All Journals
4679 articlesDecember 2023
-
Making Good on Our Promises to Language Justice: Spheres of Coalitional Possibilities across the Discipline ↗
Abstract
In this article, we argue for a coalitional orientation for writing programs and centers to advance language justice and make good on the promises delineated over fifty years ago in the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s publication of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Specifically, we argue that writing centers are ripe sites of teaching and learning—not merely auxiliary support for the composition classroom. Indeed, as we demonstrate, many writing centers actively push for language justice by, for example, publishing language diversity/inclusion statements and championing concrete, pedagogically just practices. Accordingly, we urge the discipline of composition and writing centers to work together as coalitional partners to advance language justice across the discipline and, ultimately, beyond.
-
Abstract
Using classroom play to promote comfort between composition students, encouraging greater participation and experimentation by helping students feel safe traversing educational and social boundaries, is supported in a theoretical lens connecting play to both pedagogy and various literacies valued in college writing. One practical framework, with student interviews, is described.
November 2023
-
Transnational Youth Expressing Religious Being and Belonging through Writing: Youth Writers’ Purposes, Audiences, and Formal Choices across Public US Secondary Classrooms, 2015-2020 ↗
Abstract
Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.
-
Abstract
Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).
October 2023
-
What Is the Sound of One Hand Playing: Aural Body Rhetoric in the Music of Horace Parlan and Paul Wittgenstein ↗
Abstract
ABSTRACTThis essay examines the lives of two pianists with significant impairments of their right arms: Paul Wittgenstein, a classical pianist who lost his right arm in World War I, and Horace Parlan, a jazz pianist who lost full use of his right hand due to childhood polio. Drawing on theories of mêtis and passing developed by queer theory and disability studies scholars, we theorize aural passing to examine how Parlan and Wittgenstein differently navigated the rhetorical constraints of their respective musical genres. Engaging a rhetorical biography of each performer’s unique mêtis, we compare how disabled forms of passing are not equivalent across all instances and conclude by meditating on the entrenched ableism of musical pedagogy and performance.KEYWORDS: Aural passingclassical musicdisabilityjazzmêtis AcknowledgmentsWe thank Michael Lechuga, Emma McDonnell, Mark Pedelty, Kate Rich, and Aubrey Weber who all provided feedback on earlier drafts of this essay.Disclosure StatementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Notes1 Normate is a term developed by Rosemarie Garland-Thompson to mean “the constructed identity of those who, by way of the bodily configurations and cultural capital they assume, can step into a position of authority and wield the power it grants them” (8). Throughout this essay, we draw on this term to reference the link between the social construction of normative ablism and embodied standards of self-expression (Dolmage, “Back Matter” 351–52).2 Deleuze and Guattari admit that “becoming-imperceptible means many things” and, in a close parallel to the animal (fox, octopus) metaphors for cunning intelligence invoked by the term mêtis, reference “the camouflage fish” to describe the act of blending in through an overlay of patterns. They also describe “becoming-imperceptible” as “to be like everybody else,” “to go unnoticed,” and as having a “essential relation” to “movement,” which is often “below and above the threshold of perception” (279–81).3 One colleague and pianist of mine responded with the singular word “VERBOTEN!” when asked if he had ever heard of the piece played by a performer using two hands.
-
Book review | Technology in second language writing: Advances in composing, translation, writing pedagogy and data-driven learning ↗
Abstract
Advanced technology has brought about great changes to language teaching and learning, such as significant shifts and requirements in the field of writing, which is considered as a complex ability to acquire, especially for second language (L2) learners (Hyland, 2021). Writing in this digital era has been shaped by various new technologies, resulting in more attention paid to technology use in L2 writing instruction and research. A new collection of papers titled Technology in second language writing: Advances in composing, translation, writing pedagogy and data-driven learning has been timely published to illustrate how the L2 writing field embraces the integration of technology in teaching and researching students with various cultural backgrounds. This fascinating book was edited by Jingjing Qin and Paul Stapleton who gathered scholars with different pedagogical experiences to provide a comprehensive detour from original research orientations to pedagogical applications.
-
Abstract
This study investigates how instructional design manifests in TPC pedagogies and where educators draw resources from. As TPC expands into areas in which instructional design traditionally governs, scholars need to discern how TPC distinguishes its specialty while providing training to support instructional design practices. Through textbook and syllabus analysis, coupled with instructor interviews, this study reports findings about instructional design pedagogy within TPC based on the themes gathered from the instructors’ experiences and existing resources.
-
Abstract
Research on corrective feedback (CF) has developed from its original focus on identifying which type of CF is most effective for developing L2 language learners’ grammatical accuracy to focusing on how learners use CF. Underpinning this is the assumption that learners know what to do with CF when they receive it. The concept of “feedback literacy” challenges this assumption. Carless and Boud (2018), define feedback literacy as “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies” (p. 1316). Our intention in this paper is to reflect on the manner in which theoretical and empirical work on feedback literacy can contribute to advancing L2 written corrective feedback (WCF) research agendas. Central in our proposal is the partially under-researched aspect of experience in terms of the L2 writers’ educational background experience, particularly experience with L1 and L2 writing. We further argue that how learners were taught L1 writing and how the L1 educational culture/ society values writing can impact on how learners approach L2 writing tasks and accompanying feedback. Implications of this inclusive view of the learner for future research and pedagogy is discussed.
-
Abstract
With the objective of improving writing assessment of language instruction, we examine the lexical and syntactic features in two corpora of high and low scoring French texts of the Test du Certificat de Compétence en Langue Seconde (Second Language Certification Test; TCCLS) at the University of Ottawa (uOttawa). We first situate the test in its local context, demonstrating how our research objectives are born from specific needs to improve student outcomes. We then describe our creation of two corpora of high and low performing test takers, followed by lexical bundle (LB) analyses (Phase 1) and further linguistic complexity analyses with a French-language tool (Phase 2). Results indicate that high level writers used more LBs and borrowed more text from the prompt than low level writers. In addition, specific elements of linguistic complexity were identified, suggesting high level writers produced texts that were lexically richer and more syntactically advanced. We discuss the importance of these findings in improving our writing instruction, as well as the challenges of adapting tools and approaches traditionally associated with English to French.
-
Abstract
Abstract This article details a collaboratively designed and taught honors course, Cultures of the Anthropocene: Climate Change and Survivance. The authors invite readers to consider interinstitutional political learning ecologies a viable and vibrant model of instruction for early-career scholars and experienced teachers seeking professional development and a profound pedagogical challenge.
-
Abstract
When we enter an empty classroom, what do we see? Desks, a board, and, if we're lucky, some collection of functional technology (and if we're luckier, windows). The classroom space operates through standardization, each element of the classroom designed to regulate the transfer of knowledge. When we enter a classroom full of students, what we see might subordinate to another question: what do we feel? Those quiet moments before class begins, as we mentally prepare, are ones dominated by feeling. (In my case, these are often the most uncomfortable moments of my teaching days.) They are moments of affective uncertainty in which a variety of feelings—chief among them, anxiety—enter the classroom along with us, through the many operating screens, and even as we look through doors and windows.1We may find ourselves at odds with the space's arrangement. Often to the criticism of contemporary pedagogical theory, the traditional classroom installs clear hierarchies of power that teachers decide either to work within or, in a now well-established attempt to subvert these hierarchies, to “flip.” Placing students in a circle, grouping them into pods, inviting them to the front of the room—these are all practices that defamiliarize what can become a practiced (and tired) method of knowledge transfer for students and teachers alike and engender a more dynamic and fruitful experience for all. Rather than allowing students to sit back and receive knowledge that they will apply somewhere else, flipping the classroom originated to encourage students to apply concepts immediately and see teaching and learning as reciprocal activities that require their participation on both sides (Brewer, McCook, and Halasek 2018: 484). If classroom structures exist to make learning more predictable, then flipping the classroom is an action that allows us to remain open to surprises.What is affect if not something that arrives to our surprise and, potentially, our transformation? Affect “arises in the midst of in between-ness,” demanding of us that we remain open to its grip and potentially allow it to “drive us toward movement . . . that can likewise suspend us” (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1). Understanding affective meaning is curious in that it requires us to be attuned to the background of experience. While it might seem strange to suggest that the classroom should be remade through the affects that undergird our experience, it is just as strange to turn to models that presuppose that we are never surprised, interrupted, or moved by affect.The humanities classroom, furthermore, is a space particularly well suited to unpack moments of affective rupture because our pedagogical goals—to reshape students’ understanding of the textual, political, and mental worlds through which they move—depend on being moved in unexpected ways. Noticing and reading the affective material of the classroom pushes us down fascinating paths, and it can dramatically and helpfully expand our pedagogical methods. Indeed, deriving meaning from the seeming interruption of affect allows us to reassess the very foundations of what Lynn Worsham (1998) calls “dominant pedagogy,” or the structures of the classroom setting that themselves produce the very notion of a “legitimate point of view” (221). Worsham's definition of legitimacy evinces how dominant pedagogy is inseparable from hegemonic structures of power, and she proposes that we turn to what she suspects “we already know but have learned to forget”: that our pedagogical commitments to social change “must occur at the affective level” (216). To fail to recognize our affective experience in the classroom is to prohibit the project of social change. Recognizing the place of “the tight braid of affect and judgement” places teacher and student in a collaborative project of reimagining social relations (216).In an effort to examine what it looks like to teach through feeling, we seek to better understand how affect shapes our encounters with not only our students but also our objects of inquiry. While there is a large and diverse body of work examining how affect relates to reading practices (Sedgwick 2002; Felski 2008, 2015; Anker and Felski 2017; Best and Marcus 2009; Love 2010) as well as how the act of reading might buttress empathetic feelings (Keen 2007; Hogan 2016), we redirect these differing but linked conversations toward different inquiries. Some essays in this cluster explore how our embodiment in the classroom creates moments of rupture that reshape our textual encounters and methodologies. Embodiment is a capacious concept, and we consider what it means when we and our students cannot find a full reckoning with our own embodiment in critical theory. Other essays explore how nonhuman beings and objects themselves shape our affective experience in the classroom. In both cases, the intersection of affect and embodiment raises questions about how we see and treat one another. Likewise, some contributors examine how the political worlds that surround the classroom shift the affective direction of our teaching by putting undue pressure on students and teachers, a lesson that has only become clearer since the spread of COVID-19. Increasingly, those political worlds enforce censorship and surveillance, influencing what students and teachers can do in classroom spaces that are either entirely virtual or shaped by their potential digital afterlives. As pedagogy continues to shift toward digital models that archive and preserve the classroom far beyond the ephemerality of class discussion, we must begin addressing how those models shape our pedagogic affects. Finally, while scholarship on the affective displacements of critique is well underway, some of the essays here help bridge the divide between critique and postcritique by locating the compatibility of affect and critical reading in our pedagogy. Across these varied approaches and inquiries, essays frequently return to a tension that emerges as a guiding thesis: the seeming disruption of affect is a productive site of learning for faculty and students alike.The concept of affective rupture is central to the work that follows. Even though we do not take rupture as an intrinsically good pedagogical event, we do hold it as one that reveals much about both the conditions in which we teach and learn and the methods of humanistic inquiry on which we most frequently rely. Much has been written about affective rupture by critics in affect studies. Rarely has this work been more compelling and urgent than in Lauren Berlant's (2011) analysis of an untitled John Ashbery poem. Berlant seizes on a moment of rupture to examine how it makes us feel “lost but alive and unvanquished” (25). “Life has been seized . . . by an event that demands fidelity” (25). Anna Ioanes picks up on nonliterary ruptures in the classroom, exploring the importance of other moments of interruption—when a bug floats through the room, a student drops a book, or the weather changes suddenly. Particularly when such moments involve nonhuman things, they offer ways to answer questions about how we treat others, both human and nonhuman, while also bringing into focus the affects circulating in the classroom all the time. In this way, Ioanes reminds us that affect is not merely bound up in interactions between people but also a dynamic part of how we see the nonhuman things that populate the classroom. She argues that we must resituate external forces—a pandemic and political protest, most recently—as sites of learning, action, and civic responsibility.Just as Ioanes insists that we should focus on the affects produced through interruptions, Lauren Silber takes seriously her students’ feelings of discomfort that emerged when discussing affect theory alongside race. Silber examines how the presence of affect theory itself can produce an interruption that shifts our inquiry away from our material and toward institutional structures and even the whiteness of critical theory. Silber explains that, somewhat paradoxically, it is in becoming better interpreters of affect that students were able to critique the limiting structures of education and their discipline, which frequently enjoins them to focus (only) on the text. Just as Silber asserts that the study of affect interrupts models for knowledge production in the humanities, Aaron Colton examines how attention to sincerity helps bridge a similar divide between critique and postcritique. If proponents of postcritical reading hold that a critical hermeneutics obscures superficial or literal readings, others argue that critique might help render “feelings as objective structures (rather) than subjective dispositions” (Rasmussen and Sharma 2017: n.p.). Colton explores how a course examining the New Sincerity movement—a post-1980 amalgam of realist fiction, sentimental film, and indie music emphasizing themes of authenticity, enthusiasm, and vulnerability—primed students to regard texts not only as subjects for suspicious interrogation but also as historical and structural catalysts for affective response. Colton argues that prompting students to identify and interpret the mechanisms by which texts might speak sincerely can help them discern the compatibility of affective and critical reading practices.Silber and Colton explore whether pedagogical models organized around feelings such as empathy and sincerity are suited to break down colonial, heteronormative, neoliberal frameworks in the classroom or whether these feelings might themselves collapse important differences into sameness (Palumbo-Liu 2012; Dischinger 2018). Likewise, Tiffany Diana Ball explores the limits and uses of other structuring feelings—namely, paranoia—when teaching queer theory in China in front of a state-required classroom camera. Ball argues that, strange as it may seem, even paranoia can produce an affective community, however tenuous that practice might feel. Teaching and learning under clear surveillance opened the space for deep investigation into how paranoia feels without placing it into clear opposition with alternative reading practices.The contributors to this cluster represent different segments of an increasingly contingent profession. The teaching of humanities courses has long been shifting toward contingent labor, hybrid teaching, split administrative-faculty positions, and interdisciplinarity—itself an imperative, albeit one that many scholars embrace, to cover ever more terrain. The casualization of labor began long before Marc Bousquet's (2008) landmark book described it through the notion of organizational flexibility or the institution's preference to hire part-time to tenure-track labor. That preference led to a situation in which “the holders of a doctoral degree are not so much the products of the graduate-employee labor system as its byproducts” (21). In the thirteen years since Bousquet wrote those words, conditions have consistently worsened. While the contributors to this essay cluster represent far from every type of labor model in the profession, they come from a variety of institutional settings: an assistant professor teaching interdisciplinary writing and literature courses, a scholar-administrator teaching literature and writing at a liberal arts institution, a lecturer teaching multimodal communication at a research institution, and a postdoctoral scholar teaching queer theory in China. These settings help us illustrate how the position in which we teach shapes our pedagogical practices.Different as these essays are, they work backward from the same question: when we encounter affect in the classroom, will we avoid that encounter or be changed by it? While nearly everyone who has taught has had the experience of what they might call an affective interruption, we sometimes think of these moments as obstacles that must be worked around with quick solutions. When we think of affective rupture as an unwelcome and momentary distraction from the task of teaching and learning, that is, we are ill prepared to think through the felt conditions of pedagogy and labor.Having moved through over a year of teaching fully online during a pandemic, we now realize that the affective obstacles of the digital classroom are legion. Far from these ruptures being limited to moments when technology fails us, we spend much of our time lamenting the unrelenting reliability of the digital classroom. As we begin to realize how exhausting it can be to work in exclusively online spaces, the questions of this essay cluster—how we interact with nonhuman elements, how we come up against institutional and disciplinary structures, how paranoia and suspicion can be worked with or against—are more urgent now than ever. If we teach students to interpret the affective materials of the classroom and remain open to working through them ourselves, we preserve the opportunity to teach with humanity and generosity. In doing so, we gain access to an important path for our students, and we redirect our pedagogy as the foundations of higher education continue to shift.
-
Abstract
Abstract This essay argues that The Palm-Wine Drinkard ([1952] 2014), a tale of a quest through the African bush by the Nigerian writer Amos Tutuola, does important decolonial work and is therefore an excellent candidate for inclusion on a literature syllabus that aims to introduce students to decolonial thinking. After introducing Tutuola's work and considering some of the issues at stake for a decolonial pedagogy, it argues that Drinkard provides an active reading experience that creates powerful opportunities in the classroom to challenge students’ assumptions about how colonialism was experienced by colonized populations, the valences of the human, and uses of the English language. In so doing, the essay highlights potential teachable moments in the text that may be useful to instructors who wish to adopt a decolonial approach in their literature courses.
-
Abstract
Abstract This article examines the impact of video surveillance on teaching. Through a consideration of disciplinary power and paranoid reading debates, the author probes her personal experience at a university in Beijing, China. Surveillance inspires paranoia as well as an opportunity to reflect on the emotional life of academic inquiry in the classroom.
-
Abstract
Abstract The appearance of a spider in the classroom can disrupt the flow of teaching, often prompting strong reactions that unsettle classroom norms. Minor classroom disruptions like this might not seem worth theorizing, but this essay reframes such disruptions as rich sites for understanding the role of affect in humanities pedagogy. Ultimately arguing against killing a spider in the classroom, this essay theorizes the moment of disruption as an opportunity to model humanistic attention to both human and nonhuman actors in the classroom space.
-
Abstract
Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.
-
Abstract
AbstractRecent advocates of postcritique urge scholars not to read texts suspiciously but instead to regard texts as capable of saying what they mean and, accordingly, to take those meanings seriously. While a suspicious disposition underlies much of introductory composition pedagogy, especially the teaching of argument, postcritique has made little entry into discourses of undergraduate instruction. Attending to the New Sincerity movement in American literature, film, and music after 1980, this essay examines how teaching texts that emphasize their own sincerity (and the difficulty of achieving sincere expression) can encourage students to regard argument and interpretation not as suspicious practices but as means for a generous mode of description that does not sacrifice the complexity of a given text.
-
Abstract
The primary purpose of this study is to investigate the degree to which register knowledge, register-specific motivation, and diverse linguistic features are predictive of human judgment of writing quality in three registers—narrative, informative, and opinion. The secondary purpose is to compare the evaluation metrics of register-partitioned automated writing evaluation models in three conditions: (1) register-related factors alone, (2) linguistic features alone, and (3) the combination of these two. A total of 1006 essays ( n = 327, 342, and 337 for informative, narrative, and opinion, respectively) written by 92 fourth- and fifth-graders were examined. A series of hierarchical linear regression analyses controlling for the effects of demographics were conducted to select the most useful features to capture text quality, scored by humans, in the three registers. These features were in turn entered into automated writing evaluation predictive models with tuning of the parameters in a tenfold cross-validation procedure. The average validity coefficients (i.e., quadratic-weighed kappa, Pearson correlation r, standardized mean score difference, score deviation analysis) were computed. The results demonstrate that (1) diverse feature sets are utilized to predict quality in the three registers, and (2) the combination of register-related factors and linguistic features increases the accuracy and validity of all human and automated scoring models, especially for the registers of informative and opinion writing. The findings from this study suggest that students’ register knowledge and register-specific motivation add additional predictive information when evaluating writing quality across registers beyond that afforded by linguistic features of the paper itself, whether using human scoring or automated evaluation. These findings have practical implications for educational practitioners and scholars in that they can help strengthen consideration of register-specific writing skills and cognitive and motivational forces that are essential components of effective writing instruction and assessment.
-
Abstract
Writing studies must conduct replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) research to understand the relationship between creativity and writing, including how writers use creative thinking to generate texts and how environmental factors mediate writers’ engagement with creative thinking. This article traces research on creativity from selected writing studies journals since the 2011 release of The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing. Through a systematic literature review, the findings show how RAD research supports domain-specific knowledge-building about writers’ creativity, which can help teachers, scholars, and practitioners to understand what counts as originality in writing, how writers produce creative texts, and how educational institutions can teach advanced writing skills that develop students’ creative thinking.
September 2023
-
My Favorite Assignment: Selections From the ABC 2022 Annual International Conference, Tampa, Florida, USA: Sharing Teaching Innovations With a Porpoise Pod’s Coordination, Speed, and Grace ↗
Abstract
Business communication teachers navigate a constantly changing pedagogical geography shaped by technology and breakthrough discoveries in linguistics, psychology, and neurobiology. My Favorite Assignment is designed to speed new teaching methods to the classroom. This article gives readers 11 teaching innovations on report writing, intercultural communication, and analysis and critical thinking debuted at the 2022 Association for Business Communication’s (ABC) 87th Annual International Conference in Tampa, Florida, USA. Additional support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the ABC and DePaul University Center for Sales Leadership websites.
-
Abstract
In this article, we discuss the unique challenges of Community-Engaged User Experience (CEUX) by using storytelling and present a framework of emergent patterns (brown, 2017) to make visible labor, practice, and messiness of the process of building, maintaining, and renewing partnerships with community members and partners. We share three models for CEUX engagements: one-to-many, many-to-many, and one-to-plural. Within the models, we detail the structure of each CEUX engagement, what students did, and the affordances and constraints of each model. In addition, we share thoughts or voices from the community partners or collaborators or students engaged in the projects. We conclude by connecting the models to the elements of Emergent Strategy in the section From Patterns to Possibilities where we call on fellow instructors and community partners to embrace abundance-oriented questions.
-
Review of "User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice by Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook," Crane, K., & Cargile Cook, K. (Eds.). (2022). User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2022.1367 ↗
Abstract
In User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice , editors Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook present and curate fresh perspectives for instructional and curriculum design by arguing that technical and professional communication (TPC) programs will benefit if user experience (UX) methodologies are applied in pedagogical settings to gain greater insight into the student user's needs, challenges, and environments, thereby not only making student users the center of the course design process, but also co-creators of instructional materials and strategies. To support the effectiveness of UX methodologies in learning about student needs and assessing program success, Crane and Cargile Cook bring together authors who present case studies where UX methods such as user profiles, journey maps, usability studies, diary entries, affinity diagramming, and so on were applied in various aspects of pedagogic design and re-design.
-
Review: Critical Rural Pedagogy: Connecting College Students with American Literature by Sharon Mitchler ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: Review: Critical Rural Pedagogy: Connecting College Students with American Literature by Sharon Mitchler, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32719-1.gif
-
Feature: “Be careful of what you’re holding with students’ hearts”: Native American Community College Students’ Perceptions of Self-Disclosure in Writing Assignments ↗
Abstract
This critical phenomenological study sought Native American student perspectives on intention and desired faculty response following self-disclosure of personal challenges in college writing assignments and discusses implications for faculty and for implementing trauma-informed writing pedagogy with students who are historically marginalized.
-
Abstract
Students entering first-year composition often discover self-inquiry for the first time, enabling them to examine their identities when opportunities are created to do so. The experiences of two traditional first-year college students are examined to better understand the power that writing instructors and writing courses hold.
-
Assimilation/Appropriation: What Jewish Discourses in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies Tell Us about the Limitations of Inclusion ↗
Abstract
Drawing upon original post-structural phenomenological research, this article explores how Jewish discourses are pathologized and marginalized in rhet/comp spaces in ways that impact theorizing, pedagogy, professional interaction, and disciplinary knowledge production and how the academy’s white Christian hegemony reifies itself through these processes. As the limited assimilative success of Jewish people demonstrates, inclusion is not inherently equitable, nor does it necessarily change the structures of white supremacy. Ultimately, I suggest that cultural rhetorics contributes a more critical conceptualization of “inclusion” for the academy that acknowledges the limitations and dangers of assimilation into whiteness.
-
Abstract
Drawing on disability studies analysis of institutional narratives of disability by composition and rhetoric scholars, this article theorizes “favor access.” Favor access gestures toward inclusion, but is steeped in the capitalist, colonialist logic of academic institutions in service of ultimately extractive, dehumanizing agendas. Instead of favor access, the article points to collective access as articulated by disability justice activists. As opposed to favor access, collective access rejects institutional logics and values community and collaboration rather than academia’s emphasis on individualism and competition. This article considers sites where collective access is happening in composition classrooms and in the field of composition and rhetoric.
-
Abstract
This essay argues for attention in cultural rhetorics scholarship to stories as effective civic pedagogical tools informed by participatory knowledge-making practices. Drawing on a multiyear “mobile cinema democracy project” based on the physical circulation across Africa, Europe, and North America of a successful African democratic story told in the multi-award-winning documentaryAn African Election, I attend to both the documentary and its larger contextual project, “A Political Safari: An African Adventure in Democracy Building.” I demonstrate the ways that the African storytelling traditions of collaboration upon which this project rests offer us cultural rhetoricians key opportunities to reimagine inclusive knowledgemaking practices in using stories as civic pedagogies. My analysis reveals how such knowledge-making practices might orient our work against the grain of hierarchical, exclusionary, colonial practices and toward decolonial approaches that are truly participatory and inclusive.
-
Abstract
Cultural rhetorics—as orientation, methodology, and practice—has made meaningful contributions to writing pedagogy (Brooks-Gillies et al.; Cedillo and Bratta; Baker-Bell; Cedillo et al.; Cobos et al.; Condon and Young; Powell). Despite these contributions, classroom teachers and writing program administrators can struggle to conceptualize assessment beyond bureaucratic practice and their role in assessment beyond standing in loco for the institution. To more fully realize the potential of cultural rhetorics in our classrooms and programs, the field needs assessment models that seek to uncover the counterstories of writing and meaning-making. Our work, at the intersections of queer rhetorics and writing assessment, provides a theoretical framework called Queer Validity Inquiry (QVI) that disrupts stock stories of success—a success that is always available to some at the expense of others. Through four diffractive lenses—failure, affectivity, identity, and materiality—QVI prompts us to determine what questions about student writers and their writing intrigue us, why we care about them, and whose interests are being served by those questions.
-
Abstract
Expanding conceptions of material cultural rhetorics in activism, I explore how amplifying autogestión by artist-activist collectives allows for an approach to allyship that contributes to changing material realities for those involved. Writing about artistic collectives that engage in autogestión amplifies projects calling out corrupt governing practices rooted in systems of oppression, while emphasizing and exercising the power of relying on each other. In this article, I reflect on how amplifying autogestión as cultural rhetoric in venues outside of the field expands the reach of cultural rhetorics and how bringing that work back to the writing classroom encourages interdisciplinary perspectives where students learn about their relationality and responsibility to Puerto Ricans and other colonized peoples within the United States.
-
Abstract
Language is powerful because it gives individuals the privilege to access a wide range of opportunities. We must acknowledge that it is problematic and harmful to uphold certain language policies, which are often standardized, as expectations. In writing centers, where the goal is to guide writers to articulate language onto paper, tutors must be conscientious of their attitudes toward language. This article examines the history, specifically the inclusivity and exclusivity, of Standard Written/American English and how it affects marginalized groups. This article also encourages reflection on terminology that is often associated with anti-racist practices. Lastly, this article aims to offer ways to reflect as it encourages intentional actions from writing tutors to engage in anti-racist strategies as they work to create more linguistically inclusive spaces for writers. Keywords : Standard Written English, Standard English, Dialect, Linguistics, Linguistic Diversity, Inclusivity, Praxis, Pedagogy, Positionality, Accountability, Anti-racism, Reflective Practice
August 2023
-
Abstract
This study presents findings and strategies found to be successful through encouraging reflective thinking about classroom practices related to access, equity, and diversity. We asked, ‘How does classroom practice change when teachers reflect on equitable instruction? Do teachers recognize biased practices in their classroom? How might a teacher’s instruction unknowingly create barriers for students, thus limiting student learning?’ Over the course of one semester, participants worked collaboratively to reflect on equitable classroom practices to affect student voices. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the study was conducted through virtual discussions and online platforms. Here, we share reflections that surfaced during the online discussions.
-
Abstract
This qualitative case study explores the experience of three first-year English language arts educators within a small community of practice designed to provide personal and professional support for beginning teachers. The participants engaged in a 6-week session where weekly meetings focused on participant experiences and English language arts pedagogy during the COVID-19 pandemic.
-
Abstract
This paper describes a fieldwork program and companion tool, The Teaching of Writing Framework, that college-based teacher educators and teachers from the Hudson Valley Writing Project, a site of the National Writing Project, developed over a three-year period. Central to the fieldwork program is an apprenticeship that allows future teachers to assist mentor teachers in a summer enrichment program for adolescent writers. The apprenticeship, coupled with reflective writing and mediated by the framework, allows future teachers to practice, identify, and reflect on writing instruction in which writing functions as a tool for learning and humanization.
-
Abstract
Three U.S. writing project teachers from Louisiana, Missouri, and North Dakota reflect on their experiences with the National Writing Project’s writing marathon and discuss their collaboration to design, implement, and study a virtual writing marathon during the coronavirus pandemic. Interspersed with teachers’ writing from the marathon, the piece explains the features of the design and ends with four primary conclusions: 1) Writing should be at the center of our pedagogy, 2) A writing marathon can and should be adapted for online spaces, 3) Virtual writing marathons have lasting value, and 4) The success of the Virtual Writing Marathon rests on National Writing Project infrastructure and culture.
-
Abstract
I offer a meditation on current challenges faced by literacy educators and researchers and uses those challenges to suggest new directions for the field. Citing the precipitous decline in interest in the humanities and the field of literacy education, I consider the significance of tools such as ChatGPT for the teaching of writing. I explore the significance of out-of-school literacies and the linguistic diversity of today’s students in terms of their implications for literacy instruction. I also remind us of the chilling political climate in which we find ourselves, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ identities. Given these contemporary challenges, I suggest that we in the field of literacy education rethink the nature of writing instruction, restructure our research paradigm to be more inclusive and democratic, and continue to be forceful political advocates for pedagogies, practices, and policies that will ensure a just and equitable literacy education for all.
July 2023
-
Abstract
September 29, 2008. Radiohead front man Thom Yorke sits frustrated at his piano. Live on stage. He is trying to start a song, but something is tripping him up. The song is “Videotape,” and he cannot start playing it. “Temporary loss of information,” he mumbles to an expectant crowd.The song “Videotape” is syncopated, meaning there is a “placement of rhythmic stresses or accents where they wouldn’t normally occur” (Wikipedia 2021). Practically, it means that Yorke is joining a song already in progress: there is a beat before the beat that “starts” the song. Yorke, then, is starting the song not on the down beat but after the down beat—after the song has already started. He needs to hear something before he can play anything. He needs to hear the beat before he can sing. “Give me the fuckin’ hi-hats only,” he asks.Yorke is moved by the drum and a beat not his alone. It is a beat preceding him to which he must become subject. He needs to listen, but it is a particular kind of listening: a passive listening that makes him, as it were, “subject to the instruction of others” (Gross 137).Like Yorke on stage in 2008, I struggled to start and write this review. Not for any fault in the book, which is clear and concise, complex and compelling, but because I wanted to write a review that practiced the art of listening Gross cultivates: Active listening [“auditor-as-judge”], as it is understood by theoreticians and practitioners of persuasion from classical antiquity through today, only takes off at dusk like Hegel’s owl of Minerva, leaving behind obscurities of our daily lives including our susceptibility to advertising, our political apathy, our immersion in commonsense, our lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change. We have much work ahead when it comes to the theoretical and practical nuances of listening in its passive dimensions. (137)This review practices listening to this call in this way. The worry remains that the genre of the book review tends toward what Gross identifies as active listening: the judge, the critic. I should probably be the “active listener-as-judge” (83). Surely, a good reviewer should protect future readers from a “bad teacher” (131). But how should a book review practicing passive listening read? Does it aim for learning? Surely. Credulity? Why not. Subjection? Hmm. . . . It is, after all, subjection that lies at the heart of Gross’s book. Subjection is the beat before the beat that is rhetoric, an art forever syncopated.There are many aspects of Gross’s argument, which I will hear out below, but key for me, and crucial for Gross’s argument, is his emphasis on passive dispositions (e.g., apathy, adherence, suggestibility, attentiveness, etc.) crucial to political formations and so vital to rhetoric. Being moved, toward which rhetoric (sacred rhetoric especially) bends, must admit not only to the prowess and power of the rhetor but also, necessarily, to the “basic vulnerability that lies at the heart of political agency itself” (1). Indeed, “Rhetoric as a life science depends upon those lives affected” (8). Because of this dependence (and dependencies saturate the arts of listening), “rhetoric offers much more detail because it is the traditional domain where subjection is both theorized and practiced” (3).To articulate this offer, Gross works through what he describes as the “orphaned materials of modernity [that] often turn out to be vital strains of a different geology altogether” (12). Gross is here describing his own historiographic methodology. There are other things to hear in and about rhetoric. The core of his argument isn’t simply that listening is a practice important to rhetoric, with listening understood as a kind of critical facility—what Gross calls “active listener-as-judge” (83–84). Listening, for Gross, through his approach to Heidegger, bears upon being and becoming; it is in this way that rhetoric, for Gross, becomes a life science—what he at various places in the book describes as “meta-practice”: “It is in this scholarly context where rhetoric is rediscovered by Heidegger: beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).The theme of passive listening organizes the book’s emphases on sacred rhetoric, inartistic proofs, and the (non)teaching of passive voice that are all teased out through engagements with key thinkers who have come to inform contemporary rhetoric: Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud. Across the chapters, Gross articulates sacred rhetoric, which for him is a lasting source of rhetorical theory and practice: “Rhetoric moves souls” (14). Joining the writing of these thinkers is the teaching of writing itself, from which we also have much to learn about the arts of listening. Both the introduction and the final chapter have pedagogical foci. At the start and finish of his book, Gross aims to confound “in practice the expectation that classrooms benefit unilaterally from scholarship” (19). In rhetoric and composition, it is often assumed that theory trickles down into writing classrooms. Gross explores the dynamic as bilateral and mutual. The teaching of writing at the level of voice exists alongside the readings of Heidegger, Foucault, and Freud: all are practices of listening that do rhetorical theory. Gross has turned the neat trick of engaging teaching beyond the pedagogical imperative. That is, there is no concluding move to a pedagogical practice informed by (rhetorical) theory. For Gross, a theory of listening is what composition pedagogy practices.Chapter 1 starts with a provocative bang: “A debilitating commonplace has the history and theory of rhetoric honoring a communicative agent, namely the speaker, at the expense of the listener” (18). The argument here, which echoes throughout the book, is that “we reinvigorate the history and theory of rhetoric insofar as we normalize Heidegger’s care for listening” (31). “Listening,” Gross writes, “is a phenomenon shared across regions of being; hence, it must be approached carefully as such” (32). This is so because being-moved, linked to passive listening, echoes (perhaps sinisterly) notions of “obedience” and “subjection”—concepts that have contemporary purchase in our scene of emerging demagoguery. Being moved by the passions and beyond the critical faculties of active listening is a hard thing to face up to. Pathos has always been a thorn in rhetoric’s side—now more than ever. Composition textbooks, (un)ironically built around Aristotelian rhetoric, foreground pathos largely in terms of logical fallacies. A trick of the trade used by (active) speakers to move (passive) audiences. Pathos is, by and large, a bug in the rhetorical tradition demanding a sturdy, critical (logical) firewall.Gross has us hear pathos otherwise and across being moved and moving. With Heidegger, Gross emphasizes rhetoric as “δύναμις (dunamus, ‘capacity’) primarily and then secondarily a τέκνη (technē, ‘art’ or ‘technology’)” (34). δύναμις suggests a more fulsome engagement with pathos. “The pathos of a stone,” Gross argues, “allows it to become part of a wall; the pathos of a plant to grow; the pathos of an animal to perceive imminent danger and to shriek a warning to others” (44). Pathos becomes less an appeal and more a mode of being—a “being-with-one-another” (34). This mode is no less ethically fraught, however. Indeed, one could hear in Gross that stakes of pathetic appeals are far greater than our textbook approach often intones: less the proper shape of our arguments than the ethical, moral, and political consequences of how we live our lives within the fraught dynamics of our abilities to wound and be wounded. In the hands of Heidegger, rhetoric’s ontological stakes are renewed. Aristotle’s pathos becomes Heidegger’s being-moved (Sein-in-Bewegung).It is important to not drown out the disciplinary argument that Gross is making here. That is, Gross is not simply rehearsing Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle but rehearing it as also an argument about what contemporary rhetorical theory and practice ought to tune into. In our focus on the ethics of the speaker and judgments of the audience (as active listeners), we “can lose our ability to grasp adequately a wide range of unavoidable rhetorical activities, including things like passive listening, obeying, following, feeling, and so on” (50). Gross sees much of rhetorical theory moving to “systematically detach rhetorical terms like these for the sake of a political ideal” (50–51): the virtues of deliberative democracy. Gross’s interest lies in grasping “rhetoric as it forms particular ways of life” (51). Such a “trick” “compels us to ask” a series of important, situated questions: “Obedience to what end, to whom, for instance; listen to what and to whom; feel what and for whom?” (51). In our desire for straightforward ethical articulations of speaking and listening, we would be remiss to throw such particular ways of life out with the bathwater. “Listening-as-obedience” (50) certainly sounds as sinister now as it did in say 1927, but there is much to our being-moved beyond the false choice between “impossible enlightenment or demagoguery” (11). Rhetoric, Gross is arguing, ought to more thoroughly explore (rather than, say, guard) this liminal space. For Gross, this liminal is the realm of rhetoric: the arts of persuasion necessarily span the agent and patient, the “potent rhetor” and the “susceptible audience”—incorporating both as objects of study, rhetoric necessarily complicates them.As chapter 1 works through an engagement with early Heidegger (and fully cognizant of his “disastrous political philosophy”), chapter 2 works to retune rhetoric’s disciplinary relationship with Foucault. The chapter is notable for several crucial insights not least of which is Gross’s disentangling of movere from Foucault’s emphasis on organizing. This chapter is finely calibrated to parse distinctions between rhetorical approaches and the work of Foucault, who remains a central figure in/for rhetorical studies. Gross persuasively argues that as helpful as Foucault has been, he tunes rhetoric in to a particular historiographic register. Not surprisingly, then, disciplinarity continues to be at stake in this chapter.The core of Gross’s argument in chapter 2 “is that movere fits poorly into the biopolitical framework built by Foucault” (62). The sacred again emerges here for Gross: moving souls, which he sees as prototypical rhetorical activity irreducible to the arrangement or organization of bodies. Gross argues that Foucault’s emphasis upon the order of things “overwhelmed a rhetorical perspective that can track the arts of moving souls: most consequentially pedagogy, politics and psychology” (57). In place of such persuasion, we find biopower, to which something like subjection, as an exemplar of passive listening, cannot be reduced. “The art of listening is difficult to grasp,” Gross argues, “because its practicalities are now less obvious than speaking, and because we have lost touch with our relevant ways of knowing” (57). Distancing ourselves a bit from Foucault allows us to come to grips with (passive) listening as more than “the road to passive indoctrination” (83)—that being taught, commanded, or “subject to the instruction of others” is vital to movere and to being-moved. “Nor is the reverse adequate,” he continues; “the active listener-as-judge tells only part of the story, which means that many of our more recent efforts to recuperate the agency of the auditor [Gross draws primarily from Krista Radcliffe] miss the point” (83–84). For Gross, there is more to listening than an investment in agency, often in terms of critical or ethical listening, can account for.This neither/nor brings Gross back to the sacred: God’s invocation—and this is the correct word insofar as it does something—materializes that domain between a speaking agent’s absolute control and a patient serving simply as a vessel for God’s Word. (88)It is this invocation that makes possible the work of the auditor. What’s needed, then, are “communicative modalities for this middle domain where we still spend most of our time” (88)—time spent neither at the pulpit nor in the pew, but moving through the world active and yet vulnerable. Such modalities, Gross argues, are latent within rhetorical theory and practice, and, in fact, exist as dispositions in a range of disciplines. “What if,” he asks, “psychology, pedagogy, and politics are first considered meta-practical arts, like rhetoric, instead of the soft natural sciences that exercise biopower?” (65). Not arts that are “described, identified, taxonomized, administered” (65), but arts that tune us into the “dynamics of passive susceptibility: how we listen, learn, and change” (68)—a rhetorical tradition wherein we are “beings in the how of their being-moved” (91).Having opened up rhetoric to what Foucault’s biopower potentially closed off, Gross turns to rhetoric beyond the art of the rhetor. And so chapter 3 listens to the Freudian slips that sound out if not always the sacred or the supernatural then surely through those things beyond the art or the technē of the rhetor: the veranstaltungen (95): “persuasive adjuncts, contrivances, or events that cannot be reduced to mere thought however expressed” (105).In working through Freud, Gross pursues a rhetoric that is reducible to neither argument nor artistic proofs (atechnoi pisteis and entechnoi pisteis). As with earlier chapters, Gross’s move here bears upon, in large part, disciplinarity: how is rhetorical theory arranged—around what is it collected? Doing rhetorical theory is itself a practice, which is constituted by the choice of terms and of domains. What currently goes unheard? And not simply unheard but unaddressed? Rhetoric, if it could listen, would have much more to say. For instance, “We have trouble grasping sacred rhetoric because our dominant ways of knowing in the academy make it difficult to pick out sacred things in the first place” (103). The sacred, being beyond invention, is often absent from analyses because rhetorical analyses focus on the human: either the choices made by the rhetor or the cultural and political structures (in a Foucauldian register) that shape such choices. Such emphases leave no room for something (precisely) like the inartistic proofs—rendered by Quintilian as “supernatural, based on oracles, prophecies and omens” (108). Such proofs become available means of persuasion through the passive listening of a would-be rhetor: to be rendered subject to that which is beyond the rhetor. This is not the same as saying that such proofs are beyond rhetoric. “My point here is contrary,” Gross writes: “when facts speak for themselves they speak rhetorically” (107). Gross takes up the questions of facts to again engage the inartistic proofs: that which exceeds invention. He continues: “Typically, we do not learn about the rhetorical force of what is given” (107), in part because, disciplinarily, the given isn’t traceable to a speaking, inventing subject, which still often remains our base unit of both theory and practice.As an example, Gross describes the pedagogical treatment of religious texts in communication and composition courses. “In making a classroom argument about euthanasia,” Gross writes, “a sacred text like the Bible can appear to document community norms and their history; it can’t appear as ultimate authority” (109). Beyond the secular drive to excise religious texts, such sacred, inartistic proofs are excluded so that students might invent their own, artistic proofs. Gross writes, “Supernatural evidence carries a rhetorical force that resides beyond the rhetorician’s hand”—“to hear it takes some effort” (110). Gross links inartistic proofs to the domain of the sacred: the gods and everything else that might be in the room while two people are conversing. What the rhetorician—what rhetorical theory and practice—provides is the capacity to study “the precise historical relation that gives this point of intersection force” (118) among the people, words, and things—sacred and mundane—that populate rhetorical activity. “Let’s just say,” Gross writes, “there is no such thing as a persuasive word” without what’s “known to the classical rhetorician as inartistic means of persuasion” (117), which Gross treats broadly as “a certain disposition of time and place” (118) and the ambiguities of things such as “statues/relics, birds/auspices, walks/pilgrimages, pills/cures, words and spectacles human or divine” (119). The job of the rhetorician, then, is to make sense of how the “miracle” of persuasion gets done, “contrivances and all” (120).Chapter 4 (re)turns toward the composition classroom to give passive voice (back) to rhetoricity. Gross unpacks how passive voice is pedagogically and what this does for the art of listening and what it about the rhetorical theory and practice we to rhetorical and political are of passive voice that or (e.g., and “the something in Gross’s argument about passive voice and how it to the arts of listening and rhetoric. The sacred here as the core of our being is a to but that voice is not our It is not our for nor is it our for the of we speak what emerges is not reducible to either what we to say or what will to instance, Gross explores the between the and Gross asks, a more and of and a is that in rhetoric’s to foreground that active rhetorical agent, we the Such a focus would foreground we namely the we as the other who is The voice at the core of us that isn’t The The up an of to and people speaking for only active critical listening as a And such in fact, There is no Gross the book by all the that passive listening The of Gross’s book from the that this that with susceptibility to and political turns toward lovely credulity, our vulnerability to others, our very capacity to learn and change” Such in the passive voice that gives voice to passive that is the very mode of our Yorke gets to the hi-hats does the It allows Yorke to the song, which is also to start the song. The beat already moving itself but the which isn’t the Yorke becomes of playing through an of subjection and of He is being But is now the time to call for passive no to demanding and As I Gross’s book, a forms the that and on the A in The to the very The of are being from the they in by those who from their in the of and And the from only part of the But what I here are not simply things to which we might but those facts of the already moving us to to of and for a more just and feel such a to be so moved, not only a clear and voice but an and a heart being rendered to what the world might be teaching it to sing.
-
On the perceived usefulness and effectiveness of Eduflow as a supplementary tool for online writing instruction ↗
Abstract
This paper centres around the use of Eduflow, a novel online learning management system (LMS) which was introduced in a university-level Academic Writing course in response to the challenges brought about by the mandatory switch from face-to-face to online writing instruction (OWI) over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, Eduflow is piloted with a group of second-year university students of English language and literature at Ss. Cyril and Methodius University in Skopje. These students chose to fulfil their Academic Writing course requirements by compiling a writing portfolio. The rationale behind the use of this platform was the assumption that it would facilitate the online management of all the stages of the essay writing process: Writing a first draft, doing a peer review of essays created by fellow students, considering the comments received from fellow students, reflecting on one’s own writing by doing a self-review, and finally, submitting the final version. The relentlessness of the pandemic led to the continuous application of this learning management system over the course of two entire academic years, each year with a different group of students. An online survey on the perceived usefulness and effectiveness of Eduflow was administered among the second generation of students who used this platform. As this small-scale analysis demonstrates, despite experiencing some easily resolvable minor technical difficulties, these students generally found Eduflow effective and useful as a supplementary tool for online writing instruction and showed particular appreciation for the collaborative peer review experience.
-
Abstract
In this paper, we present a science writing assignment in which students focus on targeting specific audiences when writing about a socioscientific issue as well as participate in a peer review process. This assignment helps students consider inclusive science communication in their writing, focusing on engaging unique audiences about the intersections of science and social justice. Students are introduced to evidence-based tools for formulating communication for unique audiences as well as for assessment of writing quality. This assignment is novel in that it helps students think about inclusion issues in STEM, science writing, and peer review, all of which are key disciplinary skills that are not always included in STEM courses. While this assignment was piloted in chemistry and environmental engineering courses, this assignment could easily be modified for other disciplines.
-
More than Memorizing Rules: Using Wikipedia to Emphasize Rhetorical Approaches to Grammar Instruction and Collaborative Editing Practices ↗
Abstract
This article details a collaborative editing assignment that asks students to analyze and assess editorial contributions made to Wikipedia. This project not only provides students an opportunity to apply their understanding of grammar and style concepts to real-world editing situations, it also calls students' attention to the underlying ideological biases and rhetorical impact of subtle language choices used in specific Wikipedia articles. In explaining the rationale behind this assignment and discussing several student samples, this article demonstrates how designing writing assignments around the collaborative, multi-authored nature of Wikipedia can highlight the influence of cultural circumstances on both sentence-level stylistic choices and broader developmental editorial practices.
-
Abstract
Teaching linguistic aspects relevant to text construction is an essential component of any thorough writing instruction program, despite the conflicting evidence regarding its effectiveness. In this study, 889 second- and fourth-grade students were assigned to one of three conditions: Self-Regulated Development (SRSD), SRSD-connectors (SRSD-C), and business-as-usual (BAU). The experimental conditions addressed planning and self-regulation strategies to write opinion essays, but only the SRSD condition included explicit teaching of connectors (e.g., because) and discourse markers (e.g., In conclusion). Children in both experimental conditions outscored children in the BAU condition across grades and outcome variables. In addition, the SRSD condition showed larger effect sizes on Grade 2 children’s gains in text quality, number of genre-appropriate elements, and number of connectors than the SRSD-C condition. The study provides evidence of the effectiveness of explicitly teaching functionally motivated linguistic representations within a SRSD program. Theoretical and educational implications are discussed.
-
What Does Linguistic Distance Predict When It Comes to L2 Writing of Adult Immigrant Learners of Spanish? ↗
Abstract
This study examined whether the linguistic distance between the first (L1) and second (L2) language is a significant determinant of L2 writing skills of 292 adult immigrants from 39 different source countries, who were beginner learners of Spanish L2. Gender, age, length of residence in Spain, education level as a proxy for literacy skills in L1, enrolment in Spanish language courses, and overall communicative competence in Spanish were also considered. Using both standard procedures for assessing L2 writing and performance-based psycholinguistic measures of accuracy and text-production fluency, the findings highlight the important role of linguistic proximity in achieving greater accuracy, text-production fluency, and overall L2 writing scores. Other significant predictors were age, enrolment in Spanish courses, and education level for accuracy; and length of residence in Spain and education level for text-production fluency. Although length of residence in Spain was negatively associated with text-production fluency in L2 writing, mediation analyses revealed that the effect of age on text-production fluency was mediated by length of residence in Spain and that L2 proficiency level mediated the link between linguistic distance and text-production fluency. Furthermore, most of the errors that these immigrants made were morphosyntactic and spelling errors, while vocabulary errors were rare.
-
And Gladly Teach: Cultivating Learning Community in an Asynchronous Online Advanced Writing Course for Multilingual International Students ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: And Gladly Teach: Cultivating Learning Community in an Asynchronous Online Advanced Writing Course for Multilingual International Students, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/85/6/collegeenglish32619-1.gif
-
Abstract
This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod, by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience, the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately, addressing the limits of reason and metacognition, the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.
-
Abstract
This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading, writing, and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric, at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.
-
Abstract
This dialogue between a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and administrator proposes listening-oriented curricula to cultivate actionable empathy in FYC: an attempt at understanding and acceptance when engaging across difference that results in naming how power shapes engagement. Actionable empathy can help students become introspective, flexible communicators and help instructors develop pedagogical agency.