College Composition and Communication

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February 2025

  1. Postcapitalist Professionalization: Civic Education and the Future of Work
    Abstract

    Critiques of neoliberal capitalism have offered a rich vocabulary for the analysis of the political economy of literacy across professional, public, and classroom contexts. Since the Great Recession, commonplaces about work-readiness have been conditioned by economic precarity and changes to the social contract of work that blur the lines between professionalization and exploitation. Looking beyond the confines of the neoliberal present, the uncertain future of work for our undergraduate students will be shaped by what the World Economic Forum describes as the “double-disruption” of the pandemic and the rise of automation. Whereas neoliberal critique offers a vocabulary for describing many job seekers’ experience of the present, this article seeks to recover an element of “literacy hope” (Wan) by looking to speculative and utopian postcapitalist theory to inform and challenge career guidance conversations with students in writing studies. By framing the future as a resource in the rhetorical constitution of present-day workers, this article advances an inquiry-focused career-guidance pedagogy that asks: How do our assumptions about the future of work inform our relationships with employers and each other in the present?

    doi:10.58680/ccc2025763370

December 2024

  1. Our Responsibility to Graduate Student Writers
    Abstract

    This article shares three focal participant profiles from a national study on graduate student writing pedagogy in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies. Working toward a more linguistically just discipline, this research explores how we might teach graduate students disciplinary genre expectations while centering their embodied ways of composing.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2024762285

September 2024

  1. “Nice Work If You Can Get It”: Preparing for the Job Search in Rhetoric and Composition
    Abstract

    This article uses the results of a five-year study of job seekers to argue for improving job search preparation. Graduate students entering the job market want advice that is knowledgeable, realistic, and honest and that goes beyond emphasizing tenure-track research jobs to include a consideration of their needs and interests.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2024761120
  2. Embracing Wobble: Mentoring Graduate Instructors in Big Composition
    Abstract

    We report our qualitative study on two graduate student instructors’ experiences teaching alongside an experienced professor in an experimental super-sized first-year writing class. Using the framework of wobble (Fecho et al), we explore how mentors can help novice teachers navigate moments of destabilization and uncertainty.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202476135

June 2024

  1. Challenging the Myth of the Traditional Grad Student: A Case Study about Academic Enculturation and Resistance
    Abstract

    Drawing from a qualitative study, this article advocates for challenging myths about the traditional graduate student. We discuss how these myths create a sense of unbelonging for graduate students, and we call attention to the exigency for transforming graduate programs to validate and sustain students’ diverse literacies and linguistic resources.

    doi:10.58680/ccc2024754728

September 2022

  1. Misogyny and the Norm of Recognition in Graduate English Programs
    Abstract

    Drawing on interviews with ten female-identifying graduate students, this article theorizes a norm of recognition and argues that recognition, conceptualized as a masculine-coded good, circulates away from female graduate students toward faculty and from faculty back to male graduate students. Female graduate students instead experience misogyny, understood as a punishment for straying from patriarchal gender roles in which they are required to be givers.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232118

June 2022

  1. How and What Students Learn in Hybrid and Online FYC: A Multi-Institutional Survey Study of Student Perceptions
    Abstract

    This multi-institutional study surveyed undergraduate students (n=669) about how and what they learned in hybrid and online first-year composition (FYC) classes, employing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework to analyze their responses. The data illustrated a significant difference in hybrid versus online students’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202232017

June 2020

  1. Monstrous Composition: Reanimating the Lecture in First-Year Writing Instruction
    Abstract

    This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202030728

February 2020

  1. Self-Care as Professionalization: A Case for Ethical Doctoral Education in Composition Studies
    Abstract

    Through surveys and interviews of 433 doctoral faculty and students, we explore professional self-care practices and related issues of academic guilt, imposter syndrome, and burnout. We argue that self-care should be included as a professional practice, taught and modeled, to prepare doctoral students for careers as functional and healthy faculty.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202030503

December 2016

  1. 2016 CCCC Chair’s Address: Making, Disrupting, Innovating
    Abstract

    0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

    doi:10.58680/ccc201628886

June 2016

  1. Expanding the Writing Franchise: Composition Consulting at the Graduate Level
    Abstract

    This article argues that composition should be involved in the study and teaching of graduate level writing. It goes on to argue that independent consulting offers a viable way for compositionists to share expertise with graduate students and programs, as well as to expand opportunities for participation in the profession.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201629616

December 2015

  1. PInterrogating Disciplines/Disciplinarity in WAC/WID: An Institutional Study
    Abstract

    Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201527644

December 2014

  1. 2014 CCCC Chair’s Letter
    Abstract

    Dear Colleagues:I am writing this letter amidst the splendor of a New England fall, a time of year marked by transition from a leafy and robust spring and summer to the inevitable, if brilliant, decline preceding the coming of winter. This fall feels different, however. The loss that fall signifies seems deeper this year, its reach extending back to early summer. I'm referring to the passing of our beloved and inspiring NCTE Executive Director, colleague and friend Kent Williamson. Those who were fortunate to have known and worked with Kent can attest to his singular qualities. A visionary with a clear grasp of the here-and-now, Kent, like no other leader that I've known, saw the Big Picture-he was the best strategic thinker that I've seen-while recognizing the importance of paying attention to the details. He also had the gift of leading while making it seem as if WE were initiating. In other words, Kent was a first-rate listener and believed with his heart and soul that no group can thrive without the full engagement and collaboration of its members. In his memory and with his spirit, the CCCC Officers and NCTE staff will attempt to carry on Kent's work to the best of our abilities. I know that he would expect no less. Now onto my report. . . .FinancesThis organization continued to make investment gains ($216,922) even as it went $120,411 over budget on operations. We ran a genuine loss last year, as spending exceeded income from operations. In FY15 there were a few areas that led to the loss. Membership dues, as an example, are declining. Feedback on the work of the organization was positive, but many could get all they need from CCCC without being members. In the end, we were $13,938 below projections on membership dues.Ultimately, we need to focus more on strategic items based on our vision. We have $2.29 million in the contingency fund, but spending it wisely requires careful planning and making choices.Activities for FY16:* In addition to extending our substantial investment in access and equity ($32,829 for the PEP program to provide registration/support to contingent and adjunct faculty who need help to attend the CCCC Convention), we earmarked up to $3,000 of spending to match funds raised from the membership to provide a CCCC Contingent Faculty Travel Assistance Fund for convention attendance, and $3,000 to support the Chair's Scholarship Fund.* Now that the 5% amount from our contingency reserve is over $120,000, the FY16 budget splits that amount between research grants selected through an open application project (at least $100,000), and the cost of developing a database of graduate and undergraduate writing programs. This makes our investment in member research larger than it has been any year except for FY15, while also providing funds to build a renewable resource of benefit to students, faculty, and program administrators alike.* We included videotaping of member interviews and advocacy training across the convention.* We again provided $8,000 in funding to support a CCCC Policy Fellow position. This person has been working with our DC office to help coordinate follow-through actions in support of reports filed by our new state-based network of higher education policy analysts, and has provided research summaries and expert testimony/insights drawn from professional practice on public policy issues of concern to our organization. The funding provides a small honorarium ($3,000) and travel fund ($5,000) to help support these activities. The CCCC Policy Fellow is selected by the CCCC Chair and Secretary-Treasurer.* Under publications, we extended a third year of funding to support a CCCC Social Media Coordinator. This person works with staff as an independent contractor to both produce online events/discussions of interest to CCCC members (on the Connected Community and across other online social media platforms as well), and to more readily connect members to each other in social media contexts. …

    doi:10.58680/ccc201426228

September 2014

  1. Mapping the Methods of Composition/Rhetoric Dissertations: A “Landscape Plotted and Pieced”
    Abstract

    What methods do graduate students take up for their dissertation projects? This article shares findings from distant reading of 2,711 abstracts, suggesting that humanist approaches predominate within the Consortium of Doctoral Programs in Rhetoric and Composition, but not without some methodological pluralism. A large number of studies outside the consortium are also considered.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201426114

June 2014

  1. Review Essay: Considering What It Means to Teach “Composition” in the Twenty-First Century
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, eds. Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities Jay Jordan First Semester: Graduate Students, Teaching Writing, and the Challenge of Middle Ground Jessica Restaino

    doi:10.58680/ccc201425451

September 2013

  1. Review Essay: Managing the Subject of Composition Studies
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Postcomposition Sidney I. Dobrin The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies Donna Strickland What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors

    doi:10.58680/ccc201324231

December 2012

  1. Review Essay: Writing Inside and Outside the Margins
    Abstract

    Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

    doi:10.58680/ccc201222120

February 2012

  1. At a Mirror, Darkly: The Imagined Undergraduate Writers of Ten Novice Composition Instructors
    Abstract

    While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201218445

December 2010

  1. Advancing by Degree: Placing the MA in Writing Studies
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc201013209

February 2010

  1. The Undergraduate Writing Major: What Is It? What Should It Be?
    Abstract

    Using the data collected by the CCCC Committee on the Major, the authors demonstrate how quickly the writing major is growing, map the commonalities among various majors, discuss some of the problems in developing a major, and raise questions about what a writing major should be.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20109954

February 2009

  1. Review Essay: Rhetorics of Critical Writing: Implications for Graduate Writing Instruction
    Abstract

    Writing the Successful Thesis and Dissertation: Entering the Conversation by Irene L. Clark; Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts by Joseph Harris; The Work of Writing: Insights and Strategies for Academics and Professionals by Elizabeth Rankin

    doi:10.58680/ccc20096976

December 2008

  1. Review Essay: Common Sense and Theory in the Teaching of Composition Teachers
    Abstract

    Reviewed: Changing the Way We Teach: Writing and Resistance in the Training of Teaching Assistants Sally Barr Ebest Don’t Call It That: The Composition Practicum Sidney I. Dobrin, editor Concepts in Composition: Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing Irene Clark, with Betty Bamberg, Darsie Bowden, John R. Edlund, Lisa Gerrard, Sharon Klein, Julie Neff Lippman, and James D. Williams

    doi:10.58680/ccc20086875

September 2008

  1. Language, Literacy, and the Institutional Dynamics of Racism: Late-1960s Writing Instruction for “High-Risk” African American Undergraduate Students at One Predominantly White University
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20086751

June 2008

  1. Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition
    Abstract

    This article places responses received from an open-ended survey of graduate students and faculty in dialogue with published commentary on the scope of composition studies as a discipline to explore three interrelated disciplinary dilemmas: the “pedagogical imperative,” the “theory-practice split,” and the increasingly complicated relationship between “rhetoric” and “composition” as our field’s titular terms.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20086676

September 2007

  1. Teaching and Parenting: Who Are the Members of Our Profession?
    Abstract

    This qualitative investigation explores the perceptions of four women compositionists regarding mothers, teaching, and scholarship in the field of composition. I examine narrative case studies about four women who have PhDs in composition from the same doctoral program.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20076382

June 2005

  1. Ideology, Textbooks, and the Rhetoric of Production in China
    Abstract

    Xiaoye You is a Ph.D. student in the English as a Second Language (ESL) programat Purdue University. He isinterested in comparative rhetoric and issues of Englishwriting instruction in international contexts. Currently he is working on his dissertation, exploring the intersections of Anglo-American and Chinese rhetorical traditions in the historical evolution of English writing instruction in Chinese colleges.

    doi:10.58680/ccc20054825

December 2004

  1. Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University
    Abstract

    Tenured Bosses and Disposable Teachers: Writing Instruction in the Managed University exposes the poor working conditions of contingent composition faculty and explores practical alternatives to the unfair labor practices that are all too common on campuses today. Editors Marc Bousquet, Tony Scott, and Leo Parascondola bring together diverse perspectives from pragmatism to historical materialism to provide a perceptive and engaging examination of the nature, extent, and economics of the managed labor problem in composition instructiona field in which as much as ninety-three percent of all classes are taught by graduate students, adjuncts, and other disposable teachers. These instructors enjoy few benefits, meager wages, little or no participation in departmental governance, and none of the rewards and protections that encourage innovation and research. And it is from this disenfranchised position that literacy workers are expected to provide some of the core instruction in nearly everyone's higher education experience. Twenty-six contributors explore a range of real-world solutions to managerial domination of the composition workplace, from traditional academic unionism to ensemble movement activism and the pragmatic rhetoric, accommodations, and resistances practiced by teachers in their daily lives.Contributors are Leann Bertoncini, Marc Bousquet, Christopher Carter, Christopher Ferry, David Downing, Amanda Godley, Robin Truth Goodman, Bill Hendricks, Walter Jacobsohn, Ruth Kiefson, Paul Lauter, Donald Lazere, Eric Marshall, Randy Martin, Richard Ohmann, Leo Parascondola, Steve Parks, Gary Rhoades, Eileen Schell, Tony Scott, William Thelin, Jennifer Seibel Trainor, Donna Strickland, William Vaughn, Ray Watkins, and Katherine Wills.

    doi:10.2307/4140657

September 2004

  1. Introducing English: Essays in the Intellectual Work of Composition
    Abstract

    Over the past thirty years, has flowered as a discipline in the academy. Doctoral programs in abound, and its position in the pantheon of academic fields seems assured. There is plenty of work in composition. But what is the nature of that work now, and what should it be? James Slevin asks such probing, primary questions in Introducing English, an overdue assessment of the state of by one of its most respected practitioners. Too often, Slevin claims, representations of take the form of promoting the field and its specialists, rather than explaining the fundamental work of and its important consequences. In thirteen thematically and methodologically linked essays, Slevin argues toward a view of the discipline as a set of activities, not as an enclosed field of knowledge. Such a view broadens the meaning of the work of to include teaching and learning, a two-way process, creating alliances across conventional educational boundaries, even beyond educational institutions. Slevin traces how emerged for him not as a vehicle for improving student writing, but rather as a way of working collaboratively with students to interpret educational practices and work for educational reform. He demonstrates the kind of classroom practice - in reading accounts of the Anglicization of Pocahontas - that reveals the social and cultural consequences of language and language education. For good or ill, writes Slevin, composition has always been at the center of the reproduction of social inequality, or of the resistance to that process. He asks those in the discipline to consider such history in the reading and writing they ask students to do and the reasons they give for asking them to do it. A much-anthologized essay by E. B. White from The New Yorker is the site for an examination of genre as social institution, introducing the ways in which the discourses of the academy can be understood as both obstacle and opportunity. Ultimately, Introducing English is concerned with the importance of writing and the teaching of writing to the core values of higher education. Composition is always a metonym for something else Slevin concludes. Usually, it has figured the impossibility of the student body - their lacks that require supplement, their ill-health that requires remedy. Introducing English introduces a new figure - a two-way process of inquiry - that better serves the intellectual culture of the university. Chapters on writing across the curriculum, university management, and faculty assessment (the tenure system) put this new model to practical, innovative use. Introducing English will be necessary reading for all those who work with composition, as well as those engaged in learning theory, critical theory, and education reform.

    doi:10.2307/4140687

December 2003

  1. Emancipatory Movements in Composition: The Rhetoric of Possibility
    Abstract

    The project Andrea Greenbaum attempts in EmancipatoryMovements in Composition is both worthwhile and ambitious. The project is worthwhile because introducing newcomers, particularly graduate students, to the multiple disciplines that have been incorporated into critical pedagogy in the last decade can be daunting, and there is certainly room in the field for text that names and organizes them. The project is ambitious because it attempts to do this in mere one hundred pages, with additional pages devoted to an appended syllabus, notes, and citations. Greenbaum opens her book with personal narrative of the Passover story, drawing from it the lesson that human beings need to experience oppression-even if it is relived only mythically-in order to understand our social responsibility to counter and resist those forces that seek to dominate, repress, and disempower individuals (xi), setting the polemical tone she maintains through the rest of the work. She organizes the book around what she identifies as four key approaches to critical pedagogy for the writing classroom: neosophistic rhetoric, cultural studies, feminist studies, and postcolonial studies, examining each for what they offer writing teachers seeking to enact critical pedagogy in their classrooms. Her first two chapters offer brief historical development of sophistic and cultural studies approaches. Greenbaum begins with the reclamation of sophistic rhetoric, drawing particularly on Susan Jarratt, Thomas Kent, John Poulakos, Sharon Crowley, and handful of others. She proposes that this neosophistic contributes to rhetoric of possibility by drawing attention to the indeterminacy of language, an empowering shift from logos privileged in Western philosophy to mythos that invites disruptive stoof the frontier is reconstrued as collabo ative zone of cultur l and linguistic contact, a historical moment of meeting, clashing, and cooperating ulticultura encounters (66).

    doi:10.2307/3594226

February 2003

  1. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies
    Abstract

    Reflecting the rich complexity of contemporary college composition pedagogy, this unique collection presents twelve original essays on several of the most important approaches to the teaching of writing. Each essay is written by an experienced teacher/scholar and describes one of the major pedagogies employed today: process, expressive, rhetorical, collaborative, feminist, critical, cultural studies, community service, and basic writing. Writing centers, writing across the curriculum, and technology and the teaching of writing are also discussed. The essays are composed of personal statements on pedagogical applications and bibliographical guides that aid students and new teachers in further study and research. Contributors include Christopher Burnham, William A. Covino, Ann George, Diana George, Eric H. Hobson, Rebecca Moore Howard, Susan C. Jarratt, Laura Julier, Susan McLeod, Charles Moran, Deborah Mutnick, Lad Tobin, and John Trimbur. An invaluable tool for graduate students and new teachers, A Guide to Composition Pedagogies provides an exceptional introduction to composition studies and the extensive range of pedagogical approaches used today.

    doi:10.2307/3594179
  2. Changing the Process of Institutional Review Board Compliance
    Abstract

    The CCCC Guidelinesfor the Ethical Treatment of Students and Student Writing in Composition Studies written by Paul Anderson, Davida Charney, Marilyn Cooper, Cristina Kirklighter, Peter Mortensen, and Mark Reynolds provides a common frame to help composition specialists as we navigate and discuss the various ethical dilemmas we face while conducting research. As a graduate student involved in my own qualitative research, I find the Guidelines beneficial, and I am committed to following them, including the first guideline that calls for composition researchers to comply with all Institutional Review Board (IRB) policies.1 However, in the past two years I have submitted proposals for the same study to eleven IRBs at colleges and universities across the country. While I strongly support the need for obtaining IRB approval, I believe as a discipline and as individuals we need to work to revise the IRB process. As it is now practiced at many institutions, the IRB process positions composition researchers and composition research in potentially problematic ways. In fall 2000 when I began my research into the Intercollegiate E-Democracy Project, a national online project where students across the country discuss various social and political issues, I knew I had to mail consent forms to

    doi:10.2307/3594176

December 2002

  1. Interchanges: Navigating in Unknown Waters: Proposing, Collecting Data, and Writing a Qualitative Dissertation
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Interchanges: Navigating in Unknown Waters: Proposing, Collecting Data, and Writing a Qualitative Dissertation, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/54/2/collegecompositionandcommunication1487-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc20021487
  2. Navigating in Unknown Waters: Proposing, Collecting Data, and Writing a Qualitative Dissertation
    Abstract

    Carole Bencich, Elizabeth Graber, Jenny Staben, Katherine Sohn, Navigating in Unknown Waters: Proposing, Collecting Data, and Writing a Qualitative Dissertation, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 54, No. 2 (Dec., 2002), pp. 289-306

    doi:10.2307/1512150
  3. Writing/Teaching: Essays toward a Rhetoric of Pedagogy
    Abstract

    2001 CCCC Outstanding Book AwardThe vast majority of academic books are written from the scholar s position, even those that primarily concern teaching. Writing/Teaching, on the other hand, is a book about teaching written from the position of the teacher. As the title suggests, Kameen s book is split into two halves yet both, in different ways and through different discourses, are derived from his work in the classroom, and his own struggle with issues and problems all teachers of writing must face.The first half is a series of essays originating from a graduate seminar Kameen team-taught with professor and poet Toi Derricotte in 1994. Included are essays Kameen wrote, a selection of pieces written by other members of the group, and a reflective postscript. These essays combine personal narrative, reflective meditation, and critical inquiry all used as discourse to depict and examine the process of teaching.The second half of the book contains essays on Plato s dialogues primarily Phaedrus and Protagoras as a means to interrogate the position of teacher through the lens of the most famous of Western pedagogues Socrates. Here, Socrates is used as a tool to examine and critique both Kameen s own teacherly identity and, in a wider sense, the set of cultural forces that pre-figure the available positions for both teacher and student in contemporary education.What unites both halves is the way Kameen approaches each the personal and the scholarly from his position as teacher. The texts presented provide the occasion for a complex and nuanced meditation on the classroom as a legitimate arena for the production of knowledge and research. Sure to be timely and controversial, Writing/Teaching will enter into the debate on whether to reconfigure the relationship between research and teaching currently taking place among teachers of composition, cultural studies, and rhetoric. Compelling reading for teachers or those contemplating a career in the profession.

    doi:10.2307/1512151

September 2001

  1. Off the Radar Screen: Gender, Adjuncting, and Teaching Institutions
    Abstract

    we read Michael Murphy's article, Faculty for a New University, we were surprised and troubled by the story about adjuncts that Murphy purports to tell. Murphy's argument, that a substructure in rhetoric and composition exists but remains invisible and that to recognize such a substructure would cost universities little, is based on a notion of universities that has not existed in most places for a very long time, if ever. Murphy's idea of a teaching track that supports full-time faculty research is based on a conception of a university at a handful of research institutions. Schools that train graduate students, produce the bulk of scholarship in the field of rhetoric and composition, and grant PhDs are about 7 percent of the total number of universities in this country (Phelan 76). To make an argument about adjunct work and adjunct labor without considering the other 93 percent of us seems to us to be thoughtless, at best, and unethical, at worst. The other aspect of adjuncting that Murphy leaves out is, of course, gender. As Theresa Enos writes, When a field has been feminized and when a disproportionate number of its workers are female, that field is devalued and is subject to both disciplinary and gender bias (43). As the latest report on Women in the Profession indicates, women are still more likely than white men ... to obtain jobs in lower-paying institutions .., and they tend to linger

    doi:10.2307/359067

February 2001

  1. Challenging Tradition: A Conversation about Reimagining the Dissertation in Rhetoric and Composition
    Abstract

    The Dissertation Consortium, Challenging Tradition: A Conversation about Reimagining the Dissertation in Rhetoric and Composition, College Composition and Communication, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Feb., 2001), pp. 441-454

    doi:10.2307/358627
  2. Challenging Tradition: A Conversation about Reimagining the Dissertation in Rhetoric and Composition
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Challenging Tradition: A Conversation about Reimagining the Dissertation in Rhetoric and Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/52/3/collegecompositioncommunication1428-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc20011428

September 1999

  1. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words
    Abstract

    Composition (at its best) and feminism work against the grain of conventional institutional practices. Both challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning. Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices. Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.

    doi:10.2307/358973

June 1999

  1. "Tales of Neglect and Sadism": Disciplinarity and the Figuring of the Graduate Student in Composition
    Abstract

    The efficiency of power, its constraining force have [sic], in a sense, passed over to the other side-to the side of its surface of application. He who is subjected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

    doi:10.2307/358483
  2. “Tales of Neglect and Sadism”: Disciplinarity and the Figuring of the Graduate Student in Composition
    Abstract

    Preview this article: "Tales of Neglect and Sadism": Disciplinarity and the Figuring of the Graduate Student in Composition, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/50/4/collegecompositioncommunication1350-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc19991350

December 1997

  1. Getting Restless: Rethinking Revision in Writing Instruction
    Abstract

    [This book] is a must for those committed to voicing the personal conflicts writers experience and to turning those confusing and sometimes dismaying moments into productive sites for questioning textual relations. - Journal of Advanced CompositionIn Getting Restless, Nancy Welch calls for a reconception of what we mean by revision, urging compositionists to rethink long-held beliefs about teacher-student relations and writing practices. Drawing primarily on feminist and psychoanalytic theories, she considers how revision can be redefined not as a process of increasing orientations toward a particular thesis or discourse community, but instead as a process of disorientation: an act of getting restless with received meanings, familiar relationships, and disciplinary or generic boundaries--a practice of intervening in the meanings and identifications of one's text and one's life. Using ethnographic, case-study, and autobiographical research methods, Welch maintains two consistent aims throughout the study: to show how composition teachers can create for themselves and for their students environments that encourage and support revision as restlessness and as a process of intervening in a first draft's thoroughly social meanings and identifications to demonstrate how composition's process legacy is revitalized when we understand that our means to form and change communities- to form and change constructions of authority--are located in revision. In achieving these ends Welch examines three academic sites: a campus writing center, undergraduate writing classrooms, and a summer workshop for K-12 teachers. This book will appeal to a wide audience, including classroom and writing center teachers, historians and theorists in composition and rhetoric, feminist theorists, and those engaged in literacy studies, teacher education, and connections/tensions among teaching, writing, and psychoanalysis.

    doi:10.2307/358474

October 1997

  1. Present Perfect and Future Imperfect: Results of a National Survey of Graduate Students in Rhetoric and Composition Programs
    Abstract

    Preview this article: Present Perfect and Future Imperfect: Results of a National Survey of Graduate Students in Rhetoric and Composition Programs, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/48/3/collegecompositionandcommunication3156-1.gif

    doi:10.58680/ccc19973156

December 1996

  1. Resituating Writing: Constructing and Administering Writing Programs
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.2307/358612

October 1996

  1. Genre Knowledge in Disciplinary Communication: Cognition/Culture/Power
    Abstract

    Contents: Preface. Rethinking Genre from a Sociocognitive Perspective. News Value in Scientific Journal Articles. You Are What You Cite: Novelty and Intertextuality in a Biologist's Experimental Article. Sites of Contention, Sites of Negotiation: Textual Dynamics of Peer Review in the Construction of Scientific Knowledge. Evolution of a Scholarly Forum: Reader, 1977-1988. Gatekeeping at an Academic Convention. Conventions, Conversations, and the Writer: An Apprenticeship Tale of a Doctoral Student, with John M. Ackerman. J.M. AckermanPostscript: The Assimilation and Tactics of Nate. Suffer the Little Children: Learning the Curriculum Genres of School and University. Appendices.

    doi:10.2307/358302
  2. Academic Writing for Graduate Students: Essential Tasks and Skills
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.2307/358319

May 1996

  1. Romancing Rhetorics: Social Expressivist Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing
    Abstract

    shows how expressivism is historically related to romanticism and interprets this connection in a positive light. It historicizes and then theorizes some of the primary texts in the romantic/expressivist tradition of language study and production. The book connects William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Matthew Arnold, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey, among others, with contemporary compositionists such as Donald Murray, Ann Berthoff, James Britton, and Peter Elbow. Using the history of romanticism, the author shows how expressivism relates to social construction and argues that reclaiming a romantic heritage enriches contemporary composition theories. By historicizing the expressivist tradition and connecting the texts of both the romantic poets and Mill, Arnold, and Dewey with education in their times and ours, demands a reconsideration of the expressivist composition theories that have been berated and misunderstood for the past few years. This book is the first to re-examine our understanding of what it means to be romantic, while connecting that new understanding to both education in general and writing instruction in particular. It does not ignore or simplify the current arguments condemning expressivism, but devotes considerable thought to the summary of and response to critics of expressivism. is an important book for scholars, theorists, practitioners of composition, and graduate students. Those devoted to the academic discourse, social constructivism/social-epistemic approach to teaching and scholarship will find Romancing Rhetorics inspiring reading.

    doi:10.2307/358806

October 1995

  1. The Craft of Revision
    Abstract

    This accessible and versatile text has been used in college English, creative writing, and composition courses, as well as middle and high school classrooms, college remedial and honors programs, graduate seminars, and teacher training courses. Chapters move through the writing process as students find a focus, choose a genre, develop a draft, and find a voice. Murray is professor emeritus of English at the University of New Hampshire. Annotation (c)2003 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

    doi:10.2307/358731

May 1995

  1. Resisting Writings (And the Boundaries of Composition)
    Abstract

    A pragmatic work that begins with analyses of experimental expository prose, avant-garde feminist poetics, African American discourse, hypertext, and other innovative discourse influences, and goes on to present a series of proposals intended for teachers, theorists, graduate students, and administr

    doi:10.2307/358445

May 1993

  1. Beyond Outlining: New Approaches to Rhetorical Form
    Abstract

    This book is a unique, long-needed comprehensive study of whole-discourse form going beyond traditional prescriptions. Ancient and contemporary innovations are combined with a new theory and practical application. The author rescues the organization of persuasive/explanatory prose from long neglect and unimaginative traditional formulas. She demonstrates a new theory of form fluency in analyses of student texts and applies it in new 'form heuristics' that go beyond outlining. The main audience for this book will be professors and graduate students in the growing discipline of rhetoric/composition, or any teacher or writer interested in new ideas about organizing discourse.

    doi:10.2307/358848

October 1992

  1. The Value of Written Peer Criticism
    Abstract

    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)

    doi:10.2307/358229