Literacy in Composition Studies
134 articlesMarch 2019
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Child Prodigies Exploring the World: How Homeschooled Students Narrate their Literacy in the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives ↗
Abstract
Approximately 1.8 million students in the United States are homeschooled, according to 2012 data from the National Center for Education Statistics (Redford et al.). However, researchers have only begun to examine how these homeschooled students reflect on their own literacy development, especially once they have entered college. Using the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN), I gather and analyze eighteen literacy narratives of currently and formerly homeschooled students, exploring how these students reflect on their own developing literacies, especially as they contrast their experiences with those of their traditionally-schooled classmates. The results of this study reveal, first, that these homeschoolers participate in a wide variety of literacy practices that both respond to and redefine those of the “traditional” classroom. Second, many of the narratives tend to embrace the “child prodigy” literacy structure, as identified and defined by Kara Alexander (2011) and Stephanie Paterson (2001). Third, four narratives reveal problems that can occur in homeschooling: namely, a parent-educator’s perceived lack of authority, and, in two cases, a tendency to trap students in unhealthy family environments. Despite these exceptions, most narratives reveal their family network as a place of vibrant literary sponsorship; and a few students narrate the “pedagogic violence” that may occur when they transition from this warm family environment into traditional secondary schools (Worsham 121). Overall, I argue that as participants in a non-dominant mode of education, these homeschoolers feel the need either to justify or to repudiate their literacy acquisition process against the dominant group. More quantitative research is needed to understand whether these experiences represent trends across the homeschooling movement.
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Making Citizens Behind Bars (and the Stories We Tell About It): Queering Approaches to Prison Literacy Programs ↗
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Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the many connections between literacy education and citizenship production (e.g. Guerra, Wan). Despite often being neglected in conversations about literacy education and citizenship training, prison education programs and incarcerated students have a unique relationship to citizenship and can make an important contribution to that scholarship. By putting literacy studies in conversation with queer studies and critical prison studies, I argue that we as literacy educators and teachers can train ourselves to notice and push back against the harmful ideologies underlying the discourse around prison literacy education programs and citizenship education. This attention to language is essential because it has a material effect on the incarcerated students we teach, as well as the futures we imagine for our classes, programs, and the wider landscape of prison education.
November 2018
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Abstract
This essay looks into the interactions between an older African American couple as they negotiate literacy together. By considering the entwined writing trajectories of longtime life partners, the author highlights ways that “Chief” and “Shirley” demonstrate their ongoing desire for literacy in this moment of their lives; how the reading and writing practices of the more literate partner impact the less literate partner, and vice versa; and, what that engagement can tell composition researchers about writing development across the lifespan, particularly for an older couple in which one partner has become more literate later in life. Writing, like many life practices that Chief and Shirley share, indicates personal and practical commitment. Their example can help literacy researchers in Age Studies and Lifespan Development of Writing Studies understand the unconventional paths that writing development can take, not just for an individual but for a couple, and to see the value in viewing writing development as always emergent.
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More Than Preaching to the Choir: Religious Literate Activity and Civic Engagement in Older Adults ↗
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Civic engagement has long been a topic that has drawn the attention of scholars in literacy and composition studies more broadly, and it is also a particular interest of both religious literacies and Age Studies. This article has an eye toward bringing these two conversations together—civic engagement in religious settings and civic engagement as practiced by older people—-through the lens of literate activity as practiced by progressive Christian churchgoers. Drawn from ethnographic fieldwork with a church book group, I argue that the members of the Pub Theology book group push back against the isolation and individualism of decline ideology and cookie-cutter notions of volunteerism promoted by productive aging, instead creating a robust model of civic engagement for older adults that is rooted in literate activity. Instead of being obsolete and useless, their familiar literate practices are crucial to connecting what they learned from their chosen texts, The New Jim Crow and Just Mercy, to their more expansive experiences of civic engagement as older members of their community.
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and by representations of the self. In sharing the work included in this special issue, Suzy and I hope to exemplify the importance of including later life in the literacy and composition research agenda, and urge literacy and composition scholars to consider how literate activity shapes, and is shaped by, ideologies of aging.
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Faith, Squirrels, and Artwork: The Expansive Agency of Textual Coordination in the Literate Action of Older Writers ↗
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Agency is a central concern of gerontology, age studies, and life course research, but the role of literate action in supporting and perpetuating agency in older adult writers is not well understood. A conceptual framework for the relationship between agency and literate action would provide important insight into contemporary writing research on older writers. In this study, I trace the literate practices of one writer, Frank, in order to understand how he used literate action to both negotiate his lifeworlds and support his own agency in his life after his retirement from an engineering career. Drawing on posthumanist understandings of agency, I use a combination of sociohistoric (Erickson and Roozen) and sociological (Brandt) methodologies to trace Frank’s literacy history, the chronotopes for writing that he enacts, and the agency that he develops and supports through that chronotopic work. I focus in particular on the acts of textual coordination that Frank enacts, using those data points to understand how Frank creates objects in his daily writing that bolster his agency in future social situations—a concept I refer to as expansive agency.
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Afterword
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This article, based on an ethnographic study of aging among women, reports on the benefits of literacy across the lifespan. Using methods based on phenomenological human science, I selected four participants in their eighties and nineties from a small town in Western Massachusetts whom I regarded as exemplars of positive aging. The importance of reading and writing over a lifetime emerged as a central theme in helping to explain how these women coped with the challenges of aging. In the participants’ elder years, literate activities were particularly significant as a way of constructing meaning. With illustrations drawn from the women’s literacy experiences over the better part of a century, I focus on the importance of early literacy development, the key role of literacy sponsors, the self-sponsored nature of memorable literacy experiences, and the differing ways in which the women used reading and writing in their adult years. All four expressed alienation from computers and modern communication technology. Despite this limitation, however, literate activities remained central into old age, helping them to make meaning of their lives, a crucial developmental task in old age. For the women in this study, active, lifelong literacy was a key factor in their continued vitality and involvement in the elder years.
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Challenging the Rhetorical Conception of Health Literacy: Aging, Interdependence, and Networked Caregiving ↗
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Abstract: Caregiving is a critical and yet understudied area related to aging, health, and wellness. Despite the importance of caregiving in the lives of older adults, assumptions about aging “actively” or “successfully” suggest that aging is independent, not interdependent. The healthcare industry reiterates these gerontological assumptions about aging when invoking notions of skills-based health literacy. This essay is an analysis of and response to the rhetorics of literacy as used in health care. Using John Duffy’s theoretical framework for literacy development as well as scholarship in age studies and community-literacy studies, I argue that literacy has become a rhetorical construct that promotes a view of older adults as particularly draining on the healthcare system. A more productive approach would be to frame the collaborative, distributed, and mediated work of giving and receiving care in the context of Paul Prior’s concept of literate activity. Finally, with a community-literacy approach that incorporates engagement and dialogue rather than individualistic skill development, I respond to this rhetorical construct of health literacy by considering how aging, interdependence, and networked caregiving expand the notion of what contributes to healthy living and well-being as we age. Using examples from a community care coordination project, this essay shows how compositionists might work together with patients, caregivers, and professionals to reframe health literacy rhetorics and act for change.
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This article presents research on older adults' literacy practices and how materiality plays a role in these activities. The article analyzes interviews with two older adults about their civic engagement and activism and examines the aging Discourse (Gee) as a component of the ambiance (Rickert) within the writers' ecologies. The article seeks to contribute to knowledge of writing ecologies and older adults' literacy practices.
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In order to contribute new knowledge about the digital literacies of midlife and older adults on social media, this study examines the literate practices of a subpopulation of Instagram users: female lifestyle Instagrammers and bloggers who self-identify as being over fifty. Survey results reveal why these women use blogs and Instagram, how they developed digital literacies, and who or what influences their practices. Case studies provide examples of the unique ways three women use Instagram to achieve visibility. Whereas most existing scholarship on visual depictions of age focuses on images that are controlled by other people (e.g., advertisers, community groups), I show how women use digital literacies and the affordances of Instagram and blog platforms to control their self-representations. Through their multimodal performances of identity, the women participate in discourses on aging and gender and pursue their goals of self-expression, inspiration, connection, and promotion.
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Critical Literacy for Older Adults: Engaging (and Resisting) Transformative Education as a United Methodist Woman ↗
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This article explores the critical literacy practices of a conservative, Christian woman as she engages in a church-sponsored reading program. Her story provides an opportunity to interrogate dominant cultural narratives that situate faith in conflict with critical consciousness and to expand our understanding of attitude change in older adults. I examine the cultural and religious contexts of her literacy, as well as the rhetorical practices that allow her to enter into dialogue with challenging texts. Ultimately, I argue for a more expansive view of critical literacy that takes into account the nonacademic settings where it occurs and the importance of transformative process.
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Coming of Age in the Era of Acceleration: Rethinking Literacy Narratives as Pedagogies of Lifelong Learning ↗
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This article calls for the fields of literacy and composition studies to develop more progressive understandings of the aging process as not only biological, but as culturally and socially situated. Drawing from age studies, we investigate a contribution to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (www.thedaln.org) as an approach that complicates prevailing notions of aging and literacy. We argue that an age studies approach to literacy provides teacher-researchers and students a language to conceptualize aging together. The article concludes with specific recommendations for composition teacher-researchers to conduct oral history collection events with students and older adults.
May 2018
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“To Whom Do We Have Students Write?”: Exploring Rhetorical Agency and Translanguaging in an Indonesian Graduate Writing Classroom ↗
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In keeping with the recent global turn in literacy and composition studies, this article explores rhetorical agency in an English-medium Indonesian PhD program. Drawing from the critical reflective lens teacher ethnography allows, the author highlights how graduate students at this Indonesian, yet international site negotiated both textually and extra-textually with the critical pedagogy she developed, while she also questions some of her initial assumptions concerning genre, audience, and rhetorical agency. Overall, the data presented here indicates that rather than focusing solely on textual form as a site of critical agency, teachers and scholars should also take into consideration the ways writers appropriate and circulate knowledge to the diverse audiences in their lives, across multiple genres and languages—and as time unfolds. Broadening the lens to account for such translingual agency might also benefit U.S.-based graduate writing pedagogies, the author ultimately suggests.
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This article examines a debate from the early 1980s about siting the Nixon Presidential Library at UC Irvine. I analyze the debate as it unfolds across the pages of the campus newspaper, exploring the interplay between literacy and geography to document how the newspaper provides a venue for inhabitants of the campus and the surrounding area to wrangle over the academic, civic, and regional responsibilities of UCI. The ideological fault lines that emerge are evidence that campus values are, much like the campus itself, an evolving construction to which college writing has much to contribute. I conclude by calling upon teacher-scholars to sustain and diversify the array of literacy practices associated with college campuses by using newspapers and other campus publications for research, pedagogy, and other curricular and cocurricular ends.
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Research, Writing, and Writer/Reader Exigence: Literate Practice as the Overlap of Information Literacy and Writing Studies Threshold Concepts ↗
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The publication of the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy has led scholars and teachers of writing and information literacy to identify ways of connecting threshold concepts of both disciplines to help students more easily and effectively acquire the transformed perspectives on research and writing. We argue that the practice of addressing writer exigence connects the concepts of IL and WS under a single literate practice. As the motivating matter of discourse, the perception of a particular exigence leads writers to identify a useful audience to address that exigence. Noting that audiences have their own exigencies for reading as well, we explain that writers must construct their texts in ways that signal a text’s exigency for readers, an effort that includes selecting the performances of evidence and writer legitimacy through information literacy. By teaching writing and researching as the literate practice of resolving the writer’s exigence by constructing exigency for particular readers, instructors can effectively link the six Frames of the ACRL Framework and Writing Studies threshold concepts and explain why concepts of both are essential and inextricable.
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Based on descriptive narratives of older, homebound adults, this article articulates how holding on to literacies is a vital part of staying engaged as an older adult. It traces a parallel between the idea of aging and literacy development. Employing the concept of heritage literacy—the decision-making processes individuals use regarding whether to adopt, adapt, or alienate various literacies and technologies over time—the article theorizes more extensively the heritage literacy practice of alienation. Alienation from literacies becomes a particularly important part of our understanding of literacy development in light of widespread experiences of aging, such as when physical health, mental health and acuity, social connection, spiritual health, or maintaining independence are challenged because of age. By examining how literacy is employed in agentive and nuanced ways in the lives of homebound adults, the article shows the impact that literacy has on aging and the impact that aging has on understandings of literacy throughout the life course.
December 2017
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Drawing on two accounts of information literacy, one from American students and another from teenaged Macedonian fake news makers, I argue that developing an information literacy reflective of the monetized and hierarchical nature of networks is paramount to writing and research. Focusing on the relationship between technological discourse—what is said about technology—and literacy—what people do with technology, I argue that recognizing the influence of corporations and differences between print and digital media are paramount for the development of information literacy.
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This article argues that fake news is only one instantiation of a shift that literacy studies will need to reckon with to understand how people encounter texts on an everyday basis. It argues that looking at the information ecologies in which fake news circulates reveals a shift to the reliance on computational and automated writing systems to circulate texts and amplify their distribution. The article critically synthesizes existing literature and provides key examples of how algorithms and bots were deployed strategically to pollute the media ecology with fake news in the time immediately preceding the 2016 Presidential election in the United States. The argument ultimately raises a series of questions that literacy studies will need to confront given the influence of computation in contemporary information environments, including asking: how can people engage in responsible discourse in the face of rapidly evolving and exploitable technologies?
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Introduction to Special Issue on Literacy, Democracy, and Fake News: Making it Right in the Era of Fast and Slow Literacies ↗
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Guest introduction to special issue 5.2.
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Symposium response.
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"Globalist Scumbags": Composition's Global Turn in a Time of Fake News, Globalist Conspiracy, and Nationalist Literacy ↗
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The past twenty years have witnessed a significant and sustained global turn in American higher education, with many US colleges and universities pursuing curricular and institutional programs that prepare students for lives of global engagement. Many institutions have redefined their civic and ethical institutional goals to foster not only national citizenship but global citizenship. While global education has consistently been attacked by the right for many years, the scope and virulence of attacks on global higher education have been amplified in the lead-up to the 2016 presidential campaign and following the election of Donald Trump. Portrayals of global education as a global conspiracy have circulated across a range of fake-news, alt-right, and hard right publications, as have calls for nationalist visions of civic education that instill an appreciation for American exceptionalism. This article maps out how global higher education is constructed in the populist rhetoric of the political right, both in accounts from fake news sources and hard right news sources and in the educational policy discourse of conservative organizations like the National Association of Scholars. It then explores the consequences of anti-global education rhetoric for the global turn in rhetoric and composition studies and maps out both a critical and political response.
March 2017
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Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the significance of family literacy practices, especially as they relate to educational experiences and achievement. Often, the literacies of migrant and refugee families are considered in terms of conflict: conflict within families, and between families and institutions. This article seeks to illuminate spaces where migrant family literacies inspire positive relations, specifically in daughter-father interactions. In this ethnographic study of Hmong women, I show that literacy alters traditional relationships between fathers and daughters, reframes disempowering gender dynamics, and supports daughters’ access to public realms. These literate interactions have lasting effects throughout daughters’ lives as they pursue education, professions, and political advocacy opportunities.
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Symposium contribution.
May 2016
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Beyond Basic Reading and Writing: The People’s House and the Political Literacy Education of the Student-Activists of the Black Liberation Front International, 1968-1975 ↗
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In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.
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Book review.
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Contact zones are useful for literacy research because they foreground the contexts that recent decades of literacy studies scholarship have deemed essential: history, orality, language difference, and power, with an emphasis on interaction rather than divides. While literacy studies has demonstrated the importance of these contexts for understanding literacy, there is not yet a model that organizes them into a framework for research. Compositionists have paved the way for understanding contact zones not just as spaces to observe and describe but also as spaces in which challenging learning and instruction can occur. In a contact zone, different languages interact through writing, reading, speech, and other expressions because of historical circumstances and with greater and lesser privileges afforded to them on account of these historical circumstances. A literacy contact zone approach calls for researchers to account for the oral, linguistic, historical, and differential power contexts for the literacy phenomenon under investigation.
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Literacy researchers might develop a richer understanding of how literacy practices construct communities and writers within those communities through more detailed attention to what writers do when they write. Very little is currently known about the processes by which individuals are actually composing in digital writing environments. However, in this cultural moment of sweeping social, linguistic, and technological literacy transformations, research on digital composing processes involves unique methodological challenges. Contemporary writing technologies intersect with digital literacy composing processes in ways that require critical ethical and methodological decision-making by literacy researchers at all stages of the research process. In this article, I argue that research on contemporary composing processes provides a crucial window onto literacy as a social practice, and further, that such research poses unique methodological challenges for researchers. Through an examination of Facebook writers’ composing processes, I articulate some of these challenges and offer guidance for future research.
October 2015
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Brokering the Immigrant Bargain: Second-Generation Immigrant Youth Negotiating Transnational Orientations to Literacy ↗
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Abstract This article explores how the children of immigrants queried and enacted the immigrant bargain narrative in their orientations to literacy and schooling at an afterschool program in New York City. The Mexican American elementary school students in this study expressed a common “immigrant bargain” narrative, a working-class immigrant family story of parents’ past and present sacrifices redeemed and validated through their children’s future academic merits (Louie 23; Smith 123). Language differences, transnational movements, and family histories affect how the children of immigrants imagine their parents’ migrations and their own transnational identities and literacies. Their identities as students, for example, compelled them to perceive their academic work ethic as repayment for their parents’ sacrifices, doubled with sometimes unreasonably high academic expectations for literacy achievement measured by merit. Literacy mentors and educators unfamiliar with the immigrant bargain should be attuned to its power for autobiographical writing, expressing both what motivates and constrains family migrations and second-generation students in their own academic goals. Afterschool program organizers, youth mentors, and school counselors especially should consider how the narrative builds confianza, or trust, and offers space for encouraging a transnational orientation to literacy in dialogue with immigrant families’ academic motives, goals, and preferences.
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For over a decade, a particular transnational educational migration trend in Korea, known as jogi yuhak or “Early Study Abroad,” has been sending thousands of pre-college students to various parts of the globe (e.g. U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore) with hopes that young Koreans will acquire “native-like” English and become “global elites.” Many of these students then enter U.S. universities that are built upon liberal ideals of diversity and individualism in theory, but offer in practice an indifferent climate towards racial and linguistic difference. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study of Korean undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, the U.S. public higher education institution with the largest number of international students, the author examines interviews, observations and artifacts collected from the Korean Student Association (KSA), a registered student organization with over 100 staff members mostly with jogi yuhak experience. As the global university offers a rather unfavorable academic climate for racially and linguistically diverse students as well as heightens the failures of literacy as a way to “global elite.” It is in this context that KSA members work to build, reestablish, and preserve their identities and create conditions of respect through practices of localization: The students foster their “Koreanness” not only through Korean language use but also through institutionally rebuilding Korean social practices and networks strained by their many years abroad. Students are able to negotiate their liberal, or rather neoliberal college dreams in seemingly Korean ways of language and literacy that ultimately help them ground their identity as U.S. college students.
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Children’s development of literacy in multiple languages has received increasing attention in Literacy Studies (I. Reyes). Researchers have noted the role that family support plays in children’s biliteracy development (Bauer and Gort; Gregory; Li; M. Reyes). Yet the impact of this support on the adult literacies of parents has received much less attention. This study focuses on Arab immigrant parents’ participation in their children’s emergent biliteracy, on the development of digital and transnational literacies by immigrant parents, and on how specifically they are influenced by the digital technologies used to support their children’s developing biliteracy in Arabic and English. We use the framework of Digital Biliteracy, which focuses on “the process of developing literacy in two language[s] through the use of digital technologies” (Al-Salmi, “Digital Biliteracy as a Social Practice” 4352), to examine digital literacy development in two languages among immigrant families. In this qualitative case study of transnational literacies of Arab immigrant mothers, we show that as these parents become involved in their children’s biliteracy, they use digital technologies to produce and interpret written texts in English and Arabic. In doing so, these mothers’ literacies are shaped through the process of helping their children become literate in Arabic and English via on-line and digital technologies.
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Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives, edited by John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold. ↗
Abstract
Learning to read and write has taken place amid convulsive changes in economic and social life, educational expectations and communication technologies.This has been a time when the meaning of what it is to be literate has seemed to shift
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In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.
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“The Advantages of Knowing How to Read and Write”: Literacy, Filmic Pedagogies, and the Hemispheric Projection of US Influence ↗
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During World War II, the US Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and the Walt Disney Company produced a series of educational films promoting literacy, hygiene, and American (US) values for distribution across the Americas. Through these films, literacy was to move across borders in service of inter-American cooperation. That movement, however, also reinscribed the distance between a modern, powerful, literate United States and a stagnant, resistant, illiterate “other America.” The program’s insistence on film as a pedagogical tool imagined the United States as a site of technical modernity in contrast to its American neighbors. Working in light of recent scholarship addressing how literacy controls and constrains movement, this essay considers the effects of literacy for literacy's others—in this case, the population of what the OIAA termed the “other American republics.” It highlights the American assumptions that circulated within the literacy films and became enmeshed with the reading and writing skills they claimed to provide. Examining how film moved literacy practice and ideology across national borders, this essay demonstrates how thoroughly the contexts and the media of literacy's movement shape the consequences of its transmission.
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While a great many educational institutions now take part in the complex network of English language learning, this article asks what an institution expressly created to respond to and spur the transnational movement of English language learners, Intensive English Programs (IEPs), can reveal about how literacy is taught and learned transnationally. Specifically, I examine how the transnational political economy of English literacy is negotiated discursively at one US-based IEP (Northwest IEP) through teacher and student talk. From this discourse analysis, I suggest that, in addition to the difficult and time-consuming tasks of language learning, students in my study were involved in and recipients of another, much less visible type of literacy management: the ongoing valuing and defining of each other’s prior literacy-related knowledge vis-à-vis their and other students’ access to global Englishes. Thus, Northwest IEP did more than situate students in relation to privileged English literacy. That institution also served as a broker for the shifting status and subsequent privileging of global Englishes. This dynamic gives insight into how multilingual spaces come to mediate the broader transnational political economy of English literacy. Ultimately, this research shows the value of looking into institutes at the periphery of US higher education, which broadens the field’s linguistic terrain to situate US-based composition as one of many actors across the transnational landscape of higher education.
July 2015
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Using the methodology of third-wave feminist linguistic analysis, this article studies how one undergraduate writer, “Polly,” brings about her gendered identity as a leader of a social sorority through writing emails to motivate members to attend events. I offer a six-item taxonomy of the rhetorical strategies Polly uses to articulate the shared values of the sorority; excite members about events; and craft a unique, interesting, and relatable peer persona for herself. I connect each of Polly’s rhetorical strategies to research on gendered communication to understand how she uses the strategies to navigate her audience’s expectations of her gender and her leadership. A quantitative, temporal analysis of Polly’s use of all six strategies over the course of a year suggests that sororities (and other student organizations that offer leadership roles to students) present time and space for participants to try out a range of intellectual tools for different leadership personas, which can transfer to future rhetorical situations. This opportunity for rhetorical experimentation allows students to play and experiment with their public selves and group affinities.
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"A Mockery in the Name of a Barrier": Literacy Test Debates in the Reconstruction Era Congress, 1864-1869 ↗
Abstract
Between 1864 and 1869, the United States Congress debated an educational requirement for voter registration–a literacy test–as a means of dealing with the millions of new American citizens created by emancipation. These debates offer a critical early perspective on the development of literacy as a racial marker serving official racist agendas. Rhetoric supporting a test relied on the premise that a more literate and educated electorate is an obvious and uncontestable cultural good, necessary for the continued health and indeed survival of the nation. When the test was first discussed, its primary advantage was that it offered a way to talk about the inferiority of the newly emancipated Southerners without resorting to racial explanations; thus, freed slaves were dangerous not because they were black but because they were ignorant and uneducated. The 1869 debates about the Fifteenth Amendment, however, reveal a growing awareness of literacy’s rhetorical utility and the ways a belief in its inherent “goodness” might be used for ends divorced from the measurement or promotion of literacy: Radical Republicans proposed including a ban on such requirements in the language of the Fifteenth Amendment, certain that Southern whites would use it as a tool of disfranchisement. These debates, in the context of the test’s subsequent history as a tool of racist exclusion, demonstrate the rhetorical power and pliability of the idea of literacy within official policy.
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This essay argues that literacy actors compose agency through the embodied practice of literacies in combination with self-aware feedback loops. The argument brings together recent conversations on agency, embodiment, and cognition in composition studies, neuroscience, and the humanities to develop the concept of discursive readiness potential. Discursive readiness potential refers to one’s embodied agency and accounts for the range of possible actions available to an actor on the basis of her or his past experiences. Furthermore, discursive readiness potential points to one’s capacity to navigate a field of potential literate practices into one actualized action. As such, the essay supports a renewed call for research on agency and embodied cognition in composition studies by outlining discursive readiness potential as a flexible process model for understanding how agents act in emergent discursive situations.
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Symposium response.
March 2015
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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'Teaching Must Be Our Demonstration!': Activism in the Prince Edward County Free School Association, 1963-1964 ↗
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Toward an Economy of Activist Literacies in Composition Studies: Possibilities for Political Disruption ↗
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Proyecto Carrito - When the Student Receives an 'A' and the Worker Gets Fired: Disrupting the Unequal Political Economy of Translingual Rhetorical Mobility ↗
Abstract
Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.
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Abstract
Article for LiCS special issue The New Activism: Composition, Literacy Studies, and Politics.