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4679 articlesMarch 2022
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Abstract
This article describes an experimental, interdisciplinary course on the immune system that was co-taught by a humanist and a scientist, and that (inadvertently) coincided with the start of the COVID-19 crisis in the United States. We propose the term “codisciplinary code-switching” to capture the pedagogical strategy we developed in designing the course and adapting it over the semester to grapple with current events. We focus, in particular, on how this approach helped our students navigate the entanglement of science and society in the shifting, uncertain world of the pandemic. Although these were peculiar circumstances, codisciplinary code-switching has broader possibilities and points to alternative ways of integrating the humanities and sciences in medical education that respects both disciplines as rigorous tools for reading bodies, texts, and contexts.
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“The Patient Decision Aid as a Pedagogical Tool: Exigencies between RHM and the Health Professions” ↗
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This past decade, the healthcare industry has undergone a transformation with where, how, and why writing happens. For example, what the health and medical professions conceive of as “documentation” or “charting” is writing, even though practitioners call it by another name. Additionally, most writing in healthcare settings is now also multimodal, incorporating textual, digital, visual, and aural content. This essay focuses on the patient decision aid as pedagogical tool that embraces the technological and multimodal changes in health and medicine. Patient decision aids can be understood as a multimodal tool guiding shared decision-making practices. As a genre, the decision aid prompts students to engage in a series of writing modalities – visuals, narrative, texts – as well as the application of user experience and design. Finally, the decision aid as an assignment offers explicit connections between humanities-based students and broader healthcare industries.
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In this article, I analyze the trigger warning, a pedagogical practice often framed as student-responsive and trauma-informed, to elucidate the ways in which trauma-informed pedagogy functions rhetorically to pathologize and individualize experiences of racism and other societal inequities that cause collective trauma. I draw upon original interview data and rhetorical analysis through a systems framework to explore how reductive pedagogical practices developed within the confines of a white, western notion of trauma may subsequently perpetuate students’ marginalization. Finally, I highlight the potential for more comprehensive, inclusive pedagogies to address student trauma, acknowledge societal conditions that impact individual experiences, and shift popular discourse that pathologizes trauma.
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Complex health and medical contexts demand not only responsive, mutable research but also responsive, flexible pedagogies. Arguing for a shift from the dominant conception of pedagogy as a pre-planned, linear scaffold, this article proposes instead an approach—called Lego™ Learning—that re-conceptualizes instructional content as self-standing, short-term units or modules, much like Lego™ bricks. Because such modules have self-contained learning objectives and corresponding tasks, they can be shifted within a course or across courses as-needed. This approach allows rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM) instructional content to respond to, and prepare students for, the ever-changing exigencies and contexts of RHM-related work. It also encourages collaborations across classes, institutions, and other contexts. In this entry, we frame our discussion around four learning outcomes and teaching practices that can be facilitated through this approach, and we provide an extended example of an ongoing cross-institutional partnership that employs Lego™ Learning.
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Does Every Lesbian Have a Superpower that Makes Them Out and Not Dead by Suicide?: A Poetics against Standardizing Literacy Narratives ↗
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This essay, in three parts plus a conclusion, is a performance of US third world feminist praxis for our contemporary moment. Part one is a literacy narrative that resists generic convention. Part two uses conventions of academic writing to explore the damage that is happening to the field of composition and rhetoric due to the academic erasure of US third world feminist praxis. Part three is a gift. The conclusion is a manifesto to end the economic exploitation of students and teachers in our first-year writing classrooms. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole.
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Abstract
<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Technical and professional communication (TPC) audiences are increasingly international and intercultural. Some of these audiences, such as US asylum applicants, may be vulnerable and suffering trauma following violations of their human rights and dignity. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> TPC has the potential to either intensify the oppression previously experienced by these audiences or empower them to act for their own well-being. Therefore, technical and professional instructors and practitioners have an ethical responsibility to communicate with these audiences through methods that are socially just. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. Are the language and design strategies in the I-589 application and instructions appropriate for their audience from an HCD perspective? 2. If not, how can the documents be revised to correct any failings in the pursuit of social justice? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> This article uses adapted plain language guidelines combined with human-centered design guiding principles to perform a qualitative document analysis and explore revisions of the application and instructions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Analysis shows that the I-589 documents are not appropriate for their audience and proposes revisions to correct major issues. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> The findings of this analysis demonstrate a need for continued integration of plain language and human-centered design in practice and pedagogy, research surrounding the ways in which technical and professional communicators should balance the needs of vulnerable audiences with the interests of powerful stakeholders, and meaningful collaboration between them and government institutions.
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Equipping Technical Communicators for Social Justice Work: Theories, Methodologies, and Pedagogies: Rebecca Walton and Godwin Y. Agboka: [Book Review] ↗
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This book is appropriate for technical and professional communication (TPC) teachers, scholars, and practitioners who wish to enact social justice in their work. Although our field has welcomed and cultivated the social justice turn enthusiastically for the last few decades, the editors acknowledge that “there is a dearth of praxis-based resources.” To address this need, this book offers “action-focused resources and tools,” which are intended to support members of the profession “in conducting research or pursuing both local and international projects in socially just ways.” To meet the needs of TPC scholars, practitioners, and teachers, the editors organized this book into four sections, consisting of three chapters each. Each chapter presents one social justice tool and a case to illustrate the effective use of that tool. Besides, each chapter presents tips, cautions, limitations, and future directions to inform the use of the resource. This book is extremely helpful because it inspires us to come up with more praxis-based resources, prioritize and learn from marginalized populations, and focus on embodied experiences and knowledges in our TPC practice, research, and pedagogy. Throughout the book, the authors remind us to be mindful of our own positionality, privilege, and power while doing TPC research, practice, and teaching and to empower the disempowered. This book can be an invaluable addition to courses in TPC research methods, field methods, Indigenous rhetorics, or pedagogy.
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Fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Technical and Professional Communication Service Course ↗
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<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. How can we address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in our business and technical communication service courses? 2. How can we help prepare future engineers, technical professionals, and managers to create more inclusive and equitable workplaces?. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> The social justice literature in technical and professional communication (TPC) has focused on a variety of areas, including research methods, user experience, and expanding what can and should be identified as TPC. Emerging research has turned toward pedagogy as an interventional strategy for educating on issues of racial justice and inclusion. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> This teaching case presents the transformation of a TPC service course to specifically address issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In response to the racial injustice documented during the summer of 2020, I developed a sequence of assignments that asked students to research and apply DEI initiatives. The assignment was to research and write a short report on DEI approaches in the workplace, followed by a larger team-based project in which students worked with the local city council to enact possible DEI initiatives in the broader community. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods:</b> The case was studied through the author's experience and the analysis of data obtained from surveys with class participants and other instructors who incorporated the assignments in their courses. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Students were able to learn more about how to address bias, inclusion, and social justice in a business environment, but also demonstrated some implicit resistance to direct attention to racial injustice. The case study humanizes and brings home issues of diversity, equity, and inclusion for students who might otherwise consider them only in the abstract.
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Abstract
Background: There is a lack of conceptual framework for how to develop more inclusive practices in the subfield of technical editing. Literature review: Some researchers have posited theories, like feminism and rhetorical theory, as ways to conceptualize technical editing. This piece extends that literature into social justice using Walton, Moore, and Jones's 3Ps heuristic of positionality, privilege, and power. Research questions: 1. What ideologies are circulating in technical editing pedagogy? 2. How might technical editing pedagogy become more inclusive? Methodology: We conduct a rhetorical analysis of the major academic works in technical editing, including books, textbooks, and academic articles, and compare them to an established framework for social justice in technical and professional communication—the 3Ps heuristic. Results: We find that there are strong instrumentalist underpinnings to much of the current literature in technical editing, making the goal of technical editing linguistic conformity to American Standard English (ASE) at the expense of linguistic diversity. We offer a conceptual framework, the inclusive editing paradigm (IEP), to challenge that linguistic hegemony in technical editing and provide technical editors with theoretical and practical foundations for developing a more inclusive editing practice. Conclusions: More work needs to be done to shift technical editing in a more inclusive direction. We call on practitioners, academics, and users to contribute to this dialogue.
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Linguistic Justice on Campus: Pedagogy and Advocacy for Multilingual Students: Brooke R. Schreiber, Eunjeong Lee, Jennifer T. Johnson, and Norah Fahim: [Book Review] ↗
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This book offers college writing instructors strategies for creating linguistically diverse classrooms. Building on theories of language that multilingualism is a student’s strength not a deficit, the book will help faculty, staff, and graduate teaching assistants design lessons, courses, professional development opportunities, and writing center programs that support multilingual students and challenge notions that success on US campuses requires strict adherence to communicating in Standard Academic English (SAE). Through a highly engaging series of studies, the authors in this collection provide evidence that their approaches strengthen their writing pedagogies and empower their students. Although this book is primarily addressed to writing instructors, it may have some utility for professional communicators in industry. The rhetorical listening framework outlined in Chapter 10 would support in-house training on communicating across differences. The editors note that their work on the collection occurred during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, another relevant context emerged that is not addressed in the book explicitly. Following now-revoked Executive Order 13950, more than half of US states have enacted or are debating laws that would restrict classroom and professional development training around issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity. These laws may affect state-funded universities in ways that limit educators’ ability to enact the pedagogies described in this collection.
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Abstract
In MemoriamJerry Murphy (1923–2021) Don Paul Abbott James Jerome “Jerry” Murphy died on Christmas Eve, 2021, at the age of 98. His death marked the end of a very long and a very productive life. As readers of this journal will know, Jerry exercised a remarkable influence over the history of rhetoric and those of us who study it. This influence was a result, in part, of an impressive record of publication extending over a remarkable 60 years. Jerry wrote about Classical, Medieval, and Renaissance rhetoric, composition and argumentation, pedagogy and bibliography, and more. Fortunately for us, his scholarly works remain readily available to us in libraries and data bases. His scholarship speaks for itself and so it is Jerry himself that I want to speak about. I first met Jerry sometime in the late 1970s. It was a meeting that would change the trajectory of my professional life. He had taken an interest in my work, encouraging me to pursue certain avenues and to forgo others. Fortunately, I had the good sense to follow his advice. I soon learned that I was by no means unique—Jerry regularly mentored young scholars in the United States and beyond. And his support often meant more than simply encouragement. Those whose work he found promising would frequently be included in his various projects: anthologies, conferences, symposia and more. For Jerry was an impresario, an organizer, and a promoter of rhetorical scholarship in ways that benefitted many individual careers and the development of the field itself. He was, after all, one of the six founders of this society and the founding editor of this journal. And, when he perceived there [End Page 109] were too few publishers of historical scholarship, Jerry simply founded his own publishing house, Hermagoras Press. My association with Jerry became closer when, because of him, I was appointed to the faculty of the University of California, Davis in 1982. I remain grateful for his confidence in me to this day. My initial appointment was in the Department of Rhetoric which, of course, Jerry had established in 1965. Having him as a colleague was rather like having my own personal consultant. I would regularly go to Jerry with questions about the project I was working on at the time and he would invariably know the answer or know how to find the answer. Thus, I was distressed when he decided to retire in 1991. But I needn’t have worried because, while he may have left the University, he didn’t really retire. Indeed, after his official retirement he continued to be remarkably productive, writing or editing six books. Happily, he remained alert and intellectually engaged until just a few days before his death. His final publication, The Oxford Handbook of Quintilian, which he co-edited, arrived exactly one week before he died. He feared he would die before he saw this, his last publication, and so he was delighted to be able to hold it in his hands. Jerry was, then, in every sense, a gentleman and a scholar. In particular, he was a profoundly kind man who was extremely reluctant to express a negative opinion about anyone. His inherent kindness was apparent in the many scholars he aided and encouraged, but it was also evident in his extensive and varied efforts as an editor. He was careful to avoid harsh criticism of others’ material even when he regarded it as deficient. Rather, he always attempted to bring out the best in the work of others by gentle prodding and careful questioning. As a result of Jerry’s fundamental humanity, the number of people around the world who regarded him as a friend and advisor is really quite extraordinary. Jerry Murphy was my friend and colleague for over 40 years. And while I still find it difficult to believe he is gone, I take solace in remembering that he led a very long—and very good—life. [End Page 110] Don Paul Abbott University of California, Davis Copyright © 2022 International Society for the History of Rhetoric
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Digital humanities and technical communication pedagogy: a case and a course for cross-program opportunities ↗
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Technical communication instructors, especially those with expertise in visual rhetoric, information design, or multimedia writing are well-suited to teach an introductory Digital Humanities (DH) course. Offering a DH course provides an opportunity to reach extrafield audiences and work with students from a variety of humanities disciplines who may not have the option of taking such a course in their home department. The article advocates for a DH course that offers a methods-driven pedagogy that engages students with active learning by requiring them to research, dissect, and report on existing DH projects, as well as work with existing datasets and methods from prior student research projects or existing DH tools. The sample student project reviewed here uses the data visualization software ImagePlot, and discussion includes how the student used the tool to examine changes in brightness, hue, and color saturation, as well as calculate the total number of distinct shapes from 397 comic book covers. Ultimately, the students are tasked with developing a research question and moving to an articulated methods-driven approach for exploring the question. The student project along with the tools and sample datasets available with them are treated as a module that may be included in an introductory DH course syllabus or training session.
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What does it mean for BIPOC, especially in the academy where teaching holds profound cultural and economic value, when past racism is repackaged as future pedagogical opportunity? How does white time weaponize pedagogy to “dictate the pace” (Cooper) of racial progress? The above examples demonstrate how the white, neoliberal academy’s deep investment in teaching/learning can naturalize ongoing modes of embodied and epistemic racial violence. Indeed, the continued retroactive acknowledgment of racial violence in the institution and its renarration as teaching/learning opportunity often do not signify “progress” as much as they render the real violences faced by BIPOC in the academy and otherwise as abstract “objects” for future white dissection. Furthermore, these rhetorics also obscure the ongoing pedagogies of BIPOC in the academy—both in the classroom and “backchannels”—that have long refused the projects of white time and space.
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This article considers disabled students’ experiences with collaborative writing and offers strategies to improve the accessibility of collaborative writing assignments.
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This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.
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Abstract
John Oddo's book argues that propaganda should be defined as an intertextual process. According to this perspective, a message succeeds as propaganda when people recontextualize it over and over, keeping that message alive across many texts. Of course, some messages achieve greater success as propaganda than others, and Oddo is interested in the linguistic and contextual factors that make certain messages “comparatively more worthy of recontextualization” (25). His focus is American propaganda justifying the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. In fact, Oddo's case studies explore a wide range of wartime materials, including print and television news, presidential speeches and political advertisements, and tweets by ordinary people. As such, his book will interest scholars studying war rhetoric as well as those interested in mediated discourse, multimodal analysis, political discourse, and circulation. In addition, this book illustrates how the inclusion of discourse analytic methods can work productively for rhetoricians interested in public address.In the introduction, Oddo states four goals. He seeks, first, to build upon insights of critical discourse analysis to develop an explicit definition of propaganda; second, to suggest a set of intertextual methods for studying propaganda; third, to draw attention to both contextual and sociolinguistic factors that give rise to propaganda; and finally, to challenge readers to consider the consequences of propaganda in a democratic society. Oddo argues that “one essential characteristic of successful propaganda is that it propagates” (3). In fact, his book's premise is that those who study propaganda should examine not only the content of messages but also the “rhetorical and sociolinguistic details” that reveal “how those messages spread, how they become mobile, durable, and repeatable” with the help of an institutional and ideological infrastructure (6, 3).Part 1 defines propaganda as an “intertextual process” in which manipulative and antidemocratic discourse is “recontextualized on a mass scale” (37). First, Oddo argues that an intertextual perspective can better account for both deliberate top–down propaganda and unwitting propaganda among ordinary people, preserving the notion that propaganda is harmful without presupposing that every propagandist seeks a selfish advantage. Building on theories of intertextuality, this section calls attention to the following question: “how do propagandists create discourse, whether strategically or unintentionally, that is likely to be recontextualized?” (22). Next, Oddo suggests that another key feature of propaganda is manipulation, which often involves positive self-representation and negative other-representation, emotional coercion, misleading representations and arguments, and manipulation of dialogic space (27–31). Finally, Oddo argues that propaganda should be defined by its antidemocratic societal consequences rather than intentions of the communicator. In other words, “it is propaganda if it consolidates the power of one group while harming the interests of subordinate groups” (34).Part 2 presents the first case study as it discusses how political propagandists create messages that are likely to be recontextualized by reporters. Oddo studies the iterations of the “incubator story,” a fabricated story in 1990 that accused Iraqi forces of removing Kuwaiti infants from their incubators and leaving them to die. He shows how the incubator story was staged as a credible narrative of personal experience. Moreover, Oddo shows that the narrative “could only succeed with the aid of journalists,” whose subsequent recontextualizations of the incubator story rendered it dominant and influential (71). Through a close analysis of linguistic discourse, multimodal semiotics, and intertextual relations between a public event and subsequent news reports, part 2 elucidates how powerful elites can induce a favorable uptake of their messages, inducing others to circulate them.Part 3 presents Oddo's second case study, which examines how TV news analysts before the 2003 Iraq War were presented as neutral experts, even though they held vested interests. Oddo argues that because news analysts are simultaneously journalists and political insiders, they, on the one hand, provide viewers with rare perspectives and penetrating insights, but, on the other, may circulate propaganda they hear from political sources (106). Oddo suggests that political propagandists exploit the dual identity of news analysts, offering them symbolic or material rewards and effectively compensating those who repeat their desired meanings (103). Meanwhile, news networks render the analysts credible and disinterested, highlighting their authority through advertising, on-screen titles, spoken introductions, background scenery, and communicative roles. Part 3 shows how this constructed authority together with incentivization from deliberate propagandists constitutes a form of manipulation, one that ultimately suppresses alternative views and enables mass recontextualization of propaganda.Part 4 presents Oddo's third case study and examines widespread publicity of the slogan “Support Our Troops.” Oddo argues that “Support Our Troops” has gained momentum for two reasons. First, it has “formal properties that make it more amenable to repetition—and, thus, more capable of traveling” (156). Second, it is surrounded by historical and cultural significance, reflecting larger wartime narratives in which the reasons for war are averted and dissent against war is demonized (156). Regarding the slogan's formal properties, Oddo shows how phonological, lexico-grammatical, and semantic factors contribute to the slogan's memorability, repeatability, and positive identification with a candidate, policy, or brand (156). Regarding cultural factors, Oddo examines the slogan as having ideographical functions by tracing its history in the Vietnam era and its continued use in both vertical campaigns (i.e., from the leaders at the top to the masses) and horizontal ones (i.e., spread among ordinary people on the same level). Oddo's discussion of the slogan sheds light on our understanding of similar slogans by encouraging attention to “the artful design of the slogan itself” and “the web of cultural meaning that shapes how people use and understand it” (175). Part 4 might interest scholars studying ideographs because it illustrates how a micro-analysis can facilitate analyses of phrases with ideological functions.Overall, the book has valuable pedagogical and theoretical implications. It provides an up-to-date discussion of propaganda studies. Its case studies are relatively independent and can be assigned separately. The author does not assume prior knowledge in his subject matter or methodology, which contributes to its accessibility. For these reasons, it can be used in graduate seminars and advanced undergraduate classrooms concerning rhetorical analysis of political discourse or the combination of rhetorical and critical discourse analysis methods. For rhetoric scholars, this book contributes an intertextual perspective to their tool kit. This perspective can be applied beyond the specific cases of this book, calling attention to the transfer and transformation of messages across texts both in domestic contexts and international ones where power dynamics may have different manifestations. Overall, this book exemplifies and furthers Oddo's endeavors to show how rhetorical scholars can draw on sociolinguistics, multimodality, and micro-intertextual comparison to conduct granular analyses of political discourse that are critical of the political status quo and grounded in textual evidence.
February 2022
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Abstract
This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.
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This article details a flood-focused, community-based writing course that was derailed by the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic crisis to argue that despite major challenges, the course helped to prepare students to face some of the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, offered them a space through weekly reflection responses to process their isolation, and positioned them to more capaciously empathize with community members who had lived through the trauma of persistent, catastrophic flooding. The stunted community-based learning course still allowed students to contribute to the work of the community partner and offered unexpected chances for students to process their own trauma. By the end of the semester, students emphasized the importance of community-based learning for cultivating the kinds of empathy and critical civic responsibility they felt would become necessities in a COVID-19 and post-COVID-19 world. We detail some of the important lessons of adapting the course to the COVID-19 crisis and suggest pathways for other faculty and community partners to build flexible, long-term collaborations that can not only ride out traumatic interruptions but actually provide students with the equipment they need to navigate these challenges.
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Abstract
The COVID-19 outbreak impacted regional Australia in ways yet to be measured; for many of the country’s regions, the pandemic immediately followed natural disasters including droughts and bushfires. In such affected regional communities, activities such as writing offer opportunities for pleasure, engagement, and connectedness. Yet the restrictions developed in response to COVID-19, such as the need to move traditionally face-to-face learning online, significantly disrupted the usual way of undertaking these activities. For the New England Writers Centre (NEWC), a productive community writing organisation operating in the North Western part of the state of New South Wales in Australia. These restrictions required both quick responses and more long-term consideration of the ways writing instruction is delivered to the community it serves. This profile provides an example of a community-based writing project, an online course in writing historical fiction, developed in response to COVID-19 restrictions. The profile offers three distinct perspectives on the course: Chair of the New England Writers Centre, Sophie Masson, gives an overview of the Centre’s role in the region, the effect of the pivot to online teaching on the centre’s programming, and the initial learnings that impact the centre; online workshop facilitator Ariella Van Luyn provides an overview of the pedagogical design principles and learning objectives underpinning the design of the course and her observations of participant engagement; and NEWC program director and workshop participant Lynette Aspey reflects on her experiences learning online. Together, these three perspectives offer initial findings about online community writing instruction useful to other regional writing organisations.
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Pedagogical Openings and the Gift(s) of Teaching: Announcing the 2020–2021 Alan C. Purves Award Honorees: The 2021 Alan C. Purves Award Committee ↗
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Preview this article: Pedagogical Openings and the Gift(s) of Teaching: Announcing the 2020–2021 Alan C. Purves Award Honorees: The 2021 Alan C. Purves Award Committee, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/rte/56/3/researchintheteachingofenglish31641-1.gif
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“Our Community Is Filled with Experts”: The Critical Intergenerational Literacies of Latinx Immigrants that Facilitate a Communal Pedagogy of Resistance ↗
Abstract
Anti-immigrant legal violence and grassroots organizing against it have fundamentally shaped the lives of immigrant children and families in the US. This article inquires into the intergenerational literacy, teaching, and learning practices of Latinx immigrants’ political mobilization, drawing on qualitative data from a larger yearlong practitioner inquiry study that involved observant participant field notes, artifacts, photographs, and in-depth interviews with 11 undocumented and documented Latinx immigrants with whom I, a Latina immigrant, shared an organizing practice. Through analysis grounded on literacy as critical sociocultural practice, intergenerational learning, and Chicana/Latina education in everyday life, I argue that Latinx immigrants mobilize against oppression through critical literacy practices that facilitate what I theorize as a “communal pedagogy of resistance.” This is an intergenerational pedagogy enacted in communal spaces that grows from Latinx immigrants’facultad,meaning the critical consciousness and epistemic privilege that results from living in the liminal space of theborderlands. This pedagogy views our community’s cultural, literacy, and linguistic practices as strengths and tools of resilience and resistance, and expands our definition of family and our sense of interdependence to fellow oppressed communities, teaching us to enact inclusive justice. A key takeaway is that Latinx immigrant students’ educational and literacy practices cannot be separated from those of their wider family/community, nor from their intergenerational sociopolitical struggles and expertise. Another is that intergenerational literacy and learning are bi/multidirectional. Implications include the need for educational institutions to learn from this pedagogy, and for additional literacy research into communal sociopolitical mobilization.
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A rationale for integrating writing into secondary content area classrooms: Perspectives from teachers who experience the benefits of integrating writing frequently ↗
Abstract
Teachers navigate ongoing accountability pressures that target writing in each content area, yet little is understood about their experiences with or their rationales for integrating writing into content area lessons. While previous research describes writing in U.S. secondary classrooms and explains barriers to writing integration, this study investigates teacher decision making to determine why teachers in various content areas are integrating writing. Using a multicase study design, we explored teacher reflections to discern the reasons why teachers chose to integrate writing frequently. Four teachers, one from each primary content area (mathematics, English language arts, science, social studies), reflected on their writing integration over one quarter. Findings revealed that teachers who integrate writing frequently value the substantial benefits of regular writing for their students. Teachers saw that frequent writing led to students both producing written products more independently and deepening their disciplinary understandings. Teachers also saw benefits to their own pedagogy; specifically, they better understood students’ learning processes and planned more attentively. This research suggests that committing to frequent writing integration can (1) enhance students’ writing and disciplinary knowledge, and (2) enrich teacher knowledge related to supporting students’ writing practices and using writing as a tool for learning in the content areas. Our findings also highlight the complex relationship between teacher beliefs and teacher practice. By looking at the instructional decision making of teachers who integrate writing frequently, we offer guidance on how pre- and in-service teachers might use reflection in and on action to develop a commitment to writing instruction.
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Understanding writing curriculum innovation in Grades 7-12 in Chile: Linking teachers´ beliefs and practices ↗
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This study aimed to provide evidence for continuing the innovation of writing instruction in Grades 7-12 of Chilean public schools. Teachers' beliefs influence their curricular interpretations; therefore, these beliefs play a key role when aiming for educational innovation. Hence, we investigated the relations between Language teachers’ current practices of implementing the national curriculum and their beliefs regarding five paradigms of Language instruction. While beliefs on writing instruction are possibly embedded in beliefs on the broader topic of Language instruction, we took this broader category into account. We obtained 182 completed surveys from teachers of all Chilean regions (response rate: 47%). Teachers reported a rather strong adherence to four curricular paradigms both in terms of practices and beliefs, while the fifth, the communicative paradigm, demonstrated a low level of adherence. The strength of the implementation of teachers´ practices of writing instruction seemed to be related to teachers´ beliefs, about writing and more general aspects as well. The results suggest that policymakers must focus public efforts on reinforcing teachers’ beliefs regarding writing instruction, especially regarding communicative writing and on the connections between the five paradigms. In addition, we recommend that public efforts prioritize improvements in Grades 9-12 over Grades 7-8.
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Writer/reader visibility in young learner writing: A study of the TRAWL corpus of lower secondary school texts ↗
Abstract
A pervasive finding in learner corpus research is that advanced EFL learners tend to overuse interactional features of writer/reader visibility (WRV) in their written academic texts, including first- and second-person pronouns, I think, modal adverbs, modal auxiliaries, and questions. Very little research has been done on younger learners, however. The present study is a mixed-methods investigation of WRV features in argumentative and expository genres in the TRAWL longitudinal corpus of learner texts from Norwegian lower secondary school. Comparisons are made with more advanced levels (undergraduate university students) using the Norwegian component of ICLE, ICLE-NO. The results show that the TRAWL pupils use many WRV features in their writing, first-person reference being especially frequent (with I dominating). Compared to the advanced learners in ICLE-NO, the TRAWL learners overuse some, but not all, features. One explanation for the high frequency of WRV features in TRAWL is that the prompts – both argumentative and expository – often request a personal style. Some expository prompts and texts are more impersonal, but overall there is little distinction between the genres. The pedagogical implications are that instructors need to be more specific about genre requirements, and create more obligatory prompts that do not request a personal style.
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Performing Data and Visualizing Difference: Developing a Performative Rhetoric of Infographics for the Writing Classroom ↗
Abstract
To equip students to analyze and create infographics with a rich understanding of rhetorical dynamics and sensitivity to how difference and equity issues are communicated, I propose a pedagogical approach to infographics drawn from Karen Barad’s concept of performative enactment and describe its implementation in a required writing classroom.
January 2022
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Abstract
This research assignment asks preservice undergraduate secondary education teachers in an applied grammar class to engage in a two-prong research project: a multimodal, interactive “poster” and a research paper that together explore the pedagogical possibilities for engaging with World Englishes in middle and high school classrooms. The prompt invites students to consider social justice and equity at the level of language. The assignment draws on both antiracist and queer pedagogies and examines the relationships among language, power, and resistance to linguistic oppression in the classroom. As students work through the assignment, they enact real-life stories of historical and contemporary figures from around the world who were forced to speak a colonizer’s language and resisted linguistic oppression. They then read articles focusing on Black Language, Indigenous languages, and World Englishes, which serve as touchstones for their own research. Although designed for a grammar pedagogy class, the assignment can be modified for multiple disciplines; at the end of the article, I provide several examples of how teachers outside English might modify the assignment for their own disciplinary contexts.
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Abstract
This makerspace-based assignment is designed to cultivate students' literate agency and their awareness of semiotic resources in two-year college contexts. The maker movement in education has been predominantly studied in business, science, and engineering fields and in four-year colleges. Networking translingual and transmodal scholarship and the maker movement, I devised a makerspace-based writing assignment as a scaffolding project to support students' analysis on their digital practices in the corequisite developmental writing courses and the composition courses in a community college. Although students' responses varied, I argue that this assignment can benefit two-year college students and offer social implications in multiple ways: it can promote students' access to the emerging trend of the maker movement and DIY fabrication culture; it encourages students to employ their multilingual and multimodal resources with an awareness of their changing literate ecologies; it can help them build their literate agency and transfer the maker mindset to other rhetorical environments such as their workplace or discipline-specific writing situations.
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Brokering Community-Engaged Writing Pedagogies: Instructors Imagining and Negotiating Race, Space, and Literacy ↗
Abstract
Although much scholarship on community-engaged pedagogies attends to student negotiations of difference, little attention has been paid to how instructors navigate difference, particularly racial difference, across classroom and community spaces. In this article, we use the concept of brokering to examine how seven different instructors of a community-engaged writing course titled “The Literacy Narratives of Black Columbus” imagined the racialized spaces of the course and facilitated engagement between students and community members in those spaces. Drawing primarily on instructor interviews, we present three approaches instructors took to imagine and facilitate student and community engagement across racialized and spatialized boundaries. We found that instructor positionality influenced how they imagined and negotiated the roles of brokers who could facilitate connections between students and community members as well as provide students with cultural knowledge necessary for navigating the course’s racialized spaces. Ultimately, we argue that instructors, particularly in predominantly white institutions, must carefully consider race, space, place, and their own positionalities when planning and implementing community-engaged pedagogies.
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Book Review - Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy by April Baker-Bell ↗
Abstract
020 was an unprecedented year for the entire world but more so for the US, where COVID-19 killed far more people than in any other country and caused widespread unemployment, food insecurity, and homelessness. What is more striking is the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on minority, immigrant, and low-income populations. These disparities question the notion of post-racial America and call for a long and difficult journey toward social justice. Moreover, 2020 will also be remembered as a year of inflammatory political rhetorics, extreme polarization, and racial tensions. Recurrent deaths of Black people at the hands of law enforcement resulted in protests and riots across the country. Published during such tumultuous times, April Baker-Bell's 2020 monograph, Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy, shows how language and racism are intertwined, makes a strong case against the anti-Black linguistic racism affecting millions of lives both inside and outside the classroom, and offers an Antiracist Black Language Pedagogy as a way to deal with linguistic injustice. Throughout the book Baker-Bell introduces Black Language Artifacts as a part of the antiracist pedagogy where Black experience and Black culture are used as a resource for learning. Bringing together theory, history, culture, pedagogy and activism, Baker-Bell aligns with the mission of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter and calls for action to create classrooms where Black students' linguistic and cultural resources are valued and imagines a world without anti-blackness, where another George Floyd doesn't get killed despite his repeated plea-"I cannot breathe"-in "Standardized American English. "
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The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline ↗
Abstract
Reviewed by: The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend by T. J. Keeline Martin T. Dinter T. J. Keeline, The Reception of Cicero in the Early Roman Empire: The Rhetorical Schoolroom and the Creation of a Cultural Legend. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 388 pp. ISBN: 9781108426237 Cultural memory is a strange beast indeed. While there is no doubt that Cicero sculpted his own image during his lifetime, he could hardly have foreseen that as soon as the first century AD he would be defined by his style—i.e., that the style would become the man. The incorporation of Cicero into Roman cultural memory is thus highly selective. Without explicitly buying into the framework of cultural memory studies, Keeline, in the revised version of his 2014 Harvard dissertation, illuminates this process in seven chapters by focusing on Cicero’s early reception. The first four chapters on the reception of Cicero in Roman education are followed by three more specialized sections on Cicero in the works of Seneca the Younger, Tacitus, and Pliny the Younger. Reception indeed serves as the overarching framework for this monograph, even though Keeline shies away from deconstructing its tenets. We cannot fathom whether or not Roman schoolboys “enjoyed” reading Cicero as much as today’s students, but Keeline employs Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria, the commentaries of Asconius, and the Scholia Bobiensia to illustrate how young Romans would have encountered Cicero’s speech Pro Milone in the classroom. The rhetorically focused pedagogical approach—namely, the narrowing of Cicero’s persona and personality in a pedagogical context to a model of eloquence (which strips him of his historical and psychological complexity)—that emerges from this analysis usefully exemplifies the process Keeline expounds in the second chapter. The third chapter highlights the prominence of Cicero’s death in Roman declamation. It proposes that the narrative that Cicero was murdered by Popilius, a former client whom he had previously defended against the charge of parricide, is but an added color of the rhetorician schools. This nevertheless fits neatly with Octavian’s desire to downplay his own role in the proscriptions and shift the blame onto Mark Anthony. Cicero thus does not serve as advocate of Republican freedom but rather as advocate of freedom from Mark Anthony. In addition, the style and content of these declamations left behind traces in the accounts of Cicero’s death by Valerius Maximus and many of the historiographers such as Florus, Velleius Paterculus, and later authors such as Cassius Dio and Appian. In contrast, the chronologically fairly early accounts by Livy and Asinius Pollio still offer a morally more complicated image of both Cicero and the events surrounding his death. In the fourth chapter, Keeline ingeniously examines a group of pseudepigraphic texts that have distilled Cicero to the essence consumed in declamation schools: the Invective against Cicero (Ps.-Sallust) contrasts neatly with the Invective against Sallust (Ps.-Cicero), the Speech delivered the day before Cicero went into exile and the Letter to Octavian (Ps.-Cicero), and a pair of Ps.-Brutus’ letters to Cicero and Atticus (transmitted as Cic. Ad Brut. 1.16 and 1.17). Stylistically faithful, these texts concentrate on major life events such as Cicero’s consulship, his exile, and his speeches against Mark Anthony. [End Page 90] In addition, they provide an inventory of the tropes that formed around Cicero s life and character and subsequently found their way into the historiographical tradition. The book’s second part delves into the oeuvres, of Seneca the Younger (chapter 5), Tacitus (chapter 6), and Pliny the Younger (chapter 7) and analyses how each of them comes to terms with the über-father Cicero. Seneca the Younger adopts neither Cicero’s style nor his philosophy or educational theories. Even in his edifying letters to Lucilius, he only utilises Cicero’s correspondence with Atticus as a foil against which he constructs his own philosophical achievements. While Seneca the Elder engages frequently and substantially with Cicero, in his son’s works Cicero is conspicuous by absence. Tacitus’ Dialogus de Oratoribus is steeped in Cicero as Keeline demonstrates by analysing the speeches by Aper...
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Abstract
Instructors within the writing across the curriculum (WAC) movement leverage student writing for learning and engagement beyond the traditional English or composition classroom. To this end, WAC pedagogy foregrounds the benefits of real-world active learning strategies. Educators often find it logistically difficult to create sustainable versions of these realistic environments, however. The same challenges faced by writing instructors present themselves across disciplinary contexts, including ethics and computer science instruction. In this article, we describe our integrated ethics module linking first-year composition students with computer science capstone design teams to better integrate the study of ethics into the writing classroom while giving students more realistic contexts for practice. The tension between two prominent metaphors for learning – the swamp (the messy situationality of professional practice) and the scaffold (the building of progressively more challenging tasks for students out of smaller, simpler assignments) – guides our discussion of WAC-centered course design.
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Abstract
Without our undergraduate research experiences nearly twenty years ago, this special issue of Pedagogy may not have existed. It was undergraduate research that prompted our careers as writing scholars, and it is a practice that animates our work today. At a religiously
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Abstract
Abstract This article discusses how the concept of undergraduate research has evolved from an artificial academic exercise, typically introduced in first-year composition courses, to an authentic activity that engages students in primary research. Through these authentic experiences, students have opportunities to learn why research is valued in colleges and universities, to see themselves as makers of knowledge, and often to contribute to their communities.
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Abstract
Abstract The authors present a lab-based research model that engages graduate students in undergraduate research mentorship positions that are mutually beneficial for graduate students, undergraduates, and faculty. They show how this model can be scaled up and adapted across the range of English disciplines. The authors share examples of the different types of research that they have engaged in for linguistics, literary archival studies, creative writing, and writing pedagogy. These examples illustrate how undergraduate research mentorship can prepare graduate students to teach and mentor students using effective methods in various institutional contexts.
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Abstract
Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.
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Abstract
Abstract This article proposes that an unexplored avenue of pedagogy in undergraduate research lies in courses that merge English and the public humanities. These disciplines often have shared goals, including increased interest in the humanities and engagement with local communities, greater accessibility to scholarly materials, more research opportunities for and fewer burdens on instructors, and more frequent occasions for scholars at all levels to participate in knowledge making. Examining a course titled Writing About Public Problems, this article argues that undergraduates are capable of undertaking theoretical, creative, and practical writing and research when paired with empirical data collection on public stakeholders. Additionally, performance theory can facilitate experiential learning and a greater connection in undergraduate public humanities work between academics and the publics with which they seek to communicate.
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Using Multimedia for Instructor Presence in Purposeful Pedagogy-Driven Online Technical Writing Courses ↗
Abstract
Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.
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“A Lot of Students Are Already There”: Repositioning Language-Minoritized Students as “Writers in Residence” in English Classrooms ↗
Abstract
This article centers on Faith, a Latinx bilingual student who, because of her failure to pass a standardized exam in English language arts, had to repeat 11th-grade English. Despite this stigma of being a “repeater,” during the year-long ethnographic study I conducted in her classroom, Faith proved to be an insightful and critical reader and self-described poet who shared her writing with her peers as well as with other poets in online forums. Drawing from that more expansive classroom study, this article features Faith’s metacommentary on language and her own writing process and explores how her insights (1) disrupt monoglossic, raciolinguistic ideologies by highlighting the disconnect between her sophisticated understandings of language and the writing process and her status as a “struggling” student; (2) draw attention her wayfinding, which chronicles her navigation of those ideologies that complicate her search for a writerly identity and obscure the translingual nature of all texts and all writers; and (3) can move teachers and researchers of writing to reimagine the writing classroom so that it (re)positions students like Faith as “writers in residence,” whose existing translingual writing practices and wayfinding can serve as mentors and guides for others.
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Abstract
In a UI-driven design world, we cannot overstate the anxiety many individuals experience when encountering code. If we wish to promote any form of coding literacy at scale, our earliest attempts will need to address these fears. This webtext introduces the pedagogy of basic coding and Open Fuego, a tool designed to help educators easily integrate aspects of coding literacy, computational thinking, and computer science knowledge into the rhetoric and composition classroom.
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Abstract
In this webtext, I approach the composition course as an assemblage of technologies that inhibits moving beyond White Mainstream English (WME). The assemblage of state-assigned learning outcomes, the American Community Survey (ACS) data on language, and the composition course reinscribe WME. However, this assemblage of technologies works against itself when reassembled appropriately. Through mapping technologies, I reassemble these technologies to 'break' learning outcomes...
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Abstract
Attention to visual literacy and graphic literature has greatly increased in the field of rhetoric and composition. However, the comics industry has fallen behind in terms of attention to access for readers. This webtext discusses how writing faculty can make their visual course content—comics, in particular—more inclusive while fostering discussion of disability studies and access in the classroom.