Susan Kates
7 articles-
Abstract
This essay examines the history of a massive literacy campaign called the Citizenship School Program that began as a response to the racist literacy tests that disenfranchised countless African American voters throughout the Southern United States between 1945 and 1965. The Citizenship Schools prepared thousands of African Americans to pass the literacy test by using materials that critiqued white supremacism and emphasized the twentieth-century struggle for civil rights.
-
Abstract
For the Sake of Argument: Practical Reasoning, Character, and the Ethics of Belief by Eugene Garver. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 272 + xi pp. Being Made Strange: Rhetoric Beyond Representation by Bradford Vivian. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. 229 + xiv pp. Deliberate Conflict: Argument, Political Theory, and Composition Classes by Patricia Roberts‐Miller. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 263 + x pp. Liberating Voices: Writing at the Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers by Karyn L. Hollis. Southern Illinois University Press, 2004. 192 + xiii pp.
-
Abstract
In this study of the history of rhetoric education, Susan Kates focuses on the writing and speaking instruction developed at three academic institutions founded to serve three groups of students most often excluded from traditional institutions of higher education in late-nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century America: white middle-class women, African Americans, and members of the working class. Kates provides a detailed look at the work of those students and teachers ostracized from rhetorical study at traditional colleges and universities. She explores the pedagogies of educators Mary Augusta Jordan of Smith College in Northhampton, Massachusetts; Hallie Quinn Brown of Wilberforce University in Wilberforce, Ohio; and Josephine Colby, Helen Norton, and Louise Budenz of Brookwood Labor College in Katonah, New York. These teachers sought to enact forms of writing and speaking instruction incorporating social and political concerns in the very essence of their pedagogies. They designed rhetoric courses characterized by three important pedagogical features: a profound respect for and awareness of the relationship between language and identity and a desire to integrate this awareness into the curriculum; politicized writing and speaking assignments designed to help students interrogate their marginalized standing within the larger culture in terms of their gender, race, or social class; and an emphasis on service and social responsibility.
-
Subversive Feminism: The Politics of Correctness in Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking (1904) ↗
Abstract
n the introduction to The Origins of Composition Studies in the American College, 1875-1925, John Brereton remarks that few signs exist of explicitly feminist rhetoric texts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, despite the presence of many women composition teachers in America at this time. While Brereton acknowledges the contributions of women professors who authored innovative textbooks (the first reader to use student papers, by Francis Campbell Berkeley, for example, as well as one of the first handbooks, by Luella Clay Carson), he argues that feminist rhetoric texts are conspicuously absent from the history of rhetoric and composition. Brereton asks to what extent publishing houses may have restricted explicitly feminist modes of writing and speaking instruction. He suggests that feminist rhetoric texts and pedagogies by women during this period perhaps operated in a more subversive fashion, reflecting the conservative climate of the time, and he suggests that women's rhetoric texts (as well as their pedagogical artifacts) ought to be read in terms of the climate of the historical moment (20-21). With Brereton's remarks in mind, I wish to discuss Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking, a rhetoric text authored for women who studied writing and speaking outside of the formal academy. Jordan (1855-1941) is a rhetorician to be added to the list of other remarkable women professors who wrote textbooks for new audiences at this time. Her work makes a con-
-
Subversive Feminism: The Politics of Correctness in Mary Augusta Jordan’s Correct Writing and Speaking (1904) ↗
Abstract
Preview this article: Subversive Feminism: The Politics of Correctness in Mary Augusta Jordan's Correct Writing and Speaking (1904), Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ccc/48/4/collegecompositionandcommunication3164-1.gif
-
Abstract
Examines the pedagogy of African-American elocutionist Hallie Quinn Brown (1845–1949), professor of elocution at Wilberforce University from 1893 to 1923, as it addresses pedagogical issues still important today, such as how rhetorical instruction should address the needs of those who have a different linguistic heritage and culture.