Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, eds. Race and Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, eds. Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies Michael R. Neal Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds.

This essay invites a critique of contact zone theory and rhetoric’s origin story based on a reading of Guaman Poma’s First New Chronicle and Good Government. I read this writer’s argument for indigenous ability and reshaping of space through picture, map, and text as a multimodal effort that invites attention to classroom rhetorical power dynamics and standards.

This essay interrogates the concept of “clarity” that has become an imperative of effective student writing. I show that clarity is neither axiomatic nor transparent, and that the clear/unclear binary that informs the identification of clarity as a goal of effective student writing is itself unstable precisely because of the ideological baggage that undergirds its construction. I make this argument by finding the traces of composition’s insistence on student writers’ clarity in the attacks on the writing of critical theorists.

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of “race” through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in College Composition and Communication and College English since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what “race” is has grown increasingly vague, despite its use as a commonplace from which to begin scholarly discussions. I argue that we must rearticulate our own racial ideologies in order to become more aware of how we use “race” persuasively for our own purposes.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

Review of Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’ “and not just Plateau students’ rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This article explores the emotioned dimensions of racist discourses at an all-white public high school. I argue that students’ racist assertions do not always or even often originate in students’ racist attitudes or belief. Instead, racist language functions metaphorically, connecting common racist ideas to nonracist feelings, values, beliefs, and associations that are learned in the routine practices and culture of school.

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for “high-risk” African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within present-day writing programs.

Using Frederic Jameson, we outline concentric circles of the political unconscious structuring debates about academic freedom at the national and state levels. By drawing parallels between the World War I university and the contemporary university, we suggest that such circles function historically, always bearing traces of an earlier time. To illustrate implications at one local site, we discuss the “Anti-American Studies” fliers repeatedly posted in our department and end by emphasizing the importance of using critical writing pedagogies to encourage opportunities for dissenting rhetorics.

This article traces a decline in CCCC sessions on language along with a shift toward more reductive definitions. It analyzes early CCCC treatment of language issues, the Students’ Right document, changes in demographics and linguistics, and shifts within English departments that have left us overdue for professional reexamination of our role as teachers of language.

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in the classroom is not in our textbooks or critical discourse but in what many of our students already consume, the ghettocentricity expressed in the music of rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Eminem.

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.

Review Essay: Language, Identity, and Citizenship Keith Gilyard Black Identity: Rhetoric, Ideology and Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalism Dexter B. Gordon, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education. Catherine Prendergast, Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2003 Latino/a Discourses: On Language, Identity and Literacy Education, Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester, and Victor Villanueva, eds., Portsmouth, NH: Boynton, 2004.

Using Burkean theory, I claim that Malcolm X brilliantly exposed the rhetoric and epistemology of whiteness as he rejected the African American jeremiad—a dominant form of African American oratory for more than 150 years. Whiteness theory served as the basis for Malcolm X’s alternative literacy, which raises important questions that literacy theorists have yet to consider.

From the early 1990s to the present, Ruth Frankenberg, David Roediger, coauthors Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, and other academics have focused on race by uncovering, interrogating, and theorizing as a largely unacknowledged but vastly important rhetorical and epistemological system. Nakayama and Krizek consider relatively unchartered territory that remained invisible as it continues to influence the identity of those both within and without domain (291). Whiteness, they claim, wields power yet endures as a largely unarticulated (291). Further, they argue, whiteness has assumed the position of an uninterrogated space (293). Many whites, they argue, refuse to acknowledge their ethnicity, claiming simply to be human, thereby erasing from its history and social

“Your Average Nigga” contends that just as exaggerating the differences between black and white language leaves some black speakers, especially those from the ghetto, at an impasse, so exaggerating and reifying the differences between the races leaves blacks in the impossible position of either having to try to be white or forever struggling to prove they’re black enough. In this essay I recount how I negotiated my own black ghettoto- middle class identity conflict as I facilitated classroom interactions with a black male student from the ghetto.

By addressing race and class through the stories we tell about service-learning in the classroom and in our scholarship, I argue that we can more effectively negotiate the divide between the university and the community and work toward social change.

Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community- based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an effort to build a collaboratively transformed understanding.

Foregrounding issues of race, ethnicity, and education, this article ties together two important issues in teaching (so-called) basic writing: how social and pedagogical issues in higher education shape possibilities for bicultural students’ writings and how these students can use their developing sense of literacy and their texts to explore identity.

The fiftieth anniversary issue of CCC included a call from Geneva Smitherman for compositionists to renew the fight for language rights. In this article, we take up Smitherman’s call by situating the theory of language rights in composition studies in a brief history of rights rhetoric in the United States.

This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites-the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years-and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.

This article examines the contradictory representations of whiteness in the literature on critical pedagogy and argues that a deeper engagement with these contradictions can help critical educators in their work with white students. The essay explores a number of sites--the rhetoric of critical pedagogy, the literature on whiteness that has surfaced in the past five years--and concludes by analyzing portraits of white students as they read texts that challenge them to think about race and racial identity in new ways.

This article examines Black student responses to Black Panther Party documents and how those documents moved the students toward change. I maintain that by allowing the classroom to function as a public space in which students can discuss the issues that matter to them, teachers can help to foster and encourage student activism and ultimately their empowerment.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

Traces of a offers a unique scholarly perspective that merges interests in rhetorical and literacy studies, United States social and political theory, and African American women writers. Focusing on elite nineteenth-century African American women who formed a new class of women well positioned to use language with consequence, Royster uses interdisciplinary perspectives (literature, history, feminist studies, African American studies, psychology, art, sociology, economics) to present a well-textured rhetorical analysis of the literate practices of these women. With a shift in educational opportunity after the Civil War, African American women gained access to higher education and received formal training in rhetoric and writing. By the end of the nineteenth-century, significant numbers of African American women operated actively in many public arenas.In her study, Royster acknowledges the persistence of disempowering forces in the lives of African American women and their equal perseverance against these forces. Amid these conditions, Royster views the acquisition of literacy as a dynamic moment for African American women, not only in terms of their use of written language to satisfy their general needs for agency and authority, but also to fulfill socio-political purposes as well.Traces of a Stream is a showcase for nineteenth-century African American women, and particularly elite women, as a group of writers who are currently underrepresented in rhetorical scholarship. Royster has formulated both an analytical theory and an ideological perspective that are useful in gaining a more generative understanding of literate practices as a whole and the practices of African American women in particular. Royster tells a tale of rhetorical prowess, calling for alternative ways of seeing, reading, and rendering scholarship as she seeks to establish a more suitable place for the contributions and achievements of African American women writers.

The authors attempt to confront the construction of “whiteness” as a silent but potent epistemology that pervades writing instruction and contributes to racism within academic institutions. Pedagogical practices as well as university policies are discussed, focusing particularly on the subject positions of “black” and “white” for both students and instructors.

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I make the following moves in this article: (1) I briefly trace how rhetorical listening emerged in my thinking; (2) I explore disciplinary and cultural biases that subordinate listening to reading and writing and speaking; (3) I speculate why listening is needed; (4) I offer an extended definition of rhetorical listening as a trope for interpretive invention; (5) I demonstrate how it may be employed as a code of cross-cultural conduct; and (6) I listen to a student’s listening.

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What composition studies can take from critical race theory is an awareness that if we are to understand the mechanisms (like racism) that prevent some students from being heard, we need to recognize that our rhetoric is one which continually inscribes our students as foreigners. (Prendergast 51).

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