“The Schooling of Gestural Listening” attends to how gestural listening—defined as all of listening’s embodied manifestations, such as nodding and nonverbal backchanneling—is used, shaped, and then evaluated by school. The author shows how gestural listening is first leveraged to help students gain literacy, then disciplined into overly-restrained embodied norms, eventually fusing with notions of classroom management and student attitude. To illustrate this trajectory, the article draws upon Nicolas Philibert’s 2002 film Être et Avoir and the work of early literacy figures Marie Clay and Megan Watkins. Throughout, the essay argues that gestural listening’s relegation to an amalgamated landscape of “good” or “correct” conduct in school inordinately affects neurodiverse students. The author investigates this phenomenon by highlighting the writing of two students with self-disclosed ADHD diagnoses, and by engaging with scholars of neurodiversity and disability such as Melanie Yergeau, Shannon Walters, and Thomas Brown. By reminding readers of gestural listening’s affordances in early literacy acquisition, and its subsequent flattening by the process of schooling, this article ultimately aims to render it visible to educators once again, especially to those working in secondary and college environments where listening’s rich gestural register is often delimited to narrow perceptions of “correct” conduct.

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?

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.

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.

Previous scholarship in literacy and composition has noted the importance and function of ancestors in the literacy and rhetorical practices of descendants. However, such research has not explored how ancestorship functions for people at the marginalized intersection of racialized otherness and queer sexualities and genders. This article offers one response to this gap by reporting on the role of literacy in the life stories of sixty Black queer people residing in various regions across the United States who named historical erasure as a particularly detrimental form of oppression enacted by, though subverted through, literacy. An analysis of participants' uses of literacy to navigate historical erasure reveals that as participants encounter historical erasure, they disrupt its negative impact through four patterns of ancestorship: (1) literacy is used to create, discover, and affirm relationships to ancestors; (2) ancestors model the multiplicity of identities as a category of rhetorical analysis; (3) descendants’ identity formation/affirmation is affected by an ancestors’ writing and lives; and (4) descendants receive cross-generational mandates to become ancestors through literacy. Further, while African American literacies and LGBTQ literacies have each emerged as potent areas of scholarship in literacy and composition studies, the absence of a sustained and substantive discussion at the intersection of both areas contributes to a larger critical vacuum in rhetoric and composition in which we have overlooked the literacy and composition practices shaped at the intersection of race and queerness. This article begins to address this oversight through an in-depth exploration of a specific literacy and rhetorical practice among Black LGBTQ people.

As a composition historian working with nineteenth-century American literacy artifacts, I have become increasingly aware of how particular keywords have come to dominate our histories. Specifically, I have noticed how the keyword that most resonates with my research—literacy—has been eclipsed and to some extent erased by the dominance of the keyword “rhetoric” in our history writing over the last decade. Why has this happened? How does this trend affect the materials historians look for and the questions they ask? How do our keywords modulate the voices of our artifacts? How do our keywords determine the uses we claim for history?I have surveyed book-length American composition histories published between 1999 and 2010 in order to describe the major trends shaping the kinds of histories we are producing to see if we can identify gaps and fissures, the roads not taken, in relation to these major trends. The preliminary thesis I put before you is that we are in danger of closing off certain types of materials and questions because our histories are increasingly dominated by the keyword “rhetoric.”