College Composition and Communication

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September 1998

  1. Letters/Interchanges: The Job Market and Graduate Programs in Composition
    doi:10.58680/ccc19981325
  2. Special Section: Forum: Newsletter of the Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Special Interest Group
    doi:10.58680/ccc19981324

February 1998

  1. Special Section: Forum: Newsletter of the Non-Tenure-Track Faculty Special Interst Group
    doi:10.58680/ccc19983179

October 1994

  1. Evolving Paradigms: WAC and the Rhetoric of Inquiry
    Abstract

    university campuses gathered at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a conference we organized to discuss the pedagogy and politics of in the disciplines. Some teams were comprised of writing program lecturers at University of California campuses; teams from other universities consisted of tenure-track faculty in composition and other fields who were developing and teaching in WAC programs at their campuses. Discussion centered around the politics of WAC, institutional constraints, collegial networking, faculty development, and teaching models and objectives. Though participants welcomed such discussion, when group members began to name what they did and to define their goals, a level of conflict emerged that surprised us. Some participants spoke long and heatedly about the primacy of writing to learn, while others argued with equal heat for the power of discourse conventions in specific fields. A gap soon opened between the two groups that seemed almost unbridgeable. Upon reflection, we realized that the conference was playing out in microcosm one of the major conflicts in our field-a conflict variously expressed as voice versus discourse, learning versus performance, process versus form. In this article we explore the theoretical and pedagogical implications of this conflict for writing across the curriculum. We argue that the conflict itself is based on a false dichotomy and that work in the social construction of knowledge-particularly the concept of rhetoric of

    doi:10.2307/358816

May 1994

  1. Beyond the Tenure Track: Fifteen Months in the Life of an English Professor
    doi:10.2307/359028
  2. Writing to Heal: Using Meditation in the Writing Process
    Abstract

    Unifying the many definitions and practices of is the notion of training the mind, which suggests that the technique of could usefully supplement courses designed to train people to think and write critically, analytically, or academically. In Riding the Ox Home: A History of Meditation from Shamanism to Science, Willard Johnson argues that meditation has no intrinsic goal or meaning; it is rather technique, way of developing consciousness (3). Coming from Hindu tradition, Ekneth Easwaran similarly defines as a systematic technique for taking hold of and concentrating to the utmost degree our latent mental power (9). Most frequently is discussed within spiritual context, yet for beginning college students, who often report difficulty keeping their minds on what they read, practice in could be as useful as other study techniques frequently taught, such as focused free writing, mapping, and dialogic reading logs. Yet work linking writing and remains on the fringes of our discipline. In this essay I want to review the scholarship on the connections between and writing, analyze objections to the use of in writing classroom, and suggest that writing teachers consider using with apprehensive or blocked writers, population I have studied and seen it serve. Most of my experience with and writing has occurred outside the academy; I've led workshops at bookstore, in therapist's office, and most frequently through Unity, center for spiritual growth. Teaching at spiritual site helped me shift my focus from helping writers produce good prose to helping them enjoy the process of meditating and writing regardless of the outcome. I have also guest taught in elementary and high school classes and typically offer an optional day of meditating and writing in my university writing courses. Despite enthusiastic student response, the marginality of meditative practice within the academy has discouraged me, as an untenured faculty member, from regularly offering to writing classes. Peter Elbow relates similar reluctance to bring new practices into his university classes: The

    doi:10.2307/359010

December 1993

  1. Editor’s Column: Scholarship, Promotion, and Tenure in Composition Studies
    doi:10.58680/ccc19938806

October 1991

  1. A One-Time Part-Timer's Response to the CCCC Statement of Professional Standards
    Abstract

    The published draft of the CCCC Statement (CCCC Initiatives on the Wyoming Resolution, CCC, Feb. 1989, 61-72) made me uneasy in its assumption that full-time teaching was the only legitimate model for academic employment in our--or indeed, any-field. Thus, I was pleased when the final version-in response to suggestions made by several of us at the 1989 CCCC meeting in Seattle-acknowledged the legitimacy of fully professional, tenuretrack part-time positions in the teaching of writing (Statement of Principles and Standards, CCC, Oct. 1989, 329-36). Regular part-time faculty are a permanent good in the academy and in our writing programs for two reasons. First, they allow for some variation from the standard male academic career track in one's 20's and early 30's-the track where you graduate from college, start grad school (maybe with a wife to help support you through it), land your first full-time tenure-track job, and write your first book to earn tenure (while your wife bears and watches the kids and provides the support system for 6 or 7 years). Not everyone can easily fit that time frame or career schedule, and our students need to see that different career patterns and work lives are possible. Business and government have been successfully experimenting with professional part-time positions and a number of successful part-time policies also exist in academia, like the ones at Carleton in Minnesota, Central College in Iowa, and Wesleyan in Connecticut, where part-time faculty in all disciplines can earn tenure and sabbaticals just like their full-time colleagues. Second, such professional part-time positions are important because they allow us to build into our writing programs, in a stable and productive way, faculty who have chosen to work part-time in order to have time for their own writing or other work which involves writing-people working as everything from novelists to free-lance journalists to political activists to consultants. These people bring a broad range of experiences with language into the classroom and they can teach our students and us a lot about writing in the nonacademic world. The final version of the CCCC Statement does not suggest

    doi:10.2307/358076

December 1982

  1. How to Handle an Adjunct
    doi:10.2307/357963

December 1980

  1. Regaining Our Composure
    Abstract

    Several months ago, a colleague and I presented a proposal to the Ph.D. graduate committee at Arizona State University for a new concentration on the Ph.D. level in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. Our proposal seemed reasonable enough. What we were proposing was that graduate students be given a series of options on the Ph.D. level, so that those whose primary interest was belles lettres could choose from among the traditional areas of English and American literature. However, those whose primary interest was language, or a broader conception of letters as exemplified by the bonae litterae of the Renaissance, could do half of their work in the traditional areas of literature and half of their work in rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. We argued that students seeking degrees in order to teach and to do research face a job market very different from the one that students encountered as recently as eight or nine years ago, and drastically different from what most teachers encountered when they began. We reminded the committee of the results of the MLA Job Information List, published in the February 1978 ADE Bulletin, which showed a preponderance of job opportunities for people in the areas of rhetoric, composition, and linguistics. For example, of the 405 jobs advertised in '76-'77 for people with Ph.D.'s in English, 56 of those jobs were in rhetoric and composition, 53 in linguistics, and 29 in creative writing. Then in descending order, there were 18 openings in American Literature, 18 in Black Studies, 17 for generalists, 15 each in Old and Middle English Literature, 19th Century British Literature, and American Studies, 13 in Renaissance Studies, 8 in 19th Century American Literature, 7 in Colonial Literature, and so forth. We emphasized that the opportunity for serious research and scholarship in rhetoric and composition has never been better. The professional membership in the Conference on College Composition and Communication has increased dramatically over the past few years. The MLA has recognized the

    doi:10.2307/356592