This qualitative study investigates an approach to mentoring that offers guided practice in authentic disciplinary activities prior to the dissertation stage. The mentoring project under investigation was unique in that it was designed to double as an authentic collaborative research study and as an opportunity for professional development. Starting from the assumption that writing is a function of the activities that underlie it, this article examines the embedded practices out of which writing emerges—namely, the forms of participation taken up by the doctoral student participants during their research and writing, as well as the mentoring practices enacted alongside. Findings show that participants devoted considerable attention to negotiating individual roles and responsibilities throughout the project and to negotiating emerging research objectives in response to a variety of unexpected obstacles posed by the research environment. Additionally, participants encountered significant difficulties constructing claims in the collaborative setting, owing in part to their status as disciplinary newcomers. Findings also show that the design of the collaborative project helped facilitate and distribute mentoring across the diverse research team in productive ways.

This study investigated how struggling adult writers solve a writing task and what they know about writing and themselves as writers. The writing process of the adult writers was examined by combining three elements: the observation of collaborative writing tasks, analyses of their written texts, and structured individual interviews that included both retrospective and prospective parts. This methodical approach provides productive tools to assess writing processes and writing knowledge of struggling adult writers. The triangulation of data from the different sources is visualized in a case study. Findings from the case study suggest both similarities and differences between struggling adult and younger writers. Concerning the writing process of both groups, planning and revision play a limited role. However, alongside these similar limitations in their writing process, struggling adult writers distinguish themselves from their young counterparts through their relatively extensive knowledge about themselves as writers.

Human-centered design expands the context and reach of the work of technical communicators and provides an opportunity to investigate and advocate for the needs of vulnerable populations. This article summarizes and contributes to the conversation about social justice occurring in both technical communication and design. Using a variety of qualitative methods as a type of design ethnography, this article shares findings from a study that investigated the experiences of homeless bus riders. The study findings provide an opportunity to examine the design of information and communication technologies and changes to policies that impact vulnerable populations. The article discusses the implications of an advocacy perspective for technical communicators practicing human-centered design and their role and opportunity to bring about socially responsible design.

Human-centered design is a burgeoning field of study that has the potential to work toward actively creating more just and equitable technology design while critically interrogating the design process. To do this, human-centered design needs to consider making social justice aims a primary objective and end-goal in design. One way of integrating social justice aims into design is to employ the use of narrative inquiry. This article explores an alternative method for developing design scenarios using narrative inquiry and the feminist concepts of silence and voice as a way to promote considerations of social justice and inclusion in design. Using narrative inquiry to rethink certain aspects of the design process can help designers address issues of agency. The methodological focus of this article responds to Suchman’s call for “alternative visions” of how technology production and design can be undertaken.

This article explores what sources students use for advice while writing their résumés, their reasons for choosing those sources, and their perceptions about the sources’ quality. Results from surveys, interviews, and focus groups with 86 undergraduates and 20 career counselors and instructors suggest issues with educators’ credibility and students’ access. To address these issues, the author suggests that educators approach the résumé as a research project, which empowers students and legitimizes educators’ expertise.

This qualitative study compares how technical communicators (TCs) and subject matter experts (SMEs) characterize the role and value of the TC. Seven TCs and eight SMEs participated in an investigation of the similarities and differences between the perceptions of these two groups. Key findings are that SMEs perceive of TCs as investigators, educators, and relationship builders; TCs talk about themselves in terms of investigators, interpreters, and audience advocates; and TCs are often uncomfortable discussing their value.

This article is an investigation of composing practices through which people create networks with mobile phones. By looking through the lens of actor-network theory, the author portrays the networking activity of mobile phone users as translation, what Latour describes as an infralanguage to which different disciplinary perspectives can be appended. Given how much mobile phone use is information-based, the author describes how five people composed on mobile phones to create coordinated networks of professional and domestic activity. To arrive at this discussion, the author first considers the objectives of mobile networking, which include creating a sense of place and coordination within that space. The author then describes the findings of a case study of mobile phone users who build translational networks. The discussion focuses on the participants’ composing practices.

Engaged public science communication can support community resilience as policymakers, resource managers, and citizens come to terms with the effects of environmental disturbances, natural disasters, and climate change. Drawing upon field-based ethnographic research of public-facing outreach and education at Fire Island National Seashore (FIIS), the researcher considers how, in the wake of a catastrophic storm, the evolving ethical science communication and public engagement strategies of park rangers might contribute to and strengthen community resilience. A rhetorical analysis of science communication and interpretive practices at FIIS illuminates some affordances and constraints of rhetorical models of science communication and of pedagogies of play for community-based work.

This essay theorizes a pedagogy of responsibility as an alternative to place-based and critical pedagogies that offers to ground students in deep ethical obligation. Using Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics, I suggest that place may function as a trace of the Other that reminds the self of her responsibility. By analyzing a case study of a place-based college writing assignment, I demonstrate how a pedagogy of responsibility cultivates students’ responsibility for engaging others in ethical, rhetorical response.

Recent research suggests that climate change is a “tribal” issue. That is, some audiences deny the reality of anthropogenic climate change because of their group identities, not because they misunderstand the science. In this essay, I offer a case study of two Christian climate science communicators and their efforts to persuade religious and conservative audiences who are skeptical of the need to respond to climate change. I analyze three of their rhetorical moves that may be of interest to those who teach and practice public rhetoric. As I analyze these moves, I consider both their persuasive potential and tradeoffs.

Background: This case study examines how users of varied experience levels interact with an open-access content-management system (CMS) that lacks managed leadership. In particular, this case study compared how experienced and new users performed at a variety of tasks in a nonprofit community wiki to evaluate skill acquisition and possible skill loss. Research questions: (1) Do experienced users make more use of CMS features (templates, tags, hyperlinks) than new users, even without instruction? (2) Where do experienced and new users differ in successful task completion in the wiki? Situating the case: A number of content-management evaluations have utilized usability as a key method for evaluating user experience. In addition, Wikipedia has been a frequent target of investigation. This study looks to expand the crowd-sourced wikis evaluated in this manner. Methodology: This case study started with a series of interviews to determine how users expected to use the community wiki. After the interviews, 10 users (5 new and 5 experienced) were evaluated for this study, each performing 6 tasks. About the case: This study looked at the initial installation of a local community wiki system. The system is a CMS designed for use by municipal territories to create crowd-sourced wikis capable of preserving knowledge that would not traditionally fit in Wikipedia entries. Conclusions: Users who maintained sufficient interest in the wiki to become experienced wiki users developed a number of core skills even without organizational support, though new users demonstrated a steep skill deficit. However, new users actually demonstrated a greater capacity to highlight incompleteness of information within the wiki than experienced users in one key task.

Background: Environmental impact studies often enlist professional communicators to develop and implement public engagement plans and processes. However, few detailed reports of these public engagement plans exist in either scholarly venues or government reports. This case reviews one public engagement project in transportation planning as implemented by one professional communications firm. Research questions: 1) What communication and engagement strategies do the consultants employ in their public engagement process? 2) How do professional communicators design engagement for diverse citizen groups? Situating the case: A number of cases have revealed the ways professional and technical communicators integrate participatory or user-centered design strategies in public engagement projects. These cases suggest that professional and technical communicators are uniquely positioned to develop ethical and effective public engagement plans for environmental impact studies. Professional and technical communicators are further prepared for this work because of their knowledge about theories of intercultural communication and rhetorical theories of delivery. Methodology: This case was studied over the course of 1.5 years using qualitative research methods, including observations, interviews, and textual analysis. About the case: This case reviews the work of one particular public engagement firm, VTC Communications, as they planned and implemented public engagement in one environmental impact study. This environmental impact study team was tasked with determining the best way to accommodate the increase in rail traffic the city anticipated with the development of the high-speed rail. The public's input was needed to fulfill environmental impact statement (EIS) requirements and to fully understand the community concerns regarding the increased traffic, noise, vibrations, and family/business displacements. VTC Communications was hired to conduct this portion of the environmental impact study, and their work included the development of a range of deliverables and events. Conclusions: This case provides an overview of the process of developing public engagement plans, the deliverables designed, as well as the key goals that guided the development of public engagement. My case suggests that effective public engagement can address intercultural concerns by developing projects that are adaptable, multimodal, and dialogic.

ABSTRACT Historical study of teachers and students reveals how rhetorical theories influence writers (McClish 2015). This case study of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s prose considers the nineteenth-century rhetorical teachings of Samuel Phillips Newman, Hawthorne’s professor at Bowdoin College, a student of Blair, and a proponent of rhetorical taste. Using Newman’s 1827 A Practical System of Rhetoric and Hawthorne’s 1832 travel sketches, we analyze Newman’s influences on Hawthorne—particularly taste and the sublime and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne as a writer in the travel sketch genre. We consider Newman’s influences on Hawthorne as evidenced by writing practices that Newman had recommended or disapproved. In particular, we examine Newman’s explanation of taste and its complementary construct of sublimity and how these concepts challenged Hawthorne. We argue that Hawthorne both wrote within the paradigm of rhetorical taste as Newman taught it and struggled against its constraints to find his own perceptions. Furthermore, we see this struggle happening within the context of Hawthorne’s exposure to Newman’s American-inflected belletrism that emphasized both a discriminatory principle of taste and the growing body of American literature.

Pulling data from a year-long case study into a Division II men’s basketball team, this article suggests how threshold concepts as currently conceptualized and implemented in first-year composition pedagogy and curriculum could more directly consider unique forms of literacies student-athletes bring into the classroom.

This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

In this article, I draw from a qualitative case study supported by theoretical framing from John Dewey and Gregory Schraw to explore how and why video composition could be a particularly useful site for the development of meta-awareness about composition within a writing course. Specifically, video opened space for rhetorically layered actions, metacognitive articulations, and interest, which led students to consider, plan for, or recount the transfer of compositional knowledge across media

Drawing from a large qualitative study, we examine how students experience writing in college, focusing on the conditions that allow students to develop their authorship and those that encourage students to experience writing as a process of following rules and regulations. We situate students’ perceptions, and the assignments and practices that led to them, within what anthropologists call “audit culture”—accounting practices and their technologies, which have migrated across institutions, including higher education. We suggest our field’s institutional status and pedagogical complexities make us especially susceptible to audit culture, and we argue that students’ experiences in our writing classrooms, where they face an ever-increasing bureaucratization of literacy, is an urgent area of research. We ask readers to consider the extent to which audit culture encourages teachers to create closed systems that privilege outcomes rather than consequences with an end-inview. We conclude by calling for an artisanal identity for both teachers and students.

This phenomenological case study explores the disconnect that high school readers labeled as struggling perceived between their reading identities and experiences in traditional English classes. It analyzes how participation in a young adult literature (YAL) elective provided participants space in which to enact identities and exhibit agency in ways that were different from those afforded in their English classes. This paper contributes uniquely to the larger research conversation by examining two different spaces (traditional English classes and a YAL class) and demonstrating how students’ identities as readers manifested in different ways across two contexts. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity as a lens of analysis across student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s (2006) interview protocol, the study reveals how student participants were supported in their attempts to deconstruct their experiences in traditional classroom spaces, build new conceptions of their reading selves in a unique classroom setting, and, in the process, assume greater agency in shaping their individual reader identities, advancing the argument that differing classroom contexts can provide students with varying levels of opportunity to reject and/or accept ascribed reading identities. This work is significant in the way it emphasizes the importance of classroom and school contexts, the possibilities that come with inviting students to engage as readers in school rather than engage in school reading, the benefits and risks of reimagined relationships between students and teachers and students and peers, and the possibility that young adult literature in and of itself offers implications for reader agency.

This study examines the discourse style of managers, developers, engineers, and artists working for an independent game development studio. Fourteen employees were interviewed, and then the results were coded and analyzed using an exploratory, single-case case study methodology. The authors argue that the texts, tactics, and technologies used by these professionals reveal insights into the practical, outcome-oriented dimensions of technical communication within the games industry as well as deeper cultural characteristics of this community.

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

In this article, we use extant International Business Machines' internal communications to demonstrate how Boje’s notion of “antenarrative” can serve as a methodology for feminist historiography and as a way of uncovering forgotten and unchallenged systems of power and legitimacy in technical and professional communication. The antenarrative fragments of any official, sanctioned story give us insight into the ways in which power has been distributed throughout an organization and where agency can be claimed in real time. We also see that a methodology that considers the untold and unofficial stories of women in the workplace works to explain current distributions of power. This can be done by investigating the antenarratives that threaten to disrupt the prepackaged grand narrative of organizations; we show this specifically through a case study of International Business Machines' archival memos in contrast with the company’s website and public relations documents.

This article examines the oral communication training that took place in Eloqi, a virtual language-learning community. Eloqi (a pseudonym) was a for-profit start-up that built and operated a proprietary Web-based, voice-enabled platform connecting English-language learners in China with trainers in the United States. While it existed, Eloqi’s unique platform was used to deliver short, one-on-one lessons designed to improve students’ oral English communication skills. Using the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, a theoretical–methodological approach, the author presents an analysis of the speech code, or code of communicative conduct, employed at Eloqi. This code of English logic, which Eloqi’s community members associated with native English speech, comprised six locally defined rules for oral English speech; namely, speech had to be organized, succinct, spontaneously composed rather than rehearsed, original and honest, proactively improved, and positive. This article discusses the significance of this code, particularly as it pertains to cultural communication, and concludes with some implications for researchers and practitioners in business and technical communication.

This article reports on research addressing the role of incident reporting at the workplace as a textual representation of lean management techniques. It draws on text and discourse analysis as well as on ethnographic data, including interviews, recorded interaction, and observations, from two projects on workplace literacy in Sweden: a study in an eldercare facility and a study in a large factory. Analysis of the data set demonstrates striking similarities, both in the way incident reporting texts are structured and worded and in the literacy practices that contextualize them. Dominant characteristics in the texts are the absence of actors and the structured, process-based approach of problems and problem handling. The forms often generate conflicts in the ways workers are asked to textually represent an incident. In this article, we argue that lean thinking has penetrated texts and literacy practices of two considerably different workplaces, and this has a large impact on the way workers are instructed to think and act with regard to problem handling techniques.

Teaching problem: Immersive pedagogies-including real-world or client-based projects, case studies, and simulations-have long been used to encourage student problem-solving, analytical thinking, and teamwork in professional communication. Building a connection to the real world has real challenges, however, for both instructors and students. How can we better prepare students for their future careers in our technical communication courses? Situating the case: This paper draws on three areas in the literature to situate the Arisoph case study: First, we discuss the work that has been done with client-based projects and the problems and challenges researchers have found with incorporating these projects into the classroom. Second, we discuss a newer model of workplace simulations, particularly focusing on the work done by Fisher and Russell. Third, we discuss the psychological theories of attribution and reattribution, which provided a foundation for our development of the Arisoph case study. How this case was studied: This paper describes the development of the Arisoph case study, an online client-based simulation course designed for engineering students to learn and practice technical communication. Course development and collection of instructor and student responses took place from 2010 to 2014. About the case: This paper details the development and implementation of the Arisoph case study, which brought the workplace realities of a variety of engineering professions into a classroom filled with engineering majors. The Arisoph simulation was designed to manage student attribution and reattribution, particularly to help engineering students connect the principles and skills learned in technical communication courses with their future careers. The Arisoph case study is a full-semester simulation, where students apply for work in a fictional company and fulfill different roles on professional teams. Each assignment during the semester is situated in the context of the simulation. The major projects for the simulation, however, come from a real client in the engineering field. This unique combination of simulation and client-based projects provides students with greater opportunities for successful reattribution. Conclusions: Initial student reactions to the course show an increased understanding of workplace communication and a greater motivation to produce the best possible product for the client. We hope that long-term studies will show significant carryover of those attitudes into students' careers.

Research problem: In Ireland, technical communication has developed as an academic and occupational field since the late 20th century. Research on the field in Ireland is limited. Research questions: (1) To what extent do technical communicators in Ireland operate as a community of practice? (2) What steps are Irish technical communicators taking toward professionalization? Literature review: This study uses a theoretical framework that combines symbolic interactionism and communities of practice theories. While traditional professionalization theory uses a structural functionalist approach to the study of occupations, characterizing disciplines as professions depending on whether they meet certain traits (including autonomy, market closure, license to practice, and service orientation), symbolic interactionism prioritizes interactions among individuals. In this sense, it overlaps with the concerns of communities of practice. A community of practice involves a group of people working together, and creating meaning through their interactions. Studying an occupation through this lens foregrounds individual and community identity, and how that is formed and informed by work. Methodology: Mixed methods-a survey, focus groups, and interviews-were used to explore Irish technical communicators' perceptions of aspects of their field: practice, education, value and status, and professional and community structures. Results: The findings indicate that Irish technical communicators exhibit traits of communities of practice (such as joint enterprise and shared repertoires). They also identify with their job title and practice. A key finding is that some Irish technical communicators have a keen appetite for community involvement. This enthusiasm notwithstanding, barriers to professionalization include low visibility of the role in Ireland, limited evidence of professionalizing activity, and the potential for career stagnation.

This study investigates Grade 12 students’ global and local strategies for writing from the Internet. Analysis of screen captures, think-aloud protocols, and interviews showed two global writing strategies: 1) Students created mediating planning documents; they alternated between researching online and creating mediating planning documents, then drafted a text, and then revised. 2) Students created no (or almost no) mediating documents; they wrote directly from the source documents, alternating frequently between researching, drafting, and revising. Each global strategy comprised several sub-ordinate strategies (e.g., search using a combination of content and rhetorical keywords; take hard copy notes; draft a text out of the sequence in which it appears in the final text; use automatic spelling and grammar checkers to guide review). Some of these strategies are similar to those used in print-based writing from sources. However, using the Internet also resulted in new researching and writing strategies. We argue that writers created task environments and used strategies that maximized the affordances of the Internet, electronic writing medium, and internal cognition, and minimized their constraints. This work extends classical cognitive work on writing as well as more recent work on writing from sources.

Discourse-based interviews (or DBIs) have long been used in writing research to investigate writers’ tacit genre knowledge, including their rhetorical motivations for sentence-level wordings. Meanwhile, researchers in English for Academic and Specific Purposes (EAP/ESP) have used corpus techniques to uncover patterns of such wordings, ones that index community-valued ways of knowing and meaning. This article brings together these two methods in a novel way. By offering a case study of Richard, an advanced undergraduate writer majoring in philosophy at a U.S. university, the article demonstrates how systematic analysis of Richard’s writing informed and enriched DBIs with him and his professor, Maria. Specifically, corpus-based text analysis revealed that Richard regularly expressed an epistemic stance in his course essays in ways that are conventional and valued in philosophical argumentation, while the DBIs revealed that neither Richard nor Maria were consciously aware of these stance patterns, despite regular appearance in both their writing. Taken together, these findings point to the value of using corpus techniques prior to the DBI to identify meaningful choices in language that likely otherwise would be missed. The findings also raise important questions about the acquisition of disciplinary discourses and the sources of knowledge that foster that acquisition.

One hundred and three (N=103) peer review studies contextualized in L2 composition classrooms and published between 1990 and 2015 were reviewed. To categorize constructs in research studies, this researcher used Lai’s (2010) three Ps dimensions (perceptions, process, and product). Perceptions are the beliefs and attitudes of peer review. Process refers to the learning process or implementation procedures of peer review. Product is the learning outcomes of peer review. A thematic analysis of the studies’ constructs showed that perception studies examined learners’ general perceptions/attitudes, Asian students’ perceptions/attitudes (cultural influences), and learner perceptions of peer feedback in comparison to self and/or computerized feedback. Process studies discussed the effects of training, checklists/rubrics, writer-reviewer relationships, the nature of peer feedback, communicative language, timing of teacher feedback on peer feedback, grouping strategies, as well as communicative medium. Product research, on the other hand, investigated peer feedback adoption rates and ratio of peer-influenced revisions, effects of peer review on writers’ revision quality, effects of peer review on reviewers’ gains, and effects of peer review on writers’ self revision. In light of this review, research gaps are identified and suggestions for future research are offered.

In the previous issue of Business and Professional Communication, we focused on flipped classrooms and discovery learning. We continue that broad stream of research with our articles in this issue, most of which engage students in projects designed to facilitate learning in business and professional communication. Implementing projectbased learning can be challenging, and case studies can reveal issues that may be unanticipated in textbooks. Our lead article reports on the role of a commissioned research project in bridging the gap between theory and practice. At the authors’ research site, organizations representing different sectors of the corporate and nonprofit workplace commission teams of students in business and professional communication to act as their communication experts. The specific case discussed in this article is based on a study carried out by a team of five master’s-level students to promote corporate social responsibility in a professional association of a pharmaceutical industry. The authors analyze the student researchers’ perspectives, as well as the practitioners’ view of the collaboration, and the pitfalls involved in helping put theory into practice in a real-world situation. Our second article presents the results of an actual employee program evaluation as a case study of soft skills training at a large hospital. The authors posit four hypotheses, that greater reported willingness to learn will result in both a higher degree of course comprehension and a higher degree of behavioral change and that the method of delivery will affect trainees’ degree of comprehension and degree of behavioral change. The authors conclude that face-to-face or blended instruction is likely to be more effective than a purely online format. The authors of our third article examine the factors needed for success in group assignments. In a study of cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation, the authors find that group satisfaction is positively related to both leader assertiveness and leader cooperativeness. This research emphasizes the importance of the leader’s role to group outcomes and suggests that assertiveness is a critical component to success. 651428 BCQXXX10.1177/2329490616651428Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyKnight editorial2016

Business communication evolves and adapts to suit the times, and today’s workplace documents are increasingly multimodal. Therefore, business and professional communication specialists need to adapt to a new media workplace ecology—one that requires proficiencies with technologies such as video production, digital animation, and sound. Business and professional writing teachers, in turn, need to adopt teaching methods that include working with evolving technologies and be willing to teach multimodal skills to students. In this article I offer a case study of a flipped learning pedagogy to teach multimodal skills in the professional writing classroom.

In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son’s community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies for writing in new or unfamiliar settings and argues for a more nuanced understanding of existing ability, disposition, context, and genre in the deployment of knowledge for writing.

This introductory review article for this special issue sets out a range of issues in play as far as English for Academic Purposes (EAP) writing is concerned, but with a special emphasis on English for Specific Academic Purposes (ESAP) (as opposed to English for General Academic Purposes (EGAP)). Following the introduction, the article begins by outlining the different types of EAP and presenting the pros and cons of ESAP and EGAP for writing. It then goes on to review work in a range of areas of relevance to ESAP writing. These areas are register and discourse analysis; genre analysis; corpus analysis; ethnography; contrastive rhetoric; classroom methodology; critical approaches; and assessment. The article concludes by arguing that whichever model of writing is chosen (EGAP or ESAP), or if a hybrid model is the choice, if at all possible, students need to be exposed to the understandings, language and communicative activities of their target disciplines, with students themselves also contributing to this enterprise.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.

Queer theory often poses normativity as a primary exigency and target for queer resistance, which can result in anticipatory and ahistorical readings. A methodology of “queer rhetoric in situ” intervenes in this propensity by examining the contingent, historically specific relations among locally enforced norms, rhetors, acts, and multiple audiences. Queerness and normativity should be understood as shifting, fractured valences, rather than two cohesive opposing forces attached to perceived forms of sexual orientation, families, or activisms. A rhetorical case study of the Gay Liberation Monument’s controversial and delayed instantiation in New York’s Greenwich Village illustrates the stakes of this methodological shift.

This article presents data from a 10-month case study of a critical literacy writing group for parenting and pregnant young adults. The author focuses on the efficacy of the program to foster the critical literacy skills of two participants. Drawing on field notes and written artifacts and using case study and discourse analysis, the author suggests that, although they redefined their figured identities in the program, the two women’s ability to take action in their lives—their selves-in-practice—was contingent on other factors beyond the influence of the Program, such as familial and significant others’ influences, which were definitive and integral to who the participants were. Thus, how the participants figured or positioned themselves inside and outside of the program was fluid and sometimes contradictory and greatly influenced by the symmetry between competing figured worlds, in which they participated and the strategic and practical gender needs that informed their positional identities in their day-to-day lives.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

This article proposes an extension of Burkean cluster criticism to include performative elements of a musical theatre text. Using the musical Wicked as a case study, this article uses cluster criticism to analyze Wicked ’s script, cast recording, sheet music, and fieldnotes from three performances to reveal messages about hegemony.

This article proposes an extension of Burkean cluster criticism to include performative elements of a musical theatre text. Using the musical Wicked as a case study, this article uses cluster criticism to analyze Wicked ’s script, cast recording, sheet music, and fieldnotes from three performances to reveal messages about hegemony.

Research problem: This study investigates the phenomenon of user-generated content strategy in an open-source, wiki-based content-management system (CMS) for the repair of technological devices (http://ifixit.com). By “user-generated content strategy,” we mean processes for developing systems for producing, moderating, and encouraging user-generated content. Research questions: (1) What strategies, or holistic means of organizing content, are used to manage repair manual content via an open-source, wiki-based content-management system that relies on content generated by a wide variety of users? (2) What content rules, or logical premises for how and where content is developed, emerge from a qualitative case study of such a CMS? Literature review: Though a wealth of empirical research has been conducted into user-generated content, few studies have focused on the explicit strategies employed by organizations to develop and encourage such content. At the same time, several recent calls by researchers in both academia and industry have indicated a need for such content models. Some of the challenges these thinkers have noted with creating user-generated content strategies include the difficulty of maintaining a consistent strategy across content generated by users who don't necessarily understand what strategies are in place, as well as maintaining a modicum of quality assurance without squelching user participation. Methodology: We conducted a content audit of iFixit's main educational initiative, the Technical Writing Project (http://edu.ifixit.com) to identify strategies iFixit uses to organize content in this initiative. iFixit is an open-source wiki to help users repair their own devices. We supplemented the audit with interviews with student participants in the project and iFixit technical writing staff to find out what technologies and other affordances affected users of the iFixit Technical Writing Project. Results and conclusions: The main user-generated content strategies used by iFixit include allowing users a wide range of means to participate (such as posting comments or developing their own repair guides), using a content moderation queue (or simple interface for seeing all updates to the wiki), ensuring quality assurance of all repair guide content through redundancy (such as making sure experienced users vetted every published guide), and staging (or arranging information in a linear sequence) information in a multimodal fashion (using multiple modes of communication to reinforce the same information). Such strategies represent a commitment by iFixit to opening up practices that are central to creating content, such as repair documentation, to any interested internet user. Lessons for organizations who wish to encourage user-generated content include developing strategies that protect users from the worst consequences of their actions, that encourage participation, and that allow for experienced users to vet new content.

This article argues for a flipped learning approach to business and professional communication composing processes. Flipped learning sequences can scaffold more robust engagement with prewriting activities and support opportunities for in-class collaborative and facilitated drafting exercises. These types of learning experiences offer numerous pedagogical benefits, including more conscious control of messaging strategies and the development of more creative, rhetorically informed communication products. The effectiveness of this approach is explored through a case study of a flipped learning sequence and collaborative drafting workshop designed for an employment communication and résumé-writing assignment.

Based on a qualitative study of students’ experiences, we offer a new typology of student reading behaviors across the disciplines at a community college.

This article proposes novel methods for computational rhetorical analysis to analyze the use of citations in a corpus of academic texts. Guided by rhetorical genre theory, our analysis converts texts to graph-theoretic graphs in an attempt to isolate and amplify the predicted patterns of recurring moves that are associated with stable genres of academic writing. We find that our computational method shows promise for reliably detecting and classifying citation moves similar to the results achieved by qualitative researchers coding by hand as done by Karatsolis (this issue). Further, using pairwise comparisons between advisor and advisee texts, valuable applications emerge for automated computational analysis as formative feedback in a mentoring situation.

This paper presents the results of a case study focusing on information and communication design in indigenous villages of rural India. The villages examined for this study were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped, and their populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), and limited familiarity with computer us and computing practices. The authors sought to examine this context by conducting ethnographic field research involving a variety of methods. Through these approaches, the authors found a range of cultural and contextual factors are instrumental in shaping and co-creating communication design solutions for underserved international audiences. (Such factors include such as long-term research engagements, in-situ design development, and embracing dialogic and reflexive praxis when designing for local audiences.)

In this paper, the authors discuss how the technical and ideological design of WeChat, a social media platform, enables the free flow of information within the context of heavy Internet policing and surveillance in the People's Republic of China. Through a case study of two instances of grassroots and social activism, the authors highlight how three unique features of WeChat---Moments, Friends' Circle, and Share to---enhance privacy and security issues related to information dissemination. In both cases examined here, the unique design of certain WeChat features enhanced privacy and security in ways that allowed for the free dissemination of information and public involvement through social media. In examining these cases, this study represents one of the first attempts to use a Chinese social media app to examine technology design within a particular political and social context. The authors hope the results of this study will further our understanding of the reciprocal relationship between technology, design, and the social context in which technologies are used.

Over twenty years ago in William Nothstine, Carole Blair, and Gary Copeland’s edited volume, Critical Questions, Thomas W. Benson likened his research to doing “part of society’s homework” (185). The ends of scholarship, he suggested, were to encourage others to reflect critically upon social practices and the institutions that invite them. In Posters for Peace, Benson performs this homework by analyzing posters he collected and saved in May 1970 at the University of California, Berkeley. These posters protested President Richard Nixon’s decision to bomb Cambodia, despite earlier assurances that he would deescalate U.S. military action in Vietnam. Benson situates these artifacts in a longer rhetorical tradition of poster use and compares them with another instance of ephemeral war protest: the graffiti he observed in Rome during a 2004 protest of the Iraq War. Throughout his analysis, Benson also weaves an account of disciplinary shifts during the early 1970s, which made analyses of visual rhetoric possible in the first place. Thus, Benson offers both a rhetorical history and history of rhetoric in Posters for Peace.As the author of a rhetorical history, Benson begins by describing the context in which these posters were produced. He identifies a few antecedents that may have influenced the use of posters at Berkeley. Most immediately, the Berkeley artists were likely inspired by the 1968 Paris protestors’ posters, as well as the psychedelic posters circulating in the San Francisco Bay Area. Benson also notes the U.S. government’s substantial use of posters during the 1930s and 40s to promote President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal programs and national unity during World War II. The extent to which the Berkeley protests were inspired directly by these government posters is unclear, though Benson ably demonstrates a preexisting tradition of political poster use in the U.S. Significantly, his inclusion of a White House photograph of Nixon delivering his Cambodia address underscores the political importance of posters during the 1970s. In this photograph, the president points to a map of Cambodia while justifying military action. In a way, then, the Berkeley protesters countered Nixon’s visual rhetoric with some of their own.Following Benson’s extended essay, Posters for Peace contains full-page color reproductions of the 66 posters he saved. The Berkeley posters are mostly original art on silk-screen, though some are based on photographs or employ photo offset printing. Many of these are visually stunning. One does not get the sense that they were produced for posterity, however. Most of them were printed on the backside of used tractor-feed printer paper or whatever cardstock was handy. They were distributed freely and ended up on fences, dorm room walls, picket signs, and so forth. Some of them were preserved in Benson’s own private collection until 2008, when he donated them to the Penn State University Libraries on the condition that they were “freely available for nonprofit educational uses” (4).Most of the posters in Benson’s collection are antiwar. Some, however, advocate for civil rights in the U.S. Although Benson arranges the color reproductions of these posters in a roughly thematic fashion, he does not adhere strictly to this sequence in his analysis. Instead, he often skips around, thereby knitting them together as a cohesive unit. For instance, on pages 41–42 he references plates 2, 6, 7, 8, 30, 33, 13, and 27—in that order. His analysis identifies inventional similarities between them. Moreover, this approach has the additional benefit of tacitly promoting a disruptive reading of the posters by encouraging readers to view them in no fixed order.In his analysis, Benson attempts to recover the meanings that a passersby would have understood in 1970. He finds much to praise in these posters. Although posters are often classified as tools of propaganda, Benson observes that, “many of the Berkeley posters invoke a reflexivity about their own persuasion and call for discussion beyond the poster—asking not merely for belief or action, but for speech, participation, deliberation” (48). To a modern eye, the posters’ emphasis on civic deliberation may be easily taken for granted. At the time, however, prominent politicians such as President Nixon and Vice President Spiro Agnew sought to curtail criticisms of the war in Vietnam by associating the antiwar movement as unpatriotic and unrepresentative of U.S. public opinion. In Nixon’s “Silent Majority” speech, for instance, he described the antiwar protesters as a fervent “vocal minority” and juxtaposed them with a patriotic “silent majority,” who, he claimed, supported his own strategy in Vietnam. The best citizen, Nixon suggested, was a silent one. Benson’s analysis both demonstrates and celebrates the students’ determination to speak out and legitimize their opposition to the war.Similarly to the tumultuous political climate that birthed the Berkeley protest posters, the speech-communication discipline underwent substantial change in the early 1970s. According to Benson, The discipline, while not abandoning its interest in Aristotle’s foundational Rhetoric, was already moving rapidly in other directions, seeking to understand rhetoric from the point of view of the citizen whose judgment was being solicited, recovering marginal voices, asking questions about the ethics of persuasion, investigating the rhetorical action of non-oratorical forms, pressing forward on the close reading of rhetorical texts, and inquiring about empirical matters such as the preparation, circulation, and reception of rhetoric. (54)To demonstrate this shift, Benson identifies Robert P. Newman’s, Hermann Stelzner’s, Karlyn Kohrs Campbell’s, and Forbes I. Hill’s rhetorical analyses of the “Silent Majority” speech. Benson also highlights the Wingspread and Pheasant Run conferences, which met in 1970 to discuss the scope of rhetoric and the appropriate means for studying it. More precisely, these meetings helped legitimize scholarship that examined non-oratorical forms. Benson’s analysis of the Berkeley posters is particularly fitting in that he collected them the same month that he attended Pheasant Run. In so doing, Benson returns readers to a historic intersection of war protests, visual rhetoric, and rhetorical theory.Despite Benson’s presence at Berkeley and Pheasant Run, his analysis abstains from auto-ethnography. Indeed, Benson does not mention until the last two pages of Posters for Peace that he attended Pheasant Run. Glimmers of this project’s personal significance shine throughout, nonetheless. For instance, Benson incorporates nearly thirty photographs he took of visual rhetoric protesting the wars in Vietnam and Iraq. These photographs are helpful for illustrating his argument. Their layout could have been stronger in his section on the Roman graffiti, however. Although Benson concludes his discussion of the graffiti on page 83, photographs from Rome appear on each subsequent page until page 95. One suspects that these photographs of graffiti could have been condensed into one section. Moreover, two photographs of the Roman Pasquino statue (figures 34 and 35) appear redundant. These are minor issues, however, in an otherwise well-structured book.Posters for Peace gives readers pause to consider the role of archives in rhetorical scholarship. In recent years, the term archive has expanded within the humanities to encompass not simply institutional collections, such as those found at presidential libraries, but also those created by scholars in the course of their research. What makes Benson’s book exceptional is that he illustrates both senses of the word archive. Insofar as these posters and photographs are freely available in the Thomas W. Benson Political Protest Collection at the Penn State University Libraries, other scholars may make recourse to these historically significant artifacts. Additionally, Posters for Peace may serve as a model for scholars who are interested in preserving the ephemeral texts they study.Several years ago, in Lester Olson, Cara Finnegan, and Diane Hope’s edited collection on visual rhetoric, Visual Rhetoric Communication and American Culture, Benson invited students and scholars alike to note the significance of visual texts—exclaiming, “Look, Rhetoric!” In Posters for Peace, Benson demonstrates first-hand the value of this exhortation—both in his analysis and in creation of an archive of ephemeral visual texts. Scholars interested in visual rhetoric, protest rhetoric, or rhetorical history will profit greatly from reading Benson’s book. It is well written and offers a unique retrospective of the academic and political discussions in the early 1970s. Inasmuch as Benson offers a glimpse into the theoretical changes then afoot in speech communication, I suspect that this volume will be of special importance to young scholars as they navigate disciplinary narratives. In short, Posters for Peace is sure to inspire scholars and inform their own work as they complete part of society’s homework, too.

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.