College English
31 articlesJuly 2022
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Layering Opportunities for Increased Access: A Case Study of Undergraduate Research and Student Success ↗
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May 2020
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Metaphor 3: Transforming: Coalitional Learning in the Contact Zones: Inclusion and Narrative Inquiry in Technical Communication and Composition Studies ↗
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May 2019
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November 2016
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Stephanie West-Puckett argues for open badging as an alternative born-digital assessment paradigm that can, when attendant to critical validity inquiry, promote full participation and more equitable outcomes for students of color and lower income students. Her case study of digital badging in first-year composition demonstrates how students and teachers can negotiate “good writing,” interrupting bias through the co-creation of digital badges that demystify disciplinary knowledge and serve as portable assessment objects that build social capital across contexts.
September 2016
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This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.
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In this article, I draw from a qualitative case study supported by theoretical framing from John Dewey and Gregory Schraw to explore how and why video composition could be a particularly useful site for the development of meta-awareness about composition within a writing course. Specifically, video opened space for rhetorically layered actions, metacognitive articulations, and interest, which led students to consider, plan for, or recount the transfer of compositional knowledge across media
September 2014
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Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and census and economic data, this article examines the value of the GED for students at a community-based urban literacy center. After exploring assumptions about literacy implicit in the GED writing test, the article assesses the economic and noneconomic impacts of the GED, a test taken by over 700,000 adults in 2012. Because the students at this literacy center differ significantly from the national pool of GED test takers—being all women, older, and largely immigrants—the study provides information about the value of the GED for those who are particularly disadvantaged in seeking this credential.
July 2014
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On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”
March 2014
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Emerging Voices: The “Hands of God” at Work: Negotiating between Western and Religious Sponsorship in Indonesia ↗
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This article draws from ethnographic research to explore the interplay between Western capital (both monetary and cultural), the English language, and Indonesian religious identity at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, an “inter-religious, international Ph.D. program” in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After discussing research methodology and positioning the program’s local-global religious identity within the larger Indonesian geopolitical context—which highlights English’s complicated role as both the language of Western imperialism and the language of global academic connection—this article explores how two Muslim PhD students negotiate this contact zone as they write. These student portraits, in turn, highlight the importance of acknowledging (1) religious identities as resources in our increasingly global US classrooms; (2) that identity negotiation occurs both textually and extratextually as multilingual writers reformulate and circulate information they draw from English publications to foment social change in their local communities; and (3) the contributions that non-Western voices can make in academic conversations long dominated by the West.
January 2014
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Contributing to everyday writing research, this article reports on an interview study of retired women who use writing in the context of the household. Supported by an analysis of participants’ writing artifacts, it describes the social and material gains the women effect via mundane writing forms including menus and grocery lists. Such practices are acquired from the women’s workplaces and families, and an extensive analysis of one case in particular highlights the convergence of literacy practices, ethnic heritage, and material conditions to consider the impact and significance of writing practices handed down through family knowledge, or “rhetorical heirlooms.”
July 2013
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Emerging Voices : “Speak White”: Language Policy, Immigration Discourse, and Tactical Authenticity in a French Enclave in New England ↗
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This article provides a historical case study of the Sentinelle Affair, a conflict between French language rights and the English Only educational policies of the Catholic Church in New England in the 1920s. An analysis of this conflict reveals a correspondence between programs of language centralization and the production of language differences in the United States. The article explores the possibility that such language histories of white ethnic groups might provide grounds for creating what Malea Powell calls “a rhetoric and composition alliance.”
November 2012
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Emerging Voices: Resituating Expertise: An Activity Theory Perspective on Representation in Critical Ethnography ↗
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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.
November 2011
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Joseph V. Denney, the Land-Grant Mission, and Rhetorical Education at Ohio State: An Institutional History ↗
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Traditional narratives about composition and rhetoric in modern American universities need to be complicated through analyses of what has happened to these subjects at particular institutions. For a case study, the author examines Joseph Villiers Denney’s work in establishing and sustaining a department of rhetoric at The Ohio State University.
November 2010
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Judy Garland’s correspondence with magazines and fans in the early 1950s serves as a case study of rhetorical strategies that might operate in celebrity life writing aimed at reparation and self-justification.
September 2010
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Through an ethnographic investigation of how two different groups form biliterate relationships in the quest for legal immigration papers, the author examines how literacy and assimilation function in light of the changing writing demands of contemporary immigrant life.
March 2010
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Writing an Empire: Cross-Talk on Authority, Act, and Relationships with the Other in the Analects, Daodejing, and HanFeizi ↗
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The author calls for scholars of rhetoric and composition to become familiar with the cosmology, language, educational attitudes, speech genres, and intellectual debates of a specific culture other than their own. For a case study, she turns to Chinese history and focuses on exchanges between three models of rhetoric: Confucian, Daoist, and Legalist.
January 2008
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Nineteenth-century American leaders in education came to advocate a redesign of the schoolroom that resulted in its being seen as more the province of female teachers than of male teachers. This discourse of reform serves as a case study of how space itself may be rhetorically “gendered.”
September 2006
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The author examines how chronotopes—a term M. M. Bakhtin used to describe space-time relationships in literature—also characterize rhetorical arguments. She uses a case study of a series of debates about genetically modified foods (GMFs) in Canada to illustrate how chronotopes shape arguments along ideological lines. In particular, she suggests that dominant chronotopes, such as space-time compression or substantial equivalence, are linked with powerful ideologies, such as neoliberal capitalism or scientific positivism, in ways that limit alternative arguments based on sustainability or green politics.
November 2005
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Taking the 1969–74 classroom “dramedy” Room 222 as a case study, and setting it in the context of a range of portrayals of teachers and teaching from the period, the author raises the questions about the positive portrayals of committed teachers. These portrayals, along with positive views of community involvement and a multicultural environment, might have progressive aspects not allowed for by assumptions that such realist commercial productions inevitably co-opt any urge toward radical critique. She argues that such a rethinking might also offer teachers a way to reconsider and communicate with our students about current popular culture.
November 2002
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Argues that the conflicts and contradictions of community outreach (such as service learning) call for an intercultural inquiry that not only seeks more diverse rival readings, but constructs multivoiced negotiated meanings in practice. Presents a case study in which students use the practice of intercultural inquiry to go beyond a contact zone into confronting contradictions, inviting rivals, and constructing and negotiating meaning through the eyes of difference.
January 1999
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Investigates problems faced by minority students. Examines case studies of African-American men who had finished bachelor’s degrees in education or English at a predominantly White university. Reports case study participants’ responses to their school experiences.
March 1998
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his essay explores the convergence we see between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience.Though their aims are usually described differently, both ethnographers and composition teachers confront similar ethical issues of representing the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work.Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power.The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used.Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects.We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends.Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology.For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice.Critical ethnography and pedagogy thus reject the possibility of a politically neutral stance or practice before, during, and after contact between researchers and informants, or teachers and students.
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Explores the convergence between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience. Argues that critical ethnography and pedagogy need to redefine “experience” and its function for research and teaching and that composition can help this redefinition by looking for ways to build and constructively use a tension between teaching and research practices.
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Explores the convergence between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience. Argues that critical ethnography and pedagogy need to redefine “experience” and its function for research and teaching and that composition can help this redefinition by looking for ways to build and constructively use a tension between teaching and research practices.
October 1997
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t was not until I had embarked upon my coming out as a deaf person that I considered my rites of passage, and dwelled on my acts, both deliberate and unconscious, both past and present, of passing. Because my coming out was a mid-life event, I had much to reflect back on and much, too, to illuminate ahead of me. This through an identity crisis, as it were, and the rites of passage then involved in uncovering the paths of my lifelong passing as hearing, took place in a hall of mirrors. (Later I would come to know this place as the art and act of rhetoric.) I first saw myself mirrored in several students I met at Gallaudet University (the world's only liberal arts university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students). I was thirty-two and finishing my PhD, writing a dissertation-that quintessential act of literate passing. What's more, I was finishing it by doing an ethnographic sort of study on deaf student writers at Gallaudet University; thus I was using the guise of an academic grant and a PhD-producing project as a professional foil to make a personal journey to the center of Deaf culture. I was always good at finding a way to pass into places I shouldn't normally be. So, there I was, doing time as a teacher and researcher at Gallaudet, collecting data for my study, taking a sign language class, living with a Deaf woman and faculty member at Gallaudet, going to Deaf gatherings, tutoring some of the students. Mostly, I was trying to pass in ways that were both familiar and unfamiliar to me: to pass (unfamiliarly) as D/deaf-and doing a lousy job of it-and to
January 1996
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I hese two books have very different stories to tell about the state of feminism in the American academy. The story told in Professing Feminism is already notorious beyond the academy; Gender and Academe will almost certainly never circulate so widely. Together, though, these books imply more than either does alone about how centrally academic feminism figures in current struggles over the nature of academic work and the policing of the academy's borders. Professing Feminism, according to its authors, is an inquiry... concentrated on feminism as it is practiced in Women's Studies at colleges and universities (xvii). Daphne Patai, a literary scholar, and Noretta Koertge, a historian of science, insist that their inquiry is an inside critique, aimed at calling academic feminism back from what they diagnose as its current ills to its liberal origins. We are feminists and.. . friends of feminism, they write in their Postscript, feminists arguing from within feminism about the means for achieving the basic goal of the liberation of women from all that impedes their ability to lead full and productive lives (218). Their methods of inquiry draw on the feminist models of ethnography and
March 1991
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December 1988
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Literary theories put forward by Stanley Fish, David Bleich, Walter Michaels, and Jonathan Culler all insist, to varying degrees, that any individual critic's view of a particular literary text is likely to be affected by certain assumptions (schemata) shared by the community of scholars to which the critic belongs. Literary interpretation, so the argument goes, is not a matter of individual perception alone; every interpretation is both a process of individual discovery and a product of shared interpretive strategies. From this reader-response perspective, then, the prior assumptions held by the interpretive community are crucial constituents of the discourse, and often, as in the case of the Canadian interpretive response, such shared assumptions form the paradigm that in time becomes the locus of critical authority. Canadian criticism, in particular that branch which focuses on prairie fiction, offers an intriguing case study of just such an interpretive community at work. Canadian literary criticism has long spoken if not with one voice then at least with a widely-shared critical intent: to further the aims of cultural nationalism by establishing a critical narrative that privileges those aspects of Canadian literature-the lonely prairie landscape, the implacable brooding force of Nature, the sense of human isolation-that are historically associated with the early Canadian pioneer experience and the process of nation-building. Once accepted, the narrative assumes paradigmatic status: it establishes a closed frame of reference marked by remarkable critical consensus. Such a state of critical concord has not gone unnoticed. In his retrospective look at the teaching of Canadian literature, John Harker explains that
January 1984
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December 1981
February 1971
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THE ATTACK ON NEW CRITICISM and traditional historical research in recent years has led many American academics in English and history to re-evaluate their teaching and research, and to reconsider the canon of their respective fields. For many this has led to a widening of the definition of acceptable evidence for study; oral traditions, folk customs, music, film and the mass media are now receiving attention from both historians and literary critics. The study of racial minorities and submerged cultures, such as the working class, women, religious groups and millenial movements, has also opened new perspectives. Nevertheless, much more could be done. Journals still mainly publish textual studies or accounts of parliamentary and administrative quarrels. Annually countless critical analyses of the novels of Faulkner, Conrad or Henry James issue forth from our university presses, and we are already inundated with surveys of consensus-making history. In the meantime, we have left unexplored the lesser known cultures which contribute to Anglo-American societies. These areas of study deserve serious attention both for themselves and for the insights they give into better known writers and movements. Black Studies programs across the country have proven invaluable for ethnic minorities and white students who daily grow more aware of the large areas of American culture left unexamined and unread. The same potential for teaching and study exists in working class studies, women studies, and Euro-American studies, not to mention the domains now considered more appropriate for the folklorist and anthropologist. The following essay is a case study in the analysis of nineteenth century British working class poetry, which it is hoped will provide a guide for research into similar literature in America, the Commonwealth and other English speaking countries.' While such working class institutions as trade unions, the cooperative movement, religious groups and musical organizations have all been studied to a greater or lesser extent, working class literature has been almost completely ignored, except by folklorists usually looking for rural throwbacks rather than industrial characteristics.2