College Composition and Communication
76 articlesMay 1994
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Abstract
Rachel brings together nineteen previously unpublished essays concerned with ways in which recent research on workplace writing can contribute to the future direction of the discipline of technical and professional Hers is the first anthology on the social perspective in professional writing to feature focused discussions of research advances and future research directions.The workplace as defined by this volume is a widely diverse area that encompasses small companies and large corporations, public agencies and private firms, and a varied population of writersengineers, managers, nurses, social workers, government employees, and others. Because much research has been conducted on the relationship between workplace writing and social contexts since the ground breaking 1985 publication of Odell and Goswami s Writing in Nonacademic Settings, Spilka contends that this is an appropriate time for the professional writing community to consider what it has learned to date and where it should be heading next in light of these recent discoveries. She argues that now professional writers should try to ask better questions and to define new directions.Spilka breaks the anthology into two parts. Part 1 is a collection of ten essays presenting textual and qualitative studies conducted by the authors in the late l980s on workplace has chosen these studies as representative of the finest research being conducted in professional writing that can serve as models for current and future researchers in the field. Barbara Couture, Jone Rymer, and Barbara Mirel report on surveys they conducted relying on the social perspective both to design survey instruments and to analyze survey data. Jamie MacKinnon assesses a qualitative study describing what workplace professionals might need to learn about social contexts and workplace Susan Kleimann and editor Rachel discuss multiple case studies they conducted that help explain the value during the composing process of social interaction among the participants of a rhetorical situation. Judy Z. Segal explores the negotiation between the character of Western medicine and the nature of its professional discourse. Jennie Dautermann describes a qualitative study in which a group of nurses claimed the authority to restructure their own procedural information system. Anthony Parefinds in a case study of social workers that writing can be constrained heavily by socially imposed limitations and restrictions. Graham Smart describes a study of discourse conventions in a financial institution. Geoffrey A. Cross reports on a case study of the interrelation of genre, context, and process in the group production of an executive letter and report.Part 2 includes nine essays that assess the implications of recent research on workplace writing on theory, pedagogy and practice, and future research directions. Mary Beth Debs considers research implications for the notion of authorship. Jack Selzer explores the idea of intertextuality. Leslie A. Olson reviews the literature central to the concept of a discourse community. James A. Reither suggests that writing-as-collaboration in the classroom focuses more on the production of texts to be evaluated than on ways in which texts arise out of other texts. Rachel continues Reither s discussion of how writing pedagogy in academia might be revised with regard to the social perspective. Patricia Sullivan and James E. Porter respond to the debate about the authority of theory versus that of practice on researchers notions of methodology. Mary Beth Debs considers which methods used in fields related to writing hold promise for research in workplace Stephen Doheny-Farina discusses how some writing researchers are questioning the underlying assumptions of traditional ethnography. Finally, Tyler Bouldin and Lee Odell suggest future directions for the research of workplace writing.
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In the ideal composition class of the 1990s, everything seems to run smoothly: all learning is happily collaborative, all authority is successfully de-centered, and all students are part of a conflict-free community of writers. No student is ever bored or boring, angry or provocative, and no teacher ever responds in ways that are self-serving, subjective, or idiosyncratic. Since most books and articles on the teaching of writing describe the ideal as if it were the norm, many teachers feel embarrassed by what does or doesn't happen in their own classrooms- and envious of what they believe is happening down the hall. Writing Relationships goes beyond the idealized talk about what should happen in teaching to examine what actually occurs: competition and cooperation, peer pressure and identification, resistance and sexual tension. This book is about how interpersonal relationships -- between teacher and student, student and student, and teacher and teacher -- shape the ways that teachers read and grade their students' writing and the ways students respond, or don't respond, to their teacher's suggestions. Through narratives and case studies, the author demonstrates that much of the tension, confusion, and anxiety associated with a process approach is inevitable and, in part, desirable. But this book is more than a series of failure stories: the author gives teachers specific and useful ideas and strategies for: reading student essays responding to student writing leading a discussion of an essay running a writing workshop grading setting up peer and co-authoring groups conferencing publishing in the field.
December 1993
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Preview this article: Portfolio Evaluation, Collaboration, and Writing Centers, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/44/4/collegecompositioncommunication8813-1.gif
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Preview this article: Knowledge, Social Relations, and Authority in Collaborative Practices of the 1930s and the 1950s, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/44/4/collegecompositioncommunication8815-1.gif
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Part 1 Perspectives: education by engagement and construction - a strategic education initiative for a multimedia renewal of American education, Ben Shneiderman is there a class in this text? creating knowledge in the electronic classroom, John M. Slatin varieties of virtual - expanded metaphors for computer-mediated learning, Patricia Ann Carlson cognitive architecture in hypermedia instruction, Henrietta Nickels Shirk multimedia - informational alchemy or conceptual typography?, Evelyn Schlusselberg and V. Judson Harward dimensions, context, and freedom - the library in the social creation of knowledge, Gregory T. Anderson multimedia and the library and information studies curriculum, Kathleen Burnett the virtual museum and related epistemological concerns, Glen Hoptman an epistemic analysis of the interaction between knowledge, education, and technology, David Chen the many faces of multimedia - how new technologies might change the nature of the academic endeavour, Alison Hartman, et al. Part 2 . . . and practices: bootstrapping hypertext - student-created documents, intermedia, and the social construction of knowledge, George P. Landow the CUPLE project - a hyper- and multimedia approach to restructuring physics education, E.F. Redish, et al collaborative virtual communities - using Learning Constellations, a multimedia ethnographic research tool, Ricki Goldman-Segall the crisis management game of Three Mile Island - using multimedia simulation in management education, Thomas M. Fletcher restructuring space, time, story, and text in advanced multimedia learning environments, Janet H. Murray the virtual classroom - software for collaborative learning, Starr Roxanne Hiltz medical centre - a modular hypermedia approach to programme design, Nels Anderson prototyping multimedia - lessons from the visual computing group at project Athena Centre for educational computing initative, Ben Davis Engineering-Design Instructional Computer System (EDICS), David Gordon Wilson computers and design activities - their mediating role in engineering education, Shahaf Gal the need for negotiation in cooperative work, Beth Adelson and Troy Jordan teaching hypermedia concepts using hypermedia techniques, Peter A. Gloor computer integrated documentation, Guy Boy the Worcester State College Elder Connection - using multimedia and information technology to promote intergenerational education, Virginia Z. Ogozalek, et al paradoxical reactions and powerful ideas - educational computing in a Department of Physics, Sherry Turkle.
May 1993
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New Visions of Collaborative Writing, Janis Forman Alice M. Gillam Methods and Methodology in Composition Research, Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan Russel K. Durst Gaining Ground in College Writing: Tales of Development and Interpretation, Richard Haswell Robert Brooke Beyond Outlining: New Approaches to Rhetorical Form, Betty Cain Richard M. Coe Portfolios in the Writing Classroom: An Introduction, Kathleen Blake Yancey Karen L. Greenberg Reading and Writing Essays: The Imaginative Tasks, Pat C. Hoy II David Z. Londow To Make a Poem, Alberta Turner Working Words: The Process of Creative Writing, Wendy Bishop Diane Kendig Teaching Hearts and Minds: College Students Reflect on the Vietnam War in Literature, Barry Kroll Lucille Capra Illumination Rounds: Teaching the Literature of the Vietnam War, Larry R. Johannessen Lucille Capra Vietnam, We’ve All Been There, Eric James Schroeder Lucille Capra
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In original essays, fourteen nationally known scholars examine the practical, philosophical, and epistemological implications of a variety of research traditions. Included are discussions of historical, theoretical, and feminist scholarship; case-study and ethnographic research; text and conversation analysis; and cognitive, experimental, and descriptive research. Issues that cross methodological boundaries, such as the nature of collaborative research and writing, methodological pluralism, the classification and coding of research data, and the politics of composition research, are also examined. Contributors reflect on their own research practices, and so reflect the current state of composition research itself.
October 1992
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Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups ↗
Abstract
Muriel Harris, Collaboration Is Not Collaboration Is Not Collaboration: Writing Center Tutorials vs. Peer-Response Groups, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 43, No. 3 (Oct., 1992), pp. 369-383
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When we design a course in writing, we join that debate over whether we should see individual cognition or social and cultural context as motive force in literate (Flower 282). To remind us of this debate, Linda Flower recently asked, Can we... reconcile a commitment to nurturing a personal voice, individual purpose, or an inner, self-directed process of making meaning, with rhetoric's traditional assumption that both inquiry and purpose are responses to rhetorical situations, or with more recent assertions that inquiry in writing must start with social, cultural, or political awareness? (282). Those three commitments are not really incongruous. All three can be found reconciled in advanced composition course described below. As a course built by students around individualized projects, it encourages students to apply general principles to specialized tasks. Good writers, according to Richard M. Coe, know how to apply general principles of composition to particular writing tasks and contexts (412). With so many different projects resulting from this approach, students' divergent interests must be shared in an atmosphere of collaboration. John Trimbur has stated that one of goals of collaborative learning is to replace traditional hierarchical relations of teaching and learning with practices of participatory democracy (6.11). Yet even collaborative models need to leave instructor with a certain authority. For example, James A. Reither and Douglas Vipond, whose teaching model is based on collaboration, suggest that the most powerful way to arrange this kind of situation is to organize a course so students collaboratively investigate a more or less original scholarly question or field. The teacher sets a research project or question for class, casting students as members of a research group (863). The final exam in my course acts as that long-range research project. This assignment, which is submitted to students on first day of class, summarizes
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When I talk to graduate students and colleagues about their use of collaborative learning, I often hear stories about when it doesn't work. No one's version of collaborative pedagogy is universally rewarding, of course, but I have found some approaches consistently more successful than others. Often, peer criticism consists of oral or hastily written comments by students in a classroom group; sometimes students fill out a checklist or a form that resembles a short-answer test (for example Huff and Kline 122-23). In these cases, neither teacher nor student is taking peer criticism seriously as a writing exercise. Furthermore, much oral or checklist peer criticism is limited to students' evaluations of their peers' writing techniques, thus neglecting discussion of the substantive issues in the paper. Finally, much peer criticism focuses either on the subjective experience of the critic, such as Peter Elbow's movies of people's minds while they read your words (Writing without Teachers 77), or objectified standard criteria, such as his criterion-based feedback (Writing with Power 240-45). I would like to propose a melding of exercises from Peter Elbow and Pat Belanoff's book Sharing and Responding with the series of written peer critiques Kenneth Bruffee describes in his text A Short Course in Writing. These two kinds of peer criticism work best in tandem in the collaborative classroom because together they capture the struggle between individual expression and social constraint that most of us experience as writers. Sharing and Responding can function on its own or as a companion piece to Elbow and Belanoff's A Community of Writers (second edition forthcoming), with which it was published. The exercises continue the tradition of readerbased responding that Elbow began in Writing without Teachers and Writing with Power, but with a twist. The exercises in Sharing and Responding have a more developed social framework than their earlier manifestations. Although the emphasis is still on the writer's making individual choices, the structure of group interaction is more clearly developed than in Elbow's earlier work. For instance, each exercise has sample reader responses followed by a section called What a Writer Might Think about This Feedback. These exercises (as well as other subjective or comment-based-rather than essay-length-peer criticism)
February 1991
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Why write together? the authors ask. They answer that question here, in the first book to combine theoretical and historical explorations with actual research on collaborative and group writing.Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford challenge the assumption that writing is a solitary act. That challenge is grounded in their own personal experience as long-term collaborators and in their extensive research, including a three-stage study of collaborative writing supported by the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education.The authors urge a fundamental change in our institutions to accommodate collaboration by radically resituating power in the classroom and by instituting rewards for collaborative work that equal rewards for single-authored work. They conclude with the injunction: Today and in the twenty-first century, our data suggest, writers must be able to work together. They must, in short, be able to collaborate.
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Conversations on the WrittenWord: Essays on Language and Literacy, Jay L. Robinson John Schilb Expressive Discourse, Jeannette Harris Douglas Hesse The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present, Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg Theresa Enos Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student, 3rd ed., Edward P. J. Corbett Cheryl Glenn Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on Collaborative Writing, Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede John Trimbur Learning to Write in Our Nation’s Schools: Instruction and Achievement in 1988 at Grades 4, 8, and 12, Arthur N. Applebee et al. Paul W. Rea The Future of Doctoral Studies in English, Andrea Lunsford, Helen Moglen, and James F. Slevin Joseph J. Comprone
October 1990
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Preview this article: Collaboration in the Writing Classroom: An Interview with Ken Kesey, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/41/3/collegecompositionandcommunication8963-1.gif
May 1990
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Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.
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In her opening address, Composing Ourselves: Politics, Commitment, and the Teaching of Writing, Andrea Lunsford challenged the participants at the 1989 CCCC to tell the story of the teaching of writing in multiple voices which encourage differences and diversity. Cautioning against definition by others, particularly by those who would describe writing instruction in reductive terms or define writing instructors in limiting ways, Lunsford warned those present that we could be composed in the discourses . . . of others (75). For those of us teaching in two-year colleges, Lunsford's descriptions of historical precedents of marginalized voices writing themselves into being were particularly evocative. Her imperative for composition studies to remain inclusive, interdisciplinary, collaborative, nonhierarchical, and dialogic was a further articulation of the CCCC 1989 theme of empowerment and of interdependence. Furthermore, the 1990 CCCC theme, community through diversity, includes a strand on English in the two-year college. This focus recognizes the significance of teaching writing in two-year colleges and should provide the opportunity for participants to explore and articulate the strength in diversity among two-year institutions of higher education. Indeed, two-year schools are the largest single sector of higher education in the United States, with approximately one half of all students taking composition in two-year colleges (Facts 3). These 1,224 accredited schools serve more than five-million credit students, and many of those students transfer to four-year schools (AACJC Commission vii). The numbers of students taking composition in community colleges alone indicate the significance of community-college English departments (Raines 29). Yet no major study has been published since the 1965 NCTE and CCCC report, English in the TwoYear College. A follow-up to this report could be a critical contribution to an evolving text on the teaching of writing. In fact, the Association of Depart-
February 1990
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Preview this article: Cross-Curricular Underlife: A Collaborative Report on Ways with Academic Words, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/41/1/collegecompositionandcommunication8978-1.gif
December 1989
October 1989
December 1987
October 1987
December 1985
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Teaching students writing, reading, and thinking across the curriculum requires the acceptance of a premise, relatively simple on its face, but imbued with substantial promise for reinventing the formidable tradition of making writing the central cog of the intellectual machinery that facilitates learning. The premise is that all teachers in all disciplines should be actively involved in students' writing, reading, and thinking and should not function as mere judges and graders of purportedly finished writings. I expect to be encouraged by the administration of my college to require more writing, revision, and rewriting in courses that I teach in the future, and to expand the audiences for written work to include the class, the writing laboratory, professors in collaborative teaching arrangements, and others. The college will be participating in one of the national writing programs, and we must also assist our students in completing the writing requirements of the testing program that is mandated for all institutions in the state system of higher education. Recognizing that writing is a process and a mode for also helps students to read with more understanding of the structure of language. Writing and reading are connected, interactive processes requiring students to cooperate in the act of learning. Our students need instruction and practice for reading in their subjects. Reading assignments need to go beyond the text to include materials that offer balance, put the subject into perspective, and place it in the context of real-world points of reference for our students. Discipline-based reading helps students to acquire the learning and expected characteristic of the field. Reading also adds to the value of the writing within the subject or discipline by defining and illuminating basic practices, procedures, and values of the field. Reading and related writing in chemistry and other scientific areas are also forms of social behavior that we must teach if students are to be successful thinkers and scholars in the discipline. That is not revolutionary, it is merely practical. I invite my colleagues in the hard sciences to join the enterprise and re-
February 1982
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Preface 1. THE CONTEXTS OF TEACHING PERSPECTIVES Richard Fulkerson: Four Philosophies of Composition James Berlin: Rhetoric and Ideology in the Writing Class Edward P.J. Corbett: Rhetoric, the Enabling Discipline Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner: The Problematic of Experience: Redefining Critical Work in Ethnography and Pedagogy TEACHERS Peter Elbow: Embracing Contraries in the Teaching Process Donald M. Murray: The Listening Eye: Reflections on the Writing Conference Lad Tobin: Reading Students, Reading Ourselves: Revising the Teacher's Role in the Writing Class Dan Morgan: Ethical Issues Raised by Students' Personal Writing STUDENTS Mina P. Shaughnessy: Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing Vivian Zamel: Strangers in Academia: The Experiences of Faculty and ESL Students Across the Curriculum Todd Taylor: The Persistence of Difference in Networked Classrooms: Non-Negotiable Difference and the African American Student Body LOCATIONS Hephzibah Roskelly: The Risky Business of Group Work Gail E. Hawisher and Cynthia L. Selfe: The Rhetoric of Technology and the Electronic Writing Class Muriel Harris: Talking in the Middle: Why Writers Need Writing Tutors APPROACHES Min-Zhan Lu: Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy: A Critique of the Politics of Linguistic Innocence Mariolina Salvatori: Conversations with Texts: Reading in the Teaching of Composition Gary Tate: A Place for Literature in Freshman Composition Carolyn Matalene: Experience as Evidence: Teaching Students to Write Honestly and Knowledgeably about Public Issues 2. THE TEACHING OF WRITING ASSIGNING Mike Rose: Writing Courses: A Critique and a Proposal David Peck, Elizabeth Hoffman, and Mike Rose: A Comment and Response on Remedial Writing Courses Richard L. Larson: The Research Paper in the Writing Course: A Non-Form of Writing Jeanne Fahnestock and Marie Secor: Teaching Argument: A Theory of Types Catherine E. Lamb: Beyond Argument in Feminist Composition RESPONDING AND ASSESSING Brooke K. Horvath: The Components of Written Response: A Practical Synthesis of Current Views David Bartholomae: The Study of Error Jerry Farber: Learning How to Teach: A Progress Report COMPOSING AND REVISING Nancy Sommers: Between the Drafts James A. Reither: Writing and Knowing: Toward Redefining the Writing Process David Bleich: Collaboration and the Pedagogy of Disclosure AUDIENCES Douglas B. Park: The Meanings of Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford: Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy Peter Elbow: Closing My Eyes as I Speak: An Argument for Ignoring Audience STYLES Robert J. Connors: Static Abstractions and Composition Winston Weathers: Teaching Style: A Possible Anatomy Elizabeth D. Rankin: Revitalizing Style: Toward a New Theory and Pedagogy Richard Ohmann: Use Definite, Specific, Concrete Language