In this book, published in the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Mara Holt provides a historical overview of collaborative pedagogy in US writing classrooms. In fact, Holt argues that collaborative writing pedagogy reflects and is shaped by its historical context. The book defines collaborative learning broadly, as “a pedagogy that organizes students to work together in groups” (1). Although she focuses on collaborative writing, Holt casts a wide net to capture writing classroom practices that she sees as applications of John Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism. Holt argues that the American pragmatism espoused by Dewey is enacted in many collaborative writing practices, allowing those pedagogies to transform classrooms into training grounds for participatory democracy.Holt, who is professor and director of composition at Ohio University, intentionally operates both as a historian and as a writing studies scholar. The book has roots in Holt's (1988) history-based dissertation, “Collaborative Learning from 1911–1986,” submitted over thirty years ago, and in what the composition theorist James Berlin (1987) calls the significance of history in writing studies. Holt identifies a social-constructivist perspective in Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism that aligns with her argument that collaborative learning practices are shaped by their temporal context. Pragmatism, Holt says, offers general principles to ground education: 1) a focus on praxis; 2) knowledge creation as social, and collaboration as potentially “authoritative” (6); 3) the importance of critical thinking; and 4) the classroom as a place to model democracy and prepare students to participate in it. While Holt admits that Dewey probably never used the term collaborative (12), she implies that his principles are enacted in the most democratic collaborative learning practices.After a chapter of introduction, the chapters of Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice each provide case studies of collaborative learning in US writing classrooms at a transformational moment in US political or pedagogical history. In the introduction, Holt asserts her underlying thesis that a historical overview of collaborative writing pedagogy is needed to help new generations of writing teachers understand that they are part of a tradition of using collaborative writing in the classroom for democratic pedagogical purposes. Holt also argues that a historical perspective is necessary for educators to fully understand and assess collaborative writing practices. Chapters 2 and 3 outline collaborative learning in writing classrooms during the Progressive Era and the Cold War; chapter 4 considers the impacts of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Chapters 5 through 7 consider moments of pedagogical shift—feminist theory, the creation of writing centers, and computer-mediated collaboration. The book concludes with a chapter in which Holt reflects on the future of collaborative learning as it intersects with three current movements: globalization, posthumanism, and Black Lives Matter.In some ways, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is a contemporary complement to Anne Ruggles Gere's (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Writing at a time when social-constructivism was coming into its own, Gere outlines a theory to explain how writing groups, the collaborative writing pedagogy that she focuses on, are evidence of writing as a socially constructed activity. Holt's book, on the other hand, takes as accepted theory that writing is socially constructed and links that social interaction to Dewey's pragmatism. As a result, Gere and Holt share the notion that collaborative writing is affected by historical context. Like Gere, Holt includes historical background for the pedagogies she discusses, but Gere begins her history in the colonial era, starting at an earlier moment in US history than Holt, who extends the time line of collaborative writing into the twenty-first century.In addition to being a thesis-based history book, Holt's Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is part memoir. Holt weaves over forty years of personal experience as a writing studies scholar into her narrative. In the preface, Holt notes that her “first formal interaction with collaborative learning was at Kenneth Bruffee's Brooklyn College Institute in Peer Tutor Training and Collaborative Learning in 1980” (ix). Through her affiliation with the Brooklyn Institute she met Peter Elbow, Stanley Fish, Carol Stanger, John Trimbur, Harvey Kail, and Peter Hawkes. She read texts by Lev Vygotsky, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire. Her experiences at the Bruffee institute led Holt to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met James Berlin, who was a visiting professor from the University of Cincinnati. Holt's dissertation director was Lester Faigley. Holt also acknowledges Victor Villanueva as a major influence. The array of scholars that Holt was taught by, wrote with, and thought with shows the depth of her connection to the foundation of the field. Her connection and experience in the field lends credibility both to her authority to survey the history of collaborative learning within the field and to select case studies not just with an eye to proving her point, but because they were some of the most important developments of collaborative learning in the field at that moment.Sometimes, however, these personal details can distract from her argument; they add names and dates to case studies already crowded with such information. Some personal details may also distance Holt from readers when she recalls memories in a way that requires insider knowledge. For example, she references the iteration of the “CUNY Graduate School on 42nd Street,” which she attended as the “pre-Giuliani pornographic version,” which assumes knowledge of both the pre- and post-Giuliani versions of the building (5). The text also includes other unnecessary details. For example, Holt notes that 1930s progressivism affected how first-year writing programs were administered; that's interesting history about first-year writing, but it says little about collaborative learning.Overall, Holt effectively argues that collaborative learning in writing classrooms was shaped by its historical context. For example, during the labor movements and nascent socialism of the 1930s, pedagogies emerged that were based on collective, student-centered practices. Likewise, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in World War II, when international collectivist movements were viewed as oppressive, the use of collaborative pedagogies declined. In addition, Holt demonstrates that collaborative writing practices decades apart can mimic each other, proving her point that a historical knowledge of collaborative writing might prevent reinvention. For example, under the “Oregon Plan” of the 1950s, students critiqued each other's writing before revising it to be turned in to the teacher. These examples of peer critique foreshadowed Bruffee's peer revision of the 1970s, but Holt presents no causal link between the two pedagogies. In fact, Holt stresses that, while collaborative learning practices of one era may seem similar to those of another, their purposes will vary because their proponents are responding to different historical contexts and may be rejecting rather than amplifying democratic values. In the case above, Holt says that the Oregon Plan arose in a 1950s context in which students interacted with each other's texts suspiciously, whereas in Bruffee's context, students were encouraged to depend on classmates for educational gain.In chapter 6, Holt argues that writing centers, mostly through peer tutoring programs, have been key to the development of collaborative writing pedagogy. She also outlines current historical situations to which writing centers have responded in recent decades, including increasing numbers of underprepared and international students, and the shift from alpha text to multimodal composition. In focusing on the internationalization of writing centers, Holt also notes that American English is no longer the assumed standard in US writing centers and that institutions around the world have created writing centers of their own.In chapter 6 Holt traces the advent of computer-mediated collaboration in writing pedagogy by outlining how writing centers responded to the introduction of computers. In chapter 7 she extends her analysis of computer-mediated collaboration into the twenty-first century by acknowledging that much collaborative learning in writing classrooms is now mediated by technology. The tech-mediated case studies Holt considers in chapter 7 are the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment at the University of Texas in the 1980s and the more recent use of wikis in writing instruction. While Holt asserts that such tech-mediated pedagogies are “solidly connected to Deweyan/Bruffeean theory and practice” (109), her analysis overlooks the ideology of the infrastructure that supports tech-mediated collaboration—the technology itself. As a result, it may be that an updated version of a Deweyan/Bruffeean framework is needed to analyze collaborative learning in an increasingly tech-mediated classroom. As Holt persuasively shows, collaborative pedagogies in writing classrooms often embody democratic ideals, so a framework based on egalitarian principles is appropriate for their analysis, but perhaps that framework needs to have the capacity to analyze the infrastructure mediating the collaboration as well as the collaboration itself. Such a theoretical framework might be technofeminism, a framework concerned with issues of equity and access, but which also accounts for the ideology of the technology (Bates, Macarthy, and Warren-Riley 2018).Some readers may balk at the notion of examining collaborative writing pedagogies through any sort of theoretical framework at all. Indeed, educators from many ideological persuasions have used collaborative writing to help students improve their writing and thinking. Rather, what Holt implies is that collaborative writing almost by definition embodies elements of Dewey's democratic goals for education and that to practice collaborative writing is to enact Deweyism. Holt makes a strong case that collaborative writing pedagogies reflect the full context of their historical moment, and that many of them reflect Dewey's ideas of social reform; however, her survey also demonstrates that in an age of technology-mediated classrooms, a framework that incorporates the perspectives of colleagues who study technology through a lens of equity may be a way to productively analyze collaborative writing pedagogies in the future.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

Amy Allen's The End of Progress: Decolonizing the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory is a careful intervention in the ongoing attempts to establish a critical theory of society associated with the Frankfurt School. Its central concern is the way Critical Theory (capitalized here to indicate the specific tradition of the Frankfurt School), particularly in its latter-day incarnations, has been structured by a stadial philosophy of history that presents European modernity as the apex of progress and as a universal standard from which the rest of the world can be judged. Provoked by decolonial and postcolonial critiques of teleological philosophies of history, Allen seeks to decolonize Critical Theory by showing how current normative theorizing remains ensnared in this essentially nineteenth-century Eurocentric framework. Through a series of close readings of the work of, first, Jürgen Habermas and, later, his successors, Axel Honneth and Rainer Forst, Allen examines the ways critical theorists have grappled with the question of “European modernity”—as a historical moment, geographic location, or epistemic framework—and its relevance for Critical Theory's stated emancipatory aims (Horkheimer 2002). Although these thinkers are certainly aware of the problems of Eurocentrism, Allen is particularly adept at detailing how progressive conceptions of Universal History continue to animate normative justifications in this tradition.Allen's account begins not with the origins of the Frankfurt School in the 1920s and 1930s but with Habermas and his attempt to reconstruct the normative foundations of Critical Theory. Although Habermas has written extensively on globalization, Allen notes his lack of sustained attention to questions of imperialism, postcolonialism, and decolonization. Allen reads the lack as symptomatic of a deeper problem in which a particular account of historical progress continues to play an important role in Habermas's work. This occurs in spite of Habermas's interest in breaking with the Hegelian metaphysics of historical progress in which history marches ineluctably toward reason. Yet Allen shows how a progressive notion of history lurks within Habermas's concepts of social evolution and sociocultural learning. In this context, social evolution refers to the way societies rationally reflect on problems in the process of solving them, a notion articulated in his account of communicative reason. Although Habermas argues that the formal pragmatics of his theory “proceed reconstructively, that is, unhistorically,” the key tension for Allen is that this theory still depends on the “structures of action and structures of mutual understanding that are found in the intuitive knowledge of competent members of modern societies” (Allen 2016, 51, quoting Habermas 1987). Allen's point is that what counts as competency in modern society is not a universal property of humanity, but a specific set of practices and dispositions from a particular historical and geographic social formation connected with European modernity. Habermas, Allen claims, effaces that particularity, presenting European modernism as simply the outcome of a developmental process of learning.Responding to such critiques, Habermas has attempted to distinguish the underlying structures of modern society, which he views as universal, from the various social and cultural responses to modernity, advancing a thesis of “multiple modernities.” On this read, modernity's characteristic elements, including the techno-scientific domination of nature, bureaucratic rule, and capitalist social relations, are presented as a global infrastructure that different societies—or, in his terms, “civilizations” (68)—encounter, respond to, and shape in culturally specific ways. Yet Allen, drawing on the work of Gurminder Bhambra, argues that this approach does little to resolve the problems of Eurocentrism as it continues to present reflexivity, which Habermas connects with Enlightenment reason, as the apex of social evolution.The middle chapters of the book explain Honneth and Forst's differing responses to this basic problematic. Honneth takes a modified Hegelian position in which progress is neither linear nor inevitable but is nonetheless realized by ethical communities as they continually struggle over the conditions limiting freedom. For Honneth, institutions such as the family, the market, and the state gain a sort of legitimacy as individuals opt for certain configurations out of the range of those available. Normative foundations are given in the historical development of institutional forms, as societies pursue the expansion of diverse conceptions of freedom. Allen's critique of Honneth thus comes to center on the way a certain forward-looking notion of progress, what she calls “progress as imperative,” becomes conflated with an assertion that society has itself progressed over time, or what she terms “progress as fact” (12). For Allen, however, “progress as fact” fails to grasp the complexity of unequal societies or the extensive forms of violence coincident with European modernism.Forst, on the other hand, pursues a Kantian response to Habermas, arguing that normativity is grounded not in the historical development of societies but in the formal properties of practical reason. Here too struggles for justice are important, but not because they reveal the normative commitments of an historically specific society. Instead, Forst grounds normativity in a fundamental right to justification, which Allen glosses as requiring “that no one shall be subjected to rules or institutions that cannot be justified to him or her as a free and equal member of society” (127). As to the metaethical question concerning the validity of justifications, Forst treats justifications as valid after they withstand procedures of evaluation characterized by both reciprocity and generality (129). Justifications must be reciprocal—in that similar claims should be treated similarly, and one cannot universalize their own position—and general—in that the interests of all affected parties must also be considered. Yet Allen argues that if we push the metaethical questions back to the normative grounding of the justification procedure itself we return to a conception of the human as a “justifying being” (130), equating humanness with a particular form of practical reason. Here too, Allen finds a problematic Eurocentrism that connects Forst's account to other Kantian and neo-Kantian projects, in which a “Kantian notion of practical reason has been closely bound up with pernicious notions of progress” and has “provided the benchmark with respect to which black, female, queer, colonized and subaltern subjects have been judged” (138).As these brief summaries suggest, Allen's engagement with Habermas, Honneth, and Forst is detailed and extensive. It is clear that hers is a direct intervention in an ongoing debate over the future trajectory of the Frankfurt School (for an earlier skirmish, see Forst 2014). The chapters thus presuppose extensive understanding of the current work of its leading practitioners. For readers coming to the text more interested in a dialogue between Critical Theory and the broader project of anticolonial critical thought, the results might be more mixed. Afterall, Allen owns up to the difficulty in trying to bridge a “gulf” between Critical Theory and postcolonial critique. As she notes in the preface, the project has a quixotic element insofar as she is “criticized vehemently” for “flirting with relativism” by her Frankfurt School colleagues while also looked at askance by her colleagues working in postcolonial traditions for her interest in a “normative foundationalist project at all” (xv).Nonetheless, if the book really does dwell in the gulf between these two traditions, it remains oriented primarily toward the Frankfurt School. This orientation even structures the alternative approach to temporality she maps out in the final chapters, advocating for the forward-looking notion of “progress as imperative” while jettisoning what she sees as the Eurocentric conceptions of “progress as fact.” Where one might have expected a robust engagement with post- or decolonial theory, Allen remains within the Frankfurt School tradition, drawing on the work of Theodor Adorno and Michel Foucault—even going so far as to reposition Foucault within the family as “Adorno's other ‘other son’” (163).Allen finds Adorno and Foucault useful as thinkers who challenge the notion of history as the progressive development of reason, while also maintaining a notion of philosophy as a critique of the present. In a series of inventive readings, she treats them as taking up the basic Hegelian claim concerning the relationship between knowledge and history but destroying the Hegelian story of reason's dialectical self-realization toward the Absolute (177). Her reading of Adorno focuses on his dialectical approach to history, which views the Enlightenment as, at best, a highly ambivalent achievement and full of self-destructive tendencies. Yet rather than reading Adorno as simply a negative thinker bent on showing the irrationality of Enlightenment, she identifies a more limited understanding of progress in his thought. For Allen, the strength of Adorno's work is the way it continues to offer a notion of reason, but one stripped of the teleology of historical development and thus reflects back on its own role in fomenting the disasters associated with European modernity. For this reason, Allen frequently references Adorno's claim that “progress occurs where it ends” (163).Allen finds a similar use in Foucault, particularly his account of the history of reason from the position of unreason. In her account of History of Madness, Allen wrenches Foucault from readings that position him as celebrating unreason or even madness as a space of freedom that is set apart from modernist rationality. Instead, she carefully parses Foucault's uses of unreason as a category within modernity that problematizes or fractures the seemingly smooth surface of reason's self-development. Unlike madness, which might simply be the Other of reason and fully outside of its logic, unreason is useful as a category that exists within but is not fully intelligible by reason's own self-understanding. As she puts it, “the function of the figure of unreason, then, is to create some distance between ourselves and our system of thought” (184).It is this problematization of “our system of thought” that she urges Critical Theory to take up. Allen presents a powerful case for an approach that is more self-critical and modest, suggesting that decolonizing Critical Theory means quieting it down and allowing it to hear and be challenged by the voice of others. As an immanent critique of the role of stadial history in current normative theorizing, the book succeeds in demonstrating the persistent problems posed by the figure of historical progress. Readers of this journal, for instance, should find her reading of progressive history in Habermas's theory of communicative reason and concepts of sociocultural learning insightful, as it poses important questions about the way formal pragmatics, communication, and language are shaped by Eurocentric assumptions of linear development. But the book also raises issues concerning the meaning, content, or practice of decolonization, not only for the narrower category of normative theorizing in Critical Theory that constitutes Allen's focus but also for the broader category of critical thought more generally.For Allen, notions of progress are really the core of what needs decolonizing in Critical Theory. She notes at the outset that the critique of stadial history is “perhaps the major lesson of postcolonial scholarship over the last thirty-five years” and argues, echoing James Tully, that “the language of progress and development is the language of oppression and domination for two-thirds of the world's people” (3). Clearly Allen is right that progressive narratives have been central to the thought and practice of colonization and conquest. And a diverse range of scholars, from postcolonial theorists to critical social scientists, have demonstrated the continuities of progressive readings of history in postcolonial projects of development and modernization (see, for instance, Wainwright 2008). Those literatures also make clear, however, that Eurocentric conceptions of history as progressive development are always part of a larger apparatus of colonial thought and practice. In other words, it is the different ways that progress is mobilized in the thought and practices of, say, private property, secularism and religion, land and resource use, economic regulation, state violence, or the gendered division of labor that constitute just a few of the many techniques by which societies continue to be structured by colonial and postcolonial relations of domination.If that claim is true, it would set a higher bar for what it might mean to “decolonize,” which could also carry some methodological implications for the practice of critique. Specifically, it might suggest an approach to theory that is attentive to the way theory is conditioned by and moves in the world. What is so interesting is that this is one of the things Allen presents as the great strength of the Critical Theory tradition, that it is “rooted in and constituted by an existing social reality that is structured by power relations that it therefore also aims to critique” (xiii). Yet the diversity and complexity of power relations constituting colonization, imperialism, racism, and heteropatriarchy are largely subsumed under the singular category of “progress” in the text. This is useful for Allen's argument, providing a lever to offer critical readings of the texts at hand, but might also attenuate the multiple ways colonial power continues to work and thus the difficulty of decolonization as a practice. Recognizing as much does nothing to limit the enlightening and rigorous critiques of Habermas, Honneth, and Forst or the useful and insightful readings of Adorno and Foucault, situating them as anti-Hegelian Hegelians. But it might also suggest that there is still much to be done in the work of decolonization.

Michele Kennerly's ambitious book sends a gust of fresh air through the field of ancient rhetoric. But that figure doesn't really suit her metaphorics—such a central aspect of the project. To hone in on these (a better figure, as we'll see), we need to come down to earth—to the material substance of wax tablets and papyrus book rolls, and the bodies of text produced on them. Editorial Bodies is a study of the ways ancient Greek and Roman poets and orators engaged in working on and over texts in a process of “recursive composing” (3) with consequences exceeding any narrow considerations of grammatical niceties. As Kennerly explains at the outset through a careful etymological introduction, our English word “editing,” understood as a late-stage form of “textual tidying” (1), often done by someone other than the author, cannot capture the kinds of work with texts performed and extensively discussed by these ancient wordsmiths. Honing, smithing, polishing, filing—these are a few of the gritty figures for textual work Kennerly excavates, and their object of attention, the text, is very often presented as a body. And here we arrive at the idea of “corpus care” (15), Kennerly's richly polyvalent figure for the processes and vocabularies referring to work on a text, itself a material body, for the bodies of the writers, and for those who received their work: a complex and multidimensional concept.Kennerly tracks the analogy of the body with the written text through an impressive number of authors in the Greek and Roman traditions. She argues for a consistency of reference across many sources, demonstrating that writing about writing in terms of the body pervades these ancients' extensive and careful attention to the crafting of rhetorical texts. An adjunct to this claim is the observation that insufficient attention has been paid to the relation between writing and oratory in the ancient periods. Editorial tendencies and terminologies, writes Kennerly, become absorbed into habits of writing, which, for orators, could “come to be absorbed into habits of extemporaneous speaking” (3). But Kennerly admits that delivery—the body of the orator on display—is not her concern here (172–73). Actual bodies appear from time to time. Aristotle warns that the bodily evidence of labor on a text should be hidden (9). Cicero in his dialogue Brutus relates his early experience of strain on voice and body, but after working with Molo in Rhodes, “both his body and speech [are] better defined for the unrelenting demands of public speaking” (90–91). We learn that Horace had a habit of debating with himself through shut lips (112) and that Ovid's body wasted away in exile (138–51). But Kennerly is far more interested in what bodies mean in Greek and Roman rhetorical culture, and in the textual analogy. Those signifying systems coalesce in the domain of gender, performing the normative work of “policing appropriate style and delivery” to secure “masculinity's approved cultural boundaries” (98).After an introduction setting up her terminology and claims, Kennerly begins with Athenian rhetoric in the classical period (fifth and fourth centuries BCE), surveying a daunting array of figures: Herodotus, Agathon, Alcidamas, dramatists Cratinus and Aristophanes, Plato, Isocrates, Aristotle, Demosthenes, Aeschines, Aristotle, and Anaximenes. Accumulating evidence of the “somatic-graphic analogy” (23), Kennerly performs some quite targeted readings here. Plato scholars will look in vain for the philosophical investments of the Phaedrus and his layering of voices in the Menexenus. These are set aside in favor of a reading of “rhetorical management,” attributed to Socrates rather than Plato (38–39). But this book is cast clearly as a material, rather than intellectual, history, and the method becomes more successful when we move to comedians and their “play and polemic” about rhetorical training. The Alcidamas text, On Those Who Write, offers much pertinent commentary on editing, but it is with Isocrates that Kennerly finds the richest exponent so far of “corpus care.” In his late and highly self-reflective Panathenaicus, Isocrates offers a “harrowing composition narrative” including “a view of how extensive and collaborative an editorial process can be” (45). The “insult-dense” oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines provides Kennerly with colorful evidence of commentary on modes of composition, and of moving from written to oral performance, invested by these archenemies with “considerable invective energy” (46).The next chapter, on the Hellenistic period, is a welcome addition, given that there is less attention to these centuries than to others in the existing scholarship in rhetoric. Kennerly offers a counterpoint to the familiar narrative of rhetoric's decline, making the case here that polis life continued to rely on democratic practices and the rhetorics that they demand even after the triumphs of Philip of Macedon and Alexander at the end of the fourth century. I appreciate the way she works at the seam between Greece and Rome in this chapter, pairing two Greek writers, Demetrius of Phalerum and Callimachus, with two early Roman ones, orator Cato and poet Lucilius, who lived during the same period (roughly). Because we have no surviving work by Demetrius, Kennerly interprets his style through Cicero's extensive reception of his work in Brutus, a survey of Roman orators, and Orator, on style. Trained in the Peripatetic school of Theophrastus, Demetrius led Athens for ten years under the thumb of the Macedonians and in this role made deliberative speeches (59–65). According to Cicero, his philosophical learning “softened” his speech (64) without feminizing it. Her treatment of Cato gives us a more nuanced view of a rhetor in process than the familiar shorthand version of a gruff and taciturn moralist. Close etymological work with the treatment of figurae—understood broadly as forms or styles—in the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herennium provides Kennerly with abundant material for body-based rhetorical advice. The picture of Hellenistic rhetoric emerging from this chapter supports the assertion that the period is more accretive than derivative (76) and offers historians of rhetoric ways of rethinking the Roman relation to Greek rhetoric as more collaborative and less strictly oppositional. Where Kennerly does address the notion of a Roman inferiority complex—an anxiety of influence where letters were concerned—she attaches it to the imperial project: “editorial polish [is seen] as a solution to the general failure of Roman writing to spread and stick” (7).In chapter 3, Kennerly takes up one of her favorite figures, Cicero, highlighting his participation in a mid-first-century BCE large-scale cultural contest over style in its broadest sense (79). The struggle had to do with Atticism versus Asianism—inherited from the Greeks—and in keeping with the theme of the book, Kennerly shows how the struggle is carried out through (gendered) corporeal language. She makes the case indisputably for Cicero's interest in the use of writing before and after the delivery of the speech. There is in his process, Kennerly shows, a mix of “memory and monument,” the latter being Cicero's term for the finished text. After his exile in the mid-fifties BCE, Cicero stepped back from the vigor and intensity of his public oratory and applied his brilliance to philosophical and stylistic works on eloquence itself. In line with the purposes of her project, Kennerly does not delve into Cicero's philosophical contributions but notes that, for this consummate stylist, philosophy provides “silva (raw material; literally a forest)” (104). Later, she notes that Cicero, in his philosophical treatise De Officiis, praised the collaborative editorial practices of poets as a model for virtuous action: one should submit plans “to the scrutiny of trusted friends so that all mistakes can be caught and corrected” (151). We are treated to a more thorough analysis of Brutus and Orator, along with the less completely realized De Optimo Genere Oratorum (On the Very Best Kind of Orator). Far from simple formulae or a rejection of the new Atticism, Cicero advises a more expansive and flexible sense of style, Kennerly observes, matching each of three genres or duties of an orator—to move, to convince, and to delight—with three styles: “the weighty moves, the thin proves, and the moderate delights” (95). As with the Greeks, for Cicero the stakes are high where stylistic expertise is concerned. When an orator fails, it is not only his art or himself that he fails: it is “a client, friend, or the Commonwealth” (100). Kennerly addresses this entanglement of text, culture, and community persuasively.The chapter on Horace is refreshing, given that we have few rhetorical treatments of this poet. Kennerly highlights his compromised position in relationship to the first emperor, Octavian/Augustus, and reviews the implications for his poetic stance. Some of the most charming language in this chapter comes from Horace's Ars Poetica, where he pays a good deal of attention to style. He proposes a “compositional ethics of the slow,” advising restraint, scraping and scrubbing with the metaphorical file (127). His care in editing, Kennerly notes, is compatible with his “philosophic bent”: writing correctly arises from wisdom (130). In chapter 5 on Ovid's writings in exile, we read of his many pleas for attention, for collaboration, for editing in its most comprehensive sense. Ovid, Kennerly writes, shows an “acute rhetorical sensitivity to a situation”: his sad legal status as exile and harsh location influence his talk about writing (141). The penultimate body chapter on Quintilian is a significant one, and in it Kennerly brings to light the diligence with which Quintilian treats care of the text. She writes that he “made the managerial magisterial” (161), encouraging time, labor, and care in mastering the rhetorical art. Another important aspect of this analysis is Kennerly's attention to the gendered critical language running throughout Quintilian. A good style is always a masculine style marked by “an attractive fertility.” Tacitus and Pliny receive unusual and welcome attention at the end as well. Pliny's letters offer an accessible and revealing view of the sociality involved in composing, editing, and performing written and spoken texts in first-century CE Rome. The final chapter brings to light Cicero's famous and beloved amanuensis, Tiro: one known provider of the often unrecognized and coerced labor that went into ancient eloquence produced by elites. Kennerly ends with a reminder of the “ancient belief in the cross-indexical quality of the way one writes and the way one lives” (205).This is a beautifully prepared book; it's original and useful. The chronological movement—tracing the consistency of corporeal language across several centuries—enables the reader to follow the complex interrelations among writers and orators across the two cultures over six centuries. The attention to the original languages across the volume is meticulous. Kennerly's bibliography is very current, spanning the fields of classics, rhetoric, and poetics. She is evenhanded in her work with sources. As with all of her publications, Kennerly is a master stylist, showing how she has “love-labored” (a term from Isocrates) over this work. Her wordplay often delights. An example comes in her discussion of Isocrates, whom she characterizes as “figure-loving”: “political discourse without polish is all bluster whereas polished discourse without political import is all luster” (39). For some readers, the relentless word play may become distracting, and at times the clever tips over into the merely flip. But overall the style leavens a project entered into a field that may feel dusty and distant to students and nonspecialists. Scholars in composition / writing studies will be especially interested in the focus on writing process. At many points, we can see possibilities for contemporary comparisons and applications.Significantly, Kennerly is not pursuing stylistic manners for their own sake. She attends to contestation over what sorts of words best sustain communal life. Where I find the text really gaining purchase are the places where Kennerly points out the stakes of editorial work, and often they concern the status of the state. For example, she points out that Horace's enthusiasm for the editorial file (lima) was not only a poetic stance but also a civic one (19). We are urged to understand that editing, in the specialized sense elaborated here, is about not only the quality of the work and the status of the author but also political health and personal ethics.I will end where Kennerly ends, with comments on the canon. She claims to have shifted the canon by placing traditional names in untraditional scenes (211), and I agree that this is a contribution of the book. She also helpfully quotes and endorses Robert Gaines's proposal for an expansive reconsideration of “canon” so as to include “‘all known texts, artifacts, and discourse venues’” in a wide range of genres in “‘the ancient European discourse community’” (Gaines 2005, 65, qtd. on 210). This is an appealing invitation, one that led me to imagine how Kennerly's interest in the materials of writing and discourses of textual body care might be applied to an even wider swath of rhetorical activity in antiquity. For papyrus book rolls and wax tablets, as Kennerly knows well, were not invented in fifth-century Athens. She specifies at the outset that she will leave aside earliest examples—those with “a small chain of reception”—and concentrate on works “that have been heard and read by many” (1). This a reasonable criterion of selection. I did wish, though, that Sappho (and with her all the archaic lyric poets?) had not been dismissed so summarily (23), given the importance of the (woman's) body in her work and a substantial literature of reception. But a book can be about only so many things, and this book is about quite a few.Looking further afield, both temporally and geographically, we find many writers and speakers grappling with the materials of textual production—clay tablets in Sumeria, bone and tortoise shell in China, string knots in the Americas. And, in fact, some texts from those preclassical sites have been saved from the papyrus garbage heap. Just to take one example from the very rich repertoire of writing (on papyrus) in ancient Egypt, consider the anonymous tale “The Eloquent Peasant,” composed around 1850 BCE (Lichtheim 1973). This didactic tale features embedded speeches in the forensic mode that a peasant was required to deliver to a king/judge and then convert to writing (with the aid of a scribe) in order to get justice for a wrong. Embodied negotiations by multiple actors in the production of written and spoken texts, the quality of bodies—fine textual and debased working bodies: these are elements Kennerly has drawn on in her study of “corpus care.” The point of applying her method to such a text would be not only to expand the canon or corpus of rhetoric but also to grant the possibility of meta-consciousness about textual production not only to well-known elites of Greece and Rome but also to figures from distant times and places for whom we have only incomplete records. I'm grateful to Kennerly for her fine study and for the potential it opens up for further work in this vein.

The social media account for Steak-umm, a frozen food product, achieved notoriety in 2020 for its messages about how to evaluate the quality of information. Bogomoletc and Lee proposed that the positive reaction to these messages being posted by a brand account resulted from expectancy violations and verified their idea with an analysis of 1,000 randomly selected tweets responding to Steak-umm's tweets. This comment responds to their work from a public health perspective and asks whether the expectancies that were violated were also those of nonscientists in general, allowing the tweets to serve as relief amidst a cavalcade of misinformation about COVID-19.

In response to the numerous ethical issues involving big data, this article positions the infrastructural dynamics of big data storage and circulation as a concern for social and environmental justice. After identifying how big data accumulate in place-based ecologies that are made vulnerable to sustain ever-increasing quantities of data, the author explains how most, if not all, digital writing practices are relationally tethered to often distant places. In response, the author argues for developing and sustaining critical infrastructure literacies where big data infrastructures are not perceived as ethereal, cloud-like entities, but as materialities with relations to place, land, water, history, climate, culture, nation, and much else. Attending to infrastructure with a cultural rhetorics orientation attentive to relationality, accountability, and story, the article details four critical practices that place digital citizens within relational matrices where they are asked to account for how data practices affect a constellation of people, places, and environments.

This essay explores the implications ofThe Elements of Styleas a universally received narrative about literacy. I recontextualize the book as a product of 20th-century histories of literacy as normative middle class desires, and as a response to Cold War era ideologies of a white national language.

In this multimodal video dialogue, three writing center directors at small, regional, public colleges and universities discuss their experiences with remote tutoring amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Each speaker came into new writing center administrative positions during the pandemic. Speakers each discuss their recent experiences with the technological shifts they, their tutors, and their institutions have developed, and how those changes impact perceptions of collaboration and equity. In so doing, they hope to highlight the ways in which writing center administrators are thinking about technology’s influence on tutoring, instruction, and students’ daily lives, as well as highlight the challenges and opportunities this pandemic has provided them. Keywords : writing centers, peer tutoring, technology, online learning, critical pedagogy, higher education administration Click here for link to the audio/video recording for this transcript . Russell Mayo : Hello! We are three new writing center directors working at regional and local colleges and universities across the US, and we’re having a conversation together about navigating and adapting writing centers through a pandemic and justifying our work in new contexts. We’re going to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit and have a brief conversation around this work and the experiences we’ve had this semester. My name is Russell Mayo. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University Northwest (PNW) in Hammond, Indiana. I’m also the Writing Center Director there. This is my first year at PNW. My teaching and research focus is on writing, pedagogy, and environmental humanities. Currently I’m teaching First Year Writing (FYW) courses, but I will also be teaching English Education and Writing/Rhetorical Studies courses in the coming semesters. Eric Camarillo : Hi everyone. My name is Eric Camarillo. I am Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC). It’s a role I started in August 2020. I oversee testing, tutoring, the library, and user support services—and of course the Writing Center is contained within the Tutoring Center there. My research focuses really on asynchronous tutoring at the moment, but in the past I’ve discussed things like anti-racism in writing centers, as well as “neutrality” in writing centers and trying to break some “best practices” there. Elise Dixon : Hi, I’m Elise Dixon. I am the Writing Center Director and an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP). I started that position in August. Currently I’m teaching FYW, Writing Center training courses, and currently I’m slated to teach a graduate course on activist rhetorics in the summer. My research focus is generally on queer and cultural rhetorics, and those intersections with activists making, and of course writing center studies. Russell Mayo : We are all former TPR contributors. We were all featured in the 2018 Special Issue 2.1 on Cultural Rhetorics (Choffel, Garcia, & Goodman, 2018). Eric and Elise, you have contributed to other issues as well, right? Elise Dixon : Yes. Russell Mayo : And so part of this conversation again is just to talk about our experiences in this unique semester, and especially being new administrators. So I’m going to start by talking a little bit about what I’ve been struck with in my work with FYW students and writing tutors this semester, which is this sudden shift to technologically-mediated education, and the pandemic has thrust this upon us whether we wanted it or not. And in thinking about this shift, I am reminded of the 1998 talk by cultural critic Neil Postman (2014) entitled “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” I read this first with some of my students in a FYW class a few years ago where we focused on the social impacts of technology. I think it’s really great, and I think you should check it out. It might be really useful for yourself or for your tutors as well thinking about these questions. Postman (2014) asserts the five critical points on technology and change. While it’s quite old, I still think it speaks to our current lives in schools today. I’d like to quickly summarize Postman’s (2014) five main points, and then I’ll talk through a couple of them and how they relate to tutoring at the moment. These are the five Postman (2014) says: I want to talk about the first three. So the first one, “all technological change is a trade-off.” For this, Neil Postman (2014) is pushing us to think dialectically about how moving to something like remote learning has offered many benefits but also drawbacks for writers and tutors. So I have a lot of experiences and anecdotes to share for this; I’m sure you all do. I’m thinking about how, in a positive way, how nimbley and quickly so much of our peer tutoring work was able to shift online—especially in comparison to the struggles of K-12 education, FYW classes, or many other university functions. Rhetorically speaking, that’s because writing centers operate around a logic of one-to-one dialogue, an ethos of peer-to-peer learning, and we also harness the kairotic moments of learning (Bruffee, 1984; Kail, 1984; Harris, 1992; Wood, 2017). This is all instead of the top-down curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, happening at pre-set times and determined places that are common to other schooling arrangements. Part of what peer tutoring offers, I think, can remain in an online format, and we’ve seen that this semester, successfully (Yergeau, et al., 2008; Bell, 2006). But I think a lot is lost in the move online as well, as we want to make sure not to forget about those. I think in particular for the tutors, there’s a sense of a loss of mutuality and a shared sense of a space and a place where the tutors work together and interact together. Not during the session necessarily but before and after—those in-between times. We haven’t found a way to replicate that in any digital space. The camaraderie between tutors is not necessarily as strong. And I also think that potentially leads to some burn-out or some sense of dislocation: an unmooring for tutors. For some of them, the real joy was that in-between space of tutoring, and that also pushed them to be better, to ask questions of each other (Geller et al, 2007; Boquet, 2002). And the connections of an administrator certainly, and as somebody who teaches tutors really—a lot is lost when I don’t see them on a given day. So we’re really struggling to figure out how to train new tutors for next semester which we didn’t do this fall, given the lack of face-to-face interactions or the ability to overhear something in the writing center that you don’t quite do online. The second point that Postman made is about “the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies,” and the unevenness of that. Another way to say that is that COVID-19 has affected everyone, but not everyone is affected equally by COVID-19. This semester seems to have exacerbated the socioeconomic gap for tutors and for writers overall. The ‘haves’ seem to be doing fine. Many of them with the time, the space, the technology, the strong internet may even be thriving in an environment like this [1] . There’s wider availability of recorded lectures and teacher notes, and that level of accessibility really wasn’t a part of higher education before this point. But, on the other hand, I’m meeting with far too many tutors and writers who are taking a full load of classes and working full time. They’re calling into my class while at work. Many don’t have a reliable computer or internet access, or a quiet place to sit and learn and study, and they’re not able to do that in the way they used to on campus. This is true for the large number of our First-Gen students we have at PNW. I see a lot of people who are overworked and exhausted and just kind of going through the motions. They’re not experiencing any intellectual joy or connection that we have with in-person learning. What’s lost for them is due to no fault of their own. Many of them are going into debt for an education that is unfulfilling and unresponsive to their needs at the moment, and I think that’s something for us to think a lot about. The last point, and then I’ll end here, is that “embedded in every technology there is a powerful [but potentially hidden] idea.” I don’t really know what that is for Zoom. Is it that learning is done by lecture and presentation—a virtual TED Talk? Does Zoom reduce teaching to talking and learning to listening, what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) would call “banking education”? If so, has the pandemic-induced, video-mediated learning environment degraded the central closeness and connection we have sitting at a table together, listening to each other, looking together on a screen, and sharing and negotiation through speaking and listening in a common space that we once did and are not currently doing? These are just some of the questions that I think Postman’s (2014) work helps us to think about—as teachers, scholars, writing center administrators, and tutors—and keep me thinking about as I move forward. Eric Camarillo : Great, thank you. I think that kind of aligns with some of my own research with asynchronous writing center consultations. So I first became interested in asynchronous tutoring in Fall 2019 as part of one of my Ph.D. classes, when I realized there really was this gap in the knowledge of how we understand (1) how online tutoring works, and (2) asynchronous online tutoring and how that works. At my former institution, they had a really long track record of asynchronous tutoring. It was really part of their services, part of their suite of things they were doing. And so I never thought much about it, I just assumed others also understood how to do asynchronous writing center consultations. That turned out to not always be the case. At some places before the pandemic, they weren’t really doing any online tutoring: they didn’t have the platform, didn’t have the infrastructure. So for my own research, I draw a bit from a few different areas—really from Kathryn Denton’s (2017) “Beyond the Lore: The Case of Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” One of the points that she makes early on in the text, and kind of throughout, is this idea of asynchronous tutoring as being some kind of subpar alternative “step-child” of writing centers, where people don’t really want to do it. They will do it sometimes if they have to, if there’s a demand or if administration is like, “You should really be doing this.” They’ll do it if they really have to but there’s not always a lot of interest in it. By far, most centers are more interested in that face-to-face, traditional consultation, which is understandable. It’s a very rich, powerful form of tutorial, and steeped in history. It’s really where we’re getting a lot of our research and data from. There’s just decades of research—and probably more, if you want to go really, really old to tutoring generally (Van Horne, 2012; Neaderhiser & Wolfe, 2009; Breuch, 2005; Rosalia, 2013; Wolfe, & Griffin, 2012; Palmquist, 2003; Lerner, 1998; Casal & Lee, 2014). Certainly, with modern writing centers, decades of research on face-to-face consultation. The problem, I think, that many writing center administrators have with trying to implement asynchronous tutoring is that they’re trying to apply traditional writing center best practices to this model. I’ve argued elsewhere (Camarillo, 2020; 2020), where trying to just overlay best practices from a synchronous model to an asynchronous one is just not appropriate; it’s just not going to work. Because the key tenet in the best practices is this idea of “being there” with the student (Riley-Mukavetz, 2014). So a lot of that collaboration requires being there in real time with the student, especially when it comes to asking leading questions or Socratic questions, which don’t really make sense if you’re leaving feedback on a document in an asynchronous way. Because then your questions are acontextual; you have to do a lot more explaining in order to make them work. So coming from my background at University of Houston-Victoria (UHV), where they had a long history of asynchronous writing tutoring, to my current institution HACC, they had only really done drop-in tutoring for years. That was really their primary mode of tutoring. In early 2020, they started a pilot for online Zoom tutoring, and then of course by March that was all they were doing. And so it was very interesting comparing UHV’s experience to HACC’s. Because at HACC, when the pandemic started, pivoting to online appointments was really simple. We were using Upswing, which is a third-party product to help host all of our appointments and host all of our actual sessions. And so really it was just a matter of listing every tutor as an “Online” tutor. Very simple. HACC’s experience was a little bit different. Suddenly, you had to deal with Zoom links, making sure the Zoom room works, and making sure that everything was password secured, or that there was a waiting room because you didn’t want to get “Zoom Bombed,” things like that. I’m in this really interesting position of comparing, of trying to draw on one experience and comparing it to another. We’ve begun our HACC’s Online Writing Lab, which means students can submit essays to us electronically through email—but carefully tracked and assessed. To me, it’s just really exciting to be in this kind of position where everything is really new and everyone’s really open to new ideas. I’m able to bring some of my experience and my research that I’ve been advocating for about a year now, that we should really be doing more of. And so thinking about technology and asynchronous tutoring, and about how this will shift the way HACC, and probably other institutions, work in the future is also really exciting. How does that change tutoring for us? We’ve opened this door, right, and there’s probably no going back to just drop-in tutoring. I think students will always want the flexibility of doing something on Zoom so they don’t have to come to campus. Being able to submit things to an email account so they can go to work, and then in the evening, or the next day, they can come back and their essay’s there and then they can then apply that feedback. I’m at a community college, I’m working with students who work, and we’re trying to make sure that they’re able to access the services that we offer when they need to access those services. Elise Dixon: Okay, wow. You both brought up so many great points and I think I want to touch on a couple of things from what you both said. First, when I’m thinking about Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change,” I’m thinking about the fourth idea, actually, that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological.” This to me really harkens back to cultural rhetorics, ideologies of understanding that our lives are made up of these layers of interactions with each other and the stories that we’re telling each other over time (Powell et al., 2014; Bratta & Powell, 2016). And I see that quite clearly at my institution right now, in terms of what we’re doing in the writing center but also what our students are responding to to the primarily technological education that they’re getting right now over Zoom. They key point that I wanted to talk about today was: I think, for me, at my institution, the writing center now has a lot of evidence—a lot more evidence than usual—of the big gap between student understanding of what’s going on in the course and teacher understanding of what’s going on in the course. I see that evidence popping up in writing and in the way that teachers are evaluating. It’s no longer just a hand-written note, but it’s something that is on Zoom, WebEx, or Canvas, that the student can then just send right over to me as the Writing Center Director. So the metacognitive capabilities of talking about the moves that writers are supposed to make, those are difficult skills for faculty members to learn. And it takes a lot of time, and it’s especially hard if you don’t have a rhetoric and composition or English background. I see those gaps in understanding all the time. The additional complication of that is that there’s now the metacognitive conversation about the moves we’re supposed to be making technologically over Zoom, or over an online course. One example I wanted to bring up was this: for some background, my campus is very racially diverse and very unique. We’re the most racially diverse campus in the Southeast. What I’ve seen is that there’s a big gap in what our faculty members say to primarily the students of color who come into the Writing Center. One example that I can think of is: one day, I received a phone call from a student who was desperate. And she said, I have gotten a note from my professor that says that I have “markup” on my paper, and that any further papers that I turn in with “markup” will be immediately given a zero. And she said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is, and I said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is either! I’m not sure what your professor means.” And she indicated to me that she felt a little bit unsure of asking this professor because not only was there a gap in understanding, but there was a gap in proximity. She’d never met this man in person. She did not know how to interact with him, and all of her interactions had been either over Zoom or via email. So I volunteered to give him a call or to send him an email to ask what this meant. I think she was hoping that the Writing Center Director could tell her like, “Oh, well, this is the overarching definition of ‘markup,'” but there isn’t one. So I emailed this professor and he got right back to me and said, “Her ‘track changes’ are on in her document, and I can see all the changes that she has made. But, I don’t want a document like that.” And so really it had nothing to do with her writing. But he was giving her zeros for not turning off her track changes. Technically, the problem was that she didn’t know to accept all of her changes before she turned her paper in. Because as we might know, from our own personal experience, you can hide the “markup,” but that doesn’t mean it goes away. So when I emailed the student back and told her, she informed me that he had given her zeros on five papers because of this, and that she had not even turned in one of the papers because she knew that he was going to give her a zero, even though she had no idea what it was. The gap in communication there was just one tiny explanation that could have been fixed if there was a better system for having a conversation, if there was an understanding of how much of writing is about the correct or adequate utilization of the technology that we’re given. How do we communicate those needs to our students in a way that gives them the space to make mistakes and still learn? It taught me a lot, I hope that it taught the professor something too because I emailed him back and said that, “Your student was just confused, and I told her what to do. And I hope that you give her points on this and the other papers you gave zeroes to.” For me, in those moments, it was a realization that technology has become a part of UNCP’s ecology. And it has become a part of how students and teachers interact or don’t interact with each other, and how students can feel supported or not supported. I was not blind to the fact that this professor was a white man and that this student was a Black woman. And I was very sensitive to the understanding of all the power dynamics that exist in that situation. Especially on a campus that is very racially diverse, I think it’s really important for instructors to understand that we can’t just expect our professors to have these metacognitive understandings of the kinds of moves that we need our students to be making in writing but also the kinds of moves that they need to be making with technology. We have to be able to know how to explain it well. And the Writing Center can’t necessarily always do that explaining when we’re not really sure what something like “markup” is. So I think I’ll stop there, and then we can kind of have a conversation from there. Russell Mayo : Awesome. Yeah, let’s kind of unpack these and talk a little bit more. And we just met really today. So we’ve also been sharing a lot about our campuses and our roles and kind of what we’re learning in the process of this pandemic semester as well. So, yeah, where should we start? Eric Camarillo: Well, I’m really intrigued by this idea of technological prowess, Elise, about the instructor using one set of vocabulary, and that just not translating at all to what the student is capable of doing or, you know, connecting with the student. And I think it’s one way that we assume a lot of knowledge on the part of students, both in terms of what they’re able to do maybe with writing or what we expect them to do with writing, but also in terms of what we expect them to be able to do with technology. So often, I mean, we call our younger students especially “digital natives,” but really, it depends on the context, right? Like, we know that they’re very comfortable with TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, right? Snapchat. So they’re very savvy with mobile applications. But the more professional suite of services, or a professional suite of applications, is something that’s really foreign to them. So they may or may not know how to navigate Word, right? I’ve met plenty of students who really have no idea they’re even in track changes. They have no idea that they’ve even turned them on. They just think it looks like that. Or when they need to print out a paper, they don’t know how to leave them on there so they can show their instructor what they did. And these are all things that they need training on. We can’t just assume that they know these things, but increasingly that’s become part of things we just expect them to know or to already have knowledge of. Elise Dixon: Yes, I think something that that experience showed me too was that the Writing Center is often treated by both faculty and students as a go between of what students should know how to talk about and what faculty should know how to talk about. And in that case, I was a go-between. And really, the truth was that it wasn’t just a gap in student understanding, but also a gap, in fact, of this faculty member’s understanding of how to talk about how to use the technology. And we know, I think, as writing center administrators, we’ve seen an assignment sheet that a student brings into a session that don’t make no sense. And then realizing that the faculty member might not really fully know how to express in writing their own expectations of what writing looks like. When we have now this big gap in interpersonal experience, we can’t sit in a room with someone and say, “What do you mean by ‘markup?'” or whatever, we don’t get that chance to do the back and forth. One thing that I wanted to say in my little chunk of time, Eric was, we also are doing a lot of asynchronous tutoring this year. And it’s going very well. But I’m finding that, again, the work for me is finding ways to articulate how to access the technology, in such a way—through the technology—I have to teach people how to access the technology through the use of the technology and find ways to verbalize it, or put it in writing in a way that is most useful to students, and that it just feels sometimes like that gap in understanding is really more like a cavern, you know. It’s very, very tough. Russell Mayo: If I can just jump in and add on to that, too. We’ve been working with asynchronous tutoring, which there was a little bit of that before [at PNW]. So similar to what Eric was saying, that is sort of new to the students and to the tutors. And, like you’re saying, Elise, communicating that through the technology rather than face-to-face, somebody just saying “I want an appointment, where do I even begin?” Normally, people would say, “go to the second floor, and go to that particular space.” And now they’re just emailing into the web and hoping that somebody can help them from there. But it reminds me, I think there are some really good points here about how, essentially, these are two different forms of communication—the face-to-face and the digital asynchronous—and how they require different levels of trust, and detail, and explanation, and back and forth, and all of these things that is really new to students, and also to us and faculty or administrators too. There’s a lot of learning going on, and learning is messy and frustrating and takes us, you know, one step forward and two steps back sometimes. I like this idea that you brought up, Eric, about how the Socratic questions and the “being there” nature of face to face tutoring is both something that we always talk about as being really essential. And, I talked about that a little bit in my talk as well, but also that sort of rhetoric allows us to overlook some of the potential benefits of asynchronous tutoring, like you said, for the student who needs to drop off the paper before work, who can’t just go to a tutoring session at noon. And you know, for our campus, we have two different campus locations across [Midwestern state] that merged in 2016. We have two different writing centers, one very small at the Westville campus, and one that’s a bit larger at the Hammond campus. This semester, we were able to pool those tutors together into our writing center online platform and to offer both online and asynchronous tutoring for people across the campus. So in a way, we are more accessible, we’re more versatile, and we’re more connected than we ever have been before. There’s something about being there, which is both a benefit but also potentially a drawback. Because if you’re not there, then you can’t take advantage of being there. But the tutors are really learning a lot about what it means to communicate, like you said. One of the ways we’ve been doing it is—and this is actually something that we did in my former university as a grad student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is that they adapted that I think it was just brilliant—is utilizing the communication technology between the tutor and the writer. So rather than writing up the client report form as being something for us or internal or potentially something that you email to a professor, we started to formulate it as a letter to the writer. So at the end of each session, the writer gets a letter summarizing what they did, encouraging them to keep going, talking about next steps and making sure that they feel welcome to come back. And so creating those forms as a student-facing document, as the audience for those. If your professor wants proof you came, you can forward that on to them, but that’s something that you can have that agency to do. I think just sometimes changing some of these communication techniques can be really powerful in a lot of ways. And that’s something that I’ve been reminded of that is new to what we’re doing this semester, and I think has been really, really beneficial. There’s a lot more than tutor back and forth between the writer and the tutor after that session is over. Normally, it’s just sort of sealed, but now there’s a lot more of that back and forth happening because that letter is forward-facing and generative too. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, I think when it comes to, you know, face-to-face, or online or asynchronous, to me, it’s not really about, you know, “is one better than the other?” It’s that they’re different and they serve different students differently. Being able to drive half an hour to campus for an hour-long appointment, and then drive half an hour back is a privilege. Not all students can do it, especially working students who just don’t have time. And so being able to offer a variety of supports in a number of different ways, I think is a way to maximize that kind of accessibility. And I liked what you said, Russ, about a forward-facing document. UHV has something very similar, where they were essentially asked to do a couple of different things: they would leave feedback on the paper, they would write an email back to the students, and then they would write a form, just like a short note taking thing that was internal. And so the email was something that we spent a lot of time with training folks on how to do right, because one of the things made clear to me when I first came on board was the asynchronicity there where it’s the last thing that you’re writing, but it’s the first thing that the student is reading. So you have to take that into account as you’re generating it. And I think, Elise, to touch a little bit on your point too about how technology mediates this experience for students now and how we’re using writing to talk about writing. If students have to now read to understand, right, you can’t just verbalize it. So they already have to have, or try sometimes a little harder depending on who the student is, to understand what’s been written, so when working asynchronously, the student may not have as strong of a writing ability, but perhaps their reading ability could also be strengthened, right? And so there needs to be a bit more explanation, a bit more breaking down of things in that process. Which is why I wish there was more research on asynchronous tutoring practices, to be able to know what other institutions do and how they approach this kind of work. There are a variety of ways. One thing HACC is doing that I love that I never thought to do at UHV is that you as a student can submit a paper for feedback. And then they can request a Zoom follow up session about that paper, which I think is so cool. Because then you have a student and they’ve gotten this feedback and they want maybe more. They have other questions, they want to get that additional feedback. And now they can. They can just request a Zoom session through TutorTrac or sometimes a drop-in one if one is available, depending on the tutor’s availability. But I think this is one way, at least, I’m trying to maximize that flexibility that we currently have. What is for most people, a very stressful time to be anywhere but I think especially to be a student. Elise Dixon : That makes me think of, you know, when I read through various writing center scholarship about online writing centers, quite frequently in my own research, especially up until 2010, a lot of the research was about how do we replicate a face-to-face collaborative session, right (Yergeau et al., 2008; Reno, 2010)? We’ve all been there. And this pandemic has really forced us into—maybe not forced but have given us some opportunities—to think through what you were saying, Russ, about what opportunities there are in new technologies or in using technologies in a different way that look, perhaps on the surface as not collaborative, which is what we always want, to have a collaborative writing center space. And when I first came to UNCP, I had never done an asynchronous tutoring program of any kind. And we already had one going partially because of a money situation, we were using Tutor.com. And the administration had found out that our students were using Tutor.com—the writing portion of Tutor.com—and it was costing them $28 an hour, I think, to provide that service, when the writing center was already readily available and had open spots. And so our previous interim writing center director had a talk with our dean of the University College, and they both decided that it would probably be a best idea to just create an asynchronous tutoring opportunity through the writing center. So often in my meetings this semester, even though I had some reticence over how do I make this a “collaborative” experience, I was also sort of being pressured: “Are you having a lot of asynchronous appointments? We want to make sure that you’re having a lot of asynchronous appointments because it’s all about, you know, the bottom line.” But over time, what I realized is that my students were very organically doing what you both were talking about in terms of the front-facing documentation. Because writing center tutors are trained or shown through our own work that we’re peers, that we want people to progress, and want them to learn how to be good writers on their own through our guidance. My tutors started organically having those conversations with students over email and making sure that their feedback was really explicit and gave step-by-step: “Maybe you should do this? How about this? These are three options for what you might do.” We tend to have this idea, and I think sometimes it stems from really our oldest most original writing center scholarship, like Jeff Brooks’ (1991) “Minimalist Tutoring,” that tells us that in order to be collaborative, we have to be hands off, and in order to be hands off we can’t touch the paper. And it’s very hard to be hands off when you are doing an asynchronous session. But we’re never not collaborating, even if it’s asynchronous. And, gosh, if there’s anything the pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re never not collaborating when we’re online with each other because people have continued to get things done—albeit, in weird and exhausting ways. But we have continued to get things done over the internet in many different ways. Russell Mayo : To build on that point, Elise, I think it’s really good to point out to the people who are in charge of budgets, or who ask questions about things like Tutor.com or other services: There’s something the writing center offers that goes beyond the bottom line, too, right, which is that it is a professionalizing space for the students who become tutors, and it’s a learning space. They learn so much about writing and rhetoric that our courses can’t teach them through that hands-on learning. And they move in a “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) kind of way away from the periphery and more toward the center of what it really means to do academic writing and collaborative learning. And so it’s such an invaluable resource for the people who are tutors as well that an outsourced kind of website may be cheaper—although, as you’re saying, it’s not actually—it doesn’t offer those other benefits to the university community and the community of writers that I think we can develop at a center. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, we’re in “competition” with SmartThinking, our third-party service that we use. HACC had it when we were initially in that five-campus model that I mentioned before. Now we’re in a one-college model. In that five campus model there was—and there still is a virtual learning department, and they used SmartThinking, and it was initially only for their students. So the virtual students were students taking courses asynchronously, so they were the only ones really—I don’t want to say allowed to use it, anyone could’ve used it, but it was really for them, that’s why we subscribed to them or bought them whatever you want to call it. And now, with HACC’s Online Writing Lab, that’s one of the reasons I think we have the follow-up Zoom sessions, finding ways to differentiate us from SmartThinking tutors, not to mention the other feedback that we provide. For me, I’m also a big believer in the peer tutoring model or at least the context-oriented model, right, people who know and understand the institution. Not to discredit other types of tutors who work for these companies—they know the content, but not the context. They do not know who the instructor is, they do not know what their expectations are, and sometimes you have to know in order to give that kind of—I call it actionable feedback in my research. So this kind of, “I know this professor prefers it broken down in this way,” or “They may not think of the thesis in this one way, perhaps you can revise it to this other way.” And one point I also kind of wanted to jump on is how asynchronous tutoring really breaks from the traditional face-to-face model. So with minimalist tutoring—really great example. How do you give feedback without touching the document, you know? Without “writing” on it, you know what I mean? It’s impossible. I mean, there are other places that try and do it, and maybe they do like, just a letter and the letter will give feedback about the document, and it’ll give tips here pointing to particular sections but nothing in the paper itself. But, we know that Beth Hewett (2015) posits in her various research on online writing instruction that sometimes, and I don’t usually advocate for this, but sometimes writing within the text itself is what you should be doing, especially if you’re trying to model what a sentence could look like or what the various options are, right? So, while I’m very oriented toward just leaving the comments, there are others that definitely advocate for more what is definitely not minimalist tutoring, right? Or perhaps what it means is that you have to think about minimalism and collaboration differently in an online context. So, what does it mean to be minimalist when you’re leaving feedback? Maybe it means just leaving ten comments or something and being very selective about what that means. I think there are definitely ways to translate some of the best practices to an asynchronous paradigm, but there definitely needs to be a translation happening. Like, there won’t be a one-to-one, direct layover—or overlay—of those practices. Russell Mayo: Okay, so to wrap up, maybe each of us could go around and share out a little bit about looking forward, looking forward to next semester, next year, of continuing our work in our new institutions, in our new roles. What are we excited about? What are we concerned about? Future challenges or plans in your centers. I guess I’ll leave it open there and either one of you can jump in. Eric Camarillo: Yeah, I can start. What I’m really excited about is what new practices emerge as we better understand asynchronous tutoring. So, how do we better understand racism or antiracism, right? So, these issues that we’ve grappled with for so long with the traditional model, what does it mean now to grapple with them in the asynchronous space? So how do we achieve equity or racial justice, how do we embrace multiple languages, other types of discourses in an asynchronous context? I’m really looking forward to how writing centers continue having those conversations and what research develops. And I’m looking forward to hopefully also being able to contribute to those discussions. Those are things that are definitely interesting to me, right, learning more about how do we deal with both students who are hurting because of a pandemic that is maybe biologically related and students who are hurting from a pandemic that is more culturally related, right? Many things happened in 2020, but those two things stick out to me. A pandemic of both a virus and racism and a great reckoning of and working through—achieving antiracism. So that’s one thing I’m looking forward to, definitely, with asynchronous practices at least. And I guess my concern, really, is trying to adapt what we’re doing now in one way to, ultimately, perhaps a hybrid way, or when we go back to campus, which I believe will happen eventually. So, worrying a little bit about how we adapt our practices that have—you know, my institution has adapted really well to this context; we did a really tremendous job. What does it mean when we return to our five separate campuses? How do we divvy up resources? How do we divvy up the work? In what ways can we continue on with our online tutoring? Who will be assigned that kind of work? Elise Dixon: Eric, those are such great concerns and excitements, and they seemed to be interconnected, which I think always happens. I think similarly. I just finished teaching my tutor training course, which happens every fall, and my tutor training courses are always very social justice oriented and we had lots and lots and lots of conversations about race and racism this semester, more than ever before for obvious reasons, I’m sure you can guess why. And what I think I’m most excited about is that—in my previous work, some of which is in The Peer Review (Dixon 2017, 2019), I tend to focus on wanting us to think through the everyday moments of our writing center, and especially the uncomfortable everyday moments of our writing center that we tend to gloss over. And what I saw in a virtual form was that one story I told you today about this markup situation. It was an uncomfortable everyday moment of the new “pandemical” research—or new “pandemical” writing center. And I was pleased to see that I and my tutors were able to notice, in those uncomfortable everyday moments, issues of power and equity and inequality (Denny, 2010; Greenfield & Rowan, 2011; Greenfield, 2019; McKinney, 2013). So, for instance, as I said, the conversation between this student and her professor was raced because we all are raced, and because of that there were power issues that existed, and I was pleased to see that it wasn’t just me that noticed those things but that my tutors noticed those things even in their asynchronous sessions. And I think I look forward to finding ways to continue to have conversations about equity and equality and how we can foster that work in our writing center to create a more social justice oriented, activist writing center, and I look forward to knowing that it can be done online, asynchronously, in person, face-to-face, we can do it all. And I think that is also the great challenge that will be the great challenge of, I think, my writing center career, is finding ways to train tutors to holistically understand issues of equity so that when they are thrust into a new situation like they were this year that they have various tools to enact the activism that they can through whatever medium they have to. So, yeah, that’s my challenge and my excitement. Russell Mayo : Wonderful. I want to echo what you both mentioned, and I think it was fantastic. I, too, am looking forward to bringing in critical questions about the work we do in schools and how with that, as scholars (Grimm, 1999) said, in spite of our “best intentions,” that we can do harm unintentionally in our work and, therefore, we need to be anti-oppressive and it’s not going to happen by happenstance. It has to be deliberate, and it’s not something you do once and then it’s over. So I look forward to having these conversations with tutors and with faculty about ableism and racism and all the other aspects that are wrapped up in the human work we’re doing, really. And I look forward to doing more with those conversations. One thing I’m really excited about, and that’s an exciting opportunity to be honest with you, I’m not—I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, I think it’s something that needs to happen and can happen more, and I think that it takes a long time for those conversations to really make a difference in a community, so I look forward to doing that. I also look forward to, so one of the ways of justification and justifying is something—one of the themes from the TPR, for this issue—one of the things that I did immediately was starting to have concerns and worry about justifying. What happens to those sessions that don’t get booked? Where we’re paying a tutor, but they don’t have a writer there? In a face-to-face or in an in-person writing center, there’s lots of work to be done in the space, but when tutors are working from home or not in the same room, what do we do with that time and how do we make it meaningful to the people who are paying their checks, really? So, we developed an ad hoc professional development research project, so the students could develop something. Some students are really taking over the social media—which they would’ve done if we’d been together—social media for the center. Some students are studying writing across the disciplines, interviewing engineering professors about what writing looks like in their courses, and some students are comparing different majors and looking at different pedagogies for engaging students and studying what it means to be a writing partner—you know, working with the same writer week after week for a whole semester, a very unique project or problem they’re engaged with. What I’m really excited about in the Spring is that our tutors are going to be presenting on those, so we’re going to have a monthly meeting, which we didn’t have this semester, to have presentations. So tutors are going to be presenting their work, their professional development, ongoing questions, and inquiry projects. And then we’re just going to have some social time together because that’s something the tutors really, really missed. So just giving them that time to connect and bring in the new tutors that we’ll be training to connect with the tutors as well, to bring in more of a social sense of space that we didn’t have before because we lacked a place together, or we’re without that place for the temporary moment. So, really looking forward to those conversations and bringing those projects to bear and to learn from the tutors and with them as well. So, I guess we should wrap up there. It’s so good to talk to you both and meet you finally, virtually. And thank you, thank you for doing this. Elise Dixon : This was very invigorating. I don’t know how you all feel—I’m very excited. Eric Camarillo : I am, yes. Russell Mayo : Thanks!

In response to increasing interest in Vygotskian sociocultural theory in second-language learning (Lantolf and Thorne, 2006; Swain, Kinnear, and Steinman, 2015) and the call for understanding language-learning processes in relation to contexts surrounding individuals (e.g., Polio and Williams, 2009; Ferris and Hedgcock, 2014), this study adopts a sociocultural approach – more specifically, an activity theory (Leont’ev, 1981) framework – to explore an undergraduate student’s approach to L2 writing in a preparatory writing course. Using a single case study design (Duff, 2014), I investigated how a student from China learned to write academic papers that met the academic norms in an English as a second language (ESL) writing class in an American university. Specifically, I analyzed how his writing activity aligned with his instructor’s proposed approach to a writing task. Through the analysis of course materials, the participant’s written work, observations, email communications, and interviews, I tracked how his agency (Bhowmik, 2016; Casanave, 2012; Lee, 2008; Saenkhum, 2016) as a writer developed over his first semester in the ESL program. Findings indicate that while the participant did not follow the operations assigned by the instructor, he acted strategically to accomplish selected parts of his writing assignments. His mediated actions were driven by his goals and motives that were understood from within his social and cultural environments, and interacted with each other in a dynamic and constructive manner. Overall, the study underscores the need for flexible approaches to writing instruction and the usefulness of employing activity theory as a framework in studying L2 writing processes.

Providing comments on student writing is one of the most important, difficult, and time-consuming activities instructors undertake. Many studies have examined written feedback, and much research has shown the problems associated with this form, ranging from time spent providing thoughtful feedback to students’ confusion about the commentary. Some instructors have used audio commentary to address these issues. Audio commentary has been researched for years; the results have indicated that students prefer audio commentary, and it is perceived as more personal and positive by instructors and students. To date, little research has looked closely at audio commentary to understand if or how it might differ from written in form and function. This research uses as multicase approach and genre analysis to examine the organisational moves and discourse analysis uncover why audio commentary is perceived differently by both producers and consumers of this genre. Results show that audio commentary does not differ in form or function from its written counterpart, but metadiscursive features may play a role in how the genre is perceived by both instructors and students, providing real evidence of how audio commentary is different from written.

Preview this article: Editors' Introduction: Childhoods across Borders, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/1/researchintheteachingofenglish31340-1.gif

This Instagram “Weekly Writing” assignment is a social-media-based, low-stakes, and longitudinal approach to teaching and experimenting with multimodal composition. Students create an account for the purposes of the class and follow each other. They post three times per week, sometimes freely and sometimes in response to a prompt or challenge. Together, we use the platform and its rich multimodal resources to consider how in-the-moment multimodal composing can spur invention, place the writer in the perpetual position of noticing, and create an archive of experience that holistically communicates beyond the author’s original intention. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale for this approach, along with the issues to consider before adopting and adapting this practice.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

The editor's note for issue 5.2.

This Rhetoric Review Symposium extends long overdue conversations about racism in the discipline begun in a NCTE/CCCC cross-caucus College Composition and Communication symposium titled “Diversity ...

This article provides an overview of technical content marketing and examines the audiences and messaging for technical product messaging, which differ from general consumer products. Notably, technical products, particularly those in innovative categories, require a varying marketing strategy throughout the technology adoption lifecycle as products appeal to customers with different attitudes towards technologies. Especially, content marketing for innovative technologies requires an understanding of the technical consumers' (or audiences') psychological motivations and needs, which have yet to be reviewed in the technical communication literature. In this article, the foundations of marketing innovative technical products are explored, with a specific focus on the messaging strategies as it changes to educate and persuade different categories of technology consumers during different phases of the technology adoption lifecycle. For new technical products and categories of products, the messages and channels of information evolve as the technical innovation progresses from the early market to a mainstream market, with both requiring adaptation to different audience segments and in response to emerging competitive pressures. For the majority of technical innovations, the technical content marketing strategy and messaging is a long-term investment for change to reach different consumer groups at the appropriate stage of the technical product life cycle.

Since 2016, we have borne witness to an authoritarian leader who has wielded words to shape our national consciousness about people of color, women, immigrants, and disabled people in ways that have ignited the extreme right, resulting in a rise in hate crimes, the loss of protections for LGBTQ+ people, and, harrowingly, the indefinite detention and separation of immigrant children from their families. On January 6, just two weeks before the inauguration of President Joseph R. Biden, Jr. and Vice President Kamala Harris, the vitriol of the past four years catalyzed an insurrection by Trump supporters, encouraged by Donald Trump himself, in which U.S. Capitol police were violently attacked and killed and lawmakers were chased and called to be hanged. Emboldened by their indignation and their immutable belief that Joe Biden’s win was the result of widespread voter fraud, the insurrectionists, mostly white people, many with ties to white supremacist groups, armed themselves with Trump’s combative rhetoric to launch a physical attack on our democracy.

Who is an activist? What actions define a scholar-activist, an artist-activist, or community activist? How do community members, as non-academics, serve their community as advocates as well as intellectuals? And, finally, what is the impact that scholars and advocates make when they join with one another for social justice efforts within their respective communities? These are the questions that guided the work we present in this special issue of Reflections. This special issue will underscore how activism can work with academic life in the fight for social justice and change, so we invite you to take a closer look at activism and academia in community work.

In environmental communication, audience engagement is an essential prerequisite for achieving persuasive aims. This article responds to recent interest in visual storytelling and emotionalization – purposeful display and elicitation of emotions – as engagement techniques. A case study of the 2020 Global Biodiversity Festival – part online science festival, part fundraising event – provides evidence of how these techniques are employed in environmental communication for biodiversity conservation. Informed by scholarship on affect, emotion, visual rhetoric, and environmental communication, the case study analysis shows how visual representations of nature, mediated experiences of nature, and accompanying narration orient festival audiences toward specific ways of seeing and feeling that foreground emotional commitments and draw audiences into potentially transformative encounters. The visual rhetoric and affective dimensions of the festival’s website, virtual fi eld trips, and multimodal presentations focus attention, create moments of connection, and call audiences to action. The case study analysis also reveals how the festival, planned in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, treats this crisis as a kairotic moment for encouraging awareness, care, and pro-environmental behaviors.

This article examines tensions within infertility advocacy campaigns, like #Access2Care, which seek to improve access to healthcare, yet, at times operate within an advocacy framework that fails to listen to the very subjects they seek to empower. Ultimately, such actions lead to a misrepresentation of what empowerment means for the advocacy subject, and in doing so, fractures coalition-building. In response to these shortcomings, I outline a rhetorical framework built on relational advocacy and illustrate how rhetorical scholars can contribute to advocacy campaigns.

“Showcasing the many intersections of public rhetoric, current controversies, and effective pedagogy, the authors in this issue of Present Tense bring to light some remarkable instances of persuasive techniques and offer nuanced critiques of those moments in less than 2,500 words.”

While A Rhetoric of Motives remains one of the most well-known works on rhetoric, few realize that it was at one point intended to comprise two volumes. In a curious footnote on page 294, Burke states briefly that the sentences concluding the section on “Pure Persuasion”—one of his knottier concepts—were meant as a transition to a “section on The War of Words. But that must await publication in a separate volume” (Burke 1950/1969, 294). This never before published “separate volume” is now available. In it Burke names, describes, and analyzes transhistorical rhetorical devices that he discovers in journalism, bureaucratism, the news, and other media to emphasize how symbol users can, under the guise of peace, subtly incite readers to hold attitudes of acquiescence to states of war.After publishing Attitudes toward History, Burke began conceiving of a third book to conclude what he at first hoped would be a trilogy that began with Permanence and Change, but that third volume, first called “On Human Relations,” developed into yet another trilogy: the motivorum project that began with A Grammar of Motives and was also to include A Rhetoric of Motives and A Symbolic of Motives. In a 1946 letter to James Sibley Watson, the “W. C. Blum” on the dedication page of and in the introduction to A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke states that the “War of Words” would “deal with all the variants of malice and the lie, the thumbs-down side of rhetoric,” and would also include “our specialty, analysis of rhetorical devices (operated about the ambiguities of competition and cooperation),” plus “analysis of news, literary polemic, etc.” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 17). The title, The War of Words, certainly alludes to the motto and epigraph of A Grammar of Motives: ad bellum purificandum, toward the “purification” of war, an epigraph that hopes for war to be acted out symbolically rather than actually, and an epigraph that helps to explain the “thumbs-down side of rhetoric” that one sees in The War of Words. The War of Words includes an editors' introduction, four chapters (two complete, two incomplete), three appendices, explanatory notes, and an index.Because Burke's plan for “The War of Words” kept changing, the editors focus on its composition history in their indispensable introduction, which I discuss below. The first and by far the longest chapter, “The Devices,” lists, analyzes, and describes formal patterns instantiated in journalism and the news. In Burke's own words, the chapter discusses “characteristic rhetorical forms employed in the struggle for advantage that is essential to the Human Comedy” (2018, 43). While Burke worries that his political examples might stir up either strong passions in readers or assumptions that particular devices are fleeting, the purpose is not to do either; rather, it is to “isolate the universal ingredient,” one that can be applied to multiple situations, contexts, and time periods (45). In other words, while “yesterday's sneeze” might be “gone forever,” Burke states, “the ‘principles’ of that sneeze are eternal” (46). These transhistorical patterns reflect personality states and states of motivation. Therefore, they “are primarily matters of style” (135). These devices include the Bland Strategy, Shrewd Simplicity, Undo by Overdoing, Yielding Aggressively, Deflection, Spokesman, Reversal, Say the Opposite, Spiritualization (the Nostrum), Making the Connection, and Say Anything, each of which Burke discusses. The transdisciplinarity and transhistoricality of the devices enable them to be discovered and analyzed in contemporary logomachies so that readers and listeners can see the subtle attempts that are made to invite them to hold attitudes of war under the guises of peace.One device, Deflection, has “so general an end that nearly all of the Logomachy could be included under it,” even as the discussion of that device also looks toward the later-developed concept of terministic screens. Burke gives an example of Franklin Roosevelt enacting deflection when responding to a question about some (unfavorable) election results by saying that he was only paying attention to the (favorable) results from the battlefront (73). Yet, while “The Devices” catalogues and classifies many of these patterns, Burke did not intend “The Devices” to be a method for symbolic weapons distribution, nor as “a rhetorical manual for instructing students in their use” (159). The principles discussed in The War of Words are useful, “not as a device for throwing at an enemy, but for purposes of solace and placement, and for the cultivation of mental states that make one less likely to be hurt by enemies” (159). Rather, Burke is more interested in “an ethical approach … a method of meditation or contemplation that should be part of a ‘way of life’” (159). The devices can also be understood as Aristotelian topoi; and just as Aristotle defines rhetoric as a capacity for seeing the available means of persuasion in any situation, so a contemplation of the devices enables a person, not just to see or even to use them, but also to be able to listen cautiously, carefully, and critically so as to recognize their use. There is deception only when readers think they are “reading ‘facts’ as distinct from rhetorical manipulation” (191), Burke goes on to say in the next chapter.Chapter 2, “Scientific Rhetoric,” assumes a broad interpretation of science (broader than most would define it today) as it focuses on “the typical rhetorical resources available to journalism and other mediums that deal in the distributing of information” (43). The first section, “‘Facts’ Are Interpretations,” anticipates the scientific turn in rhetorical studies by mentioning how reports are “implicitly rhetorical” (169). Burke's emphasis in the chapter, however, is on reporting in news and journalism. Since “facts” are interpretations, they are also selections that assume standards of judgment. Therefore, the act of reporting assumes an underlying philosophy. In other words, rather than being antithetical to philosophy, a news or media source “is itself the uncritical and unsystematic, or implicit, philosophy” (172). In the relevant words of the prospectus for A Rhetoric of Motives, helpfully reprinted in the editors' introduction, Burke states that he wanted to show “why Rhetoric is not just a matter for specialists, but goes to the roots of psychology and ethics, including man's relation to his political and economic background” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 14). Statements in The War of Words about people as philosophers add to Burke's arguments elsewhere about human beings as poets, symbol-using animals, and bodies that learn language. However they are defined, human beings demand drama, a demand that media and news sources attempt to satisfy but necessarily do so selectively, reductively, and tonally using what Burke calls Headline Thinking. Burke's discussion makes The War of Words essential reading for students and scholars interested in analyzing contemporary rhetoric found in clickbait and on social media.While chapters 1 and 2 are more polished, the editors have added the words “[Notes toward]” to the titles of both chapters 3 and 4 to signify that these inclusions are preliminary drafts of other documents that Burke at one point planned to include in “The War of Words.” Nevertheless, these incomplete chapters still provide much insight into rhetoric and the relationship between war and words. While chapters 1 and 2 emphasize the verbal aspects of rhetoric, chapter 3, “[Notes toward] The Rhetoric of Bureaucracy” discusses nonverbal rhetoric in “instances where administrative or organizational factors are exceptionally prominent” (43). The chapter adds to previous notions about pentadic agency, including an insightful analysis of an Agency-Purpose ratio in its descriptions of how corporate identification and corporate boasting lead to corporate thinking. Highly reminiscent of the Grammar, Burke shows how bureaucratic Agencies not only deem actions appropriate and inappropriate but also provide people with attitudes, attributes, and goods that enable them to obtain a Purpose that is understood and achieved only in relation to those Agencies.Continuing the trajectory of the discussion that began verbally and then expanded to the nonverbal, chapter 4, “[Notes toward] The Rhetorical Situation,” discusses the extraverbal that “concerns what we consider to be the ground of the Logomachy today” (43). Largely reminiscent of Thomas Hobbes's (and others') bellum omnium contra omnes, this chapter describes “the essential rhetorical situation” as a constant “invitation to war” (242). Here, Burke wrestles with some “essentials of present conditions implied in the characteristic rhetoric of social relations, the press, and administrative persuasion” (43). For example, Burke shows how a thing's identity can be understood as being twofold: the “universal nature in which it is grounded” and the “part distinct from other parts”—a “part distinct” that is also in some sense “an exclusion” (242). As soon as one recognizes that war is “everywhere,” one can also recognize that peace is “everywhere,” given the ambiguities between war and peace, cooperation and competition. Burke warns against the dangerous self-aggrandizement tragically inherent in American culture as he critiques the atrocious treatment of Native Americans by white settlers who exploited natural resources to the point that, symbolically, “exploitation” became synonymous with “progress,” while culturally it became the “American way” (255). Here, Burke obviously foreshadows his later work on hypertechnologism and ecological rhetoric. Burke's critique also shows how this rhetoric projects an ethical standard that influences Americans to assume that their material purchases are what provide them with evidence of their freedom and propriety. In order for this kind of materialistic “progress” to continue, people are led to passionately desire things that they do not need and cannot use (255–56). Here, the war of words also hints at a war of desires; logomachy quietly shades into eromachy.The editors of The War of Words also include three appendices. Appendix 1, “Facsimile of the Outline of ‘The Rhetorical Situation,’” shows Burke's plan for what appears as chapter 4. Appendix 2 is a transcription of “Foreword (to end on),” a document that was intended to conclude a future published version of The War of Words, while appendix 3 is a facsimile of the “Foreword (to end on).” These last two appendices reveal Burke's struggle to decide where “The Devices” should be placed in relation to the Grammar and the Rhetoric. While stating that he wrote “most of this material” before the Grammar and Rhetoric as a foundation for those books, he wishes here that the books had been “published exactly in the order in which they were written, with the Devices as preparation for what followed” (265, 270). The Devices, a “poor man's Machiavelli,” began as Burke compiled the “signs of plotting, deviousness, and duplicity” that he saw in the news, but as he continued to write, however, he “sometimes felt downright mean” (266). Since the Devices can be used for “ulterior purposes,” they find themselves in the realm of rhetoric; but since they also can become “implicit self-portraits, in representing the character of the user,” they also impinge on the realm of ethics (266). However, insofar as they relate to self-expression and identity, they find themselves in the realm of poetics, which was to be discussed in the Symbolic of Motives. In other words, The War of Words includes material that spans rhetoric, ethics, and aesthetics.After praising A Rhetoric of Motives, discussing the cryptic footnote on page 294, and summarizing The War of Words, the editors in their informative introduction discuss Burke's social and professional circles in a post–World War II context of 1945–50. This context provides a background for the main focus of the introduction: a composition history of The War of Words. After publishing the Grammar, Burke turned his attention to the Rhetoric. The word-for-word transcription of his 1946 prospectus to Prentice Hall for the Rhetoric shows a vastly different book than the one that was later published in 1950, with “Part One (on the War of Words, the ‘Logomachy’)” being “designed to show just how deeply the militaristic ingredient in our vocabulary goes” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 14). But as Burke wrote the Rhetoric, he kept moving and expanding his work on the Logomachy until it became a separate volume. The editors include a helpful facsimile of part of Burke's 1946 letter to Watson, which shows Burke saying that the Rhetoric, as it was then being drafted with “The War of Words” as a central part, “was becoming too negativistic” because of Burke's depression brought on by the contemporary press's corruption “which is doing almost as much as is humanly possible to prepare us for a cult of devastation and desolation that will leave practically noone in a position to attain even rudimentary amenities” (qtd. in Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 17). The editors also chronicle Burke's thinking in five episodes during Burke's writing of 1946 and 1948: his research and studies of myth, his search for commonalities between rhetoric and poetic, his orienting the Rhetoric around the concept of identification, his wrestling with the “Landmarks of Rhetoric” (Aristotle's Rhetoric, Cicero's De Oratore, Quintilian's Institutio Oratoria, Augustine's De Doctrina Cristiana, and Longinus's On the Sublime), and the placement of the concept of identification within the dialectical framework of the “Upward Way” in the final section of A Rhetoric of Motives, “Order” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 20–24). After the “Upward Way,” Burke then worked furiously on “The Downward Way” consisting of “The Devices” and “Scientific Rhetoric,” grateful that he could treat the material less polemically than he had during his earlier drafting process (27). At this point, however, Burke realized that A Rhetoric of Motives had grown into two volumes instead of one, so he added the footnote on page 294 and sent the first volume to Prentice Hall without even telling them that the second existed (30–31). This close connection between “The War of Words” and A Rhetoric of Motives, leads the editors to state that people often misunderstand A Rhetoric of Motives because it is missing what was once its central part. In other words, because parts of “The War of Words” were at one point intended to be the “first half” of the book that became A Rhetoric of Motives, and because “The War of Words” was later intended to be published as a separate volume, A Rhetoric of Motives “remains incomplete” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 30). Hence the import of The War of Words to contemporary rhetorical theory.Such an intriguing emphasis on the composition history of The War of Words naturally invites readers to ask several questions about it. While the introduction emphasizes the relationship between “The War of Words” and A Rhetoric of Motives, Burke states in the “Foreword (to end on)” that he finished “most of this material” before he wrote the Grammar and Rhetoric, which were intended to be “preparatory grounding” for it (270). What should be made of these and other statements that suggest that parts of The War of Words may have been drafted before the Grammar as Burke worked on what he thought was to be the final volume in the trilogy that began with Permanence and Change? In addition, if A Rhetoric of Motives remains incomplete without The War of Words, as the editors argue, then, given the incompleteness of both chapters 3 and 4 of The War of Words, does this then mean that A Rhetoric of Motives itself remains perpetually incomplete? If so, why did Burke tell Watson that it was “finished”? And finally, readers who underscore Burke's statement that “‘Facts’ are Interpretations” (169) would appreciate a clarification of the editors' assertion that they explain the composition history and evolution of The War of Words “without our advancing interpretation of the work” (4). In sum, scholars of Burke would greatly benefit from a longer, additional work about The War of Words and its relationship to A Rhetoric of Motives comparable to what Ann George has done for Permanence and Change (see George 2018).In sum, it certainly sounds alluring to say that the original unpublished second volume—if not the very core—of “the most intriguing, original, and stimulating contribution to rhetorical theory since Aristotle” (Burke, Jensen, and Selzer 2018, 1) has recently been discovered and published. Yet even for those who hesitate when they notice an attempt at allurement, it is nevertheless clear that Burke's study of contemporary rhetorical devices, still in use by journalists, bureaucrats, and other media writers, could not be more timely. It is hard to overstate the value of The War of Words in an age of seemingly endless logomachies that include much misinformation and disinformation, heated attacks, drama, “Tithing by Tonality,” and the like. The War of Words is a remarkable work, multifaceted, admirably edited, worthy of attention, and one that will be essential to the study of philosophy and rhetoric in the years, and in the logomachies, to come.

AbstractIn response to an accusation of having said something inappropriate, the accused may exploit the difference between the explicit contents of their utterance and its implicatures. Widely discussed in the pragmatics literature are those cases in which arguers accept accountability only for the explicit contents of what they said while denying commitment to the (alleged) implicature (“Those are your words, not mine!”). In this paper, we sketch a fuller picture of commitment denial. We do so, first, by including in our discussion not just denial of implicatures, but also the mirror strategy of denying commitment to literal meaning (e.g. “I was being ironic!”) and, second, by classifying strategies for commitment denial in terms of classical rhetorical status theory (distinguishing between denial, redefinition, an appeal to ‘external circumstances’ or to a ‘wrong judge’). In addition to providing a systematic categorization of our data, this approach offers some clues to determine when such a defence strategy is a reasonable one and when it is not.

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This reflection offers an example of how one Writing Center director decided to approach antiracism through practices of mindfulness. Rather than a “how-to guide,” it encourages practitioners to think about what would work best for their contexts and offers a couple flexible activities one could adapt for their center at any given time. On June 19, 2020, Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts observed Juneteenth for the very first time in its 100-year history. There was music, guest speakers, and about 300 virtual attendees who not only listened but also participated in challenging break-out discussions. Although I had only been hired as the Director of the Writing Center for less than a year at the time, I could tell it was an important historic moment for the Babson community, and it further cemented my commitment to ensuring that our Writing Center be an explicitly antiracist space on campus. Essentially, like many of us have felt over the course of 2020, it was another one of those “What can I do?” moments, and it felt incredibly urgent. With so much feeling out of my control and so much energy going towards immediate concerns over funding and safety, I turned to practices of mindfulness to ground the clouds of thought that were continually generating questions of what and how . I turned to breathing and writing, eventually making lists of the steps I could take: review the literature, talk to colleagues, survey my staff’s interest in pursuing this work with me, and reflect on my own position and motivations. For each task on the list, I broke it down into smaller steps I could take, realizing that, while the exigence was there, it didn’t have to happen in a day. That’s when it hit me: perhaps mindfulness could be the key. When hearing the word mindfulness, one might imagine a practice of “clearing your mind”; however, rather than pushing thoughts away, the goal of mindfulness is to be fully present—to be fully aware of one’s thoughts, feelings, and sensations of the body. This can be difficult, especially when experiencing difficult emotions, but our bodies are built with internal rhythms to help us relax and reduce spikes in cortisol (the stress hormone). Certainly, tools like guided meditation and movement can help when we cannot focus, but mindfulness offers something much simpler and accessible: slowing down and allowing space for your mind and body to connect, which could involve taking three intentional breaths or pausing for a few minutes to notice the sound outside your window. Mindfulness involves an intention and a goal to self-regulate—to honor one’s embodied thoughts and feelings before acting. Theories and practices of mindfulness complement many of the tenets of writing center work in important ways regarding student emotion (see Johnson, 2018; Kervin & Barrett, 2018), mentoring current tutors (see Concannon et al., 2020; Mack & Hupp, 2017), and training new tutors (see Emmelhainz, 2020; Featherstone, Barrett, & Chandler, 2019; Godbee, Ozias, & Tang, 2015). Although the scholarship cited here paints a picture of something relatively new, we understand that contemplative practices have been a part of human existence for millennia. In times of trouble, it is not uncommon for a person to deeply reflect on a situation whether through breathing, meditation, prayer, writing, or other modes of thought. Similarly, a review of the literature may suggest that attention paid to writing centers and antiracism is relatively new (see especially the International Writing Centers Association’s antiracism annotated bibliography prepared by Godbee, Olson, & the SIG Collective, 2014) though we’ve long known in this field that the same systems that have allowed writing centers to flourish are some of the very same systems that perpetuate oppression. As a POC, I have had to think about my own complacency in such systems and consider how I can do better. Can we have a “cathartic repudiation of white supremacy” at Babson (Coenen et al., 2019)? How do I embrace the “willingness to be disturbed” (Diab et. al, 2013)? What informs an explicitly antiracist center? Given this topic explicitly centers around bodies, and thoughts and emotions associated with bodies, a potential entrance into this conversation could start from within our own bodies. In their article “Reflections on/of Embodiment: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Class,” Trixie Smith et al. (2017) explain that embodiment scholarship “works to continually remind readers, writers, researchers, and pedagogues that bodies matter to the paradigms, perspectives, relations, and decisions one has in a given situation” (p. 46). Like with teaching—and perhaps even more given the interpersonal proximity and less hierarchical relationship—tutoring professionals cannot separate the mind from the body in this work. Since bodies feel and then act on those emotions, it is important to reiterate Micciche’s (2007) argument that bodies do emotions; emotions do not just happen. Moreover, Micciche (2002) reminds us that writing projects are “a training ground for emotional dispositions that coincide with gender, race, class, and other locations in the social structure” (p. 438). In essence, writing tutors are always engaging in an emotional space when collaborating with students, which has only furthered my thinking that perhaps mindfulness could be a way to honor our emotions and work together through both the joys and difficulties. As Christie I. Wenger (2020) writes in her chapter on mindfulness from The Things We Carry: Strategies for Recognizing and Negotiating Emotional Labor in Writing Program Administration , “Mindfulness helps develop resilience because it emphasizes agency; we practice mindfulness to cultivate resilience as a rhetorical choice and action in collective and communal networks” (p. 262). While I’m certainly not the first to do so, I do find an emphasis on embodiment and mindfulness to be a radical move for our writing center, which I view as a fruitful place for social justice work for reasons articulated by Laura Greenfield (2019) given the ways we are able to question ideas of power, negotiate identities and experiences, and have meaningful engagements wherein we recognize, particularly when working with multilingual students, that “we all stand in some kind of relationship to each other—indeed that our experiences are mutually constituted—but that our experiences differ because we are positioned differently within the systems of power in which we all operate (globally and locally)” (p. 123). That being said, I do think this is easier said than done and that we need more spaces that allow for students and administrators to start from within. In Integrating Mindfulness into Anti-Oppression Pedagogy: Social Justice in Higher Education , Beth Berila (2016) discusses the necessity for embodying knowledge. She writes, “One can be an expert on the sociopolitical factors that cause something to happen and still not know how it manifests deep in one’s body or why it produces certain responses in others” (p. 45). In order to undo systemic issues, we need both knowledge and presence; we need both body and mind. We can read articles from scholars like Romeo Garcia (2017) and Asao B. Inoue (2016); we can try to understand the “new racism” that scholars like Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan (2011) have put forth for us; but how do we embody the work especially as non-BIPOCs? Could, as Berila suggests, we make room to excavate ourselves in order to begin to recognize the power dynamics that we benefit from or that sustain our oppression? I started developing a way to do just that—to help our students look inward, perhaps uncomfortably, at the self in relation to our larger goals and communities. This ongoing project draws from practices of mindfulness to engage tutors and students in more-holistic approaches to antiracism in the writing center. It’s based on the idea that shifting a culture takes time, and I share its goals here now—in the middle of it all—not to showcase the findings of such a project but to perhaps inspire those who, like I had been, just aren’t sure where to start (particularly of the mind that we already try to design writing centers to be some of the most welcoming, most inclusive spaces). What are some small, concrete steps we could take based on the contexts of our own centers given the constraints of a global pandemic? As we weren’t building an antiracist center from the ground up, my first step was to get a sense of how my writing consultants viewed race in the Writing Center. When creating the fall schedule, in addition to the typical questions I ask about preferences for hours and if they’d be interested in visiting first-year writing classrooms, I asked consultants to freewrite on a few questions relevant to Fall 2020. Here are the instructions and questions I gave: Please freewrite on the following questions for 2-3 minutes each. With freewriting, I want you to just jot down what comes to your mind—no need to worry about spelling, grammar, or getting it “perfect”; rather, I just want to get a sense of where your head is at before we start working together this fall. Please set a timer so that you don’t spend too much time on this! That being said, if you feel particularly compelled to keep writing, that is fine with me. The answers to the social question elicited some very thoughtful responses as one might imagine when thinking of their own thoughtful consultants, and, as suspected, there seemed to be a spectrum of students who were clearly interested in talking more and some who weren’t sure what to say. With Berila’s idea of embodying knowledge for social justice in mind, I planned to have consultants look inward by examining their own thoughts on race before moving our way to examining the larger forces at work within our institutional context. I had my first decision to make: do I fold this work into our regularly scheduled staff meetings, or should this be a separate series of workshops? As no one was studying abroad or otherwise taking time away from the Writing Center, I had already decided that having more small-group staff meetings for our much larger staff would be helpful in keeping a sense of community and giving everyone the space to speak, and I took my own advice to start small. When creating our small groups that would meet every other week to talk about tutoring, I asked for preferences on foci, which included antiracism, marketing, and online tutoring strategies. We had a core group of students who wanted to talk about antiracism and the Writing Center, and I figured we could co-construct ways to talk about race on a larger level with the whole staff eventually. Inspired by the article “Talking Justice: The Role of Antiracism in the Writing Center” (Coenen et al., 2019), I recreated a version of an activity from the antiracist workshop the authors described. I asked my consultants to freewrite on when they first became aware of race as a concept. After the time was up, I then asked that everyone turn their writing into a six-word story (or thereabouts) that we would share anonymously. In the workshop described by Coenen et. al (2019), participants wrote their six-word stories anonymously on sticky notes, which were stuck along the walls of the room; participants then walked around the room and responded to the stories, again anonymously with sticky notes, before having a larger conversation. Given our online environment, I used Pinup , a free online sticky note generator that allowed participants to be anonymous . Each participant typed their story onto their own individual sticky note. Then I let them comment on each other’s posts by simply typing below the original story. With permission, here are some of the stories we shared: Again, imagining your own consultants, you might have a sense of how compassionate they were with one another’s words and how much thought these short, gentle excavations could reveal when we started thinking about them more deeply. While my intention was to simply talk about what we noticed overall, some students took ownership over their stories—“Okay, that one was mine”—and generously answered questions. As my main goal for this project is to start by meeting consultants where they are in terms of their discomfort with looking inward and gently excavating to better understand the larger systems of oppression that most likely benefit the majority of our staff and students, my expected goal is for all individuals involved with the Writing Center to take one small step forward in being mindful of their current contexts. To meet this goal, we’ll continue integrating writing and discussion activities to investigate the role that race plays in writing and interpersonal communication. Although we do need staff meeting time to talk about tutoring, I have to prioritize these types of discussions to slowly shift the culture of students currently working there. The end goal is to gently excavate our embodied experiences surrounding social justice issues in order to challenge our own practices while potentially also implementing more structural shifts in our center. I see this happening on three levels to start—in our ongoing professional development (staff meetings) for current tutors, in our sessions with students, and in our training for new tutors—though I could see this being of interest to those beyond the center’s immediate reach. In addition to the steps outlined above for current consultants, for students coming in to work on writing assignments, another goal will be to see if a mindful turn inward to thinking of self (i.e. excavating on the fly) will complement their writing processes especially as we see an increase in assignments grounded in social justice. Based on what we learn from our consultants and students, we should eventually be in position to implement changes into the tutor-training practicum—a full semester, advanced course—thus developing an antiracist curriculum that comes from the ongoing experiences of those living and working within the context of our institution as opposed to assuming a one-size-fits-all approach. As a team, we will keep reading, writing, discussing, and excavating in order to develop the kind of center that continually looks in and mindfully builds out.

This article explores how Twine, an open-source platform for interactive fiction games, was used to effectively train writing center staff participating in a course-embedded tutoring program. Writing center research, as well as our own survey data analysis, revealed a need to implement creative training methods that focused on the navigation of different classroom environments and the fostering of respected relationships between faculty, students, and course-embedded consultants. To respond to the need for additional course-embedded training materials, we created a supplemental scenario-based Twine training game for consultants embedded in first-year composition at Nova Southeastern University’s Writing and Communication Center. We asked consultants to write a response to their experience playing the game in order to assess the effectiveness of the Twine training. Our consultants reacted positively to the relevance of the scenarios provided within the Twine training but wished for further interactivity within the game itself. The positive reception demonstrated that Twine can be implemented as a creative solution for how to professionally handle situations that may occur in the classroom. We determined from the assessment that our future Twine training games need to incorporate clearer directions for navigation as well as more developed scenarios and answer choices for increased interactivity. We conclude that the affordances of Twine and other video game platforms can serve as an innovative way for staff members to interact with training materials that will help prepare them for the complex role as a course-embedded consultant. Keywords : Twine, gaming, scenario-based training, course-embedded consultant, writing center

For nearly a decade, big data has been hyped as an amazing new technology that will benefit corporations and consumers alike. By promising customized knowledge at an accelerated pace, big data technologies have slowly saturated the digital systems American consumers use to live, work, and play. Yet have the promised benefits materialized? An examination of the proposed contact tracing applications in response to the novel coronavirus alongside existing wearable technologies reveal that our trust and vulnerability, opening our bodies to be sensed by these networked systems, is a fraught rhetorical activity: not because an omniscient system now sees us and cares for us in our time of grave need. Rather, the opaque system misunderstands our embodied rhetorical actions, is incapable of moving the American polis, and cannot generate the promised collective action.

T he Community Literacy Journal is an interdisciplinary journal that publishes both scholarly work that contributes to theories, methodologies, and research agendas and work by literacy workers, practitioners, and community literacy program staff.We are especially committed to presenting work done in collaboration between academics and community members, organizers, activists, teachers, and artists.We understand "community literacy" as including multiple domains for literacy work extending beyond mainstream educational and work institutions.It can be found in programs devoted to adult education, early childhood education, reading initiatives, or work with marginalized populations.It can also be found in more informal, ad hoc projects, including creative writing, graffiti art, protest songwriting, and social media campaigns.For us, literacy is defined as the realm where attention is paid not just to content or to knowledge but to the symbolic means by which it is represented and used.Thus, literacy makes reference not just to letters and to text but to other multimodal, technological, and embodied representations, as well.Community literacy is interdisciplinary and intersectional in nature, drawing from rhetoric and composition, communication, literacy studies, English studies, gender studies, race and ethnic studies, environmental studies, critical theory, linguistics, cultural studies, education, and more.