This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.

This article explores how assemblage and affect theories can enable research into the formation of a collective working-class identity, inclusive of written, print, publication, and organizational literacies through the origins of the Federation of Worker Writer and Community Publishers, an organization that expanded its collectivity as new heritages, ethnicities, and immigrant identities altered the organization’s membership and “class” identity.

Drawing from cultural studies and social justice education, this essay argues for the productive potential of racial inquiry in composition scholarship and pedagogy. Ethical imperatives facing rhetoric and composition are also pedagogical opportunities:to rethink multiculturalism, politicize student affect, and develop student-centered writing processes predicated upon deliberative critical inquiry.

Dear Colleagues and Friends~~This month's issue includes various genres- articles, symposium contributions, review essay, exchange, and poster page-that tap both time and space. In these collective texts, we have historical perspectives helping us understand our own past and allowing us to update our present; linkages to other fields of endeavor so as to enhance our own; connections across spaces to other sites of writing around the world; and closer looks at our own sites-hence the title of this introduction. As represented here, our field includes a capacious view, and as we expand sites of inquiry and activity, we have a more robust and complex view. In this introduction, then, I'll summarize each of these contributions before taking up two other tasks: (1) outlining the treat in store for us, in the combined September and December special issue of College Composition and Communication, we will learn from colleagues about various and diverse Locations of Writing; and (2) sharing with readers our new policy on rememberingIn our first article, Expanding the Aims of Public Rhetoric and Writing Peda- gogy, Writing Letters to Editors, Brian Gogan takes up how the conventional assignment of the letter to the editor can be located in what he calls an ap- proach to public rhetoric and writing pedagogy that is conducted according to the tripartite aims of publicity, authenticity, and efficacy. Drawing on his work with students, Gogan expands on these single-concept aims to situate them in relationships: publicity-as-condition and publicity-as-action, authenticity- as-location and authenticity-as-legitimation, and efficacy-as-persuasion and efficacy-as-participation. Gogan also argues that we should separate and emphasize the participation the letter-to-the-editor genre entails from the persuasion that may be its aspiration: when the efficacy of the letter-to-the- editor assignment is expanded so that it is understood in terms of participation that may lead to persuasion, public rhetoric and writing pedagogy embraces the fullness of the ecological model [of writing] by seeing the wide range of effects-persuasive or not-there within.Continuing recent work recovering our collective writing pasts, our next article details the experiences of several 19th century women, some of them from the U.S., making their educational way at Cambridge University. In 'A Revelation and a Delight': Nineteenth-Century Cambridge Women, Academic Collaboration, and the Cultural Work of Extracurricular Writing, L. Jill Lam- berton focuses on the writing these women engaged in, especially outside the classroom, in order both to succeed in the classroom and to affect wider spheres of influence. Defining this writing as a form of collaborative peer activity foster- ing agency, Lamberton identifies three benefits accruing to her 19th century subjects: (1) use of extracurricular writing that augmented and enriched cur- ricular learning; (2) use of writing to develop social networks and circulation; and (3) use of such writing to shift public opinion, looking outside the college or university for broader audiences to voice support and agitate for change.Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, John Aloysius Cogan Jr., and Tito G. Nurudeen Jr. return us to the present as they consider how our writing programs can be enhanced: by adapting a legal heuristic used to determine what in the law is called impact. In The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment, these col- leagues first distinguish between inequities produced by intent from those produced unintentionally-the latter called disparate impact-before outlin- ing a three-part question-driven process that can identify such instances and work toward ways of changing them:Step 1: Do the assessment policies or practices result in adverse impact on students of a particular race as compared with students of other races? …

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.

Preview this article: Review: Literacy, Affect, and Ethics: A Review Essay, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/57/1/collegecompositionandcommunication4020-1.gif

I value Gypsy Academics and the compassionate way in which Schell combines a feminist and materialist analysis of the historical and economic conditions that have led to the exploitation of adjunct faculty, the majority of whom are women. - College EnglishFully two-thirds of all part-time teachers in English studies are women, many with no permanent faculty standing, no benefits, no job security, and little or no chance for promotion. How does the feminization of writing programs affect the newly formed discipline of rhetoric and composition? Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers illuminates the complex gendered ideologies that surround writing instruction--drawing on feminist theories of women's work, Marxist theories of class and labor, sociological and economic studies of part-time academic employment, and personal interviews with part-time women writing faculty. Eileen Schell contends that part-time faculty members' interests and contributions have been underrepresented in our research narratives and professional histories in rhetoric and composition. Her book attempts to revalue practitioner knowledge and to reclaim the voices and perspectives of part-time women writing instructors as a vital part of the history and growth of rhetoric and composition as a discipline. Both a theoretical and practical study, Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers not only theorizes the structures of gender and labor in writing programs; it also offers administrators, theorists, and practitioners ideas for improving the working conditions and professional status of part-time writing instructors.

A s a field of professional inquiry intertwined with the practice and teaching of its own subject, composition studies has enjoyed the steady pace of its own recent evolution.Few composition scholars twenty years ago would have imagined the rate at which the field is now developing, exploding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for inquiry and knowledge production.These current transformations owe in part to the inevitable burgeoning of a theoretically interdisciplinary field with a strong orientation toward self-reflection.They also owe to unprecedented changes underway in higher education, changes pressured by shifts in the politics and economics of university administration, the advent of new technologies, population changes that affect student demographics, and the creation of alternative structures and contexts for teaching and learning.Composition, in seeking a disciplinary identity, is questioning the ways it creates and mediates knowledge and the ways in which that knowledge informs and is informed by various contexts for research and practice.This collection focuses on the ways in which composition reconsiders established dichotomies, examines new connections among areas of inquiry, and suggests avenues for inquiry that have transformative consequences for the sites of theory, research, and teaching.When we first proposed this volume of essays, we sought submissions that reconsidered the relationship among theory, research and practice, expecting that our focus would primarily be on the changing face of composition research.Our open call and invitation to individual scholars, however, resulted in very few reports of research studies, but rather in contributions that reflect the extent to which the theory/research/practice relationship now occupies our disciplinary thinking.Since the publication of Stephen North's The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field (1987), the past decade has seen attention to research methodology largely displaced by conflict between theory and practice.This conflict, still rooted, one might argue, in the desire for a unified theory, often centers on the extent to which any theory employed by compositionists must grow, if not from research, then from practice, or at least edgment of "what is contradictory, and perhaps unknowable" (9).Many of the authors in this volume (Rose and Lauer; Chiang; Grimm, et al.; Okawa) build into their essays acknowledgement of their positions as scholars and researchers and examine their "findings" as cultural and ideological products.At that same time, some of them are quick to point out the limits and consequences of new theories and methodologies for composition as a disciplinary community (Seitz; MacDonald; Neff; Ray and Barton).Increasingly, compositionists have more confidence in the recognition that teaching makes knowledge, and that practice, overdetermined as it is, continually calls into question the traditional purpose of theory-to explain unaccounted-for phenomena and solve new problems.Lore, as North distinguishes it from traditional disciplinary knowledge production, can, Harkin argues, be thought of as postdisciplinary theory, because it allows for practitioners' often contradictory attempts to solve writing problems with more than one cause, rather than using theory in the traditional way to contain situations (134).Beth Daniell has argued that while composition theories may lack the authority to dictate pedagogy, as rhetoric, they are what persuade us to teach writing in the ways that we do (130).At the same time that theories may contain the discipline by "serving the interests of . . .groups within that discipline" (131), they are what enable us, she says, to "create a community in which we can figure out what we, individually and collectively, believe about our work" (135).In that rhetorical and political sense, theory is practice.But, as several of the authors in this volume (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) ask, whose "work" and whose interests define us and remain at the center of composition as a discipline?Can theory, research, and practice in ever new relationships intersect and hold an expanding community together or drive it apart into separate communities whose power and authority may be in jeopardy?Composition's calling into question its knowledge comes at a time when the authority of that expert knowledge may be at risk.In the wake of shrinking graduate programs and the responsibility-centered-management of academic departments in the new corporate universities, the literature components of some English departments are beginning to reclaim an expertise in the teaching of writing or, in some instances, to efface that expertise, deeming it no longer necessary, politically appropriate, or cost-effective.Much composition scholarship in fact contributes to this withering away of the more public conception of composition.Our growing understanding of complex context-specific literacy practices runs counter to institutional conditions that assume composition is an essential set of transparent skills to be conveyed one-time-only to first year students by exploited instructors.If retooled writing courses do result from the disciplinary boundary crossing of compositionists into deconstruction, feminist, multicultural, and cultural studies, what in the experiences of teachers and students justifies or interrogates these theories in practice?How does interdisciplinary inquiry expand avenues and change how and what we research and teach?What locates theorists, courses, teachers, and programs that might grow from this research within "composition"?Several of the authors in this volume locate their concerns about composition's "identity crisis" in a disjuncture between theory and pedagogy, whether questioning composition's attempts to achieve more disciplinary status (Ferry; Vandenberg; Howard) or its failure to focus more attention on knowledgebuilding inside the field (MacDonald; Neff).

We have here four books, a sort of mini-groundswell, dealing in different ways with “affective issues” in composition, to use McLeod’s relatively focused term, or with “the domain beyond the cognitive,” to use the more expansive phrasing of Brand and Graves. (Fulkerson 101).

These essays by Old Dominion University students deal with two questions: What impact do their own race, class, gender, and ethnic identities have upon them as students? How do their culture and the university culture interact to affect their ability to learn?The focus of these essays is on the overlap between the students identities as students and their identities based on gender, race, class, and ethnic origin. The project began as an assignment in a women s studies class at Old Dominion University in 1993, when students in a mixed graduate and undergraduate course were asked to write a brief analysis of themselves as students, accounting for the impact of gender, race, and social class on what they studied, what they heard in class, how they were treated in the classroom, how they treated others there, and what their level of comfort in the university was. Invited to add other variables, such as religion, nationality, age, sexual orientation, or disability if they considered these significant to their identities as studentsthe students were urged to consider not only the disadvantages these various identities gave them but also the privileges and advantages.The resulting essays stimulated great interest in what students had to say and led to the formation of The Broad Minds Collectivemade up of four students from the class as well as its instructorwhich set about the task of soliciting and collecting additional essays. Although most essays contain overlapping themes, the editors detected four motifs that encompass virtually every essay included in the book. the section Cultural Perceptions and Assumptions, students show their awareness of how culturally defined categories affect education.Essays in Belonging and Alienation in the Classroom discuss the students level of comfort in the classroom and the degree to which they feel they belong at the university. The essays in Making Sense of Our Lives Through Education reveal the students use of education to learn more about the forces that shape them. In Search of an Education highlights students efforts to wrest what they feel they need from a college education.Rather than presenting a multicultural educational theory or conducting a sterile sociological study, The Broad Minds Collective has allowed students to speak for themselves. Abstraction is replaced by stories of personal conflict, struggle, and victory.

With this collection of essays, the concept of writing program administration as a significant expression of scholarship comes of age. Featuring the insights of many prominent composition scholars and writing program administrators, this book has a dual message. First is that writing programs represent a different presence in the academy, one that can pose a critique to accepted practices and elicit institutional change. Second is that WPAs can creatively use this different and liminal status to help writing programs resituate themselves at the center, rather than at the margins, of their institutions. Divided into three sections, the book's first features essays on defining the differences between writing programs and other, more familiar academic units; the ethical dimension of writing program administration; technology's place in writing programs; and the critical role of two-year institutions. In the second section, four veteran WPAs suggest ways to build liaisons with other members of the campus community. The book's final section reflects on how writing program administrators can imagine their work both to make it possible to accomplish and to make its differences understandable and appreciated by those who judge WPAs. Resituating Writing is a resource that will help composition specialists locate their scholarship and teaching within broad political and intellectual frameworks. It provides persuasive evidence of the unique scope of the WPA's work for other administrators whose decisions affect writing programs. And it is particularly relevant for graduate students as they prepare for their own future responsibilities as teachers and administrators.

Like its predecessor, the third 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; and helps students position themselves as junior scholars in their academic communities. Among the many changes in the third edition: * newer, longer, and more authentic texts and examples * greater discipline variety in texts (added texts from hard sciences and engineering) * more in-depth treatment of research articles * greater emphasis on vocabulary issues * revised flow-of-ideas section * additional tasks that require students to do their own research * more corpus-informed content The Commentary has also been revised and expanded.

Preview this article: Pygmalion or Golem? Teacher Affect and Efficacy, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/46/3/collegecompositioncommunication8733-1.gif

Gary A. Olson presents six in-depth interviews with internationally prominent scholars outside of the discipline and twelve response essays written by noted rhetoric and composition scholars on subjects related to language, rhetoric, writing, philosophy, feminism, and literary criticism. The interviews are with philosopher of language Donald Davidson, literary critic and critical legal studies scholar Stanley Fish, cultural studies and African American studies scholar bell hooks, internationally renowned deconstructionist J. Hillis Miller, feminist literary critic Jane Tompkins, and British logician and philosopher of science Stephen Toulmin. Susan Wells and Reed Way Dasenbrock provide distinctly divergent assessments of the application of Donald Davidson s language theory to rhetoric and composition, and especially to writing pedagogy. Patricia Bizzell and John Trimbur explore how Stanley Fish s neopragmatism might be useful both to composition theory and to literacy education. And Joyce Irene Middleton and Tom Fox discuss bell hooks s notions of how race and gender affect pedagogy. In two frank and sometimes angry responses, Patricia Harkin and Jasper Neel take J. Hillis Miller to task for seeming to support rhetoric and composition while continuing to maintain the political status quo. Similarly, Susan C. Jarratt and Elizabeth A. Flynn express skepticism about Jane Tompkins s vocal support of composition and of radical pedagogy particularly. And Arabella Lyon and C. Jan Swearingen analyze Stephen Toulmin s thoughts on argumentation and postmodernism. Internationally respected anthropologist Clifford Geertz provides a foreword; literacy expert Patricia Bizzell contributes an introduction to the text; and noted reader-response critic David Bleich supplies critical commentary. This book is a follow-up to the editor s (Inter)views: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Rhetoric and Literacy, already a major work of scholarship in the field.

Let me take as a point of departure from this relative certainty Rose's concluding remark that from our students' can learn much of what we want to know about the ways cultural realities such as gender influence literacy practices-if we learn to read those stories (257). Let us grant that we want to know about these cultural realities, the traces of which our student texts bear, against their writers' intentions. Let us also grant the reason for wanting to know about these realities: the world we respond to is the world that our literacy practices represent to us, so that how we symbolize ourselves in the world with others can significantly affect our living in that world. Rose's conclusion still

The teaching of paragraphs needs a revolution. Classroom instruction offers patterns and precepts which cannot be applied to the ordinary process of writing and which, moreover, are unsupported by current resg arch. Researchers English like Braddock, Meade and Ellis, and Knoblauch report findings which directly contradict the textbooks' platitudes:' paragraphs admired professional writing do not necessarily contain topic sentences, they rarely follow prescribed patterns, and they seem essentially accidental, invented as the writer composes. We have found that textbooks do not heed these warnings. Students perceive a strange disjunction between the paragraphs they read and those they are asked to write class. Too often the latter are miniature five-element themes-introductory and concluding sentences, with three intervening sentences connected by therefore and in addition. We believe that paragraphing is best presented to student writers as an important signaling system, based on signals of two sorts, visual and substantive. To readers, the strip of indented white space separating paragraphs indicates both connection and discontinuity. It heightens their attention. To the writer, marking paragraphs offers opportunity for manipulating the reader's focus. Strategically paragraphed prose not only streamlines a message but also molds and shapes it to achieve the writer's purpose. We shall argue for a reader-oriented theory of the paragraph.2 In order to paragraph effectively, a writer needs to know, not the five, ten, fifteen, or twenty most common paragraph patterns that current theories enumerate, but how indentions affect the reader's perception of prose discourse. Knowing how readers perceive prose, the writer can arrange his text to mesh with their perception. Our argument proposes (and, we hope, proves) two main theses: 1. Paragraphs depend for their effectiveness on the exploitation of psycho-

You don t know what it is, wrote Flaubert, to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word. Writer s block is more than a mere matter of discomfort and missed deadlines; sustained experiences of writer s block may influence career choices. Writers in the business world, professional writers, and students all have known this most common and least studied dysfunction of the composition process. Rose, however, sees it as a limitable problem that can be precisely analyzed and remedied through instruction and tutorial programs. Rose defines writer s block as an inability to begin or continue writing for reasons other than a lack of skill or commitment, which is measured by passage of time with limited functional/ productive involvement in the writing task. He applies the information processing models of cognitive psychology to reveal dimensions of the problem never before examined.In his three-faceted approach, Rose develops and administers a questionnaire to identify blockers and nonblockers; through simulated recall, he selects and examines writers experiencing both high and low degrees of blocking; and he proposes a cognitive conceptualization of writer s block and of the composition process.In drawing up his model, Rose delineates many cognitive errors that cause blocking, such as inflexible or conflicting planning strategies. He also discusses the practice and strategies that promote effective composition.

Ruth will labor over the first paragraph of an essay for hours. She'll write a sentence, then erase it. Try another, then scratch part of it out. Finally, as the evening winds on toward ten o'clock and Ruth, anxious about tomorrow's deadline, begins to wind into herself, she'll compose that first paragraph only to sit back and level her favorite exasperated interdiction at herself and her page: No. You can't say that. You'll bore them to death. Ruth is one of ten UCLA undergraduates with whom I discussed writer's block, that frustrating, self-defeating inability to generate the next line, the right phrase, the sentence that will release the flow of words once again. These ten people represented a fair cross-section of the UCLA student community: lower-middle-class to upper-middle-class backgrounds and high schools, third-world and Caucasian origins, biology to fine arts majors, C+ to Agrade point averages, enthusiastic to blase attitudes toward school. They were set off from the community by the twin facts that all ten could write competently, and all were currently enrolled in at least one course that required a significant amount of writing. They were set off among themselves by the fact that five of them wrote with relative to enviable ease while the other five experienced moderate to nearly immobilizing writer's block. This blocking usually resulted in rushed, often late papers and resultant grades that did not truly reflect these students' writing ability. And then, of course, there were other less measurable but probably more serious results: a growing distrust of their abilities and an aversion toward the composing process itself. What separated the five students who blocked from those who didn't? It wasn't skill; that was held fairly constant. The answer could have rested in the emotional realm-anxiety, fear of evaluation, insecurity, etc. Or perhaps blocking in some way resulted from variation in cognitive style. Perhaps, too, blocking originated in and typified a melding of emotion and cognition not unlike the relationship posited by Shapiro between neurotic feeling and

Preview this article: Rigid Rules, Inflexible Plans, and the Stifling of Language: A Cognitivist Analysis of Writer's Block, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/31/4/collegecompositionandcommunication15931-1.gif