective and deeply felt sense of (her) place in Composition creates room to consider some of the rhetorical dimensions and pedagogical implications of film work in writing classrooms and as digital scholarship. Invoking affect theorist Lauren Berlant's concept of "cruel optimism" to articulate the findings of her archival, analytical, and experiential methods, Cruel Auteurism describes a cultural shift within the discipline, from the primacy of print-based arguments, through an evolving desire to generate cinematic rhetorics, toward increasingly visible forms of textual practice currently shaping composition classrooms and digital scholarship.
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