In this essay, I develop a pedagogical stance called the “free exercise of rhetoric” as a way to approach teaching and student writing at the intersection of LGBT and religious discourses. Through this stance, I work with students’ personal commitments and build their rhetorical competence using a process that involves encountering uncommon arguments, valuing misreading, and embracing unpredictability. I suggest the free exercise of rhetoric as a pedagogical option for taking religion seriously as a topic and identity in writing classrooms, but one that does not start from students’ personal experience with religion.

Community colleges have been engaged for the last sixty years in providing open access to public higher education to anyone with a high school diploma. Recently, disappointing success rates for developmental students have driven some colleges to reduce or restrict access to college based on standardized test scores. The operative phrase in most of these discussions is “ability to benefit.” This essay examines the complex variety of issues related to ability to benefit. Using a robust archive of data from our institution to explore this question, we argue that standardized placement scores tell only one kind of story about our most underprepared students. Course pass rates and percentages of students who reach critical milestones provide only one rather limited way to assess this complex issue. Our data tell us other stories that may be more important.

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how “Austin” casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience’s pluralistic perspective. Austin’s writing thus provides a discursive window into how writing academically for an FYW course might nudge students from dualism toward pluralism. It thus prompts compositionists not only to interrogate how writing academically may implicate students’ most deeply held beliefs, but also to make such identity consequences explicit to students.

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This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.

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A question that captured our attention many years ago and continues to motivate our work, although the audience for that work has expanded and contracted over the years, is “What about reading?” In this essay we adopt a term used to frame discussion at the 2010 CCCC “remix”to revisit in three ways the role of reading in composition studies: in terms of accepted constructions of disciplinary history (and the status of reader-response theory within that history), students (the erasure of “students” as a category of analysis), and the CCCC Convention program (the disappearance and reappearance of reading as a category of professional inquiry).

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.

Although emotions are an important facet of teaching and learning in all classes, emotional literacy plays an especially significant role in classes that engage critically with difference. My article redefines and theorizes critical emotional literacy, proposing that we understand it as a social practice that must be developed not only by means of analytical strategies, but also by means of contemplative pedagogy. Addressing the nature of attention and the embodied experience of emotion is crucial if we are to cultivate the emotional literacy necessary for ongoing critical engagement with difference.

Books reviewed: The Activist WPA: Changing Stories about Writing and Writers by Linda Adler-Kassner The Managerial Unconscious in the History of Composition Studies by Donna Strickland GenAdmin: Theorizing WPA Identities in the Twenty-First Century by Colin Charlton, JonikkaCharlton, Tarez Samra Graban, Kathleen J. Ryan, and Amy Ferdinandt Stolley

In 1837, Margaret Prior became the first female missionary for the American Female Moral Reform Society. She traveled throughout the poorest neighborhoods in New York City’ entering barrooms, brothels, and sickrooms. Based on an analysis of Prior’s missionary reports, published in the society’s periodical and included in her memoir, this essay shows how Prior exerted an ethos of presence. Her willingness to traverse the seediest sections of the city, call on any person, and address any need exerted a powerful ethos in the communities she served and among the audiences who read and heard about her efforts.

New College English editor Kelly Ritter introduces the first issue of her editorship.

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become “common sense” in higher education, this article shows that the concept of outcomes tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and contests the technical rationality of the managerial university. Though I challenge outcomes assessment, I recognize that OA is the coin of the educational realm. Therefore, this article outlines ways to frame and use educational aims to minimize the negative tendencies of outcomes assessment and to maximize the positive tendencies of “consequential assessment.”

We set out to investigate Miller’s curious assertion “curious for a deconstructionist committed to a critique of the old metaphysics of presence” that literary works preexist their being written down. We find a basis for this sense of the preexistence of the literary work in Miller’s insights about the performative dynamics of reading and writing. We thus examine Miller’s intuition about the preexistence of the literary text in terms of language as a shifting structure that interpenetrates and always exceeds the writer’s and the readers’ minds, of the meta-awareness implicit in the dependence of the mimetic on self-referentiality, and of the relationship between the literary realm of the virtual and Derrida’s idea of the future anterior. As Miller’s insights into the performative act of reading disclose, the literary work exists among all of its possibilities of negotiation, interpretation, conjuration, and understanding. The intuition of the literary work’s preexistence thus relates to a sense of actuality as always a matter of interpretation and negotiation, rather than as simply a collection of facts.

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In the current economic climate, many corporate and political leaders seek to reform public education through entrepreneurial efforts that reflect a managerial approach. Similarly, several academic scholars are busily marketing their research. To counter these trends and improve our own standing, those of us in the humanities must explicitly rededicate ourselves to promoting collective flourishing.

This symposium centers on the recently released Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project. In addition to the document itself, the symposium features an introduction to it by some of its drafters, as well as responses to it by veteran composition specialists.

The editor of College English interviews the noted Nepali American fiction writer Samrat Upadhyay, specifically analyzing with him issues of translation that he has faced in his own work and that he has found in the prose of other Asian and Asian American authors who, like him, primarily address an Anglo-American audience.

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Recently, several composition scholars have engaged in apocalyptic rhetoric, although they distance themselves from versions of it that advocate critical pedagogy. Bruno Latour’s theories help expose such pedagogy’s limitations while also offering a perspective on teacher-student relationships that can more realistically and sensitively work toward allaying potential disaster.

Rather than function simply as a metonymic, part-to-whole relation, objects on exhibit in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) also function as synecdoches, establishing a part-to-part relation that ultimately defers their connection to the historical past. Potentially, this latter relation undermines the historical authenticity that museum-goers seem to seek, and which the USHMM designers wished to inculcate.

The author argues that within the classroom, an affective response to Holocaust literature can be blended with an analytical approach. She demonstrates how this dual perspective is possible by examining a fragmentary song found on a child who was murdered at Majdanek.

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults’ literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection.

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By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

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Forced displacement has often involved the use of rhetoric, both by government institutions and by people who struggle not only to survive displacement, but also to resist it. The author analyzes such discourses through three case studies: Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke, Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What, and a documentaryshe helped produce on families displaced by eminent domain when the Shenandoah National Park was created.

Reviewed are Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community by John M. Duffy, and Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe by Vicki Tolar Burton.

The author, a college English professor, explains how his military service in Afghanistan left him having to reconsider his identity as a scholarly writer.

Recent theoretical and technological developments, including concepts of networking elaborated by Bruno Latour, enable composition studies to take an empiricist turn toward issues of identity. More specifically, these developments help the field more strongly connect the figure of the writing-subject to the experiences of actual writers.

Reviewed are Out of Style: Reanimating Stylistic Study in Composition and Rhetoric by Paul Butler, and Performing Prose: The Study and Practice of Style in Composition by Chris Holcomb and M. Jimmie Killingsworth.

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.

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The contemporary university’s reliance on coursepacks, whether they take print or digital form, is illuminated by Bruno Latour’s theories and by consideration of a nineteenth-century copyright case involving noted textbook author William McGuffey. In particular, these contexts remind us that coursepacks are situated within shifting constellations of material things.

In honor of NCTE’s centennial, we present excerpts from the College Edition of the English Journal, which ran from 1928 to 1938 and served as a precursor to College English.

Reviewed is X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Richard Lyons.