This article examines the impact of the sociodemographic profile (including age, gender, and educational track) of Flemish adolescents (aged 13–20) on lexical aspects of their informal online discourse. The focus on lexical and more “traditional,” print-based aspects of literacy is meant to complement previous research on sociolinguistic variation with respect to the use of prototypical features of social media writing. Drawing on a corpus of 434,537 social media posts written by 1,384 teenagers, a variety of lexical features and related parameters is examined, including lexical richness, top favorite words, and word length. The analyses reveal a strong common ground among the adolescents with respect to some features but divergent writing practices by different groups of teenagers with regard to other parameters. Furthermore, this study analyzes both standardized versions of social media messages and the original utterances (including nonstandard markers of online writing). Strikingly, different results emerge with respect to adolescents’ exploitation of more traditional versus digital literacy skills in relation to their sociodemographic profile, especially with respect to sentiment expression (verbal versus typographic/pictorial). The study suggests that the inclusion of nonverbal communicative strategies, for instance in language teaching, might be a pedagogical asset, since these strategies are eagerly adopted by teenagers who show proof of less developed traditional writing skills.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

Service-learning pedagogies attempt to bridge the often-distant realms of work in the academy with that of the surrounding community. However, in practice, a true partnership among stakeholders can be challenging to achieve. For this project, I invited three former students and the director of a local non-profit to partner with me in an important aspect… Continue reading Advancing Campus-Community Partnerships: Standpoint Theory and Course Re-Design by Ashley J. Holmes

Activists and change agents have long used all of the tools and resources available to them to accomplish their goals: they’ve used their voices (rallies, canvassing, lobbying politicians, even talking with friends about causes near to their heart); the written word (letters to the editor, posters, flyers, and community newspapers/zines); their bodies (strikes, marches, sit-ins,… Continue reading Teaching with Vision, Teaching Social Action: An Interview with Dr. Kristie Fleckenstein by Lauri B. Goodling

“Collectively, these articles focus our attention on issues of identity, inclusion, and social justice in realms ranging from sites of education to historical signage, to bathroom placards, to music, and to television. Taken together, these articles offer a view of how rhetoric shapes and is shaped by the multifaceted world around us in profound ways.”

To investigate how college students understand and use cloud technology for collaborative writing, the authors studied two asynchronous online courses, on science communication and on technical communication. Students worked on a group assignment (3–4 per group) using Google Docs and individually reflected on their experience writing collaboratively. This article explores leadership and how it interacts with team knowledge making and the collaborative writing process. Guidelines are outlined for instructors interested in adopting collaborative, cloud-based assignments, and the tension between providing clear instructional guidance for student teams and allowing teams to embrace the ambiguity and messiness of virtual collaboration are discussed.

Online learning modes can provide convenience and flexibility to students. But communicating the value of online education in technical and professional communication should not end there. Program directors should rearticulate the narrative about the value of online graduate education beyond flexibility and convenience by reevaluating the ways that program assessment is designed and implemented. This pilot study suggests that a community of inquiry framework can help to communicate the value of the online learning environment to a variety of stakeholders, including prospective and current students, administrators, instructors, and potential employers.

“Expanding on this link between the Southern Strategy and neoliberalism, I argue proponents of municipal schools in Shelby County, TN, deployed a small government rhetoric of freedom and a neoliberal framework of self-regulation to codify the boundaries of white flight in the geospatial and discursive realms of the new school districts.”

Technical and professional communication (TPC) programs rely on contingent faculty to achieve their curricular mission. However, contingent faculty lack professional development opportunities. In this article, the author reports survey results (N = 91) and three cases studies that provide information on contingent faculty and their preparation for online teaching and then provides a three-step approach for TPC program administrators and faculty to follow so that programs can create sustainable professional development opportunities for contingent faculty to teach online.

Online course material development requires much writing, often catching faculty by surprise because of either the sheer volume or the specialized role and function of writing in an online only and multimodal environment. technical and professional communication (TPC) faculty are uniquely suited to coach faculty in producing readable writing for online courses. This article explores the professional development strategies and coaching skills necessary for TPC instructors and/or practitioners to serve in this role in online course development training.

Scholarship in literacy and composition studies has demonstrated the significance of family literacy practices, especially as they relate to educational experiences and achievement. Often, the literacies of migrant and refugee families are considered in terms of conflict: conflict within families, and between families and institutions. This article seeks to illuminate spaces where migrant family literacies inspire positive relations, specifically in daughter-father interactions. In this ethnographic study of Hmong women, I show that literacy alters traditional relationships between fathers and daughters, reframes disempowering gender dynamics, and supports daughters’ access to public realms. These literate interactions have lasting effects throughout daughters’ lives as they pursue education, professions, and political advocacy opportunities.

Applied Pedagogies: Strategies for Online Writing Instruction, edited by Daniel Ruefman and Abigail G. Scheg. Boulder: UP of Colorado for Utah State UP, 2016. Print. Foundational Practices of Online Writing Instruction, edited by Beth L. Hewett and Kevin Eric DePew. Fort Collins: WAC Clearinghouse and Parlor Press, 2015. Print. A Position Statement of Principles and Example Effective Practices for Online Writing Instruction (OWI) by the CCCC Committee on Best Practices for Online Writing Instruction. Conference on College Composition and Communication. Mar. 2013. Web.

This essay examines the production of economic space as a rhetorical project in the motion picture work of Ford Motor Company between 1918 and 1945. On film, Ford’s overlapping visual narratives worked to position abstractions like markets, commodities, and class as spatially experienced entities grounded in the materiality of roads, village industries, and national parks. When presented to an American public working through ideas of national identity, isolationism, and economic depression during the interwar period, these films played an integral role in shaping the trajectory of the American landscape to this day. Moreover, in taking up this set of artifacts, I position Ford Motor Company as a unique category of spatial rhetor—an institutional figure large enough and powerful enough to generate and distribute narratives that can crack open the codified elements of social life and insert, in the newly formed intermediary spaces, images of individuals performing industrial or corporate identities.

Drawing from the author’s experience teaching online technical communication courses with an embedded service-learning component, this essay opens the discussion to the potential problems involved in designing online service-learning courses and provides practical approaches to integrating service learning into online coursework. The essay addresses specifically those classrooms where students may be required to develop or find their own service opportunities, whether those opportunities are within their community, on the college or university campus, or in another community. The essay argues by implementing service learning into online classrooms and requiring students to locate their own agencies, students not only build a greater sense of civic engagement because they are working with agencies whose missions they support, but also they develop a greater sense of responsibility for their own education and the coursework they undertake.

This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

This essay provides a comparative analysis of a large number of texts devoted to writing assessment, analyses that help answer questions about writing assessment volumes and that provide a picture of writing assessment scholarship over a twenty-five-year period.

The gendered rhetorical constraints imposed on female writers in mid-nineteenth-century letter-writing manuals are challenged by the representations of letter writing in Susan Warner’s  The Wide, Wide World and Maria Cummins’s The Lamplighter, popular mid-century novels. By investigating imaginative literature by women as a site of women’s rhetoric, feminist historians of rhetoric can recognize that the battlefield for expanding women’s rhetorical agency in the mid-nineteenth century is not primarily located at the division between domestic and public realms—the site emphasized in current histories of women’s rhetoric—but is interior, where letter-writing rhetorics seek to police habits of mind.

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.

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

“The editors of Present Tense are excited to announce a new issue focused on meaningful political rhetoric, insightful technical rhetoric, and thoughtful critical reviews . Volume 4.1 connects rhetoric and the public sphere and includes cogent articulations of how rhetoric functions in free speech, contested legal issues, and unexpected digital realms.”

Roughly 1 out of 10 students in our classrooms has some form of disability, and now that a growing number of technical and professional communication (TPC) courses and programs are offered online, scholars need to adequately address accessibility in online course design. Calling on the field to “pay attention” to this issue, the authors report the results of a national survey of online writing instructors and use Selfe’s landmark essay as a way to theoretically frame the results. They conclude by offering strategies for TPC instructors to design more accessible online courses.

Public writing spaces, such as blogs and social media sites, are expanding quickly with new websites, web applications, and other interfaces constantly available to users. As these digital composing spaces continue to expand, it is important that writers are capable of operating within them, yet many composition students lack the rhetorical awareness to present effective arguments in multimodal digital interfaces. To address this issue, the author designed a project to introduce students to public writing while reflecting on the implications of the permanence of their writing, the searchability of these public spaces, and their responsibility as writers. This project began by asking students to reflect on their own online personae, be it through Facebook profiles, personal blogs, or online class forums. Utilizing websites like Yelp and YouTube offered students the opportunity to see how others present themselves online and the effectiveness of composers in these digital spaces. Taught in an online course format, this project demonstrates how writing can live outside of the traditional classroom space and contribute to the students’ community. For the writing teacher, it creates the occasion to delve into students’ understandings of ethics in online writing while illustrating the rhetorical components necessitated by composing in digital media.

This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.

MOOC Response about “Listening to World Music” Steven D. Krause What I Learned in MOOC Jeff Rice

In this article, the author discusses his experiences teaching a class on the Vietnam War, a controversial subject that divided a nation along generational, class, and racial lines. He argues that learning takes place in the encounter of differences — where students consider perspectives, worldviews, and cultures different from their own. As a literature teacher, he claims to use writings by American soldiers and journalists, North and South Vietnamese soldiers, Vietnamese Buddhists, and ethnic American poets in order to have students reflect on the many perspectives on the war, perspectives that may challenge their preconceived notions about Vietnam, likely deriving from family, history, and cultural productions such as Hollywood films. In teaching this class, he discovered that, like his students, his views were interpolated by history, politics, and culture; to teach ethically, he had to reflect on his own subject positions as both an Asian American, who identifies with the struggle of other minorities, and a Cambodian, who must come to terms with his country’s historical tensions with Vietnam. Overall, the article demonstrates the importance of humanities teaching — where students learn, through language, creativity, and the imagination, to reflect on the experiences of other people and become responsible world citizens.

Recent scholarship on global online courses points to the need to examine the issue of social context in an online global learning environment. To explore global learners' cultural perspectives on the social climate of an online class, we first review the social presence theory—which can be used to examine the social climate in an online classroom, and explain factors that contribute to learners' social presence. Then we report findings of a survey conducted among a group of Chinese business students and discuss specific aspects of an online business communication class which might contribute to enhancing global learners' sense of social presence in an online environment. We conclude the study by explaining the present study's implications for delivering effective online business and technical communication courses with global learners and recommending strategies for increasing global audiences' social presence in an online class created by the instructor and the online community.

Principles of universal design are applied to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success.

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Courses on ethnic American literature can unintentionally reinscribe students' preconceptions and stereotypes about ethnic American subgroups or create the false impression that each ethnic group is homogeneous. A student with limited experience with people of color might think she now understands an ethnic group after reading an ethnic American novel, for example. By using fiction and non-fiction film, teachers can destabilize students' oversimplified views of ethnic groups and of the concepts of race and ethnicity themselves. The course described here started with Toni Morrison's short story, “Recitatif,” which ingeniously leads readers to examine their own racial preconceptions. Then, novels (Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich, Sent for You Yesterday by John Wideman, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, and Mona in the Promised Land by Gish Jen) are paired with films to demonstrate that greater diversity exists within any ethnic group than between any two. Students also engage a few key articles about canon formation so they can understand ethnic literature in the context of American literary traditions. By the end of the course, students have a healthy uncertainty regarding race and ethnicity, their oversimplifications having been undermined by their work with diverse texts.