Abstract This article examines the public controversy surrounding the National Park Services decision about how best to recognize the site of the nations first executive mansion—the Presidents House—in Philadelphias Independence National Historical Park. The first of the houses two presidential occupants, George Washington, kept nine slaves in the mansion while circumventing a Pennsylvania law that could have given the slaves their freedom. The National Park staff’s resistance to acknowledging Washingtons actions led to an ongoing and lengthy public debate that eventually resulted in the decision to build an installation that recognized all of the occupants of the house. Advocates for building such a site invoked two types of vernacular discourse—a counternarrative ("Liberty has been incompletely enacted") and a representative anecdote ("Excavating buried history")—that embraced the traditions of storytelling at Independence National Historical Park.

Given the multiple meanings of rhetoric and composition, as well as the vexed history of institutional relationships between these two terms, it is important for scholars to trace how they are “worked”—that is, how they materially function—in a variety of specific circumstances.

This essay interrogates the concept of “clarity” that has become an imperative of effective student writing. I show that clarity is neither axiomatic nor transparent, and that the clear/unclear binary that informs the identification of clarity as a goal of effective student writing is itself unstable precisely because of the ideological baggage that undergirds its construction. I make this argument by finding the traces of composition’s insistence on student writers’ clarity in the attacks on the writing of critical theorists.

The article examines the significance of lore in creative writing pedagogy discourse, the problem posed by the historical distinction between teaching craft and drawing out talent in workshops, and the role of social identity as it is rejected, theorized, or ignored in discussions on teaching creative writing. Taking into account students' subjectivity as also constituted by the dynamics of collective identities such as those suggested by the terms gender, race, ethnicity, and so forth, the essay offers examples of workshop strategies that encourage dialogic voicing.

This article examines the challenges of addressing pedagogically the international dialogue on queer sexual identities. It focuses on the essayist's experiences preparing an anthology proposal for a queer studies volume that embraces the field in its transnational complexity and richness, using the problems encountered in that process to discuss what is omitted in queer classrooms and scholarly practices today.

This article characterizes the first ten volume years of From the Classroom (FTC), one of three featured columns in Pedagogy. FTC articles, like other Pedagogy articles, showcase the work of scholars representing different ranks, subdisciplines, and institutional levels; unlike regular articles, FTC articles tend to be just 500 to 3,000 words. FTC authors, then, are challenged to raise a specific question or phenomenon by placing it momentarily within a larger theoretical, historical, and conceptual framework. Brockman groups most FTC articles into nine categories: Minding the Margins; Honoring Creative Nonfiction; Understanding Class, Culture, Gender, and Race; Mentoring Preservice Teachers; Incorporating Technology; Constructing Academic Arguments; Teaching Non-English Majors; Highlighting Effective Methods; and Showcasing Subdisciplines.

The essay discusses a thematic approach to teaching the first half of the American literature survey, focusing on race, whiteness, and class.

This piece continues the work of scholars in the field who look to uncover the ideological and textual practices of our dependence on the construct of “race” through racialized metaphors. Analyzing the rhetoric of race in College Composition and Communication and College English since 1990, I assert that our categorization of what “race” is has grown increasingly vague, despite its use as a commonplace from which to begin scholarly discussions. I argue that we must rearticulate our own racial ideologies in order to become more aware of how we use “race” persuasively for our own purposes.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

The fiftieth anniversary of the Strunk and White edition of The Elements of Style is an appropriate occasion for considering its enormous popularity. Especially interesting is the esteem for the book held by Theodore Kaczynszki, convicted as the Unabomber. His embrace of Strunk and White’s values points to a kind of violence and primitivist nostalgia in their ideology of style

Review of Your Average Nigga Performing Race Literacy and Masculinity by Vershawn Ashanti Young

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’ “and not just Plateau students’ rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This essay looks at the articulation of Black identity in personal and online contexts. Following Omi and Winant's argument that racial formation is a matter of racial representation within social structures, I examine the Internet as a "third place" for the online representation of Black identity by Blacks and by non-Blacks following two critical incidents in recent public culture: Kanye West's Hurricane Katrina speech and the Rev. Joseph Lowery's inauguration benediction. As a third place, the Internet encourages intimate discursive interaction, similar to the way Black barber shops and beauty salons allowed private spaces for identity discourses between Black men and women. The Internet also opens these formerly private spaces to non-Blacks, who contribute to the articulation of Black identity online.

Drawing on the work of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, the author examines how—in order to explain their positions in the academy—many students of color (including those who are both first-generation Chicano/a and first-generation college students) unfortunately rely on dominant color-blind ideology concerning freedom of choice and equal opportunity.

During the aftermath of recent disasters (both natural and human made), people have communicated by cobbling together available social software resources—relying on the capabilities of Internet tools such as blogs, news sites, and Flickr. Examining the use of social software taking place after the London bombings of July 7, 2005, I propose a method by which we can study users' literate appropriations to shape the development of more accommodating communication systems.

This essay reports on an effective approach to teaching both rhetorical skills and white racial awareness by using historical moments when racial definitions were asserted and defended, allowing students to see their constructed racial identities through a nonthreatening rhetorical lens.

The essay traces the genealogy and implications of the emergence of a discourse of ghosts, spectrality, hauntology, and phantoms within the rational machinery of the modern university. Moving across disciplines—including literature, sociology, physics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy—the article contends that the university is at a new moment of self-understanding.

A recent British national intelligence-based Assessment (2002) illustrates how one government agency communicated science to serve its policy goals. This article analyzes some of the values that drive science, public policy, and national intelligence, and traces how those values affected the Assessment writers' goals and communication strategies. Through close reading of the Assessment's foreword and first section, this study shows how the writers shaped scientific and technical information to satisfy their disciplines' values and to naturalize their “proper perspective” on the policy case. Further analysis of similar documents will extend current research on scientific rhetoric, multidisciplinary collaborative writing, and public communication.

Pedagogical and scholarly representations of collaborative writing and knowledge construction in technical communication have traditionally recognized consensus as the logical outcome of collaborative work, even as scholars and teachers have acknowledged the value of conflict and “dissensus” in the process of collaborative knowledge building. However, the conflict-laden work product of a Denver task force charged with recommending changes to the city police department's use-of-force policy and proposing a process for police oversight retains the collaborative group's dissensus and in doing so, illustrates an alternative method of collaborative reporting that challenges convention. Such an approach demonstrates a dissensus-based method of reporting that has the potential to open new rhetorical spaces for collaborative stakeholders by gainfully extending collaborative conversations and creating new opportunities for ethos development, thus offering scholars, teachers, and practitioners a way of reimagining the trajectory and outcome of collaborative work.

This article explores the emotioned dimensions of racist discourses at an all-white public high school. I argue that students’ racist assertions do not always or even often originate in students’ racist attitudes or belief. Instead, racist language functions metaphorically, connecting common racist ideas to nonracist feelings, values, beliefs, and associations that are learned in the routine practices and culture of school.

This essay analyzes the ways in which subtly but powerfully racist ideologies of language and literacy shaped the institutional development of one writing program for “high-risk” African American college students during the late 1960s and early 1970s. It further theorizes the value of such institutional analysis for counteracting racism within present-day writing programs.

To teach students how to write for the workplace and other professional contexts, technical writing teachers often assign writing tasks that reflect real-life communication contexts, a teaching approach that is grounded in the field's contextualized understanding of genre. This article argues to fully embrace contextualized literacy and better teach workplace writing, technical writing teachers also need to contextualize how they assess student writing. To this end, this article examines some of workplaces' best assessment practices and critically integrates them into an introductory technical writing classroom through a method called student-centered assessment instruments. This method engages students, as workplaces engage employees, in the assessment process to identify local requirements for writing tasks. Aligned with theory and practice, this method is not only an effective classroom assessment method, but becomes an integrated part of students' genre-learning process within and beyond the classroom.

Through interviews and courtroom observations in a case study done in collaboration with a community partner in two judicial districts in Minnesota, the authors extend the scholarly conversation about critical, activist research in business and technical communication and make pedagogical suggestions by studying two groups who contribute to the discourse about victim rights: judges who accept plea negotiations and make sentencing decisions and advocates who help victims contribute, through victim impact statements, their reactions as crime victims and their requests for certain punishments and conditions for the crime perpetrators. The authors identify the technologies of power used by each group to assert their disciplinary authority and trace how these assertions play out in the courtroom. They conclude that by capitalizing on the normative structures of impact statements, advocates may actually give victims more power. Such activist research might benefit research participants and enhance research methods.

Internal institutional genres can become fertile terrain for public policy debate when what Birkland called “focusing events” or ruptures extricate these genres from their contexts and subject them to public scrutiny. This study examines consequences for the local instantiation of the police use-of-force policy genre in the wake of a controversial shooting in Denver, Colorado, and traces ways in which the formation of a multi-interest task force charged with revising the police department's policy altered the policy's conventional activity system. In doing so, the public participated in remapping the local policy instantiation's relationship to the use-of-force policy genre and the routinized social action it performed.

This essay argues that a pedagogy of “dialogue across differences” should be infused into the core curriculum and function as the link joining multicultural education to service learning. Close examination of student reflections and journal writings reveals how such dialogue can enhance learning, strengthen community partnerships, and enrich antiracist pedagogy.

In this article, the authors analyze early technical documents produced by the New Mexico Bureau of Immigration (NMBI), including “The Legend of Montezuma” and “Illustrated New Mexico.” The purpose of these documents are clear: to increase the number of white Americans to create a clear white majority when New Mexico became a state and thereby prevent the Mexicans from gaining power. In analyzing these documents, the authors use theoretical frameworks from studies in the history of business and technical writing (SHBTW) and critical whiteness theory to show how early textual representations of New Mexico reproduce racist constructions of native New Mexicans and represent whiteness as the norm.

This article shows how digital archives can enrich the humanities classroom; I trace the collaborative creation of “I Remain”: A Digital Archive of Letters, Manuscripts, and Ephemera at Lehigh University, demonstrating how the archive engaged students' different learning styles, causing them to interrogate the way history is represented and processed.

Research Article| January 01 2008 Teaching Native American Literature: Inviting Students to See the World Through Indigenous Lenses Carol Zitzer-Comfort Carol Zitzer-Comfort Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2008) 8 (1): 160–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-031 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Carol Zitzer-Comfort; Teaching Native American Literature: Inviting Students to See the World Through Indigenous Lenses. Pedagogy 1 January 2008; 8 (1): 160–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2007-031 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Duke University Press2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

“Voice” is no longer a hot term in composition journals. Yet it continues to deserve scholarly attention, in part because it is still often referred to in classrooms and seems applicable to new forms of electronic communication. At the same time, we should avoid taking an either/or stand on the usefulness of “voice” as a term. This is a case where we should embrace contraries, by advocating concepts of “voice” on certain occasions and resisting the term on others.

The use of visual representation to learn science can be traced to Louis Agassiz, Harvard Professor of Zoology, in the mid-19th century. In Agassiz's approach, students were to study nature through carefully observing, drawing and then thinking about what the observations might add up to. However, implementation of Agassiz's student-centered approach has struggled with the conflict between science as a form of developing “mental discipline” in which mastery of scientific facts is the goal and science learning as a socially situated activity with an emphasis on the process of learning, not merely its products. Present-day attempts to have students draw to learn science often succumb to these same conflicts, limiting their full realization.

Reviewed are Toward a Civil Discourse: Rhetoric and Fundamentalism, by Sharon Crowley, and Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness, by Krista Ratcliffe.

Using Frederic Jameson, we outline concentric circles of the political unconscious structuring debates about academic freedom at the national and state levels. By drawing parallels between the World War I university and the contemporary university, we suggest that such circles function historically, always bearing traces of an earlier time. To illustrate implications at one local site, we discuss the “Anti-American Studies” fliers repeatedly posted in our department and end by emphasizing the importance of using critical writing pedagogies to encourage opportunities for dissenting rhetorics.

This article traces a decline in CCCC sessions on language along with a shift toward more reductive definitions. It analyzes early CCCC treatment of language issues, the Students’ Right document, changes in demographics and linguistics, and shifts within English departments that have left us overdue for professional reexamination of our role as teachers of language.

Despite the general trend to embrace interdisciplinarity in post-secondary education, we remain remarkably unclear concerning what we mean by interdisciplinarity and how it is achieved. Reporting on research conducted in a team-taught interdisciplinary course, I propose a new way of conceptualizing interdisciplinary connections, grounded in Bakhtinian theories of language and cognition. I offer a three-part schema for identifying the discursive disciplinary resources individuals use to make interdisciplinary connections and identify some broad characteristics of writing assignments that appear to invite students to make connections among disciplines. Finally, I argue that reflection on certain types of interdisciplinary connections can be an extremely powerful resource for interdisciplinary as well as disciplinary thinking and learning.

On various campuses, including the author’s, “safe space” stickers are used to designate offices supposedly free of homophobia. The author critiques this practice, pointing out that it still privileges the white heterosexual subject while also obscuring connections between sexuality, gender, and race.

“Crash” does better than the Sidney Poitier looks at racism, but it still engages in stereotyping. In fact, the film becomes interesting if you see it as a study of stereotypes as a maze you can’t walk out of.

Teaching films like Crash gives teachers and researchers the opportunity to discuss films as social texts that engage students in critical thinking and self-reflection. This particular movie is especially effective in its use of a pulp-fiction visual rhetoric. Unfortunately, the film equates and replaces the term “race” with the term “prejudice” and then argues that everyone is a little prejudiced. The result is a missed opportunity to investigate whiteness as a powerful social construction.

“Crash” has value insofar as it dives into the muck and dirt of racial and ethnic tensions. But the film de-voices African Americans in the face of white privilege, and it papers over significant social tensions by ultimately emphasizing love and redemption.

“Crash” is a means for classes to explore the complicated interpersonal, social, and political legacies of the civil rights movement. Nevertheless, it is important for students to examine how, on the subject of racism, the movie blurs the distinction between individual moral choices and larger institutional practices.

“Crash” is the worst kind of representation of what passes for multiculturalism today. A class will gain most from studying its construction of whiteness, including whiteness’s inextricable connections to “otherness(es).”

“Crash”’s most disturbing lesson seems to be that everybody—even a mean, sadistic cop—has a good side and reasons for his or her racist acts, for which they can be forgiven. This emphasis is a failure to analyze the heterogeneity of experiences among members of various races and ethnicities. Nevertheless, the film is worth teaching, especially if a class compares it with a film such as Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke. Lee’s documentary on Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans is a model for reconstructing with students a history and system of beliefs and practices, so that they deepen their analysis of any cultural phenomenon, artifact, or event.

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in the classroom is not in our textbooks or critical discourse but in what many of our students already consume, the ghettocentricity expressed in the music of rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Eminem.

This essay traces two teachers’ experiences crossing spaces in a combined literature and history seminar where students explore American culture and diversity and engage in service learning. The model has evolved from paired classes with collaborative activities to a student-centered environment promoting active learning. This article offers practical advice for establishing cross-curricular pairings and suggests course content that promotes learning across curricula.

Part I of this essay traces the evolution of my understanding of the exploratory essay as a discursive form and a genre for teaching writing. Part II explores my motivations for advocating a polarized definition of the essay and then concludes with a call to expand the purview of composition beyond first-year courses.