In Slam School: Learning Through Conflict in the Hip-Hop and Spoken Word Classroom, Bronwen E. Low argues for the significance of critical hip-hop pedagogies, particularly when engaging with racial and social conflicts in educational settings. Low collaborated with a teacher at an urban arts magnet high school in the northeastern United States through a performance poetry course that was taught using a hiphop and spoken word curriculum. Overall, Low's book is useful for community literacy scholars as an application and assessment of a popular practice and growing pedagogy in schools and community organizations.

Youth perspectives are routinely absent from research and policy initiatives. This article presents a project that infuses youth participation, training and mentorship into the research process and teaches youth how to become policy advocates. Empower Latino Youth (ELAYO) studies the individual and systemic factors impacting sexuality and childbearing among Latino youth and seeks to reduce negative stereotypes and elevate the social standing of Latino youth. As a team-in-training, ELAYO provides adolescents, undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity to develop research skills while learning the importance of linking science to policy. This paper was developed in collaboration with Latino youth.

This essay examines the way in which the song “Strange Fruit,” as performed by Billie Holiday, employs ekphrasis in order to make appeals condemning the practice of lynching. In developing the visual aspects of a lynching scene through ekphrasis, Holiday engages audiences in a way that encourages them to experience the lynching scene with all five senses. The sensory experience of the scene and Holiday's performance creates a strong condemnation of lynching and practices of racial violence.

Cristina and Isabel’s invitation to be interviewed for this edition of the journal is an honor. I apologize to all readers in advance for a contribution that could have been much better with more time, but I’m grateful to have the chance to comment on a topic that has been the motivating factor in my personal life and my life as an educator and linguist. I will respond to a few questions that have been posed to me by Cristina and Isabel, frame the ethnic studies problem in a larger context, highlight NCTE and CCCC’s work in this area, recounting the work of the Task Force on Racism and Bias in the important work of assisting teachers to recognize and implement a curriculum that authentically represents historic work, and comment briefly on Cruz Medina’s insightful essay on the ethnic studies issue in Arizona.

Reviewed are: Facing the Center: Toward an Identity Politics of One-to-One Mentoring by Harry C. Denny. Writing Centers and the New Racism: A Call for Sustainable Dialogue and Change edited by Laura Greenfield and Karen Rowan. I Hope I Join the Band: Narrative, Affiliation, and Antiracist Rhetoric by Frankie Condon. Logan A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, new ed. by Joseph Harris Language and Learning in the Digital Age by James Paul Gee and Elisabeth R. Hayes Contemporary Literature: The Basics by Suman Gupta The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives edited by Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt

In a photo taken at the community college where my father Julian Medina taught, he’s wearing a tie and a middle-management, short-sleeved buttonup shirt, shaking hands with farm worker advocate César Chávez. As in my father’s proud image, I too work hard to project a professional appearance, often wearing a tie the first few weeks of the semester. I do so because of the often mistaken assumptions students make about my knowledge and the wisdom of assigning readings by writers of color. Unfortunately, this feeling of insecurity comes from lived experience. When my Anglo mother married my Mexican American father, her father disowned her. Even though my father had earned his bachelor’s degree and his master’s degree and taught English at a community college in central California, his accomplishments did little to diminish my grandfather’s racial prejudice. Before my father died in 2006 at the age of fifty-six, he often told me that I was supposed to surpass his success in the same way as he did with his accomplishment as the first in his family to graduate from college. He did this by changing the family trade of mowing lawns to instead teaching English at the college level.

We believe that one of the major research questions that will drive the field of technical communication during the next 5--10 years is, "How can technical communication scholars navigate increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice through better communication?"

This article draws on a four-year practitioner research study of a university partnership with an all-boys public elementary school to analyze students’ socially situated literacy practices thatoccurred on the margins of a curriculum driven by high-stakes testing. We bring together critical literacy (Freire, 2007; Janks, 2010; Luke, 2000), realist theory (Alcoff, 2006; Mohanty, 1997;Moya, 2001), and Gramsci’s (1971) conception of the organic intellectual to provide a layered framework for understanding how students at our research site mobilized their cultural identitiesfor critical ends, what we define as “organic critical literacies.” Through illustrative examples of third- and fourth-grade African American boys’ interactions with fiction and nonfiction texts,we examine how students critiqued common ideologies that devalued them, their school, and their city, and enacted more humanizing visions. The elementary students whose work we featurewere realizing their capacities as emerging organic intellectuals, translating their singular critical insights and observations into a broader dialogue that had more universal resonance. Weconclude by discussing the educational, epistemological, and ethical implications of our study.

Multiple studies on the relationship between lexical diversity and holistic writing quality in a second language (L2) have consistently shown that a greater number of unique lexical items, compared to the total number of words, is associated with better quality writing. The findings of such studies indicate the importance of vocabulary to L2 writing. However, they provide little information in terms of what vocabulary L2 writers need to learn in order to improve their writing. Despite its limited application in the mid to late 1990s, the use of lexical frequency profiles has not been developed as a method for analyzing the vocabulary of L2 writers’ texts and providing insight as to the vocabulary needed for developing L2 writers. This study constructed two lexical frequency profiles of texts written by a homogeneous group of Spanish-speaking learners of English. Multiple regression analyses were conducted to determine the contribution of more and less frequent lexical items to the participants’ holistic scores. The results indicated that word types which occur less frequently in the English language contributed significantly to the participants’ holistic scores, despite the relatively low frequency with which they were used in the participants’ essays. These results suggest not only the utility of lexical frequency profiles in teaching and researching L2 writing, but also that L2 writers may benefit from instruction using frequency information. Pedagogical implications are discussed in terms of how L2 writing instructors can incorporate lexical frequency information into direct vocabulary instruction.

ABSTRACT This rhetorical analysis investigates Martin Delany's (1861) innovative yet understudied Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party as a significant instance of nineteenth-century African American generic transformation and constitutive pan-Africanism. I explore how Delany recasts the genre of the mid-nineteenth-century African missionary narrative—with its white supremacist standpoint—into a lean, tightly controlled secular report intended to establish (1) Delany's African American readers’ agency as potential African emigrants; (2) the value of Delany's leadership in the emigration movement; and (3) a powerful constitutive pan-African ideological foundation for the emigration movement and for black uplift more generally.

The contemporary American political landscape is littered with talk of apology. Throughout the 2012 presidential campaign, both camps sparred over when, why, and to whom apologies should be made. The most striking clash occurred in July 2012. The Obama camp ran a series of campaign advertisements alleging that the then presumptive Republican nominee had in fact remained at Bain Capitol in a leadership role longer than he had claimed, bolstering their characterization of Romney as a businessman whose business was not good for America.1 When Romney's aide failed to quiet the critique by claiming that the candidate had “retired retroactively” (DeLong 2012), Romney himself took to the airwaves to speak to the situation. On Friday, 13 July, he appeared on five different networks to condemn these types of attacks and to call for a campaign centered on issues, sidestepping the question of his tenure at Bain. In an ABC interview, Romney emphatically stated, “He [Obama] sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). When asked, Obama and his team refused comment. The next day, however, a video advertisement posted on YouTube titled “Mitt Romney: Asking for Apologies”—attributed to the “Truth Team”—did respond in a manner that was read by pundits as a blatant refusal of Romney's demand for an apology. Interspersed with clips of Romney claiming that Obama does not understand freedom and that he should be apologizing to America rather than for it, appeared three simple blue screens that read: “Mitt Romney. He sure asks for a lot of apologies. When he's not busy launching attacks.”This exchange triggered almost predictable responses from political commentators. On the right, Obama's refusal to apologize was read as a white flag—an admission that he could say nothing without publicly acknowledging the lies he told for political gain. On the left, Romney's demand was read as an attempt to evade the questions raised by the advertisements, although some read it as even less than this, equating Romney's demand with “crying uncle” (Easley 2012). Had the back and forth of the commentary been even somewhat novel, it might have become exhausting. As it played out, however, it just lay there already dead in the water, waiting for the next wave of issues and predictable responses to wash over it.One might certainly read this scene with a sort of cynicism or even nostalgia for a time in our political life when things were otherwise—when the truth of speech mattered or apologies were read on a moral register. I think both attitudes, however, miss the larger point. The quickness with which we discount political speech, having seen for years what lies behind the curtain, and our obsession with memories of times that perhaps never were, keep us from investigating how this beastly creature, the “demand for apology,” operates. We say almost nothing about it, preferring to lament the state of political rhetoric more generally or reading it from and through established political stances. The rich body of literature produced by rhetorical theorists and critics about apology itself offers us important insights into the potential and limits of such speech acts. Yet these studies rarely include a sustained investigation of the demand for apology, and if they do, they make certain presumptions about the operations of demands that are suspect. In response, this essay highlights the need for a study of the rhetorical complexities of demands that examines the conditions through which these speech acts structure and invoke another's response, revealing how a demand for apology both constitutes and is conditioned by the scene in which this demand takes place. Implicitly then, this argument pushes us toward a renewed interrogation of rhetoric's scene of address.Demands for apology are curious in that apologies proffered in response sometimes fail to sufficiently resolve the demand. Such scenes are familiar to us. I demand an apology from you for something you have said or done, and you turn to say “sorry.” Your apology though, however uttered, does not fully satisfy me. Perhaps it is because I had to ask you to apologize in the first place, to point out that what you have said or done is wrong or injurious. Perhaps it is because, given the injury I incurred, your apology does not quite feel like enough. In any case, the anger or hurt that prompted my demand might in fact remain even after you apologize. Such emotions might be magnified in the context of apologies offered on behalf of a state to a specific group or population. It is easy to imagine how apologies might fail to “make up for” historical atrocities. “We're sorry” can hardly right involuntary internment, abuse of indigenous peoples, institutionalized racism, or genocide. But, to be fair, demands for apology rarely ask this much; that is, they do not ask for the situation to be “fixed” but rather addressed (ethically).That an apology conditions and performs an ethical address is worth noting only if we understand the complex ways in which language trips us up, causing the apology to stumble in the face of a demand. Sara Ahmed's work here is helpful. She argues that the difficulty of any apology is that its utterance cannot on its own perform the work that a demand demands. “Of course,” she explains, “the gap between saying sorry and being sorry cannot be filled, even by a ‘good performance’ of the utterance” (2004, 114). Felicitous or not, the performance of an apology—both what it says and how it is said—cannot effect, guarantee, or authenticate what Ahmed takes as the object of a demand for apology: feeling sorry. Thus into this scene of address—and Ahmed is clear that apology must be read as an interlocutionary scene—a problem of recognition appears that confounds the work of an apology. She explains: So the receiver has to judge whether the utterance is readable as an apology. So the following question becomes intelligible: Does “this” apology “apologise”? The action of the apology is curiously dependent on its reception. The apology may “do something” in the event that the other is willing to receive the utterance as an apology, a willingness, which will depend on the conditions in which the speech act was uttered. (2004, 115) The success of an apology depends then not on what is said or the emotion it conveys but on how this apology is “taken up” and read. Thus the one who demands an apology judges whether the apology meets the conditions of recognizability in the particular context.Paradoxically, however, the very terms that render an apology recognizable might effectively strip the demand for this apology of its force. In recent work, Adam Ellwanger suggests that apologies are only read as such when they perform metanoia, the subject's internal conversion or transformation. (I have apologized when I show you that I am a changed person.) Ellwanger demonstrates quite convincingly, however, that the performance of this metanoia in an apology negates or undermines the force of the demand. Understanding apologies as (speech) acts of public humiliation that ultimately bring the offender in line with public norms of civility (2012, 309), Ellwanger claims that in the apology, “the activity of confession itself becomes the punitive mechanism. This creates the illusion of self-censure, a phenomenon that is crucial to punitive apologetics” (2012, 310). The apology thus renders the demand that occasioned it at best irrelevant and at worst logically suspect. What makes it irrelevant is that the self-punishment enacted in the apology appears to be self-motivated; the confession evidences an internal transformation of a subject that, for Ellwanger, occurs “independently of his accusers' demands” (2012, 324). I see the error of my ways and find myself a changed person because of what I now know and understand. The demand is occluded because I am both the origin and the effect of this self-transformation. And what makes it logically suspect is that the demand for apology promises forgiveness in exchange for a form of punishment predicated on relationships that prohibit this forgiveness. As Ellwanger explains, “The covertly punitive goals of the call for apology ensure that the dialogue will be defined by agonism and antipathy on both sides—conditions that make forgiveness and reconciliation all but impossible” (2012, 326).That demands for apology end in paradox may lead to the conclusion that discourses of apology might have limited application in public arenas. Ellwanger himself argues that “a space that is more conducive to honest dialogue and negotiation” is possible if only we rethink the demand for apology as “the kategoria that initiates a conversation where the accused offender engages in a vocal defense of himself, while the accusers seek to prove his guilt” (2012, 326). For him, it is best not to force “a necessarily dubious metanoia” (2012, 326). Instead, we should understand apologetic speech as an antagonistic debate that allows “for the possibility that the offender does not want reconciliation” (2012, 326). In the end, Ellwanger claims that “minimizing the emphasis on forgiveness and admitting the conflict at the heart of public apologetic discourse might temper our expectations for its outcomes” (2012, 326).Although Ellwanger is right to caution against an understanding of apology as an act that brings about a total reconciliation or transformation, it is hard to imagine how the demand for apology can bring about anything but stasis. If, for instance, we read our original scene through Ellwanger, we see how Romney's demand for an apology becomes the occasion for a conversation in which both parties might state their case without seeking to reconcile their positions. Romney levels an accusation that the Obama team is telling lies for political gain rather than engaging the issues; the “Truth Team” opts for a preschooler's response of “he did it first” rather than explains why Obama will not or should not apologize for the claims made in the advertisement. In this example, the call of the demand and the response of the (non)apology become unhinged. The advertisement for Obama does not address the complaints Romney levels. Instead, it takes the occasion of the demand to address the American people, suggesting that we are in on the joke that is the demand. Romney is no worse for wear, though, given that his demand for apology never turned on Obama's response (or nonresponse, as the case may be). That Romney issued the demand allows him to stake a claim to a moral position within the political scene. The content of the demand is to some extent irrelevant because it is the act of demanding itself that is meant to accomplish his goals. These goals are revealed in what he says immediately after he issues his demand for apology. Romney comments that the president's allegations are “very disappointing” given his promises in the first campaign (Shear 2012). Romney thereby claims the high ground, a position from which he takes authority to pass judgment on Obama's speech and actions. What is so interesting in this overly familiar political strategy is that it renders any response inconsequential. This demand does not call for a response or invoke an other.2 It is instead a performance of the place (and the power) the speaker claims by virtue of the demand. All are called here to witness this spectacle but certainly not to engage it or question it. So the “conversation” begun by the demand ends with it as well, revealing a stasis that might be honest at the cost of truth.This is not, as some rhetorical scholars would have us believe, the necessary result of a political life constituted in and through agonistic debate. It gestures to a larger set of questions about the rhetorical-ethical contours of the demand for apology for which current scholarship fails to fully account. How does the demand invoke the other or bind another in an address? How does this invocation place the interlocutors in relation to each other? What are the conditions in which this relation functions ethically? The complexity of these questions confound us when we take for granted the conditions of the demand's recognizability. Considerations of the demand for apology (which may be treated as supplemental to the exploration of apology itself) often proceed from the premise that the terms of a demand merely represent or narrate some previous injury, suggesting an ontologically and temporally prior recognition of a particular history of injury or violence. When demands for apology are made, that is, we presume that they seek redress for historical acts that have already been deemed and recognized as morally wrong. Ahmed, for instance, claims that a demand for apology “exposes the history of violence to others, who are now called upon to bear witness to the injustice” (2004, 119). As an expository act, all the demand seemingly does, then, is carry forward a history that it itself does not constitute or color. Interlocutors in this scene are asked to “bear witness” to this history or respond to it through an apology, accounting for their role in this history. Because we do not account for the history itself—its constitution and the rhetorical conditions in which it is addressed to an audience—we lose a sense of the very thing that marks a demand as a demand: risk. As Alexander García Düttmann explains: One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because every demand requires uncertainty as the medium in which it is raised. One can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because nothing ensures that a response will ensue, whether the one who makes the demand encounters indifference or whether there is no one to hear the demand. Finally one can say that a demand is marked by an uncertainty because the seriousness of a demand (for recognition) cannot be guaranteed; on each occasion one must decide anew whether another person's demand (for recognition) is feigned or whether it is meant seriously. (2000, 10–11) Risk attends the demand not only because we cannot predict or guarantee a response but also because the demand itself seeks recognition as a demand. In the case of a demand for apology, the history revealed in the demand is an uncertain history because it needs recognition for both the content of the history (is this what happened?) and the telling of the story (is this telling an act of laying bare history or is it the premise of a joke?).Theorists of demands for apology also seem to presume a kind of standing for the subject of the demand. We are, as we must be, always already on the scene when we give an account of a demand for an apology. To speak of or theorize this demand and its effect, that is, one presumes that there is an already established relationship between the one who demands and the addressee of that demand. We might argue that this relationship is inaugurated in and through the injury and therefore has been structured prior to this demand. Is it the case, however, that if our account of the demand precedes from an already inhabited scene, then it must follow that the demand had no influence on setting this scene? In other words, how might the demand change the structure of address? To answer these questions, we turn for a moment to a consideration of the scene itself. In Ellwanger's work we are met with a claim that demands for apology operate as a kategoria—an accusation made in a court of law that calls for a defense. Linking contemporary demands for apology to the kategoria of antiquity, Ellwanger argues that rethinking demands as the beginning of a conversation can help us understand the role of apology in creating productive debate. Yet what Ellwanger, like many others, ignores is that the kategoria binds the other in conversation because it invokes the authority and the conventions of the legal scene. The accusation calls on the other to respond because it speaks in the name of law. Here is where the Burkean understanding of a scene fails us. The scene is not merely a “container” for the speech act, a place or landscape in which a demand is made. The force of the demand comes from and constitutes the scene in which it operates. As Judith Butler reminds us, “In order to have that relation of responsiveness, one needs already to be in a relationship to a set of others in which one can be addressed or can be appealed to in some way. In other words, one needs to be disposed to hearing, one needs to be in the scene of interlocution, one needs first to establish such a scene in order to be responsive” (Murray 2007, 418–19). We are called then to understand the ways that demands for apology are conditioned by and structure scenes of address. To do so illustrates how the demand places the speaker at risk. One can demand recognition only if one is dislocated by it. I demand an apology not as the subject who was injured but as the subject whose standing—the right and authority to speak before the other—is in jeopardy. To make a demand places me in a tenuous position. Against a history of violence or injury that almost always revokes my authority to speak, I demand “as if” I already inhabit a place in the scene of address that authorizes my speech and obligates you to respond, aware that it might establish the very conditions under which I suffered injury.To examine a demand for apology rhetorically is thus to read for how language mediates the risk of subjects and histories as it constitutes the scene of address in which it operates. With this insight, we return to our beginning. Romney's demand for apology, when examined closely, shows itself to be simply obscene. The language of his demand carries and covers over a history that authorizes Romney's standing in the scene. “He sure as heck ought to say that he's sorry for the kinds of attacks that are coming from his team” (Shear 2012). This might be the “folksy” language of George Bush or Sarah Palin to which we've become accustomed. But it also harkens back to a 1950s suburban vernacular in which Romney's standing to demand an apology would have gone unquestioned. While conjuring a scene that confirms his own authority to make the demand in the terms that he does, Romney's language mitigates the risk associated with claiming a place in the scene of address by sealing off this scene and placing it against (and the contemporary political it against the scene. Romney's demand is not issued to Obama out for a the demand invokes no one in particular even as it to witness the attacks that are the of his The risk is because the scene of the demand is with the the perhaps more with the contemporary political scene at demand is thus offered from an that can be seen but not addressed or in the As a his demand offers the a of the and place by a different As an act that the scene of though, the demand speech, the that speak within and to it. In the place of speech, we are only with a of that of truth to the very of political

The acknowledgments preceding The State of Speech illuminate much about the subtext of the book and the very real-world problems to which the author hoped to find a solution in writing it. The problem: the disjunction in post-9/11 America “between the daily practices of citizenship and the exercise of political power” (xi). Joy Connolly's solution: Cicero's ideal orator. Here Connolly's goal is not simply to provide a clearer explanation of Cicero's entwined political and rhetorical theory as read through his ideal orator but also to extract from Cicero's works a rival to current republican thought entrenched in “individual liberty” (1). For Connolly, as for Cicero, this model is based in rhetorical practices.Ultimately, accepting Connolly's argument depends first on the reader's acceptance that Ciceronian theory provides a model that values personal experience (including nonelite experience), that the orator is positioned through civility or decorum to recognize others' experiences, and finally that the orator prioritizes the common good of all (Roman) people. This requires that Connolly reconcile the Roman masses with the oratorical practices of the elite in the Roman republic and de-essentialize gender and class as the basis of full, participatory citizenship. These topics are the frequent focuses of the early chapters of the book and by far the most controversial lines of argument. Second, the reader must accept that the Ciceronian model can extend beyond the theoretical to actual political practice, presumably, in post-9/11America. While the success of Connolly's argument may hinge on the acceptance of these claims, the success of the book, a theoretically dense reading of republican rhetorical and political theory, primarily, though not exclusively, through the works of Cicero, does not. It is much of the work necessary to underpin the major arguments of the book that holds the greatest value for readers interested in oratorical performance, citizenship, gender, class, and rhetorical theory in ancient Rome.The introduction of the book begins to establish the major lines of argument and to build the claim that “Roman rhetoric makes a major contribution to the way that the western tradition thinks about politics” (262). In support of this claim, Connolly moves between Roman and early American and even contemporary rhetorical and political theory (Habermas, Marx, Mouffe, Arendt, Benhabib, Gramsci, and Žižek among others are all frequently cited). The introduction emphasizes the significance of the Roman republic in American political theory by detailing how republicanism has served to mediate between “radical and liberal approaches” to American history (7–10).The first chapter, “Founding the State of Speech,” is an exploration of two key questions in republican Rome, the relation between the orator and the masses—how the Roman populace was taken up, represented, ruled, formed, and guided by the speech act—and the basis of authority for the speaker. Connolly's examination of these issues leads to the major claim of the chapter—that for the orator of the Roman republic authority was performative and firmly rooted in the charismatic, elite body. That is, until the shift in the early first century and the influx of Greek rhetorical theory represented in the handbooks of the Rhetorica ad Herennium and Cicero's own De inventione.This shift, according to Connolly, was a move to, as the title of section header makes clear, “rationalize the republic,” in that handbooks were able to “put rhetoric forward as a model of rational and rationalized public discourse,” which “constrain[ed] expressions of authority” inasmuch as the orator was no longer “relying on ancestry or wealth, but [instead] recouping elite charisma in a logical discourse of style” (67–68). For Connolly, this shift transferred authority from the bodies of Rome's elite and conflicts among them to a “learnable code” (69). The role of the people, who Connolly argues were once “moral judges,” also shifts, through the genre of judicial oratory, to deliberation about what is “just and honorable” with the jury functioning as “a microcosm of the just city” (70). According to Connolly, these shifts moved Rome from conflict to consensus by grounding conflict in law, judicial rhetoric, and deliberation and reconciled Hellenistic rhetorical theory, namely status (or stasis) theory, with the oratorical practices of the Roman republic (73–75).Chapter 2, “Naturalized Citizens” begins with a discussion of the origins of Roman civil society using myth, specifically Virgil's Aeneid, to frame the tensions between nature and culture before moving to a similar and, Connolly argues, related tension in discussions of eloquence as resulting from nature or art in the prefaces of Cicero's De oratore. This chapter establishes two major arguments. First, that Roman citizenship underwent a transformation, necessitated by expansion of the Roman empire in the first century BCE, from an Aristotelian model of “a virtuous, homogeneous citizenry intimately linked by geographic proximity and the shared experience of living together” to a more flexible Ciceronian model that sought “to represent civic bonds as rooted in nature but activated and reinforced through human acts and their memorialization in text” (88, 89).Second, and much more significant to the remainder of the book (and scholars of rhetorical history), Connolly makes the case that Cicero's concept of republican citizenship can be unearthed from the nature/art debate regarding rhetorical training in De oratore. This reading leads to the claim that the shift in “eloquence's status as an art to its identity as a product of nature” is not “a matter of wholesale transformation” as much as “a hybridization of the categories ars and natura” (103). Interestingly, Connolly argues that those who need the art are, in Roman rhetorical treatises, “demasculinized” and not “eligible for full citizenship” (104). Because experience (apprenticeships, practice in the forum) is privileged by Cicero (and his Antonius), rhetorical training is unnecessary: “Naturalization of rhetoric amounts to a claim of natural domination in terms of class and ethnicity … [by the] male, well-educated, and wealthy” Roman citizen (111). However, Connolly argues that ultimately Cicero's characters are concealing rather than naturalizing rhetorical training, an obscuration that is symptomatic of “eloquence as stability born of instability” and “Cicero's view of the res publica.” This conflict leads Connolly to clearly articulate her reading of Cicero's ideal orator: “As Cicero closes the gap between eloquence and virtue, the orator's speaking body becomes the virtuous body of the citizen and, by extension, a microcosm of the virtuous body politic: eloquence emerges as a performative ethics that embodies and enacts the common good for the instruction and pleasure of the republic” (113). Perhaps surprisingly, there is very little consideration of Cicero's own position as a new man, though there is a brief suggestion that Cicero might be guilty of a “tactical misreading” of the bounds of Roman citizenship (90).Chapter 3, “The Body Politic,” builds on a conclusion of the previous chapter, that Cicero's ideal orator is “embodied proof of republican virtue,” by developing the implications of Cicero's philosophy of rhetoric as fundamentally performative. The chapter makes two theoretical claims about republican practices based on Cicero's ideal orator. First, while the orators of De oratore are all upper-class men, Cicero's rhetorical theory manages to “encompass a more generous circle,” his “universalizing language” broadening civic identity (125). She develops this idea, returning to the relationship between the people and the orator from the first chapter, by arguing that Cicero's orator is meant to offer a “mirror of the good life” that the audience can accept (or reject) and that in doing so the orator opens himself to the judgment of the people. Connolly's second major claim of this chapter, which follows from the first, is that Cicero's focus on the body is a largely a response to Plato's arguments against rhetoric as found mainly in the Gorgias. Here, Connolly puts forward Cicero's model as a “historic ally for theoretical work” that seeks to problematize the mind/body dualism that has connected men to logic and women to the body, arguing that Cicero's model of “rhetoric opens up a view of subjectification that is usually overlooked in examinations of the Western tradition; the positive moments of subject construction, as opposed to purely negative practices of subjection” (150–51).The arguments leading to this claim center on the body of the orator. First, Plato's questioning of the epistemic function of rhetoric is answered, according to Connolly (building on Habermas), because the orator's “beliefs and practices are not fully his own.” Rather they are a combination of history and perception, and his “virtue is constructed through interactions with others” that break down public and private communication, as the orator's “self” “emerges in the context of communal belief and practice” (144, 151). “Communal observation and supervision,” then, function as a check on the potentially unchecked power of the orator (147). This positioning of the orator is rather precarious both physically and psychologically, with the “orator's body … embedded in republican networks that anchor communicative practices … serving as site of connection for elite and mass” (154). Though Connolly does not elaborate on this claim, the potential vulnerability of the body (and mind) of the orator becomes a recurring theme in the book (152–56).Chapter 4, “The Aesthetics of Virtue,” begins with a discussion of two Roman concepts: libertas, which, although similar to the contemporary concept of negative liberty, is here positioned as free as opposed to slave, and the related dignitas, that is, the freedom not only of speech but the “accrual of standing” to see one's ideas put in place (160). These two terms open a discussion of the tension between tyranny, both of the senatorial class and of the self-interested elite, and the common good of the lawful republic. “Oratorical training and performance,” then, according to Connolly, offer a means of “self-mastery” by which to balance these polarities, in part because the orator, whether in public or private performances, seeks the “label of vir bonus” (161). “Republican patriotism,” a term coined by Connolly, is defined as the process of training the self through “self-love,” repeated performance, and the display of emotion, which, for Cicero, “brings relations of power into the realm of aesthetics” (162). Connolly develops these ideas through several sections. First, she ties together the role of passion in political speech and the idea of “civic love” or “natural sociability.” She makes the case that Cicero regards decorum as the virtue that allows the orator to control his passions (165–66, 169), a virtue similar to the Greek sophrosune, which, Connolly claims, essentializes class. She goes on to address Cicero's “paradoxical solution,” which roots “aesthetic sensibility” in nature, and finally turns to Catullus, who Connolly claims balances decorum and passion (169–85).Returning to notions of libertas through the ideal of self-control and performativity, Connolly stresses that because law played a limited role in constraining domination by the elite and the will to power, “the social conventions that regulated ethics, behavior, and deportment played a correspondingly important role” (187). This section then follows up on the risks of such self-mastery, such as that it might lead to the desire to “exploit the spectacularity of the self” or a dangerous “contempt for others” that forces one to withdrawal from civic life or self-destruction (189). Continuing with the idea of the destabilizing power of the passions, Connolly turns to the role of the passions in contemporary political thought to address the issues of “widespread civic disengagement” and “fragmentation,” particularly as articulated by Iris Marion Young, who is concerned that in using “historical polities that privileged public discourse as models” we risk excluding people based on bodily difference (192–93).1 Connolly offers a slightly different model of a “deliberating republic, one that is a constant repetitive performance…. Communal acts and witnessing of character are pivotal in the constant self-reminding of identity and sentiment that citizens must perform in order to strengthen and reconstitute civic ties” (196). Connolly's “argument in this chapter is intended to suggest that the Roman rhetorical tradition provides a model. What that tradition tells us, above all, is that speech is married to the learned, learnable techniques of emotion control” (193).Chapter 5, “Republican Theater,” begins with the anxieties about the orator as an actor who can perform virtuosity without living virtuously. The first part of the chapter explores the nature of the oratorical performance in relation to stage acting and its role in Ciceronian thought. Connolly argues that while in Cicero's model the orator must be virtuous, a certain duplicity is necessary in republican life, and ultimately the orator's training, which teaches him to pass his performance off as natural, constrains him by demanding that he conceal his education both by not discussing it and not revealing it when speaking (202–6). Connolly argues, “The student of such a curriculum was in a position to learn that the authority granted by eloquence is not the manifestation of free men's natural superiority, and that its tactics are identical to those of actors and women, who exist outside the charmed circle of the political class” (206). While this anxiety over the tension between authenticity and artifice is often expressed in language reflecting gender panic, Connolly argues that the anxiety is more complex, in that, it “emerge[s] out of a recognition precisely that the republic exists in the act, the show, the display of plausible authority, the theatrical presentation of ethos” (206). Here Connolly takes exception with John Dugan, who, according to Connolly, argues that “Cicero advocates a transgressive aesthetic that undermines conventional Roman notions of masculinity” (199n4).2 Connolly's own position has evolved from her earlier article “Mastering Corruption,” which considers gender as defining the “panic” discussed here rather than one factor among many. Though in the article she is primarily interested in Quintilian and declamation, Connolly suggests citizenship in Rome gender and class to a much than is in her discussion of Cicero's in State of “The two and were in a of that then as as the and social that them men, free to the practices of women and that they in the that the speech they was a the State of as in “Mastering Corruption,” Connolly Greek and Roman discussions of in rhetorical theory that or of with the Here, she her Cicero's anxiety is not about or discourse has the it does not because is and … but because civic of to a political what we In what Connolly the between her view that … is the in and by of gender that out what are civic and and that of others who establish “the nature of civic only its in of of this chapter shift to focus on and in and which Cicero power was Connolly's argument here is but She that as the republic Cicero moved beyond to the more and of Here Connolly as Cicero on oratorical in the law in an to to and in in order to a or that the audience not to as but to … the of the In the on particularly in Cicero's was meant to to the of the and, in doing to of an that the with one's citizens that was necessary for civil life chapter of State of Speech moves from Cicero to how the republican political on the performance of the orator, was forward into Rome in the of Here, Connolly focuses on the works of and argues that the were of the up by Ciceronian rhetorical discourse and its performative ethics of republican the that there in the first the of a in In to the significance of in terms of social and as a of to the new Connolly in several from earlier chapters here In chapters and for Connolly argues that because the orator's performance is based in experience and depends on emotion, he may his by in public This idea is connected to the of who even than the republican orator to Connolly also argues that the are symptomatic of social in their to his on and of She then suggests that with his on control of the body, represented a against the and a to the discussed in chapter According to Connolly, this rhetorical education served as a training for a of people, which ultimately Cicero's public orator. In as a way to establish social and control” brief discussion of in which Connolly scholars who Cicero is Marion and are “Cicero's on decorum lead him to that the public must his audience of citizens as in an of to be because he that they are his but because the of him to the of communal and to the decorum as the virtue, one that down the of class and Connolly the claim that to control to that and among his Cicero's ideal citizen is in a position to political before she with a for an view of claims that Cicero's orator requires and is performance are and provide a for Cicero's political to contemporary The of This of the of De oratore as Connolly with to of the the nature/art debate and the While he these very from Connolly, the debate as an an Aristotelian model of rhetoric, with Cicero down firmly on the of the he Connolly, that Cicero is a model of rhetoric that is based in as opposed to theoretical and that this is necessary in order to with the audience Perhaps the one difference between them that a is that Connolly's belief that “the debate is in terms of difference and in tension with the of (103). While this focus on difference allows Connolly to Cicero's of citizenship from it also the that Cicero, as argues, has a Greek model in Cicero's to the way in which rhetoric was Rome suggests all rhetorical training it is a Connolly's focus on Cicero's connection to contemporary political theory her from reading Cicero through so on Cicero Though Connolly that the Roman republic was by she claims that “Cicero's of civility is a place to the terms of social because it the tension of and social class, it is not by of class or what is Cicero the common but how he intended that good to be is, more than Connolly of ultimately Connolly's of the people into the performance of the values were and by rhetorical handbooks and oratorical in law as in the of the elite control of in the as the orator their and the masses to be in elite oratorical While this reading is for the role of the people in relation to in Rome, Connolly's reading is limited by the on the orator's bodily performance and his (and of the people. This the people must be for in the oratorical rhetorical their role as an and rhetorical practices that might more represent the Roman people. Connolly elite control of language as a of class to for the means by which to the masses into the oratorical Though Connolly the significance of political the “Roman to see positioning rhetoric as a art that the of among its before to Cicero's she does not or of the Roman people into oratorical practice as a model for contemporary Connolly's arguments about civic to of the for are In the what Cicero ideal orator, one who through his turns conflict into of as Connolly frequently a a response to unchecked that was the republic and, all Cicero's ideal orator and the resulting republic Connolly's reading of Cicero is by the need to Cicero a way to which scholars of the history of rhetoric will be as a model solution to contemporary political a that with the common While the arguments necessary to so may not be fully they are and lead to a consideration of gender and class in ancient Rome and work on the of the particularly those as a way to bodily charisma and as a means by which to the audience to consideration of and of the vulnerability of the orator's body and those stage and withdrawal from political life and the risk of to to audience are and of a there is in Connolly's recouping of Ciceronian theory, though it is not the it is its of negative has so the common good as to such a The The State of Speech was and the it was political in and though much of the rhetoric of the has one need no than the of control to public by to find that the disjunction that first Connolly has and a recognition of are a good place to and one than to to Cicero for of

This article provides a historical case study of the Sentinelle Affair, a conflict between French language rights and the English Only educational policies of the Catholic Church in New England in the 1920s. An analysis of this conflict reveals a correspondence between programs of language centralization and the production of language differences in the United States. The article explores the possibility that such language histories of white ethnic groups might provide grounds for creating what Malea Powell calls “a rhetoric and composition alliance.”

The author presents findings from a research study that examines the use of a racial literacy approach to teaching first-year composition.

Today, the process of image management is extremely time-consuming for IT administrators. Until now, this complicated process has not been extensively explored by design researchers. During a recent research study at Citrix, we interviewed 17 IT professionals. We used a process we call "adaptive interviewing," a flexible methodology that could accommodate the various infrastructures of IT organizations and the diversity of ways that administrators handle image management. While conducting our interviews, we worked with our information designer to create several visualizations of our data. Ultimately, we found that supplementing interviews with information visualizations is a powerful way to explore, understand, and explain the complex system of IT image management.

Scholarship on language difference has strived for decades to transform teaching practices in mainstream, developmental, and second-language writing classrooms. Despite compelling arguments in support of linguistic diversity, a majority of secondary and postsecondary writing teachers in the US still privilege Standard English. I join a number of scholars in arguing for a revival of classical style and the progymnasmata, albeit with the unique agenda of strengthening pedagogies of language difference. Although adapting classical rhetorics to promote translingual practices such as code-meshing at first seems to contradict the spirit of language difference given the dominant perception of Greco-Roman culture as imperialistic and intolerant of diversity, I reread rhetoricians such as Quintilian in order to recover their latent multilingual potential.

Problem: This teaching case presents the authors' experience planning, teaching, and evaluating a semester-long course within a computer science undergraduate program; the aim of this course was to develop soft skills that enable students to actively contribute within multicultural and transdisciplinary teams. Research question: How can an undergraduate-level course help computer science students better understand the multicultural and interdisciplinary scenarios that compose today's working environment? Situating the case: The literature review contextualizes the case as part of a broader group of literature concerned with curricular reforms that replace the traditional emphasis on memorization of fixed disciplinary knowledge with what have been called “21st Century Skills.” In addition, it builds a theoretical framework followed by the course that brings together Hofstede's Cultural Theory and Vygotsky's ideas regarding the social formation of the mind. Methodology: The researchers conducted two studies with a group of 62 students who participated in the course. The first one measured how students appropriated the concepts presented in the course and learning outcomes. The second one evaluated the students' perception of the course a year after they had enrolled in it. About the teaching case: Results show that the vast majority of students appropriate the concepts of the theoretical framework used throughout the course. In addition, most students perceive the courses' contribution to their professional lives positively-particularly regarding understanding cultural and transdisciplinary issues. A small group does not consider a course like the one proposed to be useful. Conclusions: The implication of this teaching case is that the ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences is something that can be addressed directly by a specifically designed course within a computer science curriculum (rather than exclusively being a secondary outcome of other courses). The limitations of the study are that it presents the authors' own teaching experience (therefore, it is not a third-party report) and that it uses pretesting and posttesting as an asessment tool for multicultural and transdisciplinary abilities. Future work would show how similar experiences could be conducted across other cultural scenarios and possible ways in which to engage the small group of students who do not consider the course useful.

226 RHETORICA Matthew Lauzon, Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2010.256 pp. ISBN 9780801448478. Matthew Lauzon's Signs ofLight: French and British Theories ofLinguistic Communication, 1648-1789 explores a broad array of Enlightenment perspec­ tives on discourse, from seventeenth-century discussions of Native Amer­ ican eloquence and animal communication to the longstanding debate over the relative merits of English and French that continued up to the French Revolution. Arguing that historians of the period, who overemphasize the impact of Locke's view of language, "have therefore tended to ignore both the period's tremendous engagement with the broader social implications of different languages that prevailed across the European republic of let­ ters and the ways in which such an engagement involved much more than issues of semantic and logical clarity" (p. 4), he surveys a wide range of treatises, literary works, reports, and studies to demonstrate the diversity of Enlightenment views concerning language and human community. The book is divided into three primary sections, each comprising a pair of chapters. Part I, "Animal Communication," seeks to fill the gap left by historians who have neglected "the suggestion by some in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that animals might communicate more clearly and therefore more effectively" than humans (p. 9). The first chapter in this section, "Bestial Banter," takes up Enlightenment claims of the potential su­ periority of animal communication developed by relatively obscure figures such as Marin Cureau de la Chambre and John Webster, as well as more well-known theorists such as John Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau. The second chapter, "Homo Risus: Making Light of Animal Language," features Enlightenment critiques of animal languages, both real and imaginary, that elucidate the complexity of human discourse and attempt to destabilize the virtue of clarity developed in the previous chapter. Lauzon provides analyses of Bernard Mandeville's The Fable ofthe Bees: Or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits, part 4 Four of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, and Guillaume-Hyacinthe Bougeant's Amusement philosophique sur le langage des betes. Part II, "Savage Eloquence," explores "how late-seventeenth-century missionary concerns about the sincerity of American Indian conversions gen­ erated a particularly positive representation of savage speech" (p. 6). Chap­ ter 3, entitled "Warming Savage Hearts and Heating Eloquent Tongues," emphasizes the seventeenth-century Puritans' and Jesuits' praise of the elo­ quence of Native American converts to Christianity. Featuring a series of works produced by John Eliot and his missionary colleagues, Lauzon ar­ gues that the Puritans were impressed by the pathos of Native American Christians, whose words reflected the "Christian grand style" originally identified by Augustine. Through analyses of texts from the Jesuit Relations, which recorded seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Jesuit activities in the New World, Lauzon demonstrates that Jesuit missionaries also praised what amounted to that style in the emotional appeals of Native American converts, Reviews 227 who communicated far more movingly than conventional touchstones of Jesuit rhetoric like Cicero" (p. 90). Chapter 4, "From Savage Orators to Sav­ age Languages/' marshals subsequent Enlightenment treatments of the per­ ceived energetic quality of Native American languages as further critique of Locke's rather single-minded emphasis on clarity. The final section of Szy/zs ofLight, "Civilized Tongues," features "discus­ sions about how the French and English languages reflected and reinforced distinct national practices of enlightened communication" (p. 7). Chapter 5, "French Levity," treats the spirited argument for the superiority the French language set forth bv advocates such as François Charpentier, Nicholas Beuzée, Antoine de Rivarol, Denis Diderot, and Dominique de Bouhours, based on criteria such as clarity, the sweetness of its soft sounds, the "light­ ness" of its lexicon (p. 146), the wit of the bel esprit, and its universality. The final chapter, "English Energy," provides the corresponding arguments in praise of the English tongue, which emphasized its phonotactic qualities, its syntax, its gravity, and its ability to express natural passions. Lauzon's Coda, "French Levity and English Energy in the Revolutionary Wake," extends the issues raised in chapters 5 and 6 through and beyond the French Revolution. The particular strengths of Signs ofLight are the extensive range of works and...

Reviews 223 original ceremony nt Sancta Maria ad Martyres from language that reflects the architecture of the building, the movements of the presiding Pope (Boni­ face IV), the clergy, and the dramatization of God s voice in the words of the chant. Mary Carruthers and the contributors to this volume have produced an extraordinary collection of essays, rich and complex with thematic intercon­ nections and many avenues for further exploration. The overall arrangement illustrates ductus in invention, arrangement, and figurative motifs in the art of rhetoric across disciplinary lines, including composition, oratory, art, archi­ tecture, music, and liturgical performance. Many of the essays also include excellent visual illustrations. The editing is careful, though one system for translations, provided in the text of some essays and in the endnotes of others, would aid consistency. Nevertheless, readers will find Carruthers7 collection a remarkable resource not only for historical and textual studies, but also for insights into medieval culture, worship, and performance through the art of rhetoric. Elza C. Tiner Lynchburg College Marjorie Curry Woods, Classroom Commentaries: Teaching the Poetria nova across Medieval and Renaissance Europe (Text and Context 2), Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010. xlii + 367 pp. ISBN 9780814211090. Making a well-timed appearance close to the publications of both Copeland and Sluiter's Medieval Grammar and Rhetoric (Oxford University Press, 2010) and Peter Mack's A History of Renaissance Rhetoric (Oxford Uni­ versity Press, 2011), Marjorie Curry Woods' new book helps us to imagine what took place in medieval and renaissance classes on the trivium. As her title suggests, Woods concentrates on commentaries written from the thir­ teenth through the seventeenth centuries on Geoffrey of Vinsauf's Poetria nova, a popular Latin poem extant in over two hundred manuscripts that taught students how to write poetry and prose. By "commentaries," Woods means an assortment of instructive materials from interlinear and marginal manuscript glosses to freestanding explanations, from anonymous interpre­ tations, such as the Early Commentary that Woods previously edited and translated (New York: Garland, 1985), to the works of well-known intellec­ tuals teaching in documentable circumstances. Woods inquires insightfully into what these commentaries meant for teaching grammar and rhetoric in western as well as central Europe, in elementary courses as well as in universities. The scope of this book is therefore daunting, but Woods deftly chooses particular commentaries and teachers that best exemplify the Poetria nova s 224 RHETORICA use. For instance, chapter 3 details Pace of Ferrara's humanist elaboration placing the Poetria nova amidst classical authorities and literatures, while chapter 4 emphasizes Dybinus of Prague's Aristotelian rhetorical interpreta­ tion. As Woods elucidates, such differing constructions show how variously the Poetria nova might function within European curricula: for Pace as an aid to intermediate students in construing literature, for Dybinus as a text for university students analyzing various models of rhetoric, and for others as a guide to dictamen or sermon composition. A reader can learn a substantial amount about intellectual history and educational scenarios from Woods. Such learning is possible because Woods writes in lucid, well-organized prose that appeals to both specialists and those interested more generally in the history of rhetoric and education. For the latter audience, her Preface clearly defines terms such as "accessus" and "lemmata" that will recur in describing the commentaries (xxxviii-xxxix). Further, she opens the book with fifteen plates illustrating the diversity of the commentaries and pro­ viding exempla for later chapters. Nine of these plates include the famous opening phrase of the Poetria nova ("Papa stupor mundi," or in English trans­ lation, "Holy Father, wonder of the world") that becomes the subject of so many speculations about Geoffrey's audience and purpose. Along with the manuscript illustrations, Woods provides copious translations of transcrip­ tions from commentaries. Sometimes the interjection of these visual aids can overwhelm Woods' discussion, for instance in the layout of versions of the Dybinus commentary (190- 208), but Woods' intention is to be generous with manuscript materials over which she has labored long, and indeed many readers would be challenged to assess the divergent points in the commentaries without these explicit side-by-side comparisons. Woods' presentation of manuscript transcriptions also offers doctoral students...

Literacy and Racial Justice: The Politics of Learning after Brown v. Board of Education to substantiate our claims that literacy has often, if not always, been framed as a white property.Nonetheless, I am still perplexed that there has been no real, vociferous debate around one of the book's most critical contributions, namely chapter three, on Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words.In fact, after that chapter, it seems like the very terms we use to talk about literacy when we imagine ourselves to be talking about multiple locations, academic literacy/discourse communities, schooling, and marginalized communities should be called into question.Ways with Words is a central canon in literacy studies, a product of a Post-Civil Rights/Post-Brown agenda at the same time that it reproduces that agenda.This is why Kathryn Flannery's text, "Babies and Bath Water, " offers us an important reminder that the ideological discourses we are often deploying are fundamentally connected to Ways even though we do not always recognize this text as doing that kind of heavy lifting in composition-rhetoric studies.It seems as if our elitist tendency to distance ourselves from literacy studies, an elitism that Brenda Glascott has meticulously shown in "Constricting Keywords: Rhetoric and Literacy in Our History Writing, " has left us with some blindspots.To riff off of Morris Young in his "Sponsoring Literacy Studies, " we, too, can consider Ways a literacy sponsor to the kinds of work we have done in framing literacy in the post-Brown era.To take this back to Prendergast's argument, the very thing that we imagine ourselves to be pursuing in composition studies, namely the framing of contexts, histories, and ideologies in relation to literacy, has been inhibited as much as it has been promoted when Ways with Words acts as a framing device.To quote Harvey Graff 's contribution here: "the roster of literacy studies' commissions and omissions is lengthy."In its documentation of the literacy practices of a working class black community and a working class white community in 1960s/1970s South Carolina, alongside both communities' conflicts with the middle-class townspeople (whose discourse norms match and are sustained by schooling), Heath offered an analytical schema that suggested that non-dominant groups' social clashes with school was a cultural clash.As should be fairly obvious, the focus in our research on speech communities, discourse communities, cultural models of literacies, etc. can, thus, be traced back to or, at least, connected with Ways.However, Prendergast reminds us that Ways emerges out of and because of the Post-Brown mandate to desegregate, a racial clash that Heath always distanced herself from.While Heath's focus on the local offered important models for new research, race was as local as it was national, but is still given no real frame of analysis.If we go back to Ways, or (re)read Prendergast's chapter, we will remember the white working class male who said he only went to college when the town's mill (where he worked)

A s I write this response, the end of the term is nearing, and with it, the end of my weekly meetings with a diverse group of graduate students (literature program, writing program, school of education, composition program) enrolled in my "Literacy and Pedagogy" seminar.The issues raised by this symposium's contributors resonate and echo back with the seminar's term-long collective investigation, so it is from within this context and through the concerns these graduate students have articulated throughout the term that I want to join the conversation.But first a few words about the seminar itself, the historical, theoretical, and ideological scrutiny of literacy and pedagogy it calls for, the reflexive inquiry it incites, and the contributions this kind of inquiry can make to a discussion of "the implications of Literacy Studies research, theory, and practice for Composition Studies" (LiCS Mission Statement).I started teaching this seminar in the late 1980s.What I had initially proposed was a seminar in histories, theories and practices of pedagogy (which eventually, led to my articulation of "pedagogy as reflexive praxis" (Salvatori 4).The intellectual atmosphere of my department at the time was beginning to be hospitable to the idea that advanced graduate students from our different programs, with their different teaching experiences and theoretical backgrounds, could benefit from such a course of study.But, it was suggested, it might be strategic for me to combine "pedagogy" with "literacy, " since as the subject of a graduate seminar, literacy would carry greater intellectual weight than pedagogy, and attract more students (and, I sensed, raise fewer faculty eyebrows).Needless to say, I was taken aback by the suggestion, but because I was equally invested in the study of theories of literacy, I complied and decided to foreground in my course proposal what would have been in any case two of my planned lines of critical inquiry: what kinds of literacy different theories of reading and writing, and their pedagogical enactments, assume and can presume to foster (Cultural Literacy was earning large numbers of academic and non-academic acolytes); and what can a critical and reflexive study of pedagogy contribute to and draw from the study of literacy.The "and" in the title became and has since remained the central focus of the seminar's theoretical investigations, a nexus that through the years, because of different texts and different students, has consistently disclosed new and exciting "matters of concern" (Latour) for graduate students who are about to make crucial decisions about their professional future.Since the very first time, the diversity of students' backgrounds and interests led to more expansive and inclusive articulations of the seminar's original keywords and concepts (Glascott), and consequently of the seminar's affordances (Vieira).Even before we read Street, the use of the singular for literacy and pedagogy in the original title soon felt inaccurate, constrictive, but for bureaucratic reasons, it could not be changed.Thus "the singular" remained.But it consistently occasioned early

In this short essay, I want to consider, first, how literacy studies as a field has been sponsored—What work has been foundational, transformative, and innovative?—and second, to reflect on how my own study of literacy has been sponsored. In particular, I want to think about how Brandt’s concept of “sponsorship” has not only been transformative in conceptualizing the dynamics of literacy, but how it is also useful in addressing questions of equity and diversity within literacy studies. As defined by Brandt, “sponsors of literacy” are “any agents, local or distant, concrete or abstract, who enable, support, teach, and model, as well as recruit, regulate, suppress, or withhold, literacy—and gain advantage by it in some way” (19). It is the first part of this definition that is key to my discussion: How have sponsors who “enable, support, teach, and model” informed what we do as a field broadly, and what I have done in my own work specifically? In theorizing a deep understanding of how literacy is enacted, Brandt has helped us to see that literacy does not simply empower or provide access to resources for individuals, but perhaps most importantly creates a complex web of relationships that may sustain literate action. We might think of sponsorship itself as a literacy practice and as literate action, marshalling resources in order to create opportunities for literacy development.

The effects of writing format (handwritten (HW) versus word processor (WP)) were examined in a sample of college students with and without learning disabilities (LD). All students wrote two essays, one in each format, scored for quality and length. Groups did not differ in age, gender, ethnicity, mathematical calculation, writing fluency, essay length or essay quality. The "interaction hypothesis" was not supported, in that the use of a word processor as a writing accommodation did not provide a differential boost to students with LD. Both groups produced longer essays in the WP versus HW condition. The best predictor of essay quality was essay length regardless of writing format. Most students in each group preferred the WP format. Interestingly, a smaller percentage of students in the LD group (72%) than NLD group (91%) used the available time for writing. Keywords: accommodations, learning disabilities, college students, writing, word processor

The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance Ellen Cushman Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric Vorris L. Nunley Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions Christopher Schroeder Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, editors

This article offers a case study of how three African American students enrolled in a first-year writing course employ Ebonics-based phonological and syntactical patterns across writing assignments, including those that also require students to compose multigenre essays.

ABSTRACT In his monumental speech protesting the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Rev. Jermain W. Loguen urges his fellow townsmen of Syracuse, NY, an “open city” to fugitives, to defy the new federal legislation by protecting the city's fugitives from federal marshals en route to apprehend them. My analysis of Loguen's speech examines his use of American and African American jeremiadic strategies to convince his audience of primarily white Christian abolitionists that their unified resistance against the new law was part of God's providential plan to redeem the nation of the sin of slavery. My study also reveals how Loguen's appeals to manhood, through associating divine punishment with the emasculation of American men, as well as his establishment of “identification” around shared religious and political values, proved effective in rallying Syracuse's citizens to defend their God-given freedom.

In this article, we articulate a framework for making our commitments to racial justice actionable, a framework that moves from narrating confessional accounts to articulating our commitments and then acting on them through both self-work and work-with-others, a dialectic possibility we identify and explore. We model a method for moving beyond originary confessional narratives and engage in dialogue with "the willingness to be disturbed," (Wheatley, 2002) believing that disturbances are productive places from which we can more clearly articulate and act from our commitments. Drawing on our own experiences, we engage the political, systemic, and enduring nature of racism as we together chart an educational frame that counters the macro-logics of oppression enacted daily through micro-inequities. As we advocate for additional and ongoing considerations of the work of anti-racism in educational settings, we invite others to embrace, along with us, both the willingness to be disturbed and the attention to making commitments actionable.

Although faculty across the curriculum are often faced with issues of racial identity in the teaching of writing, WAC has offered little support for addressing race in assignment design, classroom interactions, and assessment. Through examples from teaching workshops, I offer specific ways that we can engage discussions about teaching writing and race productively.

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.

Students can sometimes be resistant to discussing issues of diversity in the English classroom, making it a challenge for instructors to hold honest and enlightening exchanges about race, sexuality, gender, and other facets of human identity. This essay explores various pedagogical strategies the author has successfully employed when teaching texts that highlight diverse perspectives. She focuses specifically on global feminist literature by way of one primary example, the contemporary Australian Aboriginal novel Home by Larissa Behrendt, which highlights the “stolen generations” of Aboriginal and mixed-descent children and the many repercussions of those atrocities on future generations. After providing a brief overview of the novel, she discusses the successful techniques she has utilized in the classroom to help students prepare for and critically analyze this text. These approaches include interrogating the term diversity itself, providing historical and cultural context to the various issues illuminated in the novel, viewing related visual discourses such as film, and crafting writing and discussion assignments for the students to complete both in and out of class. These pedagogical strategies could be useful in any English classroom that focuses on issues of diversity.

This article investigates the social justice implications of localization and reports the results of an empirical study that examines poor designer localization efforts in documentation used in marketing sexuopharmaceuticals. It argues against a top-down view of design and communication and instead advocates a participatory approach that takes into account user linguacultural, political, economic, legal, and local knowledge systems in the localization process. The article also offers suggestions to guide localization theory and practice.

Using data from two surveys and end-of-semester reflections, researchers learned that students enrolled in writing-about-writing (WAW) courses are initially intimidated by the demands of a WAW curriculum, but the students’ perceived inability to complete the requirements contradicted survey data and final written reflections. Ongoing public conversations surrounding WAW curriculum and movement may lead faculty working with high at-risk populations, including but not limited to Latino/as, hesitant to adapt this approach, but the researchers challenge these perceptions and call for additional research to confirm that students who complete WAW courses have an increased sense of self-efficacy towards academic writing.

In this Retrospective, we revisit our 2007 College Composition and Communication article in order to clarify our primary argument, address some questions and critiques that have arisen, and consider anew the value of composition courses that study writing. We review our core argument that engaging students with the research and ideas of writing studies, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing, improves learning transfer. Now, using the example of Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s notion of threshold concepts, we argue for the field to better name its knowledge and conceptions and to decide what portion is suitable for first-year students. We clarify the distinction between this broad underlying goal and our personal approaches to accomplishing it, emphasizing the diversity of approaches that have come to embody the study of writing in first-year composition. While maintaining that writing studies lacks recognition of itself as a field and of the value of its specialized knowledge to writing instruction, we revise our original argument to show how writing instructors from other fields and with other expertise can build familiarity with writing studies research without extensive, specialized study. Ultimately, we continue to advocate teaching our field’s knowledge in first-year composition, while expanding our sense both of how to prepare instructors to do so and of the value of such teaching.

Book Review| December 01 2012 Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity. G. Mitchell Reyes. Jennifer Heusel Jennifer Heusel Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (4): 740–743. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940636 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Jennifer Heusel; Public Memory, Race, and Ethnicity. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2012; 15 (4): 740–743. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940636 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

This poem demonstrates the importance of the Latino/Latina vote in this election year. The reader will be able to find that the Latino experience described in the poem resonates with many other Latino/Latina experiences within our families, communities and society.

The debate surrounding how best to support African American student writers continues today as the gap between achievement scores persists. This qualitative analysis documents the classroom structures and instructional practices of two English Language Arts teachers working in a predominately African American public middle school, whose students demonstrated growth on the state’s standardized assessment of English Language Arts. Teachers were chosen based on value-added measures of student achievement using test score gain and observational data of their writing instruction. Both teachers explicitly and repeatedly targeted writing skills and strategies during instruction and offered aligned instructional supports. Tasks assigned were intellectually challenging and aligned with the targeted skills and strategies. The data suggest ways to balance both skill and strategy instruction and a process approach to writing instruction, which many argue is supportive of African American students’ writing development.

ABSTRACTThis study features two speeches by African American abolitionists Robert B. Forten and James Forten Jr., who in the 1830s addressed the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Their orations simultaneously appeal to conventional nineteenth-century, white, upper- and middle-class notions of womanhood while drawing upon arguments that more typically inform male abolitionist rhetoric. In addition, both men emphasize traditional racial differences while seeking to establish links with their listeners that transcend these differences. The development of a powerful collective sense of identity, achieved through the constitutive quality of their arguments, forms the speeches' best opportunity to serve abolition.

ABSTRACTThis article describes the need and outlines a strategy for theorizing “alloiostrophic rhetoric” and the practices and possibilities of such a theory. In brief, alloiostrophic rhetoric is one that turns toward difference, diversity, and the other. It explores this rhetoric by asking three questions: Why is alloiostrophic rhetoric needed? What are its primary characteristics? How might alloiostrophic rhetoric be performed?

This article analyzes a group of Gambian-American college writers creating an alternative public to challenge the patronizing norms operating in prevailing “aid-to-Africa” rhetorics. These young rhetors evoked performative genres and hybrid discourses so that members of their local public (the African nationals, African American professionals, white educators, fellow students, Muslim elders, conservative Christian community leaders) might themselves embody more productive self-other relations as they considered together the issue that drew them together publicly: the often hidden and insidious ways that cultural gender norms limit young African women’s ability to thrive, whether in the U.S. or in the Gambia.

This article examines the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project’s challenge and legacy to scholars seeking to create an FWP-inspired project today. It explores how scholars in various disciplines engaged in the “public turn,” which has contributed to university-community research and teaching projects, can gain perspective and insight from learning about the FWP’s goals and accomplishments. The article focuses on the FWP’s pluralistic vision of national identity, which led national FWP officials to examine American diversity in encyclopedic guidebooks and through oral history, ethnic, and folklore studies. By exploring why the work of the FWP was ignored for a long time and how its vision and work gradually reemerged, I seek not only to provide a history of the FWPs reputation but also to shed light on the opportunities and responsibilities the FWP offers to current efforts to create new FWP-like projects for a new time.

This article offers an extended treatment of two social justice efforts in a rural university town as historical examples of civic engagement with contemporary implications for Writing Democracy and similar projects. The article begins with an analysis of local activism initiated by John Carlos in 1967 while he was still a student at our university and the year before his heroic, silent protest against racism with Tommie Smith at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. The author then turns to a linked effort five years later by local activist MacArthur Evans, a university student from Chicago. In 1973, Evans and other university students established the Norris Community Club (NCC) in partnership with residents of Norris, the historically segregated neighborhood, to provide what they called “a clear channel of communication” between Norris and city officials. Both were successful, albeit it in very different ways. The author uses “a clear channel” as both the object of study and interpretive lens to examine these local efforts and their many implications for today.

Tamika L. Carey , University at Albany – SUNY Enculturation : http://www.enculturation.net/rhetorical-healing-as-reeducation ( Published: January 16, 2013 ) In The Value in the Valley: A Black Woman’s Guide Through Life’s Dilemmas , motivational speaker, spiritual teacher, and self-help author Iyanla Vanzant describes one of her purposes for writing her best-selling 1996 book. She says: Black women do not understand there is no wrong in being human. There are only lessons. No matter how outlandish, ridiculous, or irresponsible our behavior may be at any given time, know, accept, love. There is nothing wrong with you. There is, however, always room for improvement and change… Self-knowledge is not about picking your scabs, beating up yourself, feeling bad about your wounds or weak spots. It means that you recognize you have them, make a commitment to nurture and strengthen them, and leave them alone to heal. (75) Such affirmations and calls for self-reflection are common features within the numerous African American self-help books and inspirational guides published for women since the nineties. The majority of these books “promise” to teach readers insights and strategies for overcoming the dis ease of past trauma or alleviating the dis content with challenges in their present lives. Readers and writers alike have found these self-help texts beneficial. For women like Brenda Sheffield, who claims that self-help books are “springboard[s] to discussing and healing [her] life and those of people [she] knows,” the benefit in reading them is learning, or re-learning, ways of being, knowing, or acting necessary for resuming one’s intended life path (Houser). For Vanzant, and other popular and profitable writers in this genre, activism is an incentive. Through writing books containing their testimonies, observations, and teachings, they pass on the ways of knowing they consider essential for the survival of their communities. Scholarship on self-help literature critiques…

Research problem: For knowledge workers, such as IT professionals, the ties within their social network are a major channel for communicating the requisite knowledge and information. While prior studies tended to favor higher network centrality (i.e., larger volume of network ties), in this study, the researchers argue that centrality can reduce communication efficiency if the diversity of the ties is low. Research question: Which characteristic of communication ties, volume or diversity, has more influence on knowledge workers' performance? Literature review: Using social network analysis (SNA) as the theoretical framework, a review of the literature shows that social network ties have important performance implications because they can enhance an individual's access to valued resources. Studies have also examined the performance impact of “hindrance network centrality,” or how frequently a person is described by other network members as a hindrance to their performance. However, current research has overlooked the possible negative communication consequences of centrality in regards to redundant information, which may negatively affect job performance. Methodology: The current study employs a quantitative approach, using the standard SNA method of a “name generator” questionnaire to collect network data. Participants were 98 people in the IT department at a large defense company. We identified 3905 relationships and analyzed them with the UCINET software. Subsequently, social network variables, as well as performance and human capital variables were analyzed in logistic regressions. Results and discussion: Results showed a significant relationship between constraint, a measure of tie diversity, and performance. Centrality, the measure of tie volume, however, was not significantly related to performance. Our findings about the volume versus diversity of communication ties have important implications for professional communicators in the age of fast-growing social network media. A limitation of our study is that we approximated communication ties with social network links. We suggest that future studies further validate our findings by using a more direct measure of communication ties.

Reviews 451 Nancy Worman, Abusive Mouths in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2008. 385 + xii pp. ISBN 9780521857871. Insult and character assassination have a long and entertaining history in the annals of rhetoric. Not only do they generate theoretical meditation but they can provide scholars and amateurs alike with the guilty (and for Aristotle, vulgar) pleasures of nicely turned invective. Nancy Worman's fascinating study allows classicists and those with more general interests in ancient rhetorical forms to follow patterns of defamation from Homer and the beginnings of preserved Greek literature to Aristotle and Theophrastus at the end of the fourth century B.C.E. Of the two possibilities adumbrated above, her work facilitates the austere rewards of the theoretical rather than enjoy­ able indulgence in multiple examples of splenetic venting. For the latter one might settle down with Thomas Conley's Toward a Rhetoric ofInsult (Chicago 2010), which, in addition to quotation of virtuosic and delectable passages of invective (starting with Cicero and proceeding through the Flugschriften of the Reformation to end with Monty Python and modern political cartoons), does a useful job in sketching multiple patterns of defamatory language and specifying the factors that constrain their operation. Conley surveys how slurs connected with social status, gender, ethnicity, sexual habits, and the practices of eating and drinking (among others) recur in multiple cultures. He is interested in how invective can be used to create group identity through assertion of communal values, but also in the use of insult to interrogate per­ ceived hierarchies. This generalist orientation makes the book a valuable introduction to the invective mode, and thus, coincidentally, an interest­ ing counterpart to Worman's specialist study. W. carefully maps out how a discourse of abuse developed around public and professional speakers in Classical Greece. This discourse was rooted in practices of commensality associated with banquet and symposium, and was further extended in drama, until it became part of the rhetorical arsenal in the public oratory of Demosthenes and Aeschines. W.'s narrative of a gradual elaboration of a critique of public speaking and the move of this critique into ancient oratory make this an important book. The body of the book is divided into six chapters, charting the devel­ opment of an iambic discourse ranging over a variety of genres. W. uses the ideas of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Barthes to trace the operations of social performance and figuration in invective, relying in particular on a central notion of metonymy, so that the mouth acts as an emblem (Barthes' "blazon") of behavioral excess. After a scene-setting introduction, Chapter 1 looks at iambic literature in Archaic Greek epic, lyric, and Classical tragedy, where the language of invective is deployed to regulate excess and is regularly as­ sociated with ravenous mouths and dangerous types of consumption. Thus we encounter rapacious and aggressive kings (Agamemnon in Homer is a people-eating king," 29), harsh talk connected with (potentially cannibal­ istic) battlefield savagery, and clever speaking conceived as a trade-off for food. Greed leads both to uncontrolled aggressive speech and sly rhetorical 452 RHETORICA manipulation. These two possibilities will crystallize throughout the course of the book into two broad and recurring types: on the one hand the braggart and voracious politician characterized by crude consumption, and on the other the decadent and manipulative sophist. Chapter 2 explicitly juxtaposes these two types: voracious demagogues are set against glib, effete, and decadent sophists in the comedies of Aristo­ phanes, where "male protagonists engage the culinary as the primary metaphorical register in relation to the regulation of the appetites" (81). No accident, then, that the figure of the comic butcher or cook (mageiros) also becomes prominent. Whether effete or a braggart, an excessive speaker can be imagined as one who cooks up feasts of (deceptive) speech. Yet Worman also complicates (fruitfully) her model by considering how her types are measured against female appetites. In Greek comedy, women are cautionary models for men in their desires for sex, food, and wine; thus the prattling and decadent speaker is also feminized. Sexual appetite becomes an impor­ tant factor in the figuration of public speaking, not only in terms of female desire, but also...

Book Review| September 01 2012 Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. Dayo F. Gore. Maegan Parker Brooks Maegan Parker Brooks Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2012) 15 (3): 552–555. https://doi.org/10.2307/41940617 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Maegan Parker Brooks; Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 September 2012; 15 (3): 552–555. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/41940617 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2012 Michigan State University Board of Trustees2012 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Book Reviews You do not currently have access to this content.