Abstract In 2005 the National Collegiate Athletic Association banned the use of American Indian symbols such as mascots, nicknames, and imagery in postseason sporting events. However, several universities successfully appealed this decision by demonstrating permission from eponymous American Indian nations. The focus of this essay is on the rhetorical implications of this permission argument within American Indian rhetoric about American Indian mascots, nicknames, and imagery. Drawing from the lens of rhetorical colonialism and an examination of the University of Utah Utes, I reveal how American Indian permission for mascots can be seen as upholding rather than challenging the system of colonialism through a form of self-colonization.

ABSTRACTGerald Early's remark that black people are seminally important to the modern world because they created the blues is examined as a contribution to the politics of recognition that deviates from the liberal model that dominates in political theory. Central to this deviation is the politics of honor and Paul Corcoran's distinction between formal and aesthetic recognition. The politics of aesthetic recognition is examined here through Hans-Georg Gadamer's discussion of hermeneutics in Truth and Method as well as through Martin Heidegger's phenomenology and philosophy of Dasein (being-there), inspired by Aristotle's Rhetoric, and his writings on art. The significance of art and specifically of the blues to the politics of recognition goes beyond the representation or the relaying of others' voices, in that it calls forth modes of being-there over against difference.

ABSTRACTFirst I discuss the limitations of recognition for grounding both politics and ethics, the main problem being that recognition is distributed according to an axis of power that is part and parcel of systems of dominance and oppression. Next, I take up more recent attempts to link recognition to vulnerability rather than to self-consciousness. I challenge the concept of vulnerability on the grounds that it is not exclusive to, or constitutive of, humanity, on the one hand, and criticize it for ignoring differences in levels of vulnerability, on the other. I propose witnessing, grounded in response ethics, as a supplement to recognition models of political and ethical subjectivity. Witnessing takes us beyond recognition to the affective and imaginative dimensions of experience, which must be added to the politics of recognition. It requires a commitment to what Jacques Derrida calls “hyperbolic ethics,” an ethics of impossible responsibilities for what we do not and cannot recognize.

ABSTRACT This article examines the rhetorics of recognition in postclimate change political theory. As the future of human life—or a human way of life—is put under pressure from the heating of the planet, critical theory has increasingly leveled the ontological distinctions among biological, geological, and meteorological existents, and a posthuman critique is giving way to a postliving critique and biopower is giving way to geontopower. Building on my recent reflections on geontopower, I explore how critical theory is absorbing nonliving existents into late liberal forms of democracy, focusing more specifically on the logos-oriented model of Jacques Rancière and post-Deleuzean vitalist oriented models.

“The capability to turn images of Black people recently murdered or beaten by police into Internet memes further normalizes antiblack violence as spectacle, throwing doubt on the radical potential of body cameras.”

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.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

While “expertise” has been both an implicit and explicit focal point of composition, our most familiar models of expertise running along a spectrum from novice to expert may not allow for a nuanced deployment of tacit knowledge. Without dismissing any of the field's important work on expertise, therefore, I introduce the concept of para-expertise: the experiential, embodied, and tacit knowledge that does not translate into the vocabulary or skills of disciplinary expertise. This concept may help to resituate how we conceptualize, teach, and use notions of expertise in the classroom, since it can teach nonexperts to pursue rhetorical action through strategic expertise alliances without overstepping the very real limitations of nonexpertise.

During World War II, the US Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (OIAA) and the Walt Disney Company produced a series of educational films promoting literacy, hygiene, and American (US) values for distribution across the Americas. Through these films, literacy was to move across borders in service of inter-American cooperation. That movement, however, also reinscribed the distance between a modern, powerful, literate United States and a stagnant, resistant, illiterate “other America.” The program’s insistence on film as a pedagogical tool imagined the United States as a site of technical modernity in contrast to its American neighbors. Working in light of recent scholarship addressing how literacy controls and constrains movement, this essay considers the effects of literacy for literacy's others—in this case, the population of what the OIAA termed the “other American republics.” It highlights the American assumptions that circulated within the literacy films and became enmeshed with the reading and writing skills they claimed to provide. Examining how film moved literacy practice and ideology across national borders, this essay demonstrates how thoroughly the contexts and the media of literacy's movement shape the consequences of its transmission.

The authors provide a robust framework for using rhetorical foundations to teach multimodality in technical communication, describing a pedagogical approach wherein students consider the rhetorical canons—invention, arrangement, style, delivery, and memory—when developing texts beyond print. Students learn to assess their own work, reflecting on how each canon contributed to the rhetorical effectiveness of their multimodal projects. The authors argue for using the canons as a rhetorical foundation for helping students understand technical communication in the digital age.

I address how participating as a parent in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process has helped to transform my own approach to teaching by reinforcing how important it is to endorse a pedagogy that recognizes and values the individuality of my students. Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) has served as the best model I have found to help me move closer to my ideal classroom, and the course that most reflects this ideal classroom is my upper-level Disability and Literature course. The course's greatest strength lies in the extent to which its format and delivery are inextricably tied to its subject matter through an ethic of care(taking), especially through the incorporation of a number of UDI features into this course. What is more, while the traditional class meetings remain a privileged site of collaborative engagement and learning, the course blog is an equally crucial component to such collaboration, as the students create nearly all of its content. Indeed, the blog space serves not only as a place for students to record their responses to the assigned readings and in-class discussions but also as a student-driven supplement to the instructor-supplied focus points, a supplement that truly expands the range of possibilities implicitly represented in my choice of readings. I now understand such a pedagogical orientation not simply as a generic model for “good teaching” but as a reflection of a disability-inflected pedagogy of care.

This article proposes a more complex consideration of the idea-generation stage of the document design process. Survey data collected from multiple sections of graphic design and technical communication classes show that design software and other technology can help students generate solutions to design problems by enabling them to realize design options that they may not have known exist and to adopt a bricolage approach to design that facilitates the process. The author makes several recommendations for how instructors can negotiate the sketching-software divide in their classrooms to ensure that the invention process is optimized for all students.

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

ABSTRACTIn “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam,” Bruno Latour wonders whether academia, particularly the humanities, can rethink its dedication to critique and cultivate an ethos that cares. I question whether Latour's commitment to enlightenment without modernity, particularly his allergy to transcendence, inhibits his ability to transform critique into care. For Latour, transcendence makes impossible the due process of his proposed collective and the corresponding practice of real world politics precisely because it dangles a truth beyond compromise. While Latour regards notions of a transcendence in terms of a beyond as a precursor to terror, Levinas finds terror in the practice of philosophy without the disequilibrium transcendence can bring. Thus, I argue that Levinas offers Latour a way to uncross God that posits the beyond as something other than ineffectually and debilitatingly distant, as something that can inspire us to care.

ABSTRACTThis article explores an alternative logic of imprudence at work in Machiavelli's The Prince, a text seemingly defined by its prudence. Arguing that crucial engagements with The Prince by Eugene Garver and Robert Hariman operate as “prudent” readings, I note that the text offers durable resources for radical political and rhetorical imagination. Such resources are recoverable, however, only in and through an alternative, imprudent, reading strategy. Following the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I read The Prince—particularly in its aesthetic and rhetorical articulation of “the people”—neither as a manual for princes or realpolitik but as both irreducible plurality and differential network, reflecting a political imagination at work in the text beyond modern calculation. Reading The Prince imprudently, I explore the necessary interconnection between rhetorical reading and political thinking—and the subsequent importance of understanding political theory as an aesthetic and textual practice.

“The insights afforded by GFA matter—especially for research that is designed to create spaces in which to listen to marginalized people’s perspectives.”

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.

This essay argues that literacy actors compose agency through the embodied practice of literacies in combination with self-aware feedback loops. The argument brings together recent conversations on agency, embodiment, and cognition in composition studies, neuroscience, and the humanities to develop the concept of discursive readiness potential. Discursive readiness potential refers to one’s embodied agency and accounts for the range of possible actions available to an actor on the basis of her or his past experiences. Furthermore, discursive readiness potential points to one’s capacity to navigate a field of potential literate practices into one actualized action. As such, the essay supports a renewed call for research on agency and embodied cognition in composition studies by outlining discursive readiness potential as a flexible process model for understanding how agents act in emergent discursive situations.

When games are approached as a pedagogical methodology, the homologies between games and technical communication are highlighted: pedagogy that teaches people to play and succeed within certain confines; classroom assessment that provides meaningful feedback to encourage self-improvement; instructional design that incorporates gaming theory and game design principles; and usability to ensure optimum success. This article provides an overview of these topics for instructors to consider when designing a technical writing course as a game.

This article establishes traits of adaptable communicators in the 21st century, explains why adaptability should be a goal of technical communication educators, and shows how multimodal pedagogy supports adaptability. Three examples of scalable, multimodal assignments (infographics, research interviews, and software demonstrations) that evidence this philosophy are discussed in detail. Asking students to communicate multimodally drives them to effectively filter information, remix modes, and remake practices that are core characteristics of adaptable communicators. Beyond teaching students how to teach themselves as an essential part of living in an information society, contending with new and unfamiliar tools also prepares students for their roles as empathic mediators in the workplace.

The design of interactive applications for online communication is an ongoing area of research within technical communication. This study reports on the development of an interactive sea-level rise (SLR) viewer, a data visualization tool that communicates about the potential effects of SLR along coastlines. It describes the formative evaluation of a location-specific SLR viewer created via integral stakeholder engagement. Participants performed a series of tasks, answered questions about the tool's usability and communicative effectiveness, and made suggestions for ways to improve its application to desired tasks. The authors discuss the implications of this study for visual risk communication and make recommendations for others developing similar interactive data visualization tools with audience input.

Professional communication scholars have critiqued the idea that visual styles derived from cognitive theories of human perception can be universally understood by all people and thus effective in all rhetorical situations. Cognitive heuristics, or mental shortcuts that influence how individuals make decisions, provide a framework for reconciling the perceptual features of visualizations with the cultural and contextual features of particular rhetorical situations. This article analyzes information graphics using the heuristics of representativeness, availability, and affect, applying this analysis to a techne of visual design that accounts for both intuitive and contextual reasoning.

Faced with the need to educate women collectively about politics and government, Jane Croly established the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (GFWC) in 1890. Based on archival documents from the GFWC, this article seeks to address the following research questions: What do the patriotic pageants sponsored by the GFWC illustrate about civic education in the Americanization era? What can we learn about civic education and the use of particular rhetorical forms from twentieth-century pageants and organizations such as the GFWC? By exploring the organization’s contribution to civic education alongside other pageants in the same era, it is possible to better contextualize the competing histories of civic education for ourselves and our students. This article also focuses on the patriotic pageants that club women used to develop a model of social change rooted in education, which had contradictory results. The GFWC both supported and resisted whiteness as the position of authority in its promotion of pageants. Embracing the contradictions of pageants and their role in civic education in the Americanization era allows for a more nuanced and accurate picture of the history of civic education.

Abstract The perceived social value of higher education in the United States and the political will to fund it represents a fascinating paradox. This article explores one way that paradox is reconciled. I look closely at the emergence of a specific educational critique in the discourse of the Texas Public Policy Foundation. The critique encourages a neoliberal reinvention of higher education. It does so by constructing symbolic representations that align with preexisting public vocabularies and socially shared orientations reflected in images of the Deserving and Undeserving Poor. By illuminating the discursive techniques by which these representations construct an image of what I call the Undeserving Professor, the critique offers significant theoretical and political insights into an underexplored area of rhetoric, neoliberalism, and public affairs.

ABSTRACTMost Plato scholarship characterizes Socrates's dialectic as cooperative, reciprocal, and open ended. This orthodoxy echoes Socrates's characterizations of it, but the dialectic's dramatizations rarely confirm it. Commentators recognizing this seek to protect the dialectic's image by maligning Socrates's interlocutors. Francisco Gonzalez's description of the Protagoras's “central crisis” exemplifies this approach. When a dispute over how to conduct the discussion threatens its dissolution, Gonzalez blames Protagoras, claiming that relativism forecloses conversation and community. I argue that Gonzalez elides alternative forms of community supported by other discursive practices and that Socrates's refusal to answer legitimate concerns about his methodological demands turns the dialectic into the “external, nondialogical, absolute standard” Gonzalez says it lacks.

ABSTRACT This article considers Michel Foucault's theories of ethical speech and militant life in the context of Occupy Wall Street's encampments in Zuccotti Park. Focusing on the encampments and the production and circulation of resources to meet bodily needs, the article concludes that occupation was a self-inflicted form of precarity as well as an extension of an already existing vulnerability, a living that is at once a form of social death. I read the occupations as a mode of militant life, which is to say, that which enacts precarity while at the same time transforming it into the object of radical speech.

The sciences and humanities have long been regarded as discrete intellectual cultures, separated by a sharp epistemic divide. Recently, however, turns toward "transdisciplinarity" have intimated the growing importance of overcoming disciplinary boundaries. The Rhetoric of Inquiry and digital humanities are two transdisciplinary projects that have attempted, respectively, to bring humanistic inquiry to the sciences, and to bring scientific inquiry to the humanities. This paper attempts to trace the parallel genealogies of both projects in an attempt to theorize some common traits of theory in a transdisciplinary mode. I suggest that articulating these projects with one another enables us to suppose that building transdisciplinary theory will entail a heightened reflexivity concerned with questions about scope, methods, and epistemic values.

This essay uses the Community of Inquiry model to discuss strategies online writing instructors can use to provide effective feedback to students while intentionally creating a

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.

“Roundtree argues that computer simulation requires a unique type of scientific discourse because simulations do not fit neatly into common models of science. “

“The principals of aikido, meditative breathing, Japanese calligraphy, and soft argumentation constitute four slices of the same pie, whatever their respective origins and pedagogical risks. Kroll recognizes the need for closed-fist argumentation while seeking to moderate its use.”

This study exposed a major author studies class to both a reading community modeled after those popular in Charles Dickens’s own time and a digital reading community. Students gravitated toward the more traditional oral reading community over the digital project, indicating an unexpected interest in older forms of communication.

This article examines a central pedagogical dilemma within queer studies: with an increase in public attention to LGBT concerns (and an investment in the categories that comprise the LGBT rubric), how might we prioritize the complexities of queerness within a social context that tends to privilege discrete designations for identity?

English studies must confront and develop strategies to account for scholars’ and students’ unfamiliarity with geography and its precepts, or “immappancy.” This article explores the problems presented by immappancy, traces its consequences for scholarly rhetoric, and proposes two pedagogical models that can help us develop our students’ geographical knowledge.

This study applies three models of attribution to examine the public’s responses to corporate crises. Using Kelley’s covariation model and Coombs’s situational crisis communication theory, the study shows that distinctiveness information has strong and robust effects, consistency information has some effects, and consensus information has no effects on attributions of corporate responsibility, purchase intentions, and punitive opinions. Based on Weiner’s model, this study finds that attributions of corporate responsibility result in punitive opinions guided by retributive rather than utilitarian motivations.

Rhetorical use of citation is a means of indirectly reaffirming authority while avoiding the appearance of argument. It is therefore an especially useful strategy for people and institutions with compromised public images. This article compares the American Catholic bishops’ written citational patterns in the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ presidential year voting guides issued before and after the clerical sexual abuse scandals. To investigate these changing citational strategies, work on entextualization by linguistic anthropologists is integrated with micro-rhetorical methods to provide a socially situated, fine-grained English language analysis of citation within a religious discourse community. Findings suggest that the bishops’ new citational patterns work to obliquely erase the authorial presence of the American bishops, to show deference to the Vatican, and to avoid challenges from lay Catholics. Religious aims are advanced through typographical and grammatical strategies that are specific to written discourse.

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.

A Modest Proposal for the 21st Century Peter Dow Adams Computerized Evaluation of Writing: Senseless Savings Eric BatemanKicking the “Fast Assessment” Habit Carolyn Calhoon-DillahuntDr. Test Cracker, Meet John Henry James FreemanA Cautionary Tale Sharon Mitchler

“We argue that “technical rhetorics” is a concept that has affordances for thinking about how to critically communicate with public audiences about specialized information.”

AbstractThe representation and classification of the structure of natural arguments has been one of the most important aspects of Aristotelian and medieval dialectical and rhetorical theories. This traditional approach is represented nowadays in models of argumentation schemes. The purpose of this article is to show how arguments are characterized by a complex combination of two levels of abstraction, namely, semantic relations and types of reasoning, and to provide an effective and comprehensive classification system for this matrix of semantic and quasilogical connections. To this purpose, we propose a dichotomous criterion of classification, transcending both levels of abstraction and representing not what an argument is but how it is understood and interpreted. The schemes are grouped according to an end-means criterion, which is strictly bound to the ontological structure of the conclusion and the premises. On this view, a scheme can be selected according to the intended or reconstructed purpose of an argument and the possible strategies that can be used to achieve it.

AbstractThis article explores the rhetoric of regret as a way to rethink the aesthetic dimension of two hitherto artificially separated late ancient corpora of thought—rabbinic and “pagan.” Moving away from the thinking in terms of historicist “influences” I arrive at a point of mutual illumination of the corpora, thereby advancing a new model of philosophical and rhetorical analysis that both justifies the importance of the modern discussion of relationships between philosophy, rhetoric, and aesthetics for understanding the Talmud as a late ancient body of text and thought and shows how the Talmud, thus understood, complicates and raises the stakes in that discussion. I first draw on the framework of this bidirectional analysis for probing the rhetoric of the rabbis and of the “pagan” philosophers. I consequently work against the grain of a modern interpretation of late ancient aesthetics to arrive to a comparative study of the aesthetics of rabbinic discourse.

Literacy research has not yet revealed how bilingual learners develop coherent and robust theories of language. Translation, however, provides emergent bilinguals (EL students) with opportunities to develop metalinguistic awareness, which can lead to a more complete conceptual framework for thinking about language and literacy. This preliminary research study sought to formulate an instructional approach (TRANSLATE: Teaching Reading and New Strategic Language Approaches to English learners) focused on using translation to ultimately improve ELL students’ reading comprehension. Using design research methods and qualitative analytical techniques, researchers asked middle school students described as struggling readers to work collaboratively and use various strategies to translate key excerpts from their required English literature curriculum into Spanish. Analysis of students’ statements, decision making, and interaction indicated that students’ conceptual understandings about language played an important role in their learning. Students reflected on the nature of vocabulary, syntax, and the ways that different languages communicate ideas. These findings extend conversations in literacy studies concerning the unique affordances of bilingualism to increase metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness, known contributors to higher levels of reading comprehension.

While there is consensus that dialogic teaching should involve a repertoire of teaching and learning talk patterns and approaches, authorities who enjoin teachers to engage in dialogic teaching generally characterize classroom dialogue in terms of surface features such as open questions. But dialogic teaching is not defined by discourse structure so much as by discourse function. When teachers adopt a dialogic instructional stance, they treat dialogue as a functional construct rather than structural, and classroom oracy can thrive. Our research finds that dialogic talk functions to model and support cognitive activity and inquiry and supportive classroom relations, to engage multiple voices and perspectives across time, and to animate student ideas and contributions. Employing narrative analysis and cross-episodic contingency analysis, we tell a story in three episodes about how oracy practices promote dialogic functions in a third-grade classroom. We unpack how a particular teaching exchange—one we have selected specifically for its nondialogic surface appearance—reflects dialogic teaching. Findings show how supportive epistemic and communal functions of classroom talk are more important to successful dialogic teaching and learning than are surface dialogic features. We argue it is necessary to look beyond interactional form and unpack function, uptake, and purpose in classroom discourse. There is no single set of teaching behaviors that is associated with dialogism. Rather, teachers can achieve dialogic discourse in their classrooms through attention to underlying instructional stance.

This informed opinion piece discusses the author’s dispiriting experience filing the first hybrid dissertation at Ohio University. “Document Format Checklist” guidelines enforced a “rhetoric of distance” between pictures and words—compulsory logos-centrism. Specifications for projects like the author’s that blend images with text did not exist, and staff responsible for document approval at her graduate college insisted that she follow their guidelines. While her advisers’ communications with the graduate college and council eventually resulted in revised guidelines that included two new options for filing multimodal dissertations, her project continued to meet resistance when she tried to file it following these new options.

In a society in which expertise becomes increasingly specialized, we need to understand how to manage gaps in knowledge between experts in various fields and between experts and the public in general. That need is especially great in the public sphere, where technical understanding and lived experience do not always align. This study attempts to model the process by which discipline-specific topoi filter into common knowledge and general topoi are acknowledged by experts. It first addresses the issue of expertise in complex rhetorical places, then employs Michel Meyer's reinterpretation of ethos, pathos, and logos to show how experts and non-experts in such places negotiate rhetorical relationships. The study then explores the social and rhetorical mechanisms by which ideas become commonplaces, building on the established theory of symbolic convergence. Finally, the study demonstrates proof in principle with a brief analysis of one topos in the Reports of the Immigration Commission (1911).