Working in writing centers is a great gig. We get to lead units committed to making collaborative learning happen in a host of ways: students gaining access to or refining disciplinary literacies, faculty and administration discovering more effective ways for writing to demonstrate learning and transfer, and tutors becoming conscious of their voices as mentors of communities of practice, both disciplinary and sociocultural. Many of us "graduate" from being students who have been tutored in writing centers to serving as writing tutors ourselves; some of us inspired by all of that labor decide to pursue graduate education in and become directors of these amazing units, charged with sustaining and growing these amazing units and all those who teach and learn within While our field has plenty of resources for educating tutors, for coaching faculty across the disciplines on using writing for teaching

This program profile describes an initiative to meet the college reading and writing requirement for undergraduate students in a premedical program at St. George’s University (SGU) in Grenada, West Indies. Two courses were developed in response to concerns that the existing curriculum was not meeting the specific needs of premedical students. The existing courses were literature-based and provided minimal feedback or other opportunities for development. Additional concerns involved a varied range of abilities among students that was not being addressed, large class sizes, and lack of investment on the part of premedical students. Solutions include the incorporation of a task-based curriculum focused on the medical profession in order to increase engagement, division of students into small cohorts with small teacher/student ratios, integration of skill building into all activities, and implementation of process writing to allow for intensive feedback and student development.

Recently, rhetorical genre studies scholars have challenged the field to de-center the study of genre as artifact to focus on the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain how those genres get used by writers: the genre uptakes. While prior research has begun to identify many of these consequential influences, these endeavors would benefit, I argue, from an emic, writer-oriented method that follows what writers perceive has impact on genres from a longitudinal and trans-contextual perspective. To that end, I extend previous research by introducing lifeworld analysis to the study and teaching of genre uptake. Lifeworld analysis, I argue, centralizes uptake, uptakes over time, and the background life from which uptakes are formed, as salient for literacy development. To support this claim, I present a lifeworld case study of one student (Ron), an electrical engineering major and participant in local and online maker culture, who I followed over four years of his undergraduate curriculum, from general education and discipline-specific courses into an online and local community makerspace. Ron’s case reveals the interplay between maker-consciousness and encounters with engineering and general education writing, highlighting how maker culture became a core scene of uptake for his performance of school-based genres. This lifeworld analysis shows the porousness and malleability of spheres of writing activity as well as the consequences of such perceived malleability for writers. Ron’s case grounds my introduction of an uptake awareness pedagogy: an attempt to help students recognize and strategically draw from expanded and often taken-for-granted temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories of their prior genre uptakes and those uptake histories.

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

Given the growing number of international teaching assistants (ITAs) on US campuses, ITAs have become critical members of US academic communities. Research related to ITAs’ experiences in US classrooms reveals certain challenges that ITAs encounter as instructors in this new educational context. These challenges can be instructional, social, linguistic, or cultural in nature. In response to the need to provide incoming ITAs with both ongoing institutional and personal support, this pilot action research study investigates the impact of the use of reflective dialogic blogs on the ITAs in terms of their development of teaching expertise, cross-cultural awareness, and language skills at the completion of the ITA training course offered at a southwestern US university. The study involved a group of ITAs in online interactions via blogs with the ITA-training course instructor for the duration of one academic semester. Data collection focused on the content of the ITAs’ writing and their perceptions of the effectiveness of reflective dialogic blogs in regard to their development as instructors. The results suggest that more attempts to use tools such as reflective dialogic blogs should be made in the future. The article also suggests possible modifications for the use of reflective dialogic blogs with prospective students.

Improving postgraduate student writing in English is an ongoing concern in the increasingly internationalised UK Higher Education context. Although the importance of feedback for developing academic writing skills is well-established (Hyland and Hyland 2006), there is still much debate about the components of effective feedback. In response to the call for research investigating teachers’ real-world practices in giving feedback in specific contexts (Lee 2014 and 2012), this article presents an initiative to develop students’ abilities to tackle written postgraduate writing (essays and dissertations) through collaborative on-line academic writing courses. The Grounded Theory-inspired study explores student perceptions of the effectiveness of online formative feedback on postgraduate academic writing in order to identify best practices which can contribute to developing skills in providing feedback. The study analyses tutor feedback on student texts and student responses to feedback. We applied categories which emerged from this data and concluded that the students we investigated had responded most positively when a combination of confidence-developing feedback practices were employed. These included both principled corrective language feedback and positive, personalised feedback on academic conventions and practices. This collaboration between academic writing and content specialists continues to provide further opportunities for embedding practices that encourage the development of academic writing skills on one year postgraduate programmes at the University of Edinburgh.

Publication productivity constitutes a key measure of institutional and researcher performance, determining success in university rankings and academic career development. To promote such productivity, Aalto University launched the Writing Doctoral Research course for engineers. To build a domain-specific course for doctoral candidates, their needs were examined quantitatively (n=325) and qualitatively (n=74). The aim was to identify pedagogy for raising the quality of publications and expediting doctoral degree completion. These investigations showed that 1) in the absence of sufficient supervision, engineers require more support in writing-related mental processes, 2) the mechanics of writing needs to promote argumentativity, 3) researchers lack precision when describing their research aims, 4) articulation of causality in data commentary requires more accuracy, and 5) instruments must be provided for writer self-correction.Instead of taking the lexicogrammar approach, the course was designed in a way that aligned with the principles of enculturation, assisting researchers in scientific positioning and socialization into their fields. Such an approach emphasizes reporting and structural conventions in engineering and the field-specific academic style.

Peer assessment is a technique with many possible benefits for instruction across the curriculum. However, the value obtained from receiving peer feedback may critically depend upon the relative abilities of the author and the reviewer. We develop a new model of such relative ability effects on peer assessment based on the well-supported Flower and Hayes model of revision processes. To test this model across the stages of peer assessment from initial text quality, reviewing content, revision amount, and revision quality, 189 undergraduate students in a large, introductory course context were randomly assigned to consistently receive feedback from higher-ability or lower-ability peers. Overall, there were few main effects of author ability or reviewer ability. Instead, as predicted, there were many interactions between the two factors, suggesting the new model is useful for understanding ability factors in peer assessment. Often lower-ability writers benefitted more from receiving feedback from lower-ability reviewers, while higher-ability writers benefitted equally from receiving feedback from lower-ability and higher-ability reviewers. This result leads to the practical recommendation of grouping students by ability during peer assessment, contrary to student beliefs that only feedback from high ability peers is worthwhile.

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

This essay follows an active duty Army officer from her first day in graduate school until a year after graduation, when she is able to situate her role as military student within the context of a civilian university. This essay argues that some of the boundaries surrounding those associated with the military can be of their own making and that a composition class, specifically, equips its military members and student veterans with the tools to recognize, name, and negotiate those boundaries.

Background: Despite efforts to include communication instruction in both college and continuing education curricula for students in all areas of study, workplace surveys continually report that employees' communication skills are lacking. The differing contexts of school and the workplace may be one reason for this disconnect, so teaching strategies that can effectively bridge this gap are needed. Research questions: How do students respond to using scenes from a television series to teach professional communication concepts within workplace contexts? What are advantages and drawbacks to this strategy? Situating the case: Strategies used to teach professional communication in a way that facilitates its application in the workplace include classroom exercises, service-learning projects involving real clients, and simulations. In addition, videos are a commonly used method of classroom teaching. They can activate verbal/linguistic, visual/spatial, and musical/rhythmic intelligences, allowing students to use their stronger intelligences and develop their weaker ones. Research also suggests that students appreciate visual stimulation and technology use when learning communication skills. How the case was studied: Students completed a brief end-of-course survey to gather both qualitative and quantitative data concerning their learning experiences with the activities described. About the case: To make undergraduate writing courses more relevant to the workplace, specific scenes from The Office were integrated to teach units on negative messages and intercultural issues. Following these clips, students completed both in-class exercises and course assignments pertaining to the topics covered. Results: After completing the class sessions and associated exercises described here, most students could discern the relevant concepts from the clips; they found both the clips and the associated exercises helpful in learning the concepts; and they recommended ongoing use in future classes. Students appreciated the comedic nature of the material, the use of different media, and the pop culture reference. Drawbacks included scenes focusing on what not to do, that often showed communication gone awry rather than the correct way to communicate. Some students also prefer more traditional teaching methods. Conclusions: The results indicate that the use of television clips along with associated exercises can be useful aids in teaching professional communication concepts.

Research on the texts of apprentice academic writers has found that they often exhibit weaknesses related to presenting an authoritative argumentative stance. This study rendered explicit linguistic resources for stance-taking and engaged advanced L2 writers in exploring stance expressions in published research. Both linguistic and language learning theories informed this study. Seven Mandarin-speaking learners of English from fields in social sciences engaged in three writing sessions in which they consulted a concordance tool organized and created to present genre moves (Swales 1990; 2004) and engagement strategies (Martin & White, 2005) used by academic authors in research introductions. Analysis of their drafts showed improvement in rhetorical move structure and stance deployment after using the tool. They were found to be more accurate in applying and identifying stances that present assertive claims and factual statements than moderately assertive stance expressions that present expansive meanings. Despite some success in learning, close text analysis reveals that more help is needed to support students in deploying appropriately assertive claims, substantiating strong claims, and managing their stance expression across several clauses. Overall, this study found that an explicit approach to learning about authorial stance has the potential to raise L2 writers’ consciousness and improve their writing.

This article argues that composition should be involved in the study and teaching of graduate level writing. It goes on to argue that independent consulting offers a viable way for compositionists to share expertise with graduate students and programs, as well as to expand opportunities for participation in the profession.

Research has explored how scholars use citations to write intertextually across disciplines but have rarely compared how students, especially undergraduates, appropriate source texts in their writing in arts versus sciences. This study explores textual appropriation and source use in disciplinary writing of second language undergraduates in a North American university. Two samples of undergraduate writing were analyzed. One is a biology paper written by Cary to summarize a scientific concept or statement, and the other is an essay in Film Studies written by Martin on a topic of his own choosing. Text-based interviews were conducted to solicit participants’ comments and explanations of how they used source texts in completing the two specific disciplinary writing tasks. Results suggest different citing behaviors between the two students in terms of the types of sources they used (textbooks, monographs, and non-reading sources), the format of textual borrowing (quoting versus paraphrasing), and reasons for citing and not citing (e.g., to use others’ words or ideas versus expressing one’s own ideas or knowledge). The paper ends with an example of an assignment designed to help students explore how to make citation decisions in disciplinary writing.

Writing in a second language, especially using new technologies, is fraught with difficulties for most students. There are two main challenges, firstly, how can students move from their understanding of the mechanical aspects of texts (good sentence structure and appropriate lexis) to deal with issues of how to construct texts that go beyond the basics, for instance drawing upon multiple modes of expression, and secondly, how can students use their knowledge about new technologies to help them create texts? This paper examines the collaborative processes English for Science students go through when constructing a scientific text for a popular audience, here, a digital video scientific documentary. Undergraduate students had to work in groups to write the text for a digital story based on an experiment they had undertaken. As part of the process these students had to prepare a script which was then recorded, either speaking directly to the camera, or as a voice over onto the video to complement their video images. Based on examples from the students’ generated data: Facebook, WhatsApp posts and scripts, we see that the end product was rich and informative. It is maintained that a collaborative approach using new technologies to writing such popular scientific texts engages the students with their work and that, when given the opportunity, they learn from each other as much as from their teacher.

In Australian universities, doctoral research results in the production of a thesis of between 80,000–100,000 words produced by the student under the guidance of a supervisor. There is no compulsory coursework component. Recent years have seen an increase in the range of activities provided at research-intensive universities to support doctoral writing. These activities are often aimed at both native and non-native speakers of English and range from compulsory or optional courses to workshops, writing groups and boot-camps. This article discusses the approach taken to supporting doctoral writing via an analysis of the support provided through the Learning Centre at UNSW Australia. The article discusses the rationale for the approach taken, describes the programmes on offer and considers the challenges facing a small centrally-located unit that provides writing support at a large Australian university.

Producing publishable quality research articles is a difficult task for novice scholarly writers. Particularly challenging is writing the Discussion/Conclusion section, which requires taking evaluative and interpretive stances on obtained results and substantiating claims regarding the worth of the scholarly contribution of the article to scientific knowledge. Conforming to the expectations of the target disciplinary community adds another dimension to the challenge. Corpus-based genre analysis can foster postgraduate writing instruction by providing insightful descriptions of rhetorical patterns and variation in disciplinary discourse. This paper introduces a pedagogically-oriented cross-disciplinary model of moves and steps devised through top-down corpus analysis. The model was applied to pedagogical materials and tasks designed to enhance genre and corpus-based teaching of Discussion/ Conclusions with an explicit focus on rhetorical conventions.

Deep Rhetoric is addressed to philosophy and rhetoric. And, like the journal, its questions emerge from the problem of a long-standing and uncomfortable conjunction, the “and” that divides and joins in one stroke. Over the course of eight chapters or a “series of closely related essays” (8), Crosswhite argues for a redefinition of rhetoric's place within our society's ethical imagination (giving it new “rights” to reason, justice, and wisdom, rights usually given to philosophy) and thereby returns rhetoric firmly to its original arena, the human condition. Such a recovery of rhetoric, if not its empowerment, grounds Crosswhite's concern for questions that philosophy shares with rhetoric only in a kind of grudging détente. It also says a great deal about his claim that rhetoric may be (or perhaps was all along) philosophy's best critic, offering us other ways way of loving wisdom, seeking justice, and contending with violence.A note on “deep:” Crosswhite's “deep” is both a move against philosophy and a gesture toward going “beyond” rhetoric as an academic discipline. Rhetoric began—like philosophy—amid the conditions of humanity: our questions of virtue, community, and communication of both. Rhetoric's migration into a university setting says less about its essences (one being its connection to teaching) and more about how education has shifted away from a concern with those conditions (3). Moreover, as Crosswhite notes, rhetoric has not been treated well in American higher education; it has been especially damaged by “destructive elitist” attitudes that simplify the complex “communication capabilities” needed for social life (3). Yet if rhetoric can go or become “deep” enough, Crosswhite argues, if it can do what it has always done all those times institutions have tried to kill it off—respond to controversies “for a specific time and in a specific place,” ‘hosting’ them as honest and useful (6)—then it will thrive. In the end, Crosswhite is after this fully “critical, creative, and truthful” rhetoric (177).Crosswhite solidifies rhetoric's “rapprochement” with philosophy (177) in chapters 5 and 6, an extensive and productive reading of Heidegger. The work of that German philosopher/rhetorician is one of many shared substances between the two schools of thought that Crosswhite gives attention to throughout the book. A typical review would summarize those substances and their attendant chapters, moving toward an analytical climax. Yet a fair reviewer knows such a limited space cannot do justice to Crosswhite's dense arguments, especially about Heidegger. And also Crosswhite covers some old ground. I will not rehearse his expansion on Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's 1969 work (chapter 7). Readers of this journal know that Crosswhite organized and oversaw a special issue in 2010 about the legacy of The New Rhetoric.Crosswhite's individual chapters are not as important as his work on concepts that bring rhetoric into its “deeper” self. Crosswhite argues for a retrieval of four concepts “from millennia of philosophical and theological reifications” (79).1 It is these concepts—transcendence, psychagōgia, logos, and humanism—that deserve a reviewer's (and reader's) attention. Their development throughout the essays shows in a more direct way how this book situates itself within rhetorical theory and the history of rhetoric and in relation to the progress that has been made in both of those arenas in the second half of the twentieth century. These concepts are not new to philosophy or rhetoric, but taken as a whole they define the “deepest” rhetoric.Crosswhite's rhetorical attention to these concepts highlights a significant difference between philosophy and rhetoric: he insists that rhetoric resist the urge for an epistemological telos, prominent in philosophy. Thus a “deep” rhetoric pursues a direction but acknowledges that such a pursuit consistently destabilizes any actual arriving. In that frame, Crosswhite expends the first one hundred pages or so (chapters 1 and 2) trying to name but not terminally define “deep rhetoric” through these concepts; the rescued concepts become mines in which Crosswhite repeatedly enters, not because he is looking for “gold” but because he wants to describe rhetoric as the work of mining. And so he claims rhetoric as a “way of being.” This claim is not new to rhetorical theory, but what makes Crosswhite's attempt so persuasive is the ambitiousness of the book as evidenced in the depth of the mining, which extends past the first two chapters, the concepts aiding his analysis of justice, violence, and wisdom. Along with this depth, the book's breadth also argues forcefully that one does not “study” rhetoric so much as live it, because its influence is felt across the human condition. That is what makes rhetoric philosophical or, better, what makes philosophy rhetorical. And the living is an entangled, material existence. Mixing humor and serious scholarship, for example, Crosswhite couples his close reading of Heidegger with an explanation of how silence and logos inhabit the manner in which he and his wife share a bed.Living amid others requires the practice of transcendence, the first of the key concepts. Crosswhite writes that rhetoric as transcendence is “a way we open ourselves to the influence of what is beyond ourselves and become receptive, a way we participate in a larger world and become open to the lives of others, a way we learn and change” (17). This participation is a meeting with each other “in language of some kind” (61), equal to “our being-in-logos” (56). In the eternal battle between rhetoric and philosophy, rhetoric's practice in the mundane (as opposed to philosophy's attachment to the ideal seen in Plato's heavenly visions) has been seen as a weakness. In Crosswhite's estimation this lack of heavenly transcendence is not a negative when seen through a different frame. Crosswhite argues that rhetoric is “something we are, not something we have” (61). This implies a different relationship to philosophy, one hidden by “knowledge” as a having. In addition, rhetorical transcendence has an “ethical force” because ethics is “constitutive of rhetoric” (107). That force certainly has something to do with “the good,” but it does not entail imposing that “good” on others through violence, physical or rhetorical. For Crosswhite the difference between an ethical transcendence and what he calls a “warrior theory of transcendence” is the latter's lack of restraint (117). This lack is best seen in Plato's description of Gorgias: he is a man who seeks “conquest and domination” along with wealth for himself (117), but ironically his rhetoric is not rhetorical enough. “Socrates' real charge against Gorgias's rhetoric is that it does not go deep enough” (124, emphasis his). In other words, rhetoric may have been a skill or “discipline” for the Sophist but not a manner of life and so less than ethical. That ethical manner of life is a constant communicative examination, a questioning of what we claim to know and put “under” our power. This opens us to something or someone else.This communicative examination is part of the second concept, psychagōgia. Translated as “leading the soul,” this Platonic notion is a “special power” of logos (different than its usual association with sophistic magic or spellbinding) that Crosswhite draws out from the gospel of John, known for its description of Logos as the Word of God. “Pros ton theon” (“toward the god”) becomes the lack of “possession or knowledge of an ultimate being” or “definite, certain, foreseeable, outcomes” (31) or a “not-having, a way of comporting oneself toward but not a way of actually knowing or grasping or achieving the goal” (30). This restraint is what makes this concept a rhetorical one rather than a philosophical one. Psychagōgia as a practice of “deep rhetoric” is “a life of pursuing and loving that stretches out toward wisdom but never arrives at it” (253). This “limited” power is a power “to which one must yield and not simply a power that one attempts to master and use for oneself” (133). Such a limitation makes rhetoric more ethical than its more end-orientated sister, philosophy. And a “deep rhetoric” internalizes this limitation on a primal level. One might suggest that what keeps philosophy grounded—that is, what prevents its heavenly transcendence—is its rhetorical “leading.”Psychagōgia is something “which we can never completely objectify” (131). This is because of its relation to logos, the third concept. Logos “moves in and against the semiotic languages of human beings; it makes them possible, but it works strongly against their certainties and ideologies” (79). Yet this “it” is not “a thing but a direction” (79). In terms of the gospel of John it is “the dynamic movement toward and into G-d,” and it must continue moving toward that which “will always exceed the forms of comprehension that lead toward it” (34). In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, rhetoric's “essence [as logos] is its onwardness” (79) or its experiencing of psychagōgia. This particular formation has implications for rhetoric as it continues its ethical turn. Rhetorical scholars have struggled indirectly with the content of rhetoric and so also with the content of its ethic. But if it is toward a good, if it is a leading toward, then rhetoric is not suspicious but in line with the w/Word as a calling toward. Such a leading toward enhances the power of language, a win for rhetoric.Or in Heidegger's thinking, rhetoric “is an awareness of” a logos, an awareness “deeper” that extends beyond the discipline, a “more original” logos of “communication, controversy, deliberation, and being-with-one-another—the essential sociality of Dasein” (195). This “ungrounded” logos (197) appears as Crosswhite pushes past what he sees as Heidegger's self-centered “authenticity” toward “a richer conception of logos and a more complex vision of sociality” (198). Conceptualizing “sociality” as that which is human, Crosswhite argues that human “beings” are not “simple entities, enclosed in themselves, but are movements toward and away from each other,” the world, themselves, and “whatever else their transcendence reveals” (174). These movements are both inherently rhetorical and ethical, movements toward a good.It is the movement of logos—the quintessence of rhetoric in a way—that violence puts to an end. And yet, in Crosswhite's opinion, rhetorical violence is often the response to physical violence. Here he contends with Walter Benjamin's “Critique of Violence,” suggesting that as much as it offers productive paths, it also is “intellectually traumatized” by the wars of the twentieth century and so is “an extreme example” of this tendency toward violence in response to violence (Benjamin argues for a divine violence that would overwhelm a mythic violence) (168–69). Crosswhite refuses any solution to violence (ontotheological or otherwise) and argues for a “suffering” rhetoric, one that experiences and endures violence (166). The best response to violence is a “deep rhetoric” that both prevents “overarching” theories and that is “carefully attuned” to a form of the human as sociality amid transcendence. Yet Crosswhite stumbles a bit here. At times his own analysis is as abstract as Benjamin's. More profoundly, although Crosswhite suggests that Benjamin needs a type of violence, many readers of Benjamin might disagree. Even if one accepts that Benjamin does indeed have such a need, the argument between the two is a larger one concerning rhetoric and religion. One cannot easily dismiss Benjamin's theological adherence to some form of messianic glory, Jewish or otherwise, merely because of the effects of war. And perhaps our lack of intellectual traumatization due to the wars of the twenty-first century says more than we let on. In the end, many religions answer violence with a “suffering” savior. Ironically, Crosswhite describes his response to violence as a more human, “less ultimate” work of justice and peace, a kenosis ironically not unlike that of the primary character in the gospel of John.On the other hand, Crosswhite's argument against violence certainly has value and legitimacy, and it grounds his central claim on a related subject: humans need to do more work (rhetorical and otherwise) to effect justice. However, when Crosswhite dabbles in religious rhetoric (along with the gospel on John, he draws on Augustine, Buddhist meditation, and the Hebraic tradition to develop his idea of rhetorical wisdom in the last chapter), he does not go deep enough. He draws from these rhetorical depths, but he seems to stop at moments when they could offer more. Ironically, as Crosswhite shows in his interaction with wisdom in the last chapter, it is religion in part that makes possible his most substantial critique of Heidegger, namely, that Heidegger does not go deep enough into human sociality. In fairness Crosswhite notes that he has worked to show the “formal similarities” of explicit religious rhetoric to his own “deep rhetoric” (366) but also admits he could only give a “preliminary account” of this relationship (367). In a less than generous reading, the whole book itself is only a “preliminary account” of a deep rhetoric, leaving readers wanting more. In a generous reading, this is exactly what a philosophical rhetoric is supposed to do: keep the conversation moving. In other words, as with most of our best scholarship, its strength is also its weakness.The last of Crosswhite's four concepts—humanism—certainly poses the questions that religion does but does not define the human exclusively in religious terms. Like a rhetorical justice, the “human” and its attendant wisdom is “for a time” (54). For Crosswhite, humanism is not about “realizing a specifically human essence,” such as rationality, but about “struggling for human dignity,” dignity here being understood as a freedom to develop (46). Deep rhetoric thus must “prevent its own humanism from congealing into something reified and dogmatic” (56). Humanism is not just dynamic but also ethical, limiting itself, and thereby making itself accountable to others. This is the human condition to which a deep rhetoric “aspires” (222), a condition achievable, yet always achieved kairotically, within time, space, and logos. Many rhetorical scholars could enthusiastically embrace this definition, mainly because it emphasizes both a looking back and a future orientation.In the end Deep Rhetoric is certainly a virtuous keystone (perhaps not yet a capstone) to the long process of “mining” within Crosswhite's thinking that began with his own dissertation on Heidegger nearly thirty years ago. It is also a broad survey of the ways in which rhetoric can and should become a different kind of philosophy, its own kind. The book is both deep and wide, and its movement steers us toward something that can be called good. If indeed this is a sustained direction for rhetorical theory in the future (and I hope it is), Crosswhite's book will be read for a long time.

Using the British Academic Written English corpus, this study focuses on the use of grammatical complexity features in university level texts written by first language (L1) English writers to demonstrate knowledge and perform other specialized tasks required of advanced academic writers. While the primary focus of the analysis is on writing development from first-year undergraduate to graduate students, we also consider interactions with discipline and genre. The study goes beyond most previous work on grammatical complexity in writing by investigating the use of phrasal as well as clausal features. The results show that as academic level increases, the use of phrasal complexity features in writing also increases. On the other hand, the use of clausal complexity features in student writing, particularly finite dependent clauses, decreases as academic level increases. Results further indicate that the extent of the differences across level is mediated by discipline and genre, reflecting patterns observed in research on disciplinary variation in professional academic writing.

Background: This teaching case describes the evolution of a course on content strategy aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate students in the digital and professional writing programs at Michigan State University. The course has gone through three major shifts to reflect corresponding shifts in focus among professional and technical communicators: from developing content for the World Wide Web (original focus) to single sourcing; from single-sourcing to Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMS), and from ECMS to content strategy. The case primarily focuses on the most recent shift. Research questions: How can a course on content strategy be useful to both advanced undergraduates preparing to enter the job market in industry and graduate students interested in learning theories in technical communication? In turn, how can a course on content strategy reflect current practices in industry while maintaining grounding for the course in academic research? Situating the case: Three emerging themes relevant to teaching content strategy emerge in the literature. The first is the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, who creates a repeatable system for designing and managing all aspects of a website [1, 2, 3]. The second is the need to develop strategies for addressing stakeholders, especially clients and users, whose goals are to learn more about why they should invest in an organization and its broader vision. The third is adapting content for reuse, which involves designing content that can be easily accessed through various platforms and formats. How the case was studied: This is an experience report by the four faculty members who, together, have taught every section of the course in the last 15 years. Two of the instructors also participated in the course as students. About the case: The most recent version of the course is a one-term course that teaches theory and best practices for managing dynamic and distributed web content, while also incorporating assignments that help students practice content strategies with real clients. It addressed these issues with the previous version that focused on content management by collaborating with industry practitioners to help students understand the real-world implications of developing strategies for and creating web content with clients and organizations. It specifically addresses three themes identified from the literature-emphasizing the role of the content strategist as an Editor-in-Chief, differentiating the needs of clients and users, and designing for reuse. Course assignments include a landscape analysis of content-management systems and strategies used by various companies, designing content templates for specific clients, and developing a content strategy for a client selected by student groups. Key issues to address when developing the most recent version of the course included creating a course that was useful to graduate and undergraduate students aiming to enter content strategy professions, developing a balance between theory and practice in course readings and assignments, and revising a course to reflect current industry demands for skills in content strategy. Results: Anecdotal evidence from students is that the course was successful and acts as a defacto capstone for the program. Through their course evaluations and unsolicited follow-up emails, students exiting the most recent version of this course became valuable assets who help organizations develop big-picture strategies for adaptable content to be shared through various platforms. Conclusion: A course on content strategy that incorporates current industry perspectives helps graduate and undergraduate professional writing students become more adequately prepared for their future professions working with organizations.

Research Article| March 01 2016 Rights Talk and Political Dispositions Laura J. Collins Laura J. Collins Laura J. Collins is a doctoral candidate in Rhetoric and Writing at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg. She holds a J.D. from the Emory University School of Law. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2016) 19 (1): 83–90. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0083 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Laura J. Collins; Rights Talk and Political Dispositions. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 March 2016; 19 (1): 83–90. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.19.1.0083 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. © 2016 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2016 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

I am honored to be the fourth editor of Advances in the History of Rhetoric (AHR). I walk in the shadow of distinguished predecessors, and I pledge imitation as the currency of my respect and gratitude. One can never equal the contribution of a founder, but to Rich Enos, who began Advances in 2002 and served for six years, I pledge to continue his expressed and enacted commitment to encouraging, aiding, and then publishing the work of beginning scholars. By his example, Robert Gaines, editor from 2004–2011, teaches me to be a proactive editor—not to depend for the content of the journal exclusively on what comes in through the transom but to create platforms for experienced scholars to address timely questions in colloquies and to invite and publish translations and critical editions as well as thesis-driven essays. Katya Haskins, who served from 2012–2015, made special issues a regular feature of the journal, a practice that I will continue, but even more importantly worked intentionally to expand the scope of Advances to ensure a robust and inclusive understanding of “the tradition” in terms of the periods emphasized, national literatures covered, and the media examined under the sign of rhetoric. I hope to publish any quality work in rhetoric that benefits from being examined through an historical lens. I also welcome the work of graduate students, will initiate a regular invitation to submit proposals on special issues, and will regularly publish book reviews and invited essays that assess the state of the research on particular period or topic.I encourage scholars working on topics related to historical rhetoric to submit their essays to AHR. I promise you a fair and quick review process. If your essay is accepted and published it will be available to patrons of the over 2000 libraries that subscribe to one of the Taylor & Francis packages that includes AHR.

Globalization, most sociologists agree, is not a new phenomenon. Its phase in the late 20 th century and early 21 st century, however, is recognized now as one of the more transformative periods in human history-what Anthony Giddens (2011) has characterized as a "runaway world." In the last few decades, there has scarcely been a domain of human activity untouched by these forces-economic systems, mass media and communication, cultural flows, the movement of people. A global site as intensive as any has of course been our universities; indeed, it is these "runaway" forces that have been responsible for so many of the changes witnessed on our campuses in recent decades. They are evident, for example, in the considerably more diverse student cohorts who now participate in university education, along with the rich variety of languages and cultures they bring to their studies. Dramatic changes have also been seen in what is taught on programs, including the push within many disciplines to systematically "internationalize curricula." Along with new content are radically new ways of delivering programs, as digital communications become more and more sophisticated at replicating-and also reconfiguring-the learning experiences of the traditional classroom. Finally, these forces have also brought about new types of collegial relationships as institutions and academics reach out across borders to connect and collaborate on a great variety of educational and research enterprises. Versions of these changes have been experienced in many parts of the world. In my home country, Australia, for example, such has been the scale of these developments that international education has emerged in recent times as one the nation's largest export industries.

Jennifer Hitchcock interviews community activist and director of Syracuse University’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric doctoral program, Steve Parks. They discuss Parks’s working-class background, career path, influences, and activism. Parks also considers the direction of the field of composition and rhetoric and expresses optimism for the future.

Eight English graduate students and a professor reflect on their semesterlong exploration of community literacy studies. The students, some in a MFA Creative Writing program and some doing doctoral work in literature, rhetoric, or English Education, discuss how the community literacies lens unsettled their relationship to English Studies.

This article argues that getting students to learn about archival preservation and research in the context of an underpreserved, underresearched history offers a number of pedagogical rewards. Colleges and universities are pushing to increase community-based learning opportunities for undergraduates. At the same time, digital humanities initiatives are making it increasingly possible for undergraduates to work hands-on with primary sources, and a number of university-sponsored efforts are being made to process and digitize neglected African American archives. Many of these projects make use of graduate student labor, but few have recognized the benefits of engaging undergraduates in processing local and minority archives as part of their classroom experience. This article argues that such classes would not only build mutually beneficial relationships between town and gown but also encourage students to recognize that the approach to history they are familiar with—one that emphasizes national leaders and “major” events—is part of the same tendency to value the powerful that has caused African American history to be underpreserved. Preserving and publicizing local histories counters this tendency and may help produce a younger generation of scholars who are attuned to politics of power and privilege within the scholarship they encounter and produce.

Based on Vygotsky’s theory of the interplay of the tool and sign functions of language, this study presents a textual analysis of a corpus of student-authored texts to illuminate aspects of development evidenced through the dialectical tension of tool and sign. Data were drawn from a series of reflective memos I authored during a seminar for new doctoral students designed to encourage the development of their identities as educational researchers. In an effort to understand how the tool and sign functions played out in this developmental context, I employed three methods of analysis: (a) I parsed them into evidential units of induction or deduction, (b) I positioned each unit on semantic differential scales to indicate the assumptions and authorial roles manifested, and (c) I examined how these positions were discursively realized through problematizing, intertextual reach, procedural membership, and reciprocal membership. The analysis demonstrates how examining the dialectical relationship of tool and sign illuminates the developmental trajectory of a student writer.

In this interview, James Porter talks about his professional career and what he sees as the contemporary challenges for the field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. Throughout the exchange, Porter discusses his administrative concerns with the state of rhetoric in the field, the ongoing struggles with graduate education, the complexities of online writing instruction, and the potentials of programmatic collaboration. The interview concludes on a personal note about Porter’s scholarly trajectory, his collaborations, the fruits of his labor, and his advice for emergent scholars in the field.

Drawing from a five-year longitudinal data set following thirteen college writers through undergraduate writing and beyond, we explore the impact of students’ emotions and emotional dispositions on their ability to transfer writing knowledge and on their overall writing development. Participants experienced a range of emotions concerning their writing, but those emotions could be broadly categorized as generative, disruptive, or circumstantial. Students managed these emotions in different ways, with some approaching their learning less emotionally (rational interpreters), others moreso (emotional interpreters), and a final group using metacognitive practices to manage their emotions (emotional managers). Our results suggest that metacognitive concepts of monitoring and control are keys to students’ navigation of the complex emotional landscape of writing in higher education. Our discussion posits ways that faculty can help students become emotional managers and work with students’ emotions in the classroom, and it suggests further avenues for research.

Examination of the perspectives and experiences of faculty, graduate student instructors, and undergraduates participating in a WAC/WID program shows how discipline-focused WAC/WID principles are often resisted, interrogated, and subverted by all three groups of stakeholders. New disciplinarity, especially its concepts of borderlands and elasticity, offers a promising focus for WAC/WID.

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

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

Based on Social Cognitive Theory (Bandura 1986) research in academic writing and self-efficacy has shown that there is a relationship between students’ performance and their belief in their writing abilities (Matoti and Shumba 2011, Shah et al. 2011, Prat-Sala and Redford 2012). Using questionnaires, interviews and an assessed written task, this study seeks to contribute to this research by exploring the relationship between writing proficiency and self-efficacy beliefs of undergraduate students taking an Advanced Writing Skills course. The aims of the study were to find out a) what the writing proficiency self-ratings of students doing the Advanced Writing Skills course are like b) their writing self-efficacy beliefs c) what they perceive to be problems related to their writing skills and d) whether there is any relationship between performance level of the students and their self-efficacy beliefs. An analysis of the results reveals that although students’ self-rating was high, their efficacy beliefs were moderate. The results of the present study also reveal that there was no relationship between students’ essay writing performance and their self-efficacy beliefs in the context of this study. This article argues that although self-efficacy beliefs need not be high for students to be motivated to perform better, boosting these beliefs can add to students’ tools for developing their writing competence.

This essay advances a new pedagogical approach to engaging with archives in undergraduate courses. Through this approach, students not only examine traditional archival materials from the past, but also create new online archives of present-day sources they identify as related. Rather than training undergraduate students to become archival specialists, this pedagogy invites them to inquire into the relevance of archival materials to their own everyday lives and composing practices in digital spaces.

Although I do not know Richard Doyle personally, I would say that Darwin's Pharmacy: Sex Plants and the Evolution of the Noosphere is a deeply personal book. Not only does the author offer multiple accounts of his own multicontinental explorations of intraspecies cross-pollination, but he also provides many rhetorical analyses of trip reports, biological treatises, and science fiction, all of which seem to be crucial constitutive elements of his research. That is, this is not a book that offers abstract erudition—though there is plenty of content that anyone can extract from it—but one that offers something more rare. Here, I am reminded of Goethe's famous remark, which Nietzsche chose to use as the epigraph to his Untimely Meditations: “In any case, I hate everything that merely instructs me without augmenting or directly invigorating my activity” (1982, 59). Another way of saying this is that the “personal” quality of this book indicates something quite different from one person's idiosyncratic attempt to expand their consciousness—whether through learning or smoking. Instead, it points toward a kind of impersonal singularity that is the conjunction of multiple affective/conceptual directions and speeds. It is, in short, a pedagogy in the strongest sense.So as not to be misleading, I should also say that I did know someone else named Doyle some fifteen years ago when I was a graduate student at Penn State. That other Doyle (not exactly “Richard”) was then an assistant professor who had only just published his first book exploring the “rhetorical software” that enabled the field of molecular biology and that drove the sequencing frenzy that was the Human Genome Project. I am indebted to that other Doyle for provoking in me an enthusiasm for thinking and for teaching me that if our scholarship is to be worth anything at all, it must be oriented toward learning how to live. Indeed, reading, writing, teaching, and all the practices of our industry are inextricably parts of life and therefore parts of a carbon- (and silicon-) based ecology that need to be taken seriously if we are going to claim to have been alive at all. But as Darwin's Pharmacy shows, learning how to live is often a brutal, painful, and even a literally nauseating process. Suffice to say that I did not like that Doyle then any more than I like this other one now. But I have learned from (and with) them both.This book is remarkable for several reasons. First, and most apparent, is because it manages to connect extraordinarily disparate discourses in ways that in retrospect look obvious. The chapter entitled “LSDNA” (about the multivalent links between midcentury research on DNA and the discovery of LSD, including the fact that Francis Crick was apparently under the influence of LSD when he first envisioned the double helical structure of the molecule) typifies the provocative quality of these conjunctions. But the more significant attribute that makes this book so important for rhetorical studies is that it depicts rhetoric as a deeply powerful adjunct to all the lines it follows. What this means is that rhetoric here is not merely the stylistic or persuasive adornment of a linguistic content (although it is also that) but is also a constitutive element of what we might very broadly call “experience.” Doyle is at pains to emphasize this point especially through the analysis of trip reports by those who have taken hallucinogenic drugs. It would appear from the sheer quantity of these reports that the ingestion of psychotropic drugs produces an intense desire to generate language—a language that would somehow attempt (and fail) to capture the experience of the trip. But more than that, this language also provides a crucial element of the set and setting that are key elements of all encounters with hallucinogens. “To read trip reports for what they can teach us about psychedelic experience,” Doyle argues, “we must read them as if they are less failed signs of the ineffable than symptoms of, and subsequent frames for, psychedelic states” (54). Turning from a traditional emphasis on language to a contemporary thinking of information allows Doyle to foreground the active quality of rhetoric: “Information is less a phenomenon to be understood than … a potent mutagen of human experience.”The common element shared by the various sites that Doyle investigates—from global and medical imaging, to psychedelic drug use, to the love poetry of Cyrano de Bergerac—is that they all provoke an experience of connectedness, “suggesting that in some fashion human perception is indeed “wired” for a periodic recognition of the dense imbrication of organism and environment” (9). Now of course, this message isn't new or even especially noteworthy, but what Doyle is after here is less the content of the message of interconnection and more the practices and relations through which humans come to attune themselves to this event.What interests Doyle about each of these sites is that they are all involved in pragmatic experiments that explore the distributed quality of life. One of the many things that makes Doyle's itinerary deeply compelling is that he does not follow the theoretical line about the death of the subject or the overcoming of humanism but analyzes the actual practices of people involved in pursuing these projects. Thus, for instance, hallucinogenic drug users (“psychonauts”) are pioneers, “early adopters of a transitional, transhuman identity precipitated by our intensified and amplified ecologies of information in the context of an ecosystem in distress” (230). These psychonauts are not so much attempting to “expand” consciousness (as if consciousness were merely quantitative entities) but to turn it otherwise, to explore its alternate capacities by “troping” consciousness (hence the term “psychotropic” drugs).Interestingly enough, and contra the many so-called postmodern critiques of the value of consciousness, in Doyle's account, consciousness does not disappear. Nor is it merely an epiphenomenon masking certain underlying material practices. Indeed, consciousness plays an extremely crucial role in this newly configured biosphere as “the distributed capacity to manipulate and transform living systems” (252). That is, consciousness allows us (and not only us) to pay attention to certain things in certain ways and is thus deeply motivated by what we can only call “seduction.”This emphasis on seduction connects to what I think is the most powerful argument of the book, that Darwin's evolutionary engine of natural selection has unjustly overshadowed the other evolutionary motor that he discovered: sexual selection. Focusing primarily on The Descent of Man, Doyle shows that “Darwin introduces the possibility that survival comes not to the fittest but to the sexiest, those who are adepts at attention gathering” (139). From the plumage of the peacock, to the petals of the orchid, to the thought troping of peyote, this capacity to seduce and to fascinate may well be the most fundamental, rhetorical (and evolutionary) attribute of life. And this attribute is in marked contrast to some alleged demand that the individual organism exists in robust distinction against its environment. That is, “the experience of seduction … provokes not fitness but entanglement[;] sexual selection excels at the momentary breakdown of inside/outside topologies” (249).Now it is also the case that the psychonauts that Doyle investigates are not at all casual drug users and that they are involved in a very precise and care-ful relationship to psychotropic drugs. This book is not simply advocating for the mind-altering quality of hallucinogens themselves; you will not find anything like a mindless celebration of Burning Man here. When he speaks of those who have managed to “form a commons with ayhuasca” (246), as well as the fascinated (and fascinating) artisans of marijuana cultivation, Doyle is predominantly concerned with those who are dedicated to a connoisseur-like relation to these plants (and to consciousness). This is to say that such psychonauts seem to offer a privileged and perhaps altogether rare relation to “drugs” (and to the nooshpere more generally) in that they are “more than recreational” drug users; they demonstrate “a serious intent” in their relations to the exploration of consciousness (258). And indeed, this raises the essential question (for me) as to what styles of exclusions are necessary for any pedagogy and any rhetoric. But that may be a question for a different review. For the moment, it seems to me that the stakes of ingesting this other Doyle's pedagogy are well worth the risks.

In this webtext, we add to the conversation of best practices, focusing on training graduate students to teach online courses and develop pedagogically sound curricula. By training these students in online writing instruction (OWI), we not only encourage best practices in our institution, but we also prepare these graduate students to enter new jobs and programs with a comprehensive understanding of OWI pedagogy.

In this webtext, we add to the conversation of best practices, focusing on training graduate students to teach online courses and develop pedagogically sound curricula. By training these students in online writing instruction (OWI), we not only encourage best practices in our institution, but we also prepare these graduate students to enter new jobs and programs with a comprehensive understanding of OWI pedagogy.

Genre analysis has become an important tool for teaching writing across the disciplines to non-native English-speaking (EL2) and native English-speaking (EL1) graduate students alike. Since the pressing needs of EL2 graduate students have meant that educators often teach them in separate classes, and since genre-based research into teaching higher-level writing has been largely generated in fields such as English for Academic Purposes, we have an insufficient understanding of whether this instructional mode plays out similarly in EL1 and EL2 classrooms. Launching a genre-based course on writing research articles in parallel sections for EL1 and EL2 graduate students provided an opportunity to address this knowledge shortfall. This article qualitatively examines the different classroom behaviors observed in each version of the course when a common curriculum was used and specifically explores three key themes: initial receptivity, nature of student engagement, and overall assessment. Our study shows that although EL2 and EL1 learners have similar needs, the obstacles to their benefitting from genre-based instruction are different; EL2 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support that transcends linguistic matters, while EL1 students must learn to identify themselves as needing writing support despite their linguistic competence. Providing the same mode of instruction can benefit both populations as long as educators are sensitive to the specific challenges each population presents in the classroom. The insights gained contribute to the scholarship on genre-based teaching and offer ways of better meeting the needs of EL1 and EL2 students alike.

Critically evaluating research papers is an important vehicle for promoting acculturation into a scientific discipline. As science students progress through their undergraduate studies, their critical abilities are expected to become heightened, and research papers are read and cited in order to support a variety of assignments, such as essays, critical reviews and presentations, progressing to shaping laboratory research projects and dissertation-writing. This article describes the process of designing a modular online resource. The resource is aimed at familiarising students with the structural conventions and argumentative devices used in research papers and supporting them in deep-reading a research paper in life sciences or chemistry. The modules employ audio- and video-recorded extracts from interviews with a key author to provide a context for the origins, motivations and processes behind the writing of a specific paper, plus scaffolded questions to encourage critical evaluation of the paper. Notable features of the project were the employment of a multi-disciplinary team of staff and research postgraduates coupled with the developmental testing of the resource by undergraduates. Lessons learnt from the project are considered, including the resource’s integration within the curriculum and the challenges of writing such interactive resources for different disciplines.

Timothy Barney is an assistant professor of rhetoric and communication studies at the University of Richmond. His scholarship revolves around Cold War–era public address and visual rhetoric (particularly through the medium of cartography) as well as the political culture of post–Cold War transitions in Germany and the Czech Republic. His book, titled Mapping the Cold War, is forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press in 2015. He is also working on a new project about the European Union and its promotional activities in the United States.András Bozóki is a professor of political science at the Central European University (CEU) in Budapest. He has published widely in topics of democratization, the role of intellectuals, the roundtable talks of 1989, Central/Eastern European politics, the transformation of Communist successor parties, and the ideology of anarchism. His books include Post-Communist Transition: Emerging Pluralism in Hungary (1992), Democratic Legitimacy in Post-Communist Societies (1994), Intellectuals and Politics in Central Europe (1999), The Roundtable Talks of 1989: The Genesis of Hungarian Democracy (2002), Political Pluralism in Hungary (2003), Anarchism in Hungary: Theory, History, Legacies (2006), and Virtual Republic (2012). He has taught at Columbia University, Tübingen University, Nottingham University, Bologna University, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, Hampshire College, and, in his native Hungary, Eötvös Loránd University. He has been a research fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA); the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin; the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study (NIAS); the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence; the Sussex European Institute in Brighton; and the Institute for Humane Sciences (IWM) in Vienna.Senkou Chou is an affirmative cultural critic. His work bridges rhetoric, media theory, French philosophy, and Chinese culture.Matthew deTar is a visiting assistant professor of rhetoric studies at Whitman College. He recently completed his doctorate in the rhetoric and public culture program at Northwestern University. His research focuses on narratives and figures of public discourse that influence national identity and political speech, particularly in the Middle East and Central Asia. His research has been supported by the Institute for Turkish Studies at Georgetown University and the Roberta Buffett Center for International and Comparative Studies at Northwestern University.Jason A. Edwards is an associate professor of communication studies at Bridgewater State University. He is the author of Navigating the Post–Cold War World: President Clinton’s Foreign Policy Rhetoric and coeditor of The Rhetoric of American Exceptionalism: Critical Essays. In addition, he has authored more than thirty articles and book chapters appearing in venues such as Rhetoric and Public Affairs, Communication Quarterly, Southern Journal of Communication, Presidential Studies Quarterly, and The Howard Journal of Communications.Martina Klicperová-Baker is a research fellow at the Institute of Psychology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic; she is also affiliated with the Center for Behavioral Epidemiology and Community Health (C-BEACH), San Diego State University. Her research interests include the psychology of democracy, the psychology of democratic transitions, totalitarian experience, assessment of time perspective, moral behavior, and civility.Noemi Marin is a professor of communication and director of the School of Communication and Multimedia Studies at Florida Atlantic University. Dr. Marin is the author of the book After the Fall: Rhetoric in the Aftermath of Dissent in Post-Communist Times (2007) and contributor to several other books, including Negotiating Democracy: Media Transformation in Emerging Democracies (2007); Realms of Exile: Nomadism, Diaspora, and Eastern European Voices (2005); Intercultural Communication and Creative Practices (2005); Culture and Technology in the New Europe: Civic Discourse in Transformation in Post-Communist Nations (2000). In addition, she was the coeditor with Cezar M. Ornatowski of the Collocutio section in Advances in the History of Rhetoric in 2006 and 2008–2009. Dr. Marin is the recipient of the 2009 researcher/creative scholar of the year award, Florida Atlantic University, and the 2009 presidential leadership award, Florida Atlantic University; and was named the Fulbright summer institute expert on Eastern Europe in 2003, 2004, and 2011.Cezar M. Ornatowski is a professor of rhetoric and writing studies and is associated faculty in the master of science program in homeland security at San Diego State University. His research includes rhetoric and political transformation (especially in Central/Eastern Europe) as well as intersections between rhetoric, totalitarianism, democracy, and security. In 1999, he was a senior Fulbright research scholar at the Culture Study Unit of the Institute for Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences. He is also an honorary fellow of the Center for Rhetoric Studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa.Jane Robinett is a professor emerita of rhetoric and writing studies and English and comparative literature at San Diego State University. Her current research interests include rhetoric and trauma studies; rhetoric and nonviolence; and rhetoric and resistance literature. She was a Fulbright lecturer at the University of Costa Rica in 1993.Philippe-Joseph Salazar was educated at Lycée Lyautey (Casablanca) and Louis-le-Grand (Paris), and is a graduate from École normale supérieure and the Sorbonne, where he studied philosophy, anthropology, and critical theory under Emmanuel Levinas, Louis Althusser, and Roland Barthes. He is a sometime director in rhetoric and democracy at the Collège international de philosophie in Paris, founded by Jacques Derrida, and distinguished professor of rhetoric and humane letters at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. He is a 2009 Laureate recipient of the Harry Oppenheimer award, Africa’s premier research prize, in recognition of his pioneering work in rhetoric studies. His chronicles can be read on http://www.lesinfluences.fr/-Comment-raisonnent-ils-.html and http://leplus.nouvelobs.com/philippejosephsalazar.Anna Szilágyi is a doctoral candidate at the Department of Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong. She holds a master’s degree in Hungarian language and literature from Eötvös University and a master’s degree in political science from Central European University (both in Budapest, Hungary). She is a multilingual discourse analyst whose research concerns politics, political discourses, media, and journalism in post-Communist Central/Eastern Europe and Russia, especially the rhetorics of nationalism, populism, and far-right radicalism. Her recent publications include “Variations on a Theme: The Jewish ‘Other’ in Old and New Anti-Semitic Media Discourses in Hungary in the 1940s and 2011” (coauthored with András Kovács) in editors Ruth Wodak and John E. Richardson’s collection Analyzing Fascist Discourse: European Fascism in Talk and Text (New York: Routledge, 2013).David Cratis Williams is a professor of communication studies at Florida Atlantic University. His research broadly concerns rhetorical theory and criticism, public argument, and the synergistic connections between rhetoric and democracy. He focuses both on the study of political argument in Russia and on the life and works of Kenneth Burke. Williams is the executive director of both the Eurasian Communication Association of North America and the International Center for the Advancement of Political Communication and Argumentation.Marilyn J. Young is the Wayne C. Minnick professor of communication emerita at Florida State University. Her research has focused on political argument with an emphasis on the development of political rhetoric and argument in the former Soviet Union, particularly Russia. She remains an active scholar in retirement.

After reviewing some of the manuscripts for this issue, we, as editors, thought it would be appropriate to interview Steve Parks’ regarding his perspectives on graduate students and community projects. Steve has worked with graduate students for many years, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He was also the past editor of this journal for a number of years, and we have benefitted through his guidance. As he says at the end of the interview, the interview format cannot capture the spirit of “collaborative discussion” that comes from this work. However, given our close relationship with Steve over the years, the questions we did develop come out of our conversations with him and thus is a product of previous listening and dialoguing. An interview with a friend, mentor, and colleague is a different type of interview—one grounded in the familiar.

Welcome to another issue of Reflections. We are particularly pleased to begin the issue interviewing Steve Parks, someone who the editors have worked with for a number of years. Given we have a couple of articles focused on graduate student experiences with community projects and service-learning, we thought asking Steve Parks to reflect on this particular area would add continuity to this issue. For many years, Steve has mentored many graduate students, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He is also the previous Editor of Reflections and someone I’ve known for years.

We focus on the long-term impacts of service-learning pedagogy on an oft-overlooked assessment group: graduate instructors. We describe the civic engagement program we participated in as graduate student teachers, the Chicago Civic Leadership Certificate Program, and we illustrate how our early experiences with community-based pedagogies led to formative and long-term impacts on our approaches to research, teaching, and service and on our professional and personal work and identities. Based on our experiences, we offer a set of best practices that can serve as a foundation for the intentional design and assessment—both formative and summative—of forward-thinking graduate instructor objectives and outcomes.