This study considers five different tutor note styles and reports on how the three primary audiences for such notes -student writers, faculty, and tutors -assess their efficacy in terms of length, voice, purpose, and content. Surveys and focus groups reveal that all stakeholders take tutor notes seriously and that collectively they prefer notes that are about a paragraph long, address students directly in the second-person, maintain an institutional rather than colloquial voice, and include a detailed summary and revision plan. To put this study in context, the article also traces the history of writing center scholarship on session reports.

Motivated by increasing international student writing center use to learn more about second language writing development and its assessment, we conducted a case study of an undergraduate writer who submitted drafts to online tutoring over two years. Synthesizing the perspectives and methods of Applied Linguistics with those of First-Language Composition, we assessed the writer's short-and long-term progress in the rhetorical, linguistic, and writing process components of her writing development. We found linguistic improvement in accuracy, especially short-term between drafts and revisions more so than over time, but only modest long-term improvement in both rhetorical and other linguistic components. We attributed these results to the writer's expedient writing process and her narrow conceptions of writing development and of her tutors' role in it. These expedient processes and narrow concep-

Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw’s model of metacognition and Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness to outline four writing/rhetorical concepts within which meta-awareness about composition is observable. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity, and they provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how writers learn.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a “sensual pedagogy” that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

Scholars have offered research and theory about emotional labor and the feeling of emotion in rhetoric and composition, but we have little if any such research on writing center work specifically. Drawing on data from a year-long qualitative study of writing center directors’ labor, this article examines writing center directors’ emotional labor as valuable yet undervalued, fulfilling yet fraught. Emotional labor was work our participants had to do—and often wanted to do and enjoyed doing—in order to accomplish (smoothly, swiftly, or at all) the other tasks on their to-do lists. Emotional labor included tasks such as mentoring, advising, making small talk, putting on a friendly face, resolving conflicts, making connections, delegating and following up on progress, working in teams, disciplining or redirecting employees, gaining trust, and creating a positive workplace. Ultimately, participants suggest that emotional labor is difficult not because they must devote so much time to it, but because they have not been adequately prepared to expect and negotiate it.

Research problem: Most technical documents rely on a combination of text and visuals to communicate their messages. To achieve the desired effect of improved processing and comprehension of operating instructions, the text must guide readers in a clear way to the relevant visual information in order to avoid ambiguity and misinterpretation, and to ensure that the reader optimally benefits from the available information.Research questions: (1) How are textual and visual information combined in operating instructions in order to guide the user's attention precisely toward the relevant parts of a household appliance? (2) In what ways can ambiguity arise, and what kinds of strategies can be used to avoid miscommunication and conceptual problems? Literature review: Operating manuals are usually procedural instructions that tell the user how to set up an appliance, how to operate and maintain it, and how to solve any problems. The vast majority of operating instructions are multimodal in that they include visuals of some kind. But previous research has shown that visual representations of instructions can be just as difficult to interpret as textual instructions-especially if the visuals come without textual elaboration. A combination of text and visuals provides opportunities for taking advantage of both by balancing the other mode's limitations. Methodology: Our exploratory qualitative study of a small set of operating instructions identifies and classifies types of references to visuals in the documents, enriched by interviews with the technical writers of these manuals. Besides showing patterns of reference types, we examine the potential ambiguity of some types of references along with strategies to avoid communication failure. Results and conclusions: We identified 10 distinct ways in which links from text to visuals can be established. Line drawings were referred to more than visuals showing display content. The clarity of the link between text and visuals may be affected by the use of spatial expressions (such as left/right) that presuppose an underlying perspective, as well as by the use of semantic and functional information that is not readily accessible to laypersons. Ambiguity can be avoided by using clearly defined labels, specific perceptual information, and by repetition of visual elements in the text. Also, overspecification can be useful for enhancing communication. We conclude that technical writers need to attend to the links between text and visuals in order to support users effectively, avoiding ambiguity by purposeful strategies. Because our study is qualitative and analytic, implications are limited by the scope of our study, and by the lack of empirical user comprehension studies.

ABSTRACT“Like race” analogies have been critiqued from various perspectives, and this article enters that conversation to engage those criticisms from a rhetorical perspective. In short, this article makes a case for resisting proscriptive judgments about these analogies until they have been contextualized and afforded their complexity as rhetorical figures. A rhetorical perspective of analogies engages them not as truth statements or as part of propositional logic (a monological view of communication) but instead as invitations to explore similar sets of relationships that are qualified through continued dialogue (a dialogical view of communication). Through a case study of a highly recirculated issue of the Advocate, this essay demonstrates the productive possibilities and limitations of analogical reasoning.

There is considerable confusion in contemporary society when it comes to talking about race.Because of this confusion, race talk in schools can be fraught with difficulty, leading to problematic conversations, disconnections, and ultimately student disengagement. While studies in psychology, sociology, and linguistics have considered the role of race in discourse, there have been fewer of these investigations in English education, especially research on the teaching of literature. This article looks closely at the classroom talk of two veteran English teachers’ one an African American man, the other a White woman’ in a racially diverse high school, showing how teachers employ different strategies to navigate similarly fraught conversations. Taking an interactional ethnographic approach, I demonstrate ways that conversations about race that emerged from literature units in both classrooms opened up opportunities for some students to participate, while constraining and excluding others. The results of the study revealed that the two teachers navigated these dilemmas through tactical and strategic temporary alignments of actions and discourse, but in both classes, silence and evasion characterized moments of racial tension. As a growing number of researchers and teacher educators provide workshops and materials for teachers interested in classroom discourse studies, supporting new and experienced teachers’ investigations in this area may ultimately prove fruitful not only for teaching and learning, but also for race relations.

Current research suggests that attention to language variation in teacher preparation can promote equity and narrow achievement gaps, particularly for African American students. However, persistent ideologies about language and race can stymie teachers’ desires for equitable teaching.Teachers who take up linguistically responsive positions that value student language variation still struggle in the moments of enactment due to expectations that they serve as gatekeepers for “standard” English(es). In this article, I conceptualize these struggles as linguistic ideological dilemmas (LIDs) and use discourse analytic and qualitative methods to present illustrations of preservice English teachers’ LIDs as they grapple with deficit language ideologies in relation to course work about language variation. In the focal illustration, I use positioning theory to illustrate the LIDs faced by a student teacher when responding to a student’s blog writing that included features of African American English. The findings show how this participant and others hadlimited awareness of how they were positioned racially until the moment of teaching in which they struggled to articulate and enact linguistically informed principles; in some cases, this positionality led to avoidance of future discussions of race and language. The findings advance past scholarship through generative description of students’ internalized deficit language ideologies and teachers’ struggles with implementation related to valuing language variation. Findings show the affordances and limitations of code-switching for addressing language variation in classroom interactions and the need for preparation about when, how, and why to have conversations about language variation, including greater understanding of language-related ideological triggers.

This article discusses findings from a three-year ethnographic study of an ethnic studies course called Native American literature, which began during the passing of legislation that banned the teaching of ethnic studies in Arizona’s public and charter schools. The data analyzed here explore the ways students use silence as a form of critical literacy “or critical silent literacies” in response to racial microaggressions enacted by their peers, their teachers, or a combination of both. This framing of silence questions common assumptions that Native American students aresilent because of their biological, inherent, and/or cultural “traits” Challenging such assumptions, Native American students in this study reveal that as they attempt to voice their ideas, they are repeatedly silenced because their knowledges counter the dominant settler knowledges taught in public schools. As a result, they discuss how their silence has been used over time as a resistancestrategy to shield themselves, their identities, and their family and community knowledges from dominant, monocultural knowledges with which they did not agree.

For over a decade, a particular transnational educational migration trend in Korea, known as jogi yuhak or “Early Study Abroad,” has been sending thousands of pre-college students to various parts of the globe (e.g. U.S., Canada, Australia, Singapore) with hopes that young Koreans will acquire “native-like” English and become “global elites.” Many of these students then enter U.S. universities that are built upon liberal ideals of diversity and individualism in theory, but offer in practice an indifferent climate towards racial and linguistic difference. Drawing on a two-year ethnographic study of Korean undergraduate students at the University of Illinois, the U.S. public higher education institution with the largest number of international students, the author examines interviews, observations and artifacts collected from the Korean Student Association (KSA), a registered student organization with over 100 staff members mostly with jogi yuhak experience. As the global university offers a rather unfavorable academic climate for racially and linguistically diverse students as well as heightens the failures of literacy as a way to “global elite.” It is in this context that KSA members work to build, reestablish, and preserve their identities and create conditions of respect through practices of localization: The students foster their “Koreanness” not only through Korean language use but also through institutionally rebuilding Korean social practices and networks strained by their many years abroad. Students are able to negotiate their liberal, or rather neoliberal college dreams in seemingly Korean ways of language and literacy that ultimately help them ground their identity as U.S. college students.

Children’s development of literacy in multiple languages has received increasing attention in Literacy Studies (I. Reyes). Researchers have noted the role that family support plays in children’s biliteracy development (Bauer and Gort; Gregory; Li; M. Reyes). Yet the impact of this support on the adult literacies of parents has received much less attention. This study focuses on Arab immigrant parents’ participation in their children’s emergent biliteracy, on the development of digital and transnational literacies by immigrant parents, and on how specifically they are influenced by the digital technologies used to support their children’s developing biliteracy in Arabic and English. We use the framework of Digital Biliteracy, which focuses on “the process of developing literacy in two language[s] through the use of digital technologies” (Al-Salmi, “Digital Biliteracy as a Social Practice” 4352), to examine digital literacy development in two languages among immigrant families. In this qualitative case study of transnational literacies of Arab immigrant mothers, we show that as these parents become involved in their children’s biliteracy, they use digital technologies to produce and interpret written texts in English and Arabic. In doing so, these mothers’ literacies are shaped through the process of helping their children become literate in Arabic and English via on-line and digital technologies.

In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.

This article offers readers a case study of a course-based tutoring partnership that frames and enhances the focus on the stories of three participants—two with learning disabilities. The first part engages arguments involving connections between learning-disabled and typical basic writing students to ask the important question: should learning-disabled students receive more institutionally sanctioned time, attention, and pedagogical care than mainstream students, especially if they are also in basic writing courses? I offer course-based tutoring and peer review and response groups as loci for exploring that query. In the article’s second part, I narrate the sorts of ethical choices that emerged as I began to focus on the participants in this study. I describe the interactions of the participants as they worked together, and with other students, in two peer review and response sessions. The article’s third part provides a more intimate gaze into the backgrounds and experiences of all three participants, offering readers a sense of just how compelling and unexpected the participant stories proved to be, behind the scenes and beyond the classroom. The article concludes with some thoughts on how this poignant experience with two students with learning disabilities taught us all the value of what it means to struggle, to persevere, and to make the most of what “others” of all backgrounds and abilities have to offer.

Light illuminates but also reflects, and when the medium of glass is a dominant design material it communicates within the architectural space. In this paper we suggest that the transience of light and transparencies of glass posit a duplicity that is aesthetically seductive but communicatively misleading. Specifically, the central aim of the paper is to address where truth sits between reflections and reason in the glass surfaces of a mental health environment. To provide a framework the paper first covers a brief history of glass, engages with its technological properties, its language(s) of the inner and outer, its aesthetic effects in an architectural poetry of light, and the messages conveyed to vulnerable clients and careful clinicians. Then, using a detailed case study of a purpose built mental health ward in Australia, we explore how glass engenders visibility, security, surveillance and power, concluding with recommendations for future builds.

As state and federal legislation continues to regulate women's reproductive health, it follows that the field of technical communication must continue to develop methodologies to facilitate stakeholder participation in health policymaking practices. Scott's (2003) scholarship on HIV testing and his "ethic of responsiveness" serve as a foundation for methods to broaden stakeholder participation. Yet, as current legislation attempts to regulate health decisions of female bodies, more explicit feminist methods inviting feminist perspectives to resist such anti-feminist legislation must be developed. Frost's (2013, 2014a, 2014b) apparent feminism serves as a useful methodology that builds upon Scott's methods to enact feminist interventional methods. This article provides a case study of the reVITALize Gynecology infertility initiative, a health intervention project that appears to function as an ally of apparent feminism. Applying an apparent feminist analysis to the initiative reveals limitations of the project's feminist commitments. To address the limitations of the initiative, the article articulates the need to expand apparent feminism's methodology by accounting for stakeholder participation throughout health intervention projects. This article posits that expanding feminist approaches to designing public stakeholder input is vital to upholding technical communication's commitment to advocacy and an ethical feminist commitment to facilitating spaces for all citizens to contribute as public intellectuals.

Background: A content-management project that proceeds with an incomplete understanding of the views, reservations, agendas, and attitudes held by stakeholders could likely encounter problems in implementation. The vast majority of content-management implementation projects proceed with very little visibility into the cultural dynamics that will eventually play such a central role in determining the success or failure of the projects. This case study examines the usefulness of deploying a needs assessment questionnaire to gather qualitative data that could help content-management project leaders understand participant needs, attitudes, and perceptions, and that could potentially improve the implementation of content-management projects. Research questions: How might previously published research questions for assessing cultural dynamics be adapted for a questionnaire intended to gather input from participants in the early stages of the implementation of two separate content-management projects? What kinds of issues does the questionnaire elicit from participants? To what extent is the questionnaire useful in assessing content-management project participant needs and how might it be revised and adapted for other organizational contexts? Situating the case: Implementing a content-management project results in a change to organizational processes; careful attention to managing this change is essential to the success of the project. Specific change-management issues emphasized in literature that addresses organizational and technological change include organizational readiness, stakeholder input, communication of project goals and plans with stakeholders, and training and time to learn and practice new approaches to operations. Organizational culture-a set of beliefs and values that members of an company share in common-plays a role in implementations of technology. Assessing organizational climate and stakeholder values and attitudes-characteristics of organizational culture-as part of a change-management plan can ensure that the culture is addressed when implementing a content-management project. Methodology: This project consisted of three parts: designing a pilot questionnaire based on a previous published methodology for assessing cultural dynamics, conducting the questionnaire within two organizations implementing content-management systems, and assessing the extent to which the questionnaire was useful in the context of the content-management projects. Responses were analyzed using a Grounded Theory approach. About the case: We developed a cultural dynamics needs assessment questionnaire and deployed it within two organizations with the purpose of gathering data about the attitudes and perceptions of project participants toward the impending content-management system implementation. The questionnaires informed the implementations of content management as anticipated. Conclusions: A questionnaire can help understand the cultural dynamics impacting the adoption of new technologies and processes; this method can be included as part of an overall needs assessment for a content-management project. This study also confirms the merit of the research methodology followed; the questionnaire design elicited thoughtful responses from participants and the analysis approach illuminated insights that were then used to engage participants and modify project implementation plans. The constructive outcome of this study suggests the need for more empirical studies and field evaluation studies that build on this one.

Background: When an organization decides to adopt a technology, such as a content-management system (CMS), the choice affects writing styles and processes, and conversely, writing styles affect the implementation of the technology. This case study compares and contrasts the experiences of writers in organizations that implemented different types of CMSs: a web CMS (WCMS) and a component CMS (CCMS), with a focus on the different types of training given to each group to facilitate the implementations. Research questions: (1) What are the dependencies between technology choices and the corollary editorial constraints that writers must consider in order to realize the benefits that the technology can bring? (2) What types of training are needed to ensure that writers become fully productive in a collaborative, structured-authoring environment? Situating the case: When adopting structured information technologies, such as CMS, organizations seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies through the reuse and better management of content components, such as text and images, which can significantly reduce the costs of translation, reproduction, and maintenance of publications. Structured information technologies, such as a CMS, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA) affect technical communicators by changing writing styles to a more structured, topic-based approach, by introducing new tools and concepts for authoring and publishing, and by requiring more involvement in the selection, use, and maintenance of the technologies. Previous efforts to address these issues through training include works by Critchlow, who addressed the use of database systems to address challenges in developing documentation in collaborative environments; Edgell, who related how technical communicators proposed a CMS-based documentation solution to a software firm; and Lanier, who described how one organization overcame the resistance to new structured information technologies by writers. Methodology: The case was studied as an experience report by one of this article's authors (Bailie), in which the organizations engaged a consultant during their CMS implementation projects. The observations are qualitative and reflect consulting engagements with two teams over a period of almost three years. About the case: A common problem in implementing CMSs is interdependencies between content structures, on which the technology depends, and the editorial changes required to ensure that the content is best structured to take full advantage of the capabilities of the technology chosen. This case describes a four-phase training process provided to two clients: one with several contributors to the content-management effort in a single location; the other with more than a dozen contributors in several locations. Each client received four phase of training: (1) theoretical training-understanding pertinent theories behind good content development; (2) application of theory-how to apply the theories to their workplace; (3) software training-learning the new software to produce the content; (4) production-support immediately following training, during implementation. The results of the training were to increase the skill levels of the writers to understand how to leverage content in powerful ways using sophisticated technology. Conclusions: Determine the production needed for the content when choosing a class of CMS to address those production needs. Afterwards, match the training of the writers to the complexity of the system. Content strategists, project managers, technical communicators, and others involved in implementing a CMS need to allow sufficient time and training for writers to adjust their skills to the new technology and the new processes and techniques required to effectively use them.

Background: This case study examines the implementation of an early single-source (the reuse across documents and projects of content stored in a database) content-management system among technical communicators and how they influenced the decision to adopt the technology. Research questions: (1) Why was a component content-management system developed and what was the process of its implementation? (2) How did technical communicators, functioning as both adopters and change agents, influence the new system's adoption? What affected their perceptions of agency during the implementation? Situating the case: Diffusion of Innovations Theory defines innovation adoption as a communication process that occurs over time. When participating as change agents in innovation diffusion, technical communicators are uniquely qualified to support technological change because they are skilled in making technologies accessible to users. Technical communicators can also be the recipients of change, particularly when organizations adopt new technologies, such as content-management systems. Given their expertise at the interface of technology and its users, technical communicators are well positioned to impact the adoption of content-management systems. Methodology: A single, retrospective instrumental case design examined the early 2000s' implementation of a single-source content-management system in the technical communication group of a global company. Surveys, interviews, and document analysis were used to examine the case over a six-year period About the case: A single-source system was adopted to contain costly increases in document cycle time resulting from: (1) customized production of complex and varied products and (2) new European Union regulations requiring all product documentation written in the national language at the point of sale. The system stored product information in a central repository as numbered modules that could be reused in future deliverables. Doing so brought greater continuity to authoring, translation, and publication of content. The system eliminated retranslation of information and automatically recorded and applied any subsequent changes to all affected documents. Technical communicators functioned as change agents and adopters during the system's implementation. Technical communicators in the organization had the choice to adopt the system, and adoption rates varied among staff members. Despite preparation for possible resistance, several staff initially rejected the new system. Those who adopted it did so quickly and created a shared meaning about the system with change agents, a meaning not shared with resistors. The decision of whether to adopt was influenced by perceptions of the innovation and of agency (positive and negative) about the change agents. Conclusions: A pro-innovation bias can impede the creation of shared meaning between change agents and adopters. Emphasizing technical knowledge about the innovation over persuasive elements of empathy for the uncertainty it produces and identity of what it means to be a writer can also stifle adoption. As change agents, technical communicators influence adoption through their rhetorical understanding of situation and capacity for establishing contexts that allow for the construction of shared meaning between change agents and potential adopters. Also, a perceived lack of decisive leadership or a champion for the change risks restricting the power of change agents to influence adoption and can create a space for protracted resistance to it.

Winner of the 2015 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship Techne: Queer Meditations on Writing the Self is a book-length multimodal exploration of technologies, subjectivities, and affects. Blending phenomenology and auto-ethnography with queer theories, we delve into the multiple layerings of text, image, and technology as sites from which to perform/write/read ourselves in the digital age. Through image, text, video, and sound, Techne offers a multiplicitous and changing experience of reading and viewing to probe the often contradictory interplay between digital and traditional writing technologies and the author/ed self.

Abstract This essay examines an early alternative to polling, Mass-Observation (M-O), that dramatically reported on the nuances, contradictions, and passions of public opinion during some of the most extraordinary times in British history. Between the Abdication Crisis of 1937 and the start of World War II, M-O’s combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, along with its emphasis on the cultural context of public opinion, produced a richer, more textured, and more deliberative rhetoric of public opinion than the Gallup poll’s survey techniques. In the process, M-O foreshadowed many of today’s scholarly trends, including the reflexive turn in social research, increased skepticism about the knowledge claims of science, and the emergence of more public scholarship.

In this article, I turn to a grounded theory study that examines the experiences of students participating in an individual project-based FYW course, exploring up close the exploits,—practices, and products of one student “writing to assemble.” I question pedagogy stayed to theory that would treat writing as primarily a technology of representation, and in its place—introduce the concept of “writing as assemblage.” Positing a theory of the writing space that underscores writing’s more generative qualities, I call for a new definition of proficiency—for all manner of first-year writing courses.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

We ended the previous volume year in deep contemplation about the final word of this journal's title: English. We asked, Why English? Why English only? Why not Research in the Teaching of English(es)? We begin this new volume year-RTE's 50th anniversary-thinking about the first word in the journal's title: research. We come to this first word having thought a great deal over the past several months about story. Perhaps it has been on our minds as we have brainstormed ways of marking this 50th volume year-a year that in any person or institution's life traditionally invites commemoration through stories. Story has crept into our conversations about manuscripts as we have pored over them, sometimes hearing the words of a former colleague, who-in his research methods courses-would often say of a research report: I believe the author, but the story's all wrong. We know for certain that story became a centerpiece of the discussions that unfolded at our weekly editorial team meetings after we read the five papers that comprise this issue. Many of the authors in this issue push on or play at the edges of the conventional research article published in the social sciences, inviting a conceptual turn from research report to story. As editors, we feel this conceptual turn, and the articles and essays that inspire this turn, foreground a set of social and ethical responsibilities that researchers in the teaching of English(es) carry into their inquiry and writing.Todd DeStigter opens this issue with argument about argument. Using ethnographic anecdotes drawn from his years of research in AP Composition courses in a predominantly Mexican and Mexican-American neighborhood on Chicago's southwest side, DeStigter surfaces and questions the assumptions undergirding argument's esteemed status in the ELA curriculum. Like authors previously published in RTE (e.g., Newell, VanDerHeide, & Wynhoff Olsen, 2014), DeStigter takes up the epistemological underpinnings of argument, but rather than asking how students might be taught to write better argumentative essays, he explores why and how argumentative writing has assumed its place of privilege in U.S. curricula in the first place. In addition to questioning argumentation's utility in fostering democracy and students' socio-economic prospects, DeStigter makes visible a set of Cartesian and Kantian philosophies that pose questions not just for language and literacy educators, but also for researchers. To challenge argument's position of privilege is, among other things, to call into question the Cartesian and Kantian claims to an objective, made accessible through a combination of rigorous observation and abstract reasoning (p. 17). After perusing DeStigter's article, readers may wonder in relation to their own scholarly pursuits: What does it mean to know, and how varied or multiple might be our ways of knowing? Is there really such a thing as extra-human reality? Might the reality we report in the written accounts of our research be constructed by a human narrator, who, in showing her humanity, makes her reliability-or unreliability, for that matter-more visible? As researchers, we might even walk away from DeStigter's article asking ourselves whether knowing, convincing, and/or proving is, or ought to be, the function of research in the first place. Might research, like stories, serve to imagine, to evoke, to inspire? In the spirit of DeStigter's quest to legitimize other, nondominant modes of contemplation and expression as well as actions that grow from them (p. 30), this question seems well worth our consideration as teachers, as researchers, as persons.Like DeStigter, Rebecca Woodard contributes to ongoing scholarly conversations about writing instruction, while also raising questions for the researcherwriters who comprise the readership of RTE. Her investigation into the links between two teachers' writing instruction and their out-of-school writing practices honors the rich histories and experiences of teachers beyond the confines of the professional. …

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

Information management of discourse – the ability of a writer to use linguistic forms to organize and present information in a written text – is a key component of second language (L2) ability models in the language assessment literature (e.g., Canale & Swain, 1980; Weigle, 2002), but Purpura’s (2004) language ability model developed specifically for assessment purposes is the only one that considers it to be part of the ability to use grammar accurately and meaningfully when producing a text in an L2. The current study investigated whether L2 academic writing teachers consider information management of discourse as an assessment criterion when assessing grammar in L2 academic texts. Fourteen students in an academic English as a second language writing course at an English-medium university in Canada and their teacher participated in this case study. Students’ essay exam scripts were collected, and the Theme-Rheme progression (TRP) patterns and links (Daneš, 1974) as well as the distribution of new and given information (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) in these essays were analyzed. Pearson correlation coefficients between the teacher-assigned grammar grade and the results from the TRP and information distribution analyses were calculated. The findings indicate that information management of discourse indeed forms part of the assessment criteria for grammar in academic writing for the teacher in this study. The implications of this finding for L2 writing pedagogy are discussed.

In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy—specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant adolescent Muslims, leaving African American girls out of scholarly conversations. Employing methods of intertextual analysis grounded within a qualitative study, the researcher examined two questions: (a) What social issues do African American Muslim girls choose to write within broadside poetry? (b) How do these self-selected social issues relate to their identities? Findings show girls most frequently wrote about issues related to (a) war and violence and (b) the abuse, violence, and mistreatment of women and girls. Writing was a means to make sense of and critically shape their multiple identities, including who they are as Muslims, their community, and ethnic and gendered identities.

This article reports on research addressing the role of writing as a space for producing representations of children’s identity as Catholics in a First Communion preparation course. It draws on data from ethnographic participant observation over one year in a Catholic parish in England, focusing on writing in the preparation sessions, taking a social practice approach to identity and literacy. The article argues that in this course, written texts are drawn on to provide spaces within which children produce written representations of aspects of their lives that reify their identities as Catholics. Analysis of the data set demonstrates four ways in which particular kinds of identities were constructed through writing processes. Writing provided space for reframing aspects of children’s unique histories and identities within a faith-based perspective; representing children as active agents in the world; producing reifications of internal emotional states in linguistic form; and making relational connections between the children and their church, home, and friendship communities. The article argues that the production of these reframings of children’s identities requires multiple kinds of recontextualizations, and that writing provides a key means by which these are brought together.

Though usability is a must for all new applications, small organizations often lag behind in this area. This trend is frequently posed as a resource problem: User Experience design (UX) teams, usability testing software, and professional web developers are typically lacking in cash-strapped small businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions, so creating cutting-edge designs may seem impossible. We propose that what is lacking in these settings is actually knowledge of effective design workflows, however, not resources. What is lacking is a sound understanding of UX and an effective means of mobilizing existing resources. Based on a case study of a redesign process for a mobile application, we present evidence that all organizations can build awesome applications if they simply learn how to better manage their design processes.

Research problem: The study attempts to study how an empowered Chinese public coped with and interpreted the environmental crisis of the ConocoPhillips oil spill and how ConocoPhillips reacted to the growing influence of social media. Research questions: In what ways did the Chinese public exercise its new power through social media in addressing the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident? How did a multinational company like ConocoPhillips act during the crisis and react to the voices of the public through new media? Literature review: Social media has caused a power shift in China by allowing the ordinary Chinese public who used to be the silent majority to expose scandals and express their opinions about crises with greater freedom. At the same time, pressure is growing on corporations to exercise social responsibility, through responding to economic, legal, ethical, and discretionary expectations that society has. Stakeholder theory indicates that only by meeting the needs and expectations of the individuals and groups who can affect or are affected by the firm's objectives can a firm survive and succeed. In developing countries, corporate social responsibility is characterized by a lack of systematic and institutionalized approach, with stakeholders, such as the public and community, being neglected for a long time. Methodology: Researchers conducted a thematic analysis of 932 microblog and blog entries about the ConocoPhillips Oil Spill Incident in China that were published on leading Chinese social media websites between June 2011 to February 2013. Results and discussion: The study found that the oil spill sparked an uproar of anger and criticism in the Chinese online community. Most posts on microblogs and blogs engaged in finding the causes and laying the blame for the oil spill. The overwhelming majority of the Chinese public attributed the crisis to the faulty laws and inaction on the part of the Chinese government regulators, to ConocoPhillips, and the Chinese joint venture partner China National Offshore Oil Corporation's failure to undertake due responsibilities. In response to mounting online criticisms, ConocoPhillips exhibited little interest in engaging with the Chinese public and showed poor communication in terms of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). The study's theoretical contribution lies in combining CSR and Stakeholder theory with Discourse Power theory. Practical implications to multinational corporations seeking long-term business development in the developing country contexts, such as China, are that managers need to engage in responsive listening, actively participate in online conversations, and constantly scan the social media environment to manage its relations with the general public. Particularly, firms experiencing crises can gain the public's emotional support by communicating emotion-laden messages through social media.

This case study examined the extent to which expected Gen Y traits surfaced in a well-managed U.S. company. The results indicate that certain Gen Y traits typically regarded as undesirable in the workplace are especially persistent, even in an optimal organizational setting, but others are not. The findings also reveal both expected and unexpected attitudes on the part of the Gen X and Boomer employees and managers. Such studies can help us move beyond generational stereotyping to more accurate, context-sensitive advice about cross-generational communication.

This article examines the development and implementation of a strategic cultural change program from a case study perspective. Initially, the article describes how the program was developed, including an explanation as to how a communication component was integrated into the program from inception. This integration helped reduce the anxiety that change programs traditionally initiate. Additionally, the article examines preliminary findings captured during the program’s implementation. These findings provide generalized insights about ways communication, strategy, and cultural change programs interact. As such, the findings provide real-world support that communication facilitates organizational change.

This qualitative study examines how writers perceive the mobilization and adaptation of their print-based writing knowledge and multiple literacies when remediating written essays into digital stories. It also outlines a pedagogical tool that can help writers reflect on what they might transfer as they compose across media.

Examining the context and production of a community publication, I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Near Westside, this essay analyzes the ways in which local neighborhood authors situate themselves rhetorically when engaging with police issues within conditions of asymmetrical power. Furthermore, it describes the collective processes neighborhood residents used to empower their perspectives. The essay applies this case study to debates over open-hand and closed-fist rhetorics and the roles of scholars as sponsors to such rhetorical forms.

We often confuse commercial representation with political intervention. For instance, a recent Cheerios advertisement featuring a biracial family provided many people the evidence of a welcomed cultural shift, recognition of a growing acceptance of what might have been taboo and even illegal in the United States a handful of decades ago. We stumble upon another example as we realize that washing down a Chick-fil-A fried chicken sandwich with a 7–11 BigGulp has somehow become not one but two political acts of cultural defiance. While companies aligning themselves explicitly or implicitly for or against cultural politics might seem odd, the frequency of such events demonstrates a noticeable—and increasing—overlap between economic production and political intervention. At the risk of sounding clichéd, these cases remind us that we are what we eat. That said, what “we are” and “what we eat” are both at stake in contemporary culture because technological and media innovation have made that culture more malleable. Jeff Pruchnic's Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age: The Transhuman Condition does not delve directly into these particular events, but the problems the book engages help us better understand and respond to modes of cultural production that we must come to see as increasingly heterogeneous. What is the role of rhetoric in an economy of “just-in-time” accommodation?Tacking widely across cultural, economic, and biological registers, Rhetoric and Ethics in the Cybernetic Age seeks to theorize rhetorical possibility after cybernetics, a field in which every thing seems open to redesign and reinvention. Toward these ends, the book traffics in micro-studies: embryotic stem cell manipulation, a Burkebot, video game effects, stock market algorithms, political redistricting, a collection of shoes, among many more. What links these various items is the extent to which biological, cultural, social phenomena once considered autonomous are now susceptible to direct intervention through and as technological innovation. Pruchnic's central claim in response to this development is simple, albeit counterintuitive: contemporary technologies and media are evidence of an increased humanization of social and technological processes and are not inhuman forces of calculation and computation. This is to say that the proliferation of and increased reliance on information media and technological processes allow contemporary cultural practices to more effectively mimic the complexity and vitality of biological processes. While such a claim might be simply stated, its implications for understanding ethical engagement with technics may be quite profound for humanities study in general and for rhetorical scholarship in particular. Put differently, the implications concern the extent to which epistemological categories have always been shaped by supposedly inhuman forces of techne, which then refigure a host of available responses to changing technological conditions. The position allows us to explore and respond to cultural institutions that have markedly become less concerned with establishing mass markets than with identifying and intensifying market subsets that are fueled, in part, by more efficient methods of demographic research and more effective deployment of marketing techniques.Pruchnic's response to this moment is two-pronged. First—in a task occupying the book's first two chapters—he broadly traces how epistemological and technical domains are becoming conflated in contemporary culture. Second—in a series of case studies through the book's final three chapters—he articulates a version of rhetorical ethics robust enough to respond to such a conflation by engaging in specific analyses of contemporary culture. Taken as a whole, the book offers a theory of rhetorical practice and cultural analysis that moves away from logics of exclusion (classification, division, and separation) and instead emphasizes inclusionary logics that seek to establish and maintain ongoing processes of interaction.In the initial chapters, Pruchnic offers analyses of the conditions of contemporary culture, especially with regard to the ways in which cultural life is steeped in technological advancement. Key to this work is a genealogy that Pruchnic constructs and that he uses to trace how, through technics and media, “forms of knowledge/representation are not based on quantification or calculation but on dynamics processes for maintaining relationships” (13). Pruchnic arrives at this claim by arguing that we are witnessing an increasing overlap between the two previously distinct domains of logos and techne, the former largely encompassing reason and communication—traditional human activities—and the latter the material technologies and what has long thought to be nonhuman mechanics. These chapters propose that the traditional separation between these two domains allowed entire systems of ethical and political practice to be founded and sustained. We need not look too far to witness that these divisions play out explicitly in the university, where liberal arts, social sciences, and hard science are well instituted as distinct lines of inquiry. That these two domains now find themselves to be overlapping and have become less distinct is the cause of a great many of our contemporary “problems,” which include the fracturing of democratic processes and anthropocentric effects such as global climate change and armed unrest. Far from claiming that today is unlike any other, Pruchnic instead maintains that the logic undergirding much of these activities is different in kind only because of the speed and complexity with which these operations are undertaken. In response, he proposes that contemporary culture should be understood and characterized as a “technologic,” that is, as “forms of interaction and engagement that not only find their most explicit manifestation in contemporary technologies but signal the imbrication, or recombination, of techne (formalistic and goal-directed strategies) with logos (both in its sense of human ‘higher reason’ and of the general structuring of human life) that Plato attempted to so carefully separate and the division of which became a touchstone for Western thought” (9).As it combines two terms, the “technologic” helps refigure the many debates and problems we find ourselves a part of. Pruchnic finds a basis for this refiguring through a careful reading of Martin Heidegger's work concerning technology, especially as it pertains to the ontological. Toward this reading, Pruchnic goes on to argue that Heidegger's critique of technology's increasing centrality in human affairs has less force now because it regards contemporary technology as only calculation, reductionism, or standardization. Pruchnic instead revisits Heidegger's ontological approach to historical analysis and proposes that we might consider the developments that Heidegger casts as epochs of self-understanding as a “history of techniques” (71). The turn toward techniques is buoyed, as Pruchnic contends, contra many of the criticisms of Heidegger's conflation of material technologies and conceptual frameworks, by the fact that such a conflation may actually be a strength in reorganizing our capacities for responding to technological innovation. Recasting Heidegger's historical analysis as one that traces techniques eliminates issues of authenticity and emphasizes instead “elements of rhetorical thought and praxis that were largely crowded out by Platonic thought” (64). Rhetoric, considered thusly, then is better understood to be “a vector of forces or practices … premised somewhere between the application of physical force and the immaterial realm of pure reason or judgment” (17). This analysis expands Pruchnic's initial proposal, suggesting that many of our humanistic programs and modes of cultural critique—for which Heidegger serves as the most productive example—that privileged the rational, political actor may now be compelled to contend with affective or “subrational” forces as a necessary part of cultural work.Taking affective force seriously has several consequences. In particular, affective approaches focus on processes over individuals as well as asignification alongside signification. The first among these had follows from and led to a revaluation of the importance of ecological relations. Pruchnic locates our interest in ecology, as it regards our understanding of technologic, in the Macy conferences, a series of interdisciplinary discussions regarding the future of science that took place from 1941 to 1960. While the organizers hoped that they would unify disparate branches of science and theory, the conferences are remembered mostly for their work on cybernetics and artificial intelligence. Pruchnic finds in the Macy conferences two primary imports for rhetorical theory. First is the shift toward considering the ecological interaction between actor and environment. This shift gave rise to accounts of homeostatic processes that treated human and technological interactions as a circulation of agency and not the result of a central human actor controlling a nonhuman environment. Second, the conference revised notions of teleological aims often at the core of instrumental orientations to technology, a switch that especially impacts how telos may be related to technologies whose own “purpose” shares functions with many of our own in that they have changed over time. Together, these two findings have much significance for rhetorical theory and practice, as they undercut the reductive communication models that rhetoric is often charged as facilitating.In addition to outlining the conceptual work done by the conferences, much of which the humanities are only now coming around to appreciate, Pruchnic shows how early cybernetic thinkers drew heavily on rhetorical technique to conceptualize cybernetic theory. Both cybernetics and rhetorical practice invent, develop, and encourage robust and flexible techniques for organizing processes of interaction. Pruchnic focuses on how “techniques” may enable theory to be applied through rhetorical and humanities practice, defining the term as a set of “flexibly responsive practices that are directed toward motivating the performance of a generic action and/or the maintenance of a general equilibrium” (16). “Techniques” as a term and concept allows for the development of a technologic that recognizes, Pruchnic notes, that “the very same advances in, and increasing importance of, technologies and communicational media so apparent in other areas under review in this essay are crucial considerations for any attempt to rethink the contemporary status of economics, let alone labor, in the present moment” (31). Pruchnic's approach both widens the scope of his project, allowing him to include a wide array of interdisciplinary discussions, and it also does the important work of refiguring some of the practices we experience as central to rhetorical work.Pruchnic's understanding of techniques and his alignment with the complexity that subtends cybernetics leads him to outline an ethical response that affirms its imbrication within those same modes of technological production that it seeks to change rather than to adopt a critical practice that seeks its intervention from a position outside. Why this is a crucial pairing is evident in how Pruchnic understands rhetoric's role in contemporary culture: “The fundamental challenge of the present is not so much to discover some radical alternative to contemporary conditions … but to figure out how these same techniques already immensely immanent in contemporary capitalism can be made to produce different outcomes” (38). Such a task is even more pressing when we consider that scientific authority to produce and maintain what counts as fact vies with the demand to prioritize “direct application and intervention as the core goals of scientific research and knowledge production” (25). While Pruchnic often cites the work that science does, by no means is the cybernetic moment restricted to lab coats and electrical circuitry. What is true in science is also true in other realms. For example, the granular redistricting of voting districts preselects the voters charged with voting for certain politicians, and manufacturing is able to produce more specific goods for more specific subsets of markets. Basic business notions of supply and demand have become as complex and intertwined as communication's outdated sender-receiver model.These realizations lead Pruchnic to enter an ongoing conversation regarding the role of humanism in rhetoric and cultural analysis. Pruchnic carefully traces the development of posthumanism (an analysis that I cannot do justice to here), noting a tension in most posthuman thought insofar as it “ends up reinforcing [humanism's] superiority or autonomy, the position of the human as the one who ‘decides’” (50). This tension leads him to posit that “we might have to reconsider humanism as something of a rhetorical strategy rather than a philosophical doctrine” (54) and to propose the “transhuman condition” as a key organizing principle to explain contemporary culture. Working from Julian Huxley's short essay “Transhumanism,” Pruchnic posits that the increase in and proliferation of technological intervention helps displace categories of natural and artificial in favor of the idea of flexible but robust processes. “Transhuman” as a term allows Pruchnic to articulate four connected processes of interaction that characterize our contemporary technologic: transition, which details the ways that the continuing process of defining what is and can be human has accelerated in recent decades; transference, which denotes the ways that functional operations can be shared and joined between previously separated domains (human, nonhuman animals, and technologies); transactional, which refers to common processes and procedures for establishing equilibrium rather than a discrete object to be passed along; and transversal, which describes the unusual connections between separated domains of activity such as nature and culture, logos and techne. These terms are threaded throughout the book as a way to organize the intense intermingling of previously separate domains. Although these operations are distinct enough to warrant separate terms, they become confused, as each relies on the others to articulate its own operation. This, however, may be a strength as well, since the confusion performs something of the complexity that the book seeks to trace.Pruchnic's move to the transhuman as a controlling concept in place of others more commonly used today (e.g., posthumanism, antihumanism) opens an avenue of inquiry in which human activity is marked less by periodization than by processes. This avenue then positions cybernetics not as a distinct break but as an intensification of a technologic that extends far beyond our contemporary moment. Pruchnic closes the general framing of the transhuman condition with the aforementioned “history of techniques.” Our “parametric present” is a condition heralded by the standardization of time through clocks and the development of now fundamental physics, a perspective that challenges that idea that we have only recently broken away from more humanism. What characterizes the “parametric present” has been hinted at throughout this review. The conflation of techne and logos provides a greater capacity for miming biological processes in connection with markets, science, media, and democratic governance by its admission of previously nonhuman technology into our approach to epistemological structures. Such a conflation resists a reduction of technologics to mere quantification or calculation and instead gestures toward contemporary culture as concerned with algorithmically managing associations with granular detail.So, where does rhetoric fit in again?While the initial chapters sketch the broad terms of the conditions of contemporary culture in the cybernetic age, the three final chapters isolate important threads for rhetorical ethics. To start, chapter 3, “Rhetoric and the Age of Intelligent Machines,” offers a specific site in which rhetoric and cybernetic theory converse, revisiting Kenneth Burke's response to cybernetics and information technology to show how rhetoric might be revised with respects to technological innovation and social power. While Burke's anxieties about technology are well documented, Pruchnic finds that offers ways of responding to our technological moment. 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A recent trend in communication studies has seen increased attention to delineating the rhetorical dimensions of publics, public spheres, and public opinions, a project largely inaugurated by Gerard Hauser's (1999)Vernacular Voices. This intervention has shifted the focus from elite discourses of public officials in institutional spaces to everyday acts of discursive engagement in more quotidian and diverse public fora. Meanwhile, theories of “deliberative democracy” have come to be a dominant strand of democratic theory among political scientists and political philosophers. Proponents of the deliberative turn consider deliberation, plurality, and public participation essential to a healthy democratic polity and argue that “consensus based on reason-giving” should be the goal (Dryzek 2010, 322). As such, and continuing a long line of criticism that runs from Plato to Kant, Rawls, Habermas and others, rhetoric is often treated in deliberative democratic theory as the opposite of rational deliberation and as a tool to be used merely to persuade rather than to prove (Dryzek 2010, 322–23).More recently, however, there has been an upsurge of deliberative democratic theory that employs a rhetorical lens or rhetorical concepts and that seeks to emancipate rhetoric from its Platonic and Kantian shackles, such as Bryan Garsten's Saving Persuasion (2009) and Robert Ivie's “Rhetorical Deliberation and Democratic Politics in the Here and Now” (2002). Seeing see deliberation as necessarily rhetorical, these theorists shed light on the essentially controversial and agonistic nature of political debate, dialogue, and decision making. They view rhetoric not as merely monodirectional or a form of deceit but instead recognize that rhetoric occurs across multiple public settings and circulates throughout various publics.Continuing to push this dialogue further, Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation, a collection of essays edited by Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen, adopts a rhetorical lens to consider public deliberation, political discourse, and democratic society. In a well-crafted introduction, the editors advance the concept of rhetorical citizenship as a unifying perspective for developing a cross-disciplinary “understanding of citizenship as a discursive phenomenon.” In this connection, they argue that “discourse is not prefatory to real action but in many ways is constitutive of civic engagement” (1). Through eighteen chapters divided into three sections, the contributing authors use rhetorical citizenship as an umbrella term to engage a number of discursive sites, citizen actors, and various publics and public controversies in both theoretical musings and practical, international case studies on deliberative democracy. Overall, the essays marshal “a diversity of actual deliberative practices” in considering “how everyday people participate in and practice citizenship, and how everyday practices might be enhanced” (8).The authors proffer citizenship as a mode of political activity and as a discursive and deliberative process that requires public reflection and entails a rhetorical orientation to the arguments and debates that take place in democratic society. Enacting rhetorical citizenship is thus not merely constituted by “deliberative exchange among representatives and citizens across multiple sites” (4). It also requires “internal deliberation” by citizen actors with regard to the public arguments put forth by their political representatives and other public officials. Rhetorical citizenship is a process that requires both citizens' rhetorical output and their discursive, critical engagement with political discourses. To these ends, the individual authors consider “actual civic discourse” that occurs across multiple sites and through a multiplicity of actors at the same time that they interrogate notions of rhetorical agency and issues of “voice, power, and rights” (7). Further, although proponents of deliberative democracy take consensus and the elimination of conflict as their end goal in public debates and controversies, this collection affords a space for considering the productive and emancipatory nature of conflict, contention, and agon in the public sphere and within public spheres—while also looking ahead to rethink consensus and deliberative norms in general.Throughout the collection, the authors draw heavily on rhetoricians and political philosophers, including Gerard Hauser, Robert Asen, Robert Hariman, Kenneth Burke, Jürgen Habermas, and John Dryzek, among others. While the overall themes of the book are centered on deliberation and rhetoric, scholars from communication studies, discourse analysis, and political philosophy, along with fields outside the humanities such as political science and sociology, all contribute to the dialogue. Developed initially for the 2008 “Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation” conference in Copenhagen, the individual chapters in this collection represent this disciplinary diversity while bringing together academic voices from throughout the international community as well. Each chapter is prefaced by a brief introduction written by the editors, effectively organizing and clarifying the objectives that tie the essays together. As a brief review does not afford space to consider each of the eighteen individual chapters in this collection, my aim here is to reflect on several essays from each section, all of which serve to illuminate the book's broader themes and contributions.The book's first section provides the historical precedents for deliberative democracy, rhetorical citizenship, and the idea of the public forum. Kasper Møller Hansen, a political scientist, traces the origins of deliberative democracy through political thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and John Dewey. While contemporary theories of deliberative democracy are often regarded as constituting a new scholarly trend, such dialogues have their roots with these historical political thinkers and with earlier conceptions of the republican tradition. While Hansen provides a historical background for deliberative democratic theory, Manfred Kraus traces the origins of rhetorical citizenship to ancient Greece. Kraus persuasively argues that the Sophists' “analysis of operational truth with respect to the contingencies of human life,” along with their belief in the “constant negotiation between contradictory points of view as observed in the Athenian practice of political assemblies and law courts, laid the ground for the concept of citizenship” (40). Kraus argues that there was never a Sophist philosophy of rhetoric per se, but when brought together the individuals who identified with sophistry constituted an intellectual movement that presaged Aristotle's later inauguration of rhetorical theory. Finally, tracking and comparing the development and ultimate failure of forums, town halls, and public meetings in France and the United States, William Keith and Paula Cossart tease out some of the fundamental tensions that complicate the ability of citizens to enact their rhetorical citizenship in various discursive contexts. Together, the essays in this section productively set the stage for the remainder of the collection, offering a historical grounding for the main themes of the book as a whole: deliberative democracy and its republican roots; citizenship as a fundamentally rhetorical, discursive, and agonistic practice; and the need to identify alternative discursive sites where citizens can and do participate in political discussions and perform strategies that mitigate the problems and pitfalls of the formal political sphere.Broken up into three parts, the twelve essays in section 2 break some new ground in terms of theory building and for considering non-discursive norms for engaging in political action and public deliberation. Part 1 of section 2 is perhaps best represented by Marie Lund Klujeff's essay and case study on what she calls provocative style. Political debate can be messy. It does not often live up to the ideals or follow the conventions espoused by political theorists and academics. In the political arena, participants may meet discursive challenges that limit or diminish their ability to effectively contribute to debate and thus must adopt unconventional rhetorical strategies that afford an agentive capacity. Klujeff argues that employing a provocative style in public debate can serve as a “deliberate violation of the norms of official communication and communicative action,” instantiating a “stylistic parody [that] functions as refutation by mockery” (105–7). In the internet debate that Klujeff tracks in her case study, the use of such a non-normative stylistic tactic indeed resulted in “offense and irritation.” However, it simultaneously gave “rhetorical salience to the conflict” for a much wider audience that would have otherwise not been engaged. It also allowed for the citizen provocateur to participate and contribute to the deliberative process. Similarly, in “Virtual Deliberations” Ildiko Kaposi also looks to an online forum to argue that “the criteria for judging deliberative talk need to be treated and interpreted flexibly, and modified according to the circumstances in which deliberation and discussion occur” (119). In all, the four essays in part 1 of section 2 argue that breaking the rules of decorum in public deliberations can serve important rhetorical functions. Such non-normative, provocative strategies do not necessarily seek consensus but instead aim to further community building, help circulate political discourse, and foster moral respect between both debaters and broader publics.The four essays in part 2 examine elite discourse in order to “study how notions of citizenship are portrayed and realized by agents in positions of power and influence” (63). The authors look across multiple public settings and interrogate political subject matter from the literary public sphere to gendered war rhetoric and from political statements concerning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy to a case study of constitutional law and political philosophy. Challenging the discursive and deliberative norms of the formal political sphere, the elite citizens (including Barbara Bush and Tony Blair) discussed in part 2 are seen to undertake disruptive discursive acts in the midst of formal political settings. The authors demonstrate that while one is able to exercise one's rhetorical agency through such destabilizing acts, the norms in such institutionalized settings are not so easily challenged or subverted. As Lisa Villadsen writes in her exemplary essay “Speaking of Terror: Norms of Rhetorical Citizenship in Danish Public Debate Culture,” in such an “a-rhetorical debate culture” as the formal political sphere, the rules of deliberative conduct determine the standards of “proper” rhetorical citizenship (179). Any deviation from these norms is considered a breach of one's citizenship status. Given this, Villadsen calls for the need to “continue questioning the norms—spoken or unspoken—that underlie notions of rhetorical citizenship in a given national or cultural setting” (179). Using a rhetorical lens to examine why modes of communicative action may succeed or fail allows for greater opportunities to understand citizenship across multiple settings. Part 3 of section 2 continues the collection's broader goals of examining rhetorical citizenship, deliberative practices, and rhetorical agency across a variety of public contexts. From public hearings held in Quebec, Canada, to grassroots groups in New York and Washington, DC, online debates over Danish real estate economic issues, and public engagement with a song from a popular Danish revue, the four essays extend and add to the diversity of sites in which public deliberation occurs and to what effect.The final section offers a set of future-oriented proposals for how rhetorical citizenship and deliberation can be productive for democratic society in ways that are not agonistic or confrontational. Effectively bookending the collection, the three chapters advance strategies and conceptualizations for reducing contentious debate and transforming competing political arguments in such as way as to encourage a more dynamic and constructive public sphere. As an exemplar, Christian Kock's, “A Tool for Rhetorical Citizenship: Generalizing the Status System” reappropriates and reformulates status theories with the aim of identifying how “present-day debaters” and “observers of debate” may find new grounds for building consensus or mutual understanding between otherwise opposing viewpoints (279). In deliberative contexts where “partisanship and polarization rule,” Kock provides a tool for fostering “normative metaconsensus” through narrowing down party-line disagreements to “more specific points—in which either side might have a better chance of persuading people unsympathetic to their positions” (294). This is not only a tool for debaters and the elite, Kock argues, but also a means of building awareness of the nuances of political disagreements among both citizens who consume these discourses as well as the media that represents them.On the whole, the notion of rhetorical citizenship is a timely intervention that aims to rethink the standards and practices of public deliberation and thereby contribute to a healthier pluralistic democratic polity. Perhaps especially in the context of U.S. politics, where the vitriolic bifurcation of present-day partisan lines leaves little to no room for rhetoric and deliberation in the formal political sphere, such a discussion is not only warranted but necessary, providing a way to think through this antagonistic gridlock. Rhetorical citizenship affords a critical space in which to theorize new practices of public engagement and deliberation and to move beyond deliberative democratic theory's insistence on rigid discursive norms and consensus building. We should attend to and take seriously agon, agitation, destabilization, and other nonnormative dissentious acts in order to better understand alternative sites of democratic instantiation. The nature of conflict, contention, and competition is not always derisive and dividing. Instead, as many of the essays in this collection argue, agonistic enactments can be productive and provocative, building communities, circulating discourse to multiple publics, and affording an agentive modality for civic engagement and citizenship. At other times, as the essays in the concluding section argue, there is an evident need to rethink the meaning of consensus in itself and consider rhetorical strategies for orienting oneself to oppositional positions. Across multiple sites, from online fora, grassroots enclaves, and more formal institutional settings, the international case studies taken up in Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation speak to the broad applicability of rhetorical citizenship as a concept.This variety in case studies is indeed one of the strengths of the collection, especially when paired with the disciplinary diversity represented by the individual authors. A concept like rhetorical citizenship, as demonstrated by this diverse collection, produces an opening for various other academic traditions to look to the tools and theories cultivated within rhetorical theory and apply them to cases across cultural and political settings. While the concept of rhetorical citizenship in itself requires the reader to extrapolate in order to see how it might be defined across these ostensibly disparate applications, the editors' introductory chapter and prefatory remarks at the start of each section strategically orient the essays to this larger theme. Moreover, as this disciplinary promiscuity speaks to the broad appeal of rhetorical citizenship, Kock and Villadsen do not provide a justification for why these various fields are represented and what this contributes to the overall dialogue. Interdisciplinarity should not be taken as an end in itself, although that is not necessarily to say that is the case with this collection. The diversity of the authors is likely symptomatic of this being a conference proceedings rather than the editors' attempt at diversity for diversity's sake. Given that the topic of the collection is deliberation and democratic society, however, it seems fitting that a range of disciplinary voices would be represented in this dialogue, especially when humanistic disciplines, while sharing much in common, often are insular and speak in their own respective vacuums.Finally, the collection attends to a wide spectrum of public and political sites where deliberation actually takes place. As the editors state in the introduction, “Focusing on how citizens deliberate allows us to consider both macro and micro politics, but always with an eye to the significance for the individuals involved” (6). In this regard, the editors advance a set of research questions that speak to the larger themes of the book, such as “What forms of participation does a particular discursive phenomenon encourage—and by whom? How are speaking positions allotted and organized? … What possibilities are there for ‘ordinary’ citizens to engage in public discourse?” (6–7). Despite the repeated insistence on the collection's commitment to “vernacular rhetoric,” the public settings and political fora addressed in the individual case studies are not quite as representative of a pluralistic democracy as one would hope. The issue of gender is only explicitly taken up in one essay, while questions of how and where racial, ethnic, and LGBTQ minorities are able to perform their rhetorical citizenship are not addressed.The four essays that engage online deliberation are perhaps the closest the volume comes to exploring vernacular discursive contexts, and indeed these critical engagements are valuable. Participation in such online dialogues, on the other hand, still requires an availability that allows for free time to deliberate as well as the economic security that affords ready access to the internet. The editors assert that “a rhetorical focus has a special regard for individual actors in the public arena, not just the eloquent politician or NGO representative but also the person watching an election debate on TV, chiming in with a point of view through a blog on civic issues, collecting signatures from passerby on a windy street to stop municipal budget cuts, or deciding to join a local interest group” (6). And while each of these sites and settings are addressed, the rhetoric and deliberation that is endemic to the streets, down on the corner, in the market, and even in the local pub are left out of this discussion. The reader is left to wonder who we should and should not consider a citizen, what publics the concept of rhetorical citizenship includes and excludes, who has the capacity to enact their rhetorical agency, and more pointedly, whether access to the public arena and the deliberative process necessarily entails a relative position of privilege. As such, while the disciplinary diversity may be one of the strong points of this collection, this openness is contained by a mostly straight, white, male representation of deliberative democratic society.Despite these omissions, however, Christian Kock and Lisa Villadsen's Rhetorical Citizenship and Public Deliberation offers an excellent portfolio of case studies and theoretical insights that will surely contribute to future discussions across a range of disciplinary sites. The bridging of rhetorical studies and deliberative democratic theory is an important intervention that is promising for future cross-disciplinary scholarship and for extending the scope of the discourses and deliberative practices that actually do outside more formal political settings. As such, this collection would be well for that focus on rhetorical theory, civic and the public sphere, or as for scholarship that aims to on discursive theories of citizenship across multiple public and international contexts. It also well for scholarship that aims to the between political science and rhetorical studies, a that offers many opportunities for theories of contemporary democratic society.

Writing-to-learn benefits have been explored in various educational settings. However, little research has been done on how a WTL approach in combination with two different languages of instruction can influence historical reasoning learning. The main objective of the present study is to examine the effects of a particular WTL instruction in two languages (L1 is Russian and L2 is English) on historical reasoning learning outcomes. The paper presents the results of a case study of first year students of the History Faculty. Learners received small-group L1/L2 instruction by a team of two teachers in a Logic module which included evidence based direct instruction and a set of WTL activities. The instruction explicitly targeted argumentation skills such as argument structure, validity of an argument, fact vs opinion and using documented historical sources. The Critical Thinking Analytic Rubric was used for both pre and post-course metacognitive competencies assessments while argumentation skills were assessed with the help of a new developed rubric. The results showed various patterns of positive change in all the categories and seem to support the hypothesis that this approach to writing-to-learn in L1 and L2 leads to successful acquisition of disciplinary knowledge and skills.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

ABSTRACTThis longitudinal case study about the political rhetoric of Viktor Orbán—prime minister of Hungary between 1998 and 2002, and since 2010, respectively—demonstrates that the first, remarkable personal experiences in public communication may have a major impact (“imprinting”) on the future behavior of political actors. Orbán gave a memorably radical talk on June 16, 1989, urging Hungary’s democratic transition from Communism. The study uses critical discourse analysis and links it to media scholarship on live media events to show that Orbán became hostage of his own rhetoric and speech situation for the two decades that followed his 1989 entry.

The author conducted a seven-month ethnography of literacy practices in Mexico in 2003-2004 and returned in 2013 to conduct a follow-up inquiry. This essay traces both the researcher’s disillusionment with traditional, school-based literacy programs, curricula, and assessment consortiums as practiced in many postcolonial countries, and her growing interest in what she calls “ecological literacy.” The study narrates the lives of two Mexican students’ engagements with ecological literacy to argue that literacy as tested and valued in international organizations (PISA, UNESCO, etc.) is highly overrated; indeed, it is a “literacy myth” that success in autonomous literacy has any redeeming effect on the majority of material lives in countries such as Mexico, who suffer from uneven effects of the global economy. In ecological literacy, students have opportunities for action—affordances that alter lives if perceived and utilized. The author argues for a new narrative about literacy, one that understands literacy as ecological by tracing the embodied and experienced literacies of two students, ultimately elaborating on what literacy might look like if we open ourselves to the multiple literacies of most of the world. This essay also argues that traditional literacy assessments neglect to consider how individuals use literacy to navigate an environment impacted by certain global economic policies.

McCracken explores how material conditions encountered by sex workers-realities that "are created and disrupted by discourse and rhetoric" (xxviii)-have the potential to both deny and construct agential choice. To do this, she used an ethnographic design to embed herself within a community of sex workers as a method for asking questions and spending time "with women who exchange sex for money or drugs and the myriad people who come in contact with them" (191). Consequently, as a researcher and a self-identified advocate for sex workers, McCracken argues for more complex interpretations of the stories, ones that can lead to robust solutions to the systemic and individual traumas experienced by them. Through critical discourse analysis, she disrupts the historical and cultural interpretations of sex workers, showing how these constructed realities have led to ineffective or limited solutions because they have historically been hindered by an over-reliance on the archetypal binary of victim/ survivor. This binary obscures not only the kaleidoscopic meaning of these workers' lives, but also limits opportunities for responsible rhetorical agency, or what McCracken calls agential choice.

This qualitative study looks at how rural women in the American South have obtained access to digital technologies for reading and writing. Using the “life history” approach (Brandt; Hawisher and Selfe), we interviewed five women. We look at the challenges caused by the Digital Divide, at economies of access, including the financial factors that shape individuals’ uses of digital technologies for reading and writing, at the strategies that the women used for gaining access to needed technologies, and at the nature of sponsorship in digital, rural contexts.

This study describes the use of literacy—including the written word—in the maintenance and practice of Lukumí, a Diasporic African spiritual tradition. While Lukumí is decidedly orally transmitted, the written word is still a critical part of its contemporary practice. Relying on data collected during participant observation of ceremonies and rituals, semistructured interviews and focus groups, the study reveals the ways in which orality, material culture, and the written word exist within a communicative continuum critical to Lukumí devotion and practice.

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions. Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.

Rhetoricians have paid increasing attention to the influence of materiality and context on rhetorical action. However, such attention has yet to infiltrate discussions of constitutive rhetoric. This essay examines Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking as a case study for developing audience cultivation as a metaphor for analyzing audience development. This metaphor allows scholars to better account for the historical and material contexts that shape rhetorical efforts. Through analyses of Child’s and other contemporary cookbooks, as well as rigorous attention to the political, economic, social, and cultural forces at play in midcentury American life, I argue that Child’s success is not solely the product of her rhetorical prowess or charisma, but also the product of a constellation of extra-discursive elements that both enabled and constrained her rhetorical efforts.

Research problem: This study provides insight into practitioners' reasons for choosing a particular language (English versus the local language) in the genre of job ads in countries where English is a foreign language (EFL countries). Scholarly publications and public discourse have suggested reasons for language choice, but these were not based on the perspectives of practitioners. Research questions: (1) What reasons do Dutch job ad writers give for using all-English, all-Dutch, or partly English ads and what genre factors inform these reasons? (2) To what extent do the reasons given by Dutch job ad makers for using all-English,P all-Dutch, or partly English ads complement reasons mentioned in publications on job ads? Literature review: Genre theory identifies three factors as important determinants of genre: contextual factors (such as characteristics of the organization and the sector in which the genre is produced), reader-writer factors (characteristics of the genre's target audience and author), and textual factors (the genre's content, structure, and wording). The reasons mentioned for the use of all-English job ads are that English is the organization's corporate language and that the organization is looking for English-speaking candidates. The reasons given for the use of job ads in the local language are that English is less clear than the local language and that English words are strange and exaggerated compared to equivalents in the local language. Among the reasons mentioned for the use of partly English job ads are that English words attract more attention than equivalents in the local language and that English job titles sound more modern and have more status than equivalent job titles in the local language. Methodology: In this qualitative study, we conducted 25 interviews with practitioners who designed job ads in the Netherlands, selected because they had recently placed an all-English, an all-Dutch, or a partly English job ad in a Dutch newspaper. They were asked an open-ended question about their reasons behind the language used in the job ad they placed. Interview data were labelled and categorized; subsequently, patterns were identified across categories. Results and conclusions: The interviews showed that all three types of genre factors-contextual, reader-writer, and textual-underlie practitioners' language choices. Practitioners mentioned the same types of factors that were mentioned in publications on job ads, but gave a greater variety of reasons for language choice. Of the reasons mentioned by the practitioners, the large majority were not given in publications. These findings underline the importance of obtaining text producers' perspectives and can be used to sensitize both novice and experienced professional Human Resources writers to the relevance of genre factors in language choice. A limitation of the present study is that the desired effects of language choice mentioned by the respondents were not verified with the target group of the job ads. Therefore, future research on language choice in workplace writing should test whether particular language choices in job ads actually achieve the recruitment effects Human Resource Manager professionals expect.