Response to Paul Lynch’s “Composition as a Thermostatic Activity”, Matthew Abraham Response to Matthew Abraham, Paul Lynch

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman’s literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly asnotions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of affective histories and embodied practices over time.

2011 marks the Centennial of the National Council of Teachers of English, and to commemorate this milestone, CCC will publish two Symposia, one in this issue of the journal, and a second in June. Here we learn from Erika Lindemann about the founding of both NCTE and CCCC; about how both groups have developed; and, drawing from these histories, about how we might move into the next hundred years. From Keith Gilyard, who authors the second Symposium article, we learn about how activism has been at the heart of both organizations; about how language activism in particular has separatedNCTE and CCCC—and brought us together; and about how current concerns can evoke a shared agenda as we move forward into NCTE’s second century.

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions. Conceiving of agency in this way enables writers to recognize their rhetorical acts, whether conscious or nonconscious, as acts that make them who they are, that affect others, and that can contribute to the common good. Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion.

The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech W. Ross Winterowd gave at the CCCC meeting in Louisville on March 18, 2010. We’re sorry to report that Winterowd died on January 21, 2011.

Calling for an explicit commitment to graduate-level writing instruction in English studies, the authors describe a critical writing workshop that serves this purpose. The aim of the course is to create a formal curricular space through which students can brainstorm, create, and sustain a wide variety of critical writing projects.

I use Burkean analysis to show how neoliberalism undermines faculty assessment expertise and underwrites testing industry expertise in the current assessment scene. Contending that we cannot extricate ourselves from our limited agency in this scene until we abandon the familiar “stakeholder” theory of power, I propose a rewriting of the assessment scene that asserts faculty and student agency and leadership for writing assessment.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom Kristie S. Fleckenstein Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, ed. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Mark Garrett Longaker The Responsibilities of Rhetoric Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, eds. Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, eds.

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This article discusses how a group of multilingual scholars in Jordan negotiate multiple linguistic and cultural affiliations. These writers’ experiences demonstrate the varied ways English’s global dominance affects individuals’ lives. The scholars find both empowerment and disempowerment in English, viewing English as linked to Western hegemony in some situations and as de-nationalized and de-territorialized in others.

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Master’s programs have been absent from writing studies’ scholarship on graduate education, primarily because they are not sites of disciplinary research. The MA, however, should be valued in writing studies for its demographic and curricular diversity, its responsiveness to local conditions, and its intra- and  interdisciplinary flexibility.

This article defines research centers as associative enterprises for solving scholarly and societal problems that cannot be adequately addressed by individuals. We identify more than fifty research centers in rhetoric and writing, past and present, and argue that they function as change agents by emphasizing collaboration and conducting research focused on publics.

This is a written version of the address Marilyn J. Valentino gave at the CCCC meeting in Louisville on March 18, 2010.

This article argues for and models an approach to writing program assessment that relies on study of the writing practices of program graduates as a way to inform revisions in curriculum and teaching practices. The article also examines how conducting such assessments can help nondisciplinary publics understand the nature of composition studies.

For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within College Compositionand Communication, the relationship now merits attention. The two fields’ common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other, forstudents, and for policymakers. As digital tools and media expand the nature and circulation of texts, composition studies should pay more attention to craft and to composingtexts not created in response to rhetorical situations or for scholars.

Central to the future of rhetoric and composition (or writing studies or whatever label we use) is the service mission of composition: to teach students to write. But that term service has not and will not serve us well. This essay examines the limitations and dangers of a service mission and explores a different model, that of a franchise, a public trust thatlicenses us to control the largest block of classes on most campuses but also makes us responsible for the nation’s ability to write. The franchise model carries its own limitations, but it may also point to possibilities of great new promise and familiar danger.

As new ways of creating and interpreting texts complicate ideas of how and why writing happens, the field of rhetoric and composition needs to be more conscious of how ourinstitutional responsibilities and scholarly attention to college writing have limited its vision of writing and literacy. It is time to move beyond consolidating our identity asa field focused on college writing, reach out to other literacy-related fields, and form a broader, more comprehensive, and more flexible identity as part of a larger field ofliteracy and rhetorical studies.

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This article argues that tracing multimodal-multilingual literacy practices across official and unofficial spaces is key to moving composition into the twenty-first century. Key tothis remixing of the field is a situated framework that locates multimodal-multilingual activities in wider genre, cultural, national, and global ecologies.

Review of four books: Handbook of Research on Writing: History, Society, School, Individual, Text, Charles Bazerman, editor. Handbook of Writing Research Charles A. MacArthur, Steve Graham, and Jill Fitzgerald, editors.The Norton Book of Composition Studies Susan Miller, editor. Research on Composition: Multiple Perspectives on Two Decades of Change, Peter Smagorinsky, editor.

“Accountability” is widely used in discussions about what should be happening in school, but it is not an appropriate guiding concept for assessments designed to improveteaching and learning. This article examines discussions about assessment for internal and external purposes; it then outlines an alternative frame for assessment that has “responsibility” as its core.

This essay argues that a trend in histories of literary and writing studies is to bifurcate the origins of the fields and so engage in those modernist narrative fallacies describedby Jean-François Lyotard. Such works limit our understanding of past practices and the longstanding connections between disciplinarity and labor.

In the Visibility Project, professional organizations have worked to gain recognition for the disciplinarity of writing and rhetoric studies through representation of the fieldin the information codes and databases of higher education. We report success in two important cases: recognition as an “emerging field” in the National Research Council’staxonomy of research disciplines; and the assignment of a code series to rhetoric and composition/writing studies in the federal Classification of Instructional Programs(CIP). We analyze the rhetorical strategies and implications of each case and call for continuing efforts to develop and implement a “digital strategy” for handling data aboutthe field and its representation in information networks.

This article synthesizes and extends data from some of the most prominent and promising large-scale research projects in writing studies while also presenting results fromthe authors’ own research. By juxtaposing these studies, the authors offer a complex understanding of writing practices at the high school and college level. Future directionsare suggested in light of these research findings.

In this article, we argue that prior learning assessment (PLA) essays manifest a series of issues central to composition research and practice: they foreground the “contact zone” between the unauthorized writer, institutional power, and the articulation of knowledge claims; they reinforce the central role of a multifaceted approach to writing expertise in negotiating that zone; and they call attention to new and alternative spaces in which learning is gained and call for new forms in which it may be articulated. Ultimately, we claim that PLA as an emergent discourse compels compositionists to re-imagine not only the students we all teach, but also ways we might better—more explicitly, more reflectively, and more tactically—teach such students about writing as a mechanism for claiming and legitimating learning.

This article argues that craft knowledge can provide a disciplinary rationale for writing studies. It draws from the ancient concepts of teche, phronesis, and the four causes of making and makes the case for a definition of disciplinary knowledge fitting for writing studies. The article concludes with a conceptual framework that can serve as a heuristic to explore craft knowledge.

In this article, we undertake three critical tasks: First, we delineate major shifts in feminist rhetorical inquiry, thus describing a new and changed landscape of the field. Second, we argue that as feminist rhetorical practices have shifted, so have standards of excellence. To articulate excellence in feminist rhetorical studies, we draw attention to interconnections among three critical terms of engagement: critical imagination, strategic contemplation, and social circulation. Third, we propose an enhanced inquiry model for understanding, interpreting, and evaluating feminist rhetorical work in rhetoric and writing studies.

The editor introduces the articles in this issue and previews September’s special issue on the future of rhetoric and composition.

Responses to Rosalie’ Morales Kearns’s “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy” and Johnathan Alexander’s “Gaming Student Literacies and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.”

Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment in College, 2nd ed. Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. 255 pp. A Guide to College Writing Assessment Peggy O’Neill, Cindy Moore, and Brian Huot Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009. 218 pp. Organic Writing Assessment: Dynamic Criteria Mapping in Action Bob Broad, Linda Adler-Kassner, Barry Alford, Jane Detweiler, Heidi Estrem, Susanmarie Harrington, Maureen McBride, Eric Stalions, and Scott Weeden Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009. 167 pp. Teaching and Evaluating Writing in the Age of Computers and High-Stakes Testing Carl Whithaus Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. 169 pp. Composition in Convergence: The Impact of New Media of Writing Assessment Diane Penrod Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2005. 184 pp.

This article compares essays written in response to the ACT Essay prompt and a locally developed prompt used for placement. The two writing situations differ by time and genre: the ACT Essay is timed and argumentative; the locally developed is untimed and explanatory. The article analyzes the differences in student performance and predictive validity.