991 books match the query 'Writing' and 77 start with c

cover of Captains of Charity: The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence

Captains of Charity

The Writing and Wages of Postrevolutionary Atlantic Benevolence

Mary Kathleen Eyring

University of New Hampshire Press, 2017

In this thematically rich book, Mary Kathleen Eyring examines authors whose writings were connected with their charitable endeavors, which addressed the worst by-products of the brisk maritime commerce in Atlantic seaport cities in the first half of the nineteenth century. She argues that charitable institutions and societies emerged in this era because they captured and contained the discontent of imperiled and impoverished groups, thereby effectively thwarting the development of a revolutionary class in America.

According to Eyring, the men and women who most successfully wrote about and engaged in benevolent work strategically connected their work with the affluence generated by maritime commerce. The water trades supported the growth of the American publishing industry, but they also generated both vast inequities in wealth and physically and economically hazardous conditions that, in the absence of a welfare state, required the intervention of benevolent societies. Laborers in Atlantic port cities barred from lucrative professions by gender, race, physical ability, or social status found a way to make a living wage by conjoining the literary with the charitable—and attaching both to a profit structure. In so doing, they transformed the nature of American benevolence and gave rise to the nonprofit sector, which has since its inception provided discontented laborers with a forum in which to express their critique of for-profit American enterprise, by imitating it.

In Captains of Charity, Eyring looks at writers who overcame their marginalized status by bringing together the strands of maritime industry, publishing, and benevolence. These include Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, two black clergymen who managed a massive relief effort when refugees fleeing revolution in Haiti transported the yellow fever virus to Philadelphia in 1793; Nancy Prince, a free woman of color who sought her livelihood in the Protestant missions of Jamaica in the years immediately following Britain's emancipation of laborers in its Caribbean colonies; Sarah Josepha Hale, who parlayed the social influence she had gained as the founder of a seaman's aid society in Boston into a role as editor of the hugely popular periodical Godey's Lady's Book; and Sarah Pogson Smith, who donated the proceeds of her writing to such prominent charitable causes as the New York Institution for the Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb and then capitalized on the goodwill this charity work generated among her wealthy friends in New York City, Philadelphia, and Charleston.

Hardcover is un-jacketed.
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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 Center Will Hold

Center Will Hold

edited by Michael A. Pemberton & Joyce Kinkead

Utah State University Press, 2003

In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.

Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.

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cover of Centers for Learning: Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration

Centers for Learning

Writing Centers and Libraries in Collaboration

James K. Elmborg

Assoc of College & Research Libraries, 2011

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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 Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom: Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

Changing Practices for the L2 Writing Classroom

Moving Beyond the Five-Paragraph Essay

Nigel A. Caplan and Ann M. Johns

University of Michigan Press, 2019

This volume was written to make the case for changes in second language writing practices away from the five-paragraph essay and toward purposeful, meaningful writing instruction. As the volume editors say, “If you have already rejected the five-paragraph essay, we offer validation and classroom-tested alternatives. If you are new to teaching L2 writing, we introduce critical issues you will need to consider as you plan your lessons and as you consider/review the textbooks and handbooks that continue to promote the teaching of the five-paragraph essay. If you need ammunition to present to colleagues and administrators, we present theory, research, and pedagogy that will benefit students from elementary to graduate school. If you are skeptical about our claims, we invite you to review the research presented here and consider what your students could do beyond writing a five-paragraph essay if you enacted these changes in practice.”
 
Part 1 discusses what the five-paragraph essay is not: it is not a very old, established form of writing; it is not a genre; and it is not universal.

Part 2 looks at writing practices to show the essay’s ineffectiveness in elementary schools, secondary schools, first-year writing classes, university writing courses, undergraduate discipline courses, and graduate school.

Part 3 looks beyond the classroom at testing. At the end of each chapter, the authors--all well-known in the field of second language writing--suggest changes to teaching practices based on their theoretical approach and classroom experience.

The book closes by reviewing some of the major questions raised in the book, by exploring which questions have been left unanswered, and by offering suggestions for teachers who want to move away from the five-paragraph essay. An assignment sequence for genre-aware writing instruction is included. 
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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 in English Class: Discourse and the Constructions of Desires

Changing the Subject in English Class

Discourse and the Constructions of Desires

Marshall W. Alcorn Jr.

Southern Illinois University Press, 2002

Drawing on the theoretical work of Jacques Lacan, Marshall W. Alcorn Jr. formulates a systematic explanation of the function and value of desire in writing instruction.

Alcorn argues that in changing the subject matter of writing instruction in order to change student opinions, composition instructors have come to adopt an insufficiently complex understanding of subjectivity. This oversimplification hinders attempts to foster cultural change. Alcorn proposes an alternative mode of instruction that makes effective use of students’ knowledge and desire. The resulting freedom in expression—personal as well as political—engenders the recognition, circulation, and elaboration of desire necessary for both human communication and effective politics.

Responding to James Berlin’s reconception of praxis in the classroom, Theresa Ebert’s espousal of disciplined instructions, and Lester Faigley’s introduction of a postmodern theory of subjectivity, Alcorn follows both Lacan and Slavoj Žižek in insisting desire be given free voice and serious recognition. In composition as in politics, desire is the ground of agency. Competing expressions of desire should generate a dialectic in social-epistemic discourse that encourages enlightenment over cynicism and social development over authoritarian demands.

With clarity and personal voice, Alcorn explains how discourse is rooted in primitive psychological functions of desire and responds to complex cultural needs. In its theoretical scope this book describes a new pedagogy that links thought to emotion and the personal to the social.

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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 Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants

Changing the Way We Teach

Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants

Sally Barr Ebest

Southern Illinois University Press, 2005

Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants draws on eighteen case studies to illustrate the critical role writing plays in overcoming graduate student resistance to instruction, facilitating change, and developing professional identity. Sally Barr Ebest argues that teaching assistants in English must be actively engaged in the theory and practice underlying composition pedagogy in order to better understand how to alter the way they teach and why such change is necessary.

In illustrating the potential for change when the paradigm shift in composition is applied to graduate education, Ebest considers recent discussions of composition pedagogy; post-secondary teaching theories; cognitive, social cognitive, and educational psychology; and issues of gender, voice, and writing.

Stemming from research conducted over a five-year period, this volume explores how a cross-section of teaching assistants responded to pedagogy as students and how their acceptance of pedagogy affected their performance as instructors. Investigating reasons behind manifestations of resistance and necessary elements for overcoming it, Ebest finds that engagement in composition strategies—reflective writing, journaling, drafting, and active learning—and restoration of feelings of self-efficacy are the primary factors that facilitate change.

Concerned with gender as it relates to personal construct, Changing the Way We Teach traces the influence of familial expectations and the effects of literacy experiences on students and draws correlations between feminist and composition pedagogy. Ebest asserts that the phenomena contributing to the development of a strong, unified voice in women—self-knowledge, empathy, positive role models, and mentors—should be essential elements of a constructivist graduate curriculum.

To understand composition pedagogy and to convince students of its values, Ebest holds that educators must embrace it themselves and trace the effects through active research. By providing graduate students with pedagogical sites for research and reflection, faculty enable them to express their anger or fear, study its sources, and quite often write their way to a new understanding.

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cover of Chaos, Creativity, Completion: New Approaches to Writing and ADHD

Chaos, Creativity, Completion

New Approaches to Writing and ADHD

Edited by Chloe Martinez and Lisa Van Orman Hadley

University of Chicago Press, 2026

Fifteen essays that offer inspiration, encouragement, and advice from accomplished writers with ADHD.

A rising number of ADHD diagnoses, particularly among adults, is not only confirmed by medical studies and mainstream reporting but also borne out across social media and elsewhere among people who’d been privately coping with persistent, often inexpressible challenges. Many of the contributors to this collection can attest to how a later-in-life diagnosis radically demystified the patterns, impulses, and impasses that had affected their lives and their writing. The essays in Chaos, Creativity, Completion reflect the ways poets, novelists, memoirists, filmmakers, and others have come to understand and engage the relationship between their ADHD and their creative tool kits. 

These essays consider how writers can embrace rather than mask their neurodifference, offering multiple ways of finding writing practices that work for ADHD brains—including techniques that often look quite different from traditional writing instruction. Some essays are analytical, some are reflective, and some are delightfully weird, employing humor, research, personal narrative, deep description, close reading, and experimental approaches to genre and form. Each essay also concludes with a writing prompt, providing readers with opportunities to expand their own creative toolkits. Finally, the book includes an interview with David Kessler, a licensed therapist and nationally recognized ADHD advocate, and an appendix with a glossary of helpful terms and a list of recommended resources, from books and organizations to apps and gadgets.

Just as the experience of ADHD varies from person to person, so, too, do the ways those experiences can be expressed. Chaos, Creativity, Completion is a kaleidoscopic, adventurous series of takes on what writing looks like today.
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cover of Character, Scene, and Story: New Tools from the Dramatic Writer's Companion

Character, Scene, and Story

New Tools from the Dramatic Writer's Companion

Will Dunne

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Will Dunne first brought the workshop experience down to the desk level with The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, offering practical exercises to help playwrights and screenwriters work through the problems that arise in developing their scripts. Now writers looking to further enhance their storytelling process can turn to Character, Scene, and Story.

Featuring forty-two new workshop-tested exercises, this sequel to The Dramatic Writer’s Companion allows writers to dig deeper into their scripts by fleshing out images, exploring characters from an emotional perspective, tapping the power of color and sense memory to trigger ideas, and trying other visceral techniques. The guide also includes a troubleshooting section to help tackle problem scenes. Writers with scripts already in progress will find they can think deeper about their characters and stories. And those who are just beginning to write will find the guidance they need to discover their best starting point. The guide is filled with hundreds of examples, many of which have been developed as both plays and films.

Character, Scene, and Story is fully aligned with the new edition of The Dramatic Writer’s Companion, with cross-references between related exercises so that writers have the option to explore a given topic in more depth. While both guides can stand alone, together they give writers more than one hundred tools to develop more vivid characters and craft stronger scripts.
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cover of Chasing Literacy: Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration

Chasing Literacy

Reading and Writing in an Age of Acceleration

Daniel Keller

Utah State University Press, 2013

Arguing that composition should renew its interest in reading pedagogy and research, Chasing Literacy offers writing instructors and literacy scholars a framework for understanding and responding to the challenges posed by the proliferation of interactive and multimodal communication technologies in the twenty-first century.

Employing case-study research of student reading practices, Keller explores reading-writing connections in new media contexts. He identifies a culture of acceleration—a gathering of social, educational, economic, and technological forces that reinforce the values of speed, efficiency, and change—and challenges educators to balance new “faster” literacies with traditional “slower” literacies. In addition, Keller details four significant features of contemporary literacy that emerged from his research: accumulation and curricular choices; literacy perceptions; speeds of rhetoric; and speeds of reading.

Chasing Literacy outlines a new reading pedagogy that will help students gain versatile, dexterous approaches to both reading and writing and makes a significant contribution to this emerging area of interest in composition theory and practice.

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cover of Ciardi Himself: Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry

Ciardi Himself

Fifteen Essays in the Reading, Writing, and Teaching of Poetry

John Ciardi

University of Arkansas Press, 1989

An excellent introduction to the man and his thoughts on the painstaking craftsmanship involved in the art of writing poetry, Ciardi Himself includes some hard lessons, but in the hands of this master teacher, the going is easy.
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cover of Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric

Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric

Laurie Gries

Utah State University Press, 2018

While it has long been understood that the circulation of discourse, bodies, artifacts, and ideas plays an important constitutive force in our cultures and communities, circulation, as a concept and a phenomenon, has been underexamined in studies of rhetoric and writing. In an effort to give circulation its rhetorical due, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric introduces a wide range of studies that foreground circulation in both theory and practice. Contributors to the volume specifically explore the connections between circulation and public rhetorics, urban studies, feminist rhetorics, digital communication, new materialism, and digital research.

Circulation is a cultural-rhetorical process that impacts various ecologies, communities, and subjectivities in an ever-increasing globally networked environment. As made evident in this collection, circulation occurs in all forms of discursive production, from academic arguments to neoliberal policies to graffiti to tweets and bitcoins. Even in the case of tombstones, borrowed text achieves only partial stability before it is recirculated and transformed again. This communicative process is even more evident in the digital realm, the underlying infrastructures of which we have yet to fully understand.

As public spaces become more and more saturated with circulating texts and images and as networked relations come to the center of rhetorical focus, Circulation, Writing, and Rhetoric will be a vital interdisciplinary resource for approaching the contemporary dynamics of rhetoric and writing.

Contributors: Aaron Beveridge, Casey Boyle, Jim Brown, Naomi Clark, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Rebecca Dingo, Sidney I. Dobrin, Jay Dolmage, Dustin Edwards, Jessica Enoch, Tarez Samra Graban, Byron Hawk, Gerald Jackson, Gesa E. Kirsch, Heather Lang, Sean Morey, Jenny Rice, Thomas Rickert, Jim Ridolfo, Nathaniel A. Rivers, Jacqueline Jones Royster, Donnie Johnson Sackey, Michele Simmons, Dale M. Smith, Patricia Sullivan, John Tinnell, Kathleen Blake Yancey

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cover of Cite Right, Third Edition: A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More

Cite Right, Third Edition

A Quick Guide to Citation Styles--MLA, APA, Chicago, the Sciences, Professions, and More

Charles Lipson

University of Chicago Press, 2018

A compact, accessible guide to citations for any student 

Cite Right is the perfect guide for anyone who needs to learn a new citation style or who needs an easy reference to Chicago, MLA, APA, AMA, and other styles. Each chapter serves as a quick guide that introduces the basics of a style, explains who might use it, and then presents an abundance of examples. This edition includes updates reflecting the most recent editions of The Chicago Manual of Style and the MLA Handbook. With this book, students and researchers can move smoothly among styles with the confidence they are getting it right.
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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 Class in the Composition Classroom: Pedagogy and the Working Class

Class in the Composition Classroom

Pedagogy and the Working Class

Genesea M. Carter

Utah State University Press, 2017

Class in the Composition Classroom considers what college writing instructors should know about their working-class students—their backgrounds, experiences, identities, learning styles, and skills—in order to support them in the classroom, across campus, and beyond. In this volume, contributors explore the nuanced and complex meaning of “working class” and the particular values these college writers bring to the classroom.

The real college experiences of veterans, rural Midwesterners, and trade unionists show that what it means to be working class is not obvious or easily definable. Resisting outdated characterizations of these students as underprepared and dispensing with a one-size-fits-all pedagogical approach, contributors address how region and education impact students, explore working-class pedagogy and the ways in which it can reify social class in teaching settings, and give voice to students’ lived experiences.

As community colleges and universities seek more effective ways to serve working-class students, and as educators, parents, and politicians continue to emphasize the value of higher education for students of all financial and social backgrounds, conversations must take place among writing instructors and administrators about how best to serve and support working-class college writers. Class in the Composition Classroom will help writing instructors inside and outside the classroom prepare all their students for personal, academic, and professional communication.

Contributors: Aaron Barlow, ​Cori Brewster, ​Patrick Corbett, ​Harry Denny, Cassandra Dulin, ​Miriam Eisenstein Ebsworth, ​Mike Edwards, ​Rebecca Fraser, ​Brett Griffiths, ​Anna Knutson, ​Liberty Kohn, ​Nancy Mack, ​Holly Middleton, ​Robert Mundy, ​Missy Nieveen Phegley, ​Jacqueline Preston, ​James E. Romesburg, ​Edie-Marie Roper, Aubrey Schiavone, Christie Toth, ​Gail G. Verdi

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cover of Close Encounters of Empire: Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations

Close Encounters of Empire

Writing the Cultural History of U.S.-Latin American Relations

Gilbert M. Joseph, Catherine C. LeGrand, and Ricardo D. Salvatore, eds.

Duke University Press, 1998

New concerns with the intersections of culture and power, historical agency, and the complexity of social and political life are producing new questions about the United States’ involvement with Latin America. Turning away from political-economic models that see only domination and resistance, exploiters and victims, the contributors to this pathbreaking collection suggest alternate ways of understanding the role that U.S. actors and agencies have played in the region during the postcolonial period.

Exploring a variety of nineteenth- and twentieth-century encounters in Latin America, these theoretically engaged essays by distinguished U.S. and Latin American historians and anthropologists illuminate a wide range of subjects. From the Rockefeller Foundation’s public health initiatives in Central America to the visual regimes of film, art, and advertisements; these essays grapple with new ways of conceptualizing public and private spheres of empire. As such, Close Encounters of Empire initiates a dialogue between postcolonial studies and the long-standing scholarship on colonialism and imperialism in the Americas as it rethinks the cultural dimensions of nationalism and development.

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cover of Close Writing: Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces

Close Writing

Kathy Acker, Cookie Mueller, and Love-in-Pieces

Alice Butler

Duke University Press, 2026

In Close Writing, Alice Butler reflects on the diaries, letters, publications, performances, lives, and afterlives of her most beloved queer feminist writers: Kathy Acker and Cookie Mueller. While the transgressive avant-garde writer Kathy Acker has developed a cult following in the decades since her death in the late-90s, the actress and writer Cookie Mueller has remained relatively obscure. In this creative-critical study, Butler participates and responds to the lives and writings of her shared “beloved," reimagining the scene of the archive as a scene of triangulated and bittersweet love that traverses the boundaries of life and death. She draws on the autofictional strategies that Acker and Mueller pioneered in their own experimental writings and performances, encountering the women in intimate theoretical spaces of sensuality, sexuality, and sickness that slip between life and text. By encountering Acker and Mueller as transgressors and innovators, but also as beloved figures in her writing life whom she addresses in love letters, Butler brings readers to new, reparative textures of understanding, embodiment, and affection through close writing.
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cover of Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies: Revising Identities and Institutions

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies

Revising Identities and Institutions

Laurie Grobman

Utah State University Press, 2025

Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies focuses on the largely unnoticed and unexplored tradition of faculty/undergraduate publication in writing studies. Coauthoring makes new authorial identities and relationships available to both faculty and students and demonstrates promise as a way to increase access to meaningful research experiences for undergraduates from communities that have been historically underserved in higher education, creating more inclusive learning environments.
 
In this book, faculty and undergraduates describe and theorize about their coauthoring experiences within a variety of institutional contexts including land-grant universities, Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic-Serving Institutions, religiously affiliated research universities, and regional campuses of statewide higher education systems. They explore the relationships between undergraduates and faculty that lead to coauthoring opportunities in a range of courses—first-year writing classes, general educational requirements in various disciplines, and upper-level offerings for English majors—as well as in other institutional spaces such as writing centers, community engagement initiatives, and assessment offices. The collection offers faculty and undergraduates models, ideas, and strategies for how to coauthor together while also preparing them for the challenges—pragmatic, intellectual, and ethical—that they may encounter.
 
Coauthoring with Undergraduates in Writing Studies showcases why and how coauthorship between faculty and undergraduates is a vital site for scholarly engagement, professional development, and socially just education. It boldly enacts rhetoric and composition’s commitment to collaborative scholarship and is significant for graduate students and faculty in rhetoric and writing studies, especially in community-engaged writing, undergraduate education, collaborative writing, and mentorship, as well as those interested in WAC, WID, and the scholarship of teaching and learning.
 
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cover of Coded Encounters: Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America

Coded Encounters

Writing, Gender, and Ethnicity in Colonial Latin America

Francisco Javier Cevallos

University of Massachusetts Press, 1994

Much has been written about the ways in which Columbus's "discovery" of America began a process of inventing a new world in European consciousness. But far less has been published about those on the margins of the dominant European discourse--Amerindians, Africans, and women--whose experience is reflected in documents written during the early years of European rule in Latin America. This volume brings together essays by leading scholars of colonial Latin America who address a series of topics relating to both the marginal and European-dominant discourses. The book is divided into five sections: "Representing the New World," "The Institutionalization of the Colony," "Amerindian Texts," "Women in Colonial Latin America," and "The Later Colony and the Caribbean Experience." The essays range from a consideration of Amerindian codes of mapmaking to the career of a transvestite nun, from confessional "sin lists" used by priests to examine the transgressions of their American charges to a new view of colonial women's lives based on birth records, dowry agreements, and wills. Contributors include Walter Mignolo, Maureen Ahern, Abel Alves, Rolena Adorno, Lúcia Helena Santiago Costigan, Pedro Lasarte, Raquel Chang-Rodríguez, Regina Harrison, Asunción Lavrin, Stephanie Merrim, Nina M. Scott, Antonio Carreño, Julie Greer Johnson, Karen Stolley, and Antonio Benítez-Rojo.
[more]
cover of Codex Bodley: A Painted Chronicle from the Mixtec Highlands, Mexico

Codex Bodley

A Painted Chronicle from the Mixtec Highlands, Mexico

Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez

Bodleian Library Publishing, 2005

Painted shortly before the Spanish conquest of Mexico in 1521, the Codex Bodley has been long recognized as one of the most important Mixtec manuscripts and a premier example of native Mixtec pictorial historiography in all its complexity. The complete manuscript of the Codex Bodley is offered here for the very first time in a single illustrated volume.

Codex Bodley explores the enormous wealth of information contained in the manuscript, which documents precolonial Mixtec genealogical relationships and historical events spanning from 900 AD to 1521. Maarten Jansen and Gabina Aurora Pérez Jiménez provide insightful and expert commentary on the manuscript, explaining its history as they consider key characteristics of Mixtec pictography. They then provide an engaging and masterful interpretation of the manuscript's narrative, with a detailed explanatory reading of its pictograms and their significance. Accompanied by vivid and colorful illustrations, Codex Bodley is an invaluable text for scholars of precolonial Mexican history, art, and culture.
[more]
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.
[more]
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.

[more]
cover of College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction

College Writing and Beyond

A New Framework for University Writing Instruction

Anne Beaufort

Utah State University Press, 2007

Composition research consistently demonstrates that the social context of writing determines the majority of conventions any writer must observe. Still, most universities organize the required first-year composition course as if there were an intuitive set of general writing "skills" usable across academic and work-world settings.

In College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort reports on a longitudinal study comparing one student’s experience in FYC, in history, in engineering, and in his post-college writing. Her data illuminate the struggle of college students to transfer what they learn about "general writing" from one context to another. Her findings suggest ultimately not that we must abolish FYC, but that we must go beyond even genre theory in reconceiving it.

Accordingly, Beaufort would argue that the FYC course should abandon its hope to teach a sort of general academic discourse, and instead should systematically teach strategies of responding to contextual elements that impinge on the writing situation. Her data urge attention to issues of learning transfer, and to developmentally sound linkages in writing instruction within and across disciplines. Beaufort advocates special attention to discourse community theory, for its power to help students perceive and understand the context of writing.

[more]
cover of Coming To Terms: A Theory of Writing Assessment

Coming To Terms

A Theory of Writing Assessment

Patricia Lynne

Utah State University Press, 2004

In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory?

By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented paradigm of educational assessment theory subjugates and discounts the very social constructionist principles that empower composition pedagogy. Further, Lynne criticizes recent practice for accommodating the big business of educational testing—especially for capitulating to the discourse of positivism embedded in terms like "validity" and "reliability." These terms and concepts, she argues, have little theoretical significance within composition studies, and their technical and philosophical import are downplayed by composition assessment scholars.

There is a need, Lynne says, for terms of assessment that are native to composition. To open this needed discussion within the field, she analyzes cutting-edge assessment efforts, including the work of Broad and Haswell, and she advances a set of alternate terms for evaluating assessment practices, a set of terms grounded in constructivism and composition.

Coming to Terms is ambitious and principled, and it takes a controversial stand on important issues. This strong new volume in assessment theory will be of serious interest to assessment specialists and their students, to composition theorists, and to those now mounting assessments in their own programs.

[more]
cover of Commentary for Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 2d ed.: Essential Tasks and Skills

Commentary for Academic Writing for Graduate Students, 2d ed.

Essential Tasks and Skills

John M. Swales and Christine B. Feak

University of Michigan Press, 2004

The second edition of this successful guide to writing for graduate-and undergraduate-students has been modified to include updates and replacements of older data sets; an increased range of disciplines with tasks such as nursing, marketing, and art history; discussions of discourse analysis; a broader discussion of e-mail use that includes current e-mail practices.

Like its predecessor, this edition of Academic Writing for Graduate Students
"explains understanding the intended audience, the purpose of the paper, and academic genres.
"includes the use of task-based methodology, analytic group discussion, and genre consciousness-raising.
"shows how to write summaries and critiques.
"features "language focus" sections that address linguistic elements as they affect the wider rhetorical objectives.
"helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities.
[more]
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.
[more]
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.
[more]
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.
[more]
cover of Compelled to Write: Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice

Compelled to Write

Alternative Rhetoric in Theory and Practice

David L. Wallace

Utah State University Press, 2011

David Wallace argues that any understanding of writing studies must include the conception of discourse as an embodied force with real consequences for real people. Informed in important ways by queer theory, Wallace calls to account users of dominant discourses and at the same time articulates a theory base from which to interpret "alternative rhetoric."

To examine the practice of writing from varied margins of society, Compelled to Write offers careful readings of four exemplar American writers, each of whom felt compelled within their own time and place to write in response to systemic injustices in American society.

Sarah Grimké, a privileged white woman advocating for abolition, is forced to defend her right to speak as a woman; Frederick Douglass begins his public career almost as a curiosity (the articulate ex-slave) and ends it as one of the most important rhetors in American history; Gloria Anzaldúa writes not only in multiple languages and dialects but from marginalized positions related to gender, race, class, sexual identity, and physical abled-ness; David Sedaris uses his privileged position as a middle-class white male humorist to speak unabashedly of his sexuality, his addictions, and obsessive-compulsive personality disorder.

Through these writers, Wallace explores a range of strategies that comprise alternative rhetorical practice, and demonstrates how such practice is inflected by social constraints on rhetorical agency and by how writers employ alternative discourses to resist those constraints. Grounding and personalizing Compelled to Write with rich material from his own teaching and his own experience, Wallace considers a number of implications for teachers of writing.

[more]
cover of Composing Feminist Interventions: Activism, Engagement, Praxis

Composing Feminist Interventions

Activism, Engagement, Praxis

Kristine L. Blair

University Press of Colorado, 2018

This edited collection offers self-reflexive, critical accounts of how feminist writing studies scholars variously situated within rhetoric, composition, and literacy studies plan, implement, examine, and represent community-based inquiry and pedagogy. Readers will gain insight into the hows and whys involved with this important disciplinary work. Sharing a commitment to social change, the twenty-one chapter discussions and five course designs complicate and continue to evolve possibilities for how we conceptualize writing research and teaching as deeply collaborative, inclusive, and reciprocal practices.
[more]
cover of Composing Media Composing Embodiment

Composing Media Composing Embodiment

Kristin L. Arola and Anne Frances Wysocki

Utah State University Press, 2012

“What any body is—and is able to do—cannot be disentangled from the media we use to consume and produce texts.” ---from the Introduction.

Kristin Arola and Anne Wysocki argue that composing in new media is composing the body—is embodiment. In Composing (Media) = Composing (Embodiment), they havebrought together a powerful set of essays that agree on the need for compositionists—and their students—to engage with a wide range of new media texts. These chapters explore how texts of all varieties mediate and thereby contribute to the human experiences of communication, of self, the body, and composing. Sample assignments and activities exemplify how this exploration might proceed in the writing classroom.

Contributors here articulate ways to understand how writing enables the experience of our bodies as selves, and at the same time to see the work of (our) writing in mediating selves to make them accessible to institutional perceptions and constraints. These writers argue that what a body does, and can do, cannot be disentangled from the media we use, nor from the times and cultures and technologies with which we engage.

To the discipline of composition, this is an important discussion because it clarifies the impact/s of literacy on citizens, freedoms, and societies. To the classroom, it is important because it helps compositionists to support their students as they enact, learn, and reflect upon their own embodied and embodying writing.

[more]
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.
 
[more]
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.
 
[more]
cover of Composition Studies As A Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration

Composition Studies As A Creative Art

Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration

Lynn Z. Bloom

Utah State University Press, 1998

Bloom gathers twenty of her most recent essays (some previously unpublished) on critical issues in teaching writing. She addresses matters of philosophy and pedagogy, class and marginality and gender, and textual terror transformed to textual power. Yet the body of her work and this representative collection of it remains centered, coherent, and personal. This work focuses on the creative dynamics that arise from the interrelation of writing, teaching writing, and ways of reading—and the scholarship and administrative issues engendered by it. To regard composition studies as a creative art is to engage in a process of intellectual or aesthetic free play, and then to translate the results of this play into serious work that yet retains the freedom and playfulness of its origins. The book is fueled by a mixture of faith in the fields that compose composition studies, hope that efforts of composition teachers can make a difference, and a sense of community in its broadest meaning. Included are Bloom's well-known essays "Teaching College English as a Woman," "Freshman Composition as a Middle Class Enterprise," and many more recent works, equally provocative and insightful.
[more]
cover of Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future

Composition Studies in the New Millennium

Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future

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

Southern Illinois University Press, 2003

A collection of twenty-four essays assessing and challenging the current state of writing instruction, Composition Studies in the New Millennium: Rereading the Past, Rewriting the Future emerges from presentations given at the national Writing Program Administrators conference held at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, in 2001. Like its acclaimed and widely-used predecessor, Composition in the Twenty-First Century: Crisis and Change, this timely collection by leading scholars in composition studies responds to concerns about the evolution and future of this field of study.

Charting new directions, the contributors grapple with seven distinct questions: What do we mean by composition studies—past, present, and future? What do and should we teach when we teach composition? Where will composition be taught, and who will teach it? What theories and philosophies will undergird our research paradigms, and what will those paradigms be? How will new technologies change composition studies? What languages will our students write, and what will they write about? What political and social issues have shaped composition studies in the past and will shape this field in the future?

In addressing these queries, the essayists approach composition studies from perspectives ranging from rhetorical to cultural, political to economic, administrative to technological; and they do so with a style and organization appropriate for composition instructors, scholars, and administrators at all levels, from teaching assistants to college presidents. The result is an invaluable vision of the future of composition studies in the new millennium.

[more]
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.

[more]
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.
 
[more]
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.
[more]
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.

[more]
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.

[more]
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

[more]
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.

 
[more]
cover of Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction

Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction

Alan Hirvela

University of Michigan Press, 2004

Academic writing often requires students to incorporate material from outside sources (like statistics, ideas, quotations, paraphrases) into their own written texts-a particular obstacle for students who lack strong reading skills. In Connecting Reading and Writing in SecondLanguage Instruction, Alan Hirvela contends that second language writing students should be considered as readers first and advocates the integration of reading and writing instruction with a survey of theory, research, and pedagogy in the subject area.

Although the integrated reading-writing model has gained popularity in recent years, many teachers have little more than an intuitive sense of the connections between these skills. As part of the popular Michigan Series on Teaching Multilingual Writers, Connecting Reading and Writing in Second Language Instruction will provide invaluable background knowledge on this issue to ESL teachers in training, as well as teachers who are already practicing.
[more]
cover of Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction, Second Edition

Connecting Reading & Writing in Second Language Writing Instruction, Second Edition

Alan R. Hirvela

University of Michigan Press, 2016

In this substantively revised new edition, Hirvela moves beyond the argument he made in the first edition of the value of connecting reading and writing. This new edition explains various dimensions of those connections and offers a fresh look at how to implement them in L2 writing instruction. It also provides both new and experienced teachers of writing with a solid grounding in the theoretical foundations and pedagogical possibilities associated with reading-writing connections.
 
The new edition features two new chapters. The first is a chapter on assessment because students are now being asked to connect reading and writing in the classroom and on formal assessments like the TOEFL®. The second new chapter is an argument for accounting for transfer elements in the teaching and researching of reading-writing connections.
 
The goals of this revised volume are to provide: resources for those wishing to pursue reading-writing connections, summaries of the beliefs underlying those connections, ideas for teaching the connections in the classroom, and information about the work others have done to develop this domain of L2 writing.
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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.
[more]