A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY
Copublished with CSU Open Press
This edited collection builds on the three themes that emerged from the 2018 inaugural lifespan writing conference—identity, society, and theory—to further the study of writing through the lifespan. The contributors to this collection provide a framework within which the reader can develop a dynamic, interdisciplinary, multifaceted understanding of the limits and possibilities of studying lifespan writing. Recognizing that such research requires methodological rigor and flexibility as well as theoretical precision and adaptability, Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research draws on a range of methodological and theoretical approaches, from autoethnography to longitudinal structural equation modeling. This methodological and theoretical flexibility reflects the challenges inherent in studying lifespan writing—in particular, the need to develop an integrated framework that enables the “translation” of research findings for use by other lifespan writing researchers. Approaches to Lifespan Writing Research begins that process.
This book is also available as an open access ebook through the WAC Clearinghouse
The editors’ introduction presents a condensed history of academic writing, chronicles the origins of autobiographical criticism, and emphasizes the role of feminism in championing the value of personal narrative to disciplinary discourse. The essays are all explicitly informed by the identities of their authors, among whom are a feminist scientist, a Jewish filmmaker living in Germany, a potential carrier of Huntington’s disease, and a doctor pregnant while in medical school. Whether describing how being a professor of ethnic literature necessarily entails being an activist, how music and cooking are related, or how a theology is shaped by cultural identity, the contributors illuminate the relationship between their scholarly pursuits and personal lives and, in the process, expand the boundaries of their disciplines.
Contributors:
Kwame Anthony Appiah
Ruth Behar
Merrill Black
David Bleich
James Cone
Brenda Daly
Laura B. DeLind
Carlos L. Dews
Michael Dorris
Diane P. Freedman
Olivia Frey
Peter Hamlin
Laura Duhan Kaplan
Perri Klass
Muriel Lederman
Deborah Lefkowitz
Eunice Lipton
Robert D. Marcus
Donald Murray
Seymour Papert
Carla T. Peterson
David Richman
Sara Ruddick
Julie Tharp
Bonnie TuSmith
Alex Wexler
Naomi Weisstein
Patricia Williams
---Foreword by Dana R. Ferris, author of Treatment of Error and Teaching College Writing to Diverse Student Populations
This book attempts to engage directly with the complexities and tensions in genre from both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives. While struggling with questions of why, when, and how different writers can manipulate conventions, Tardy became interested in related research into voice and identity in academic writing and then began to consider the ways that genre can be a valuable tool that allows writing students and teachers to explore expected conventions and transformative innovations. For Tardy, genres aren’t “fixed,” and she argues also that neither genre constraints nor innovations are objective—that they can be accepted or rejected depending on the context.
Beyond Convention considers a range of learning and teaching settings, including first-year undergraduate writing, undergraduate writing in the disciplines, and the advanced academic writing of graduate students and professionals. It is intended for those interested in the complexities of written communication, whether their interests are grounded in genre theory, academic discourse, discourse analysis, or writing instruction. With its attentiveness to context, discipline, and community, it offers a resource for those interested in English for Academic Purposes, English for Specific Purposes, and Writing in the Disciplines. At its heart, this is a book for teachers and teacher educators.
After an introductory section reviewing the theory literature, chapters present research on implementing multimodal composition in diverse contexts. Contributors address starter subjects like using comics, blogs, or multimodal journals; more ambitious topics such as multimodal assignments in online instruction or digital story telling; and complex issues like assessment, transfer, and rhetorical awareness.
Bridging the Multimodal Gap translates theory into practice and will encourage teachers, including WPAs, TAs, and contingent faculty, to experiment with multiple modes of communication in their projects.
Contributors: Sara P. Alvarez, Steven Alvarez, Michael Baumann, Joel Bloch, Aaron Block, Jessie C. Borgman, Andrew Bourelle, Tiffany Bourelle, Kara Mae Brown, Jennifer J. Buckner, Angela Clark-Oates, Michelle Day, Susan DeRosa, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Stephen Ferruci, Layne M. P. Gordon, Bruce Horner, Matthew Irwin, Elizabeth Kleinfeld, Ashanka Kumari, Laura Sceniak Matravers, Jessica S. B. Newman, Mark Pedretti, Adam Perzynski, Breanne Potter, Caitlin E. Ray, Areti Sakellaris, Khirsten L. Scott, Rebecca Thorndike-Breeze, Jon Udelson, Shane A. Wood, Rick Wysocki, Kathleen Blake Yancey
In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges.
Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops themes that Harris first brought to the field, and contributors here offer explicit recognition of the role that Harris has played in the development of writing center theory and practice. But they also use her work as a springboard from which to provide reflective, descriptive, and predictive looks at the field.
The authors draw on the threshold concepts framework, research in writing studies, and theories of learning, leadership, and change to deftly explore why faculty are often stymied in their efforts to design meaningful curricula for deep learning and how carefully scaffolded professional development for faculty teams can help make such change possible. This book is a powerful demonstration of how faculty members can be empowered when professional development leaders draw on a range of scholarship that is not typically connected.
In today’s climate, courses, programs, and institutions are often assessed by and rewarded for proxy metrics that have little to do with learning, with grave consequences for students. The stakes have never been higher, particularly for public higher education. Faculty members need opportunities to work together using their own expertise and to enact meaningful learning opportunities for students. Professional developers have an important role to play in such change efforts.
WAC scholars and practitioners, leaders of professional development and centers for teaching excellence, program administrators and curriculum committees from all disciplines, and faculty innovators from many fields will find not only hope but also a blueprint for action in Changing Conceptions, Changing Practices.
Contributors: Juan Carlos Albarrán, José Amador, Annie Dell'Aria, Kate de Medeiros, Keith Fennen, Jordan A. Fenton, Carrie E. Hall, Elena Jackson Albarrán, Erik N. Jensen, Vrinda Kalia, Janice Kinghorn, Jennifer Kinney, Sheri Leafgren, Elaine Maimon, Elaine Miller, Gaile Pohlhaus Jr., Jennifer J. Quinn, Barbara J. Rose, Scott Sander, Brian D. Schultz, Ling Shao, L. James Smart, Pepper Stetler
Editors Rachel McCabe and Jennifer Juszkiewicz consider how educators can respond to multiple current crises relating to composition and rhetoric with generosity and cautious optimism; in the process, they address the current concerns about the longevity of the humanities. By engaging with social constructivist, critical race, socioeconomic, and activist pedagogies, each chapter provides an answer to the question, How can our courses help students become stronger writers while contending with current social, environmental, and ethical questions posed by the world around them? The contributors consider this question from numerous perspectives, recognizing the important ways that power and privilege affect our varying means of addressing this question.
Relying on both theory and practice, Composition and Rhetoric in Contentious Times engages the future of composition and rhetoric as a discipline shaped by recent and current global events. This text appeals to early-career writing program administrators, writing center directors, and professional specialists, as well as Advanced Placement high school instructors, graduate students, and faculty teaching graduate-level pedagogy courses.
Soliday provides an overview of the contemporary theory and research in Writing across the Curriculum programs, focusing specifically on the implementation of the Writing Fellows Program at the City College of New York. Drawing on her direct observations of colleagues and students at the school, she addresses the everyday challenges that novice writers face, such as developing an appropriate "stance" in one's writing, and the intricacies of choosing and developing content.
The volume then goes on to address some of the most pressing questions being asked by teachers of composition: To what extent can writing be separated from its situation? How can rhetorical expertise be shared across fields? And to what degree is writing ability local rather than general? Soliday argues that, while writing is closely connected to situation, general rhetorical principles can still be capably applied if those situations are known. The key to improving writing instruction, she maintains, is to construct contexts that expose writers to the social actions that genres perform for readers.
Supplementing the author's case study are six appendixes, complete with concrete examples and helpful teaching tools to establish effective classroom practices and exercises in Writing across the Curriculum programs. Packed with useful information and insight, Everyday Genres is an essential volume for both students and teachers seeking to expand their understanding of the nature of writing.
In a landmark collaboration, five co-authors develop a theme of ordinary disruptions ("the everyday") as a source of provocative learning moments that can liberate both student writers and writing center staff. At the same time, the authors parlay Etienne Wenger’s concept of "community of practice" into an ethos of a dynamic, learner-centered pedagogy that is especially well-suited to the peculiar teaching situation of the writing center. They push themselves and their field toward deeper, more significant research, more self-conscious teaching.
Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in ways that both support and empower the student writer.
While authors here look at courses across disciplines and across a range of genres, they are similar in presenting genre as situated within specific classrooms, disciplines, and institutions. Their assignments embody the pedagogy of a particular teacher, and student responses here embody students' prior experiences with writing. In each chapter, the authors define a particular genre, define the learning goals implicit in assigning that genre, explain how they help their students work through the assignment, and, finally, discuss how they evaluate the writing their students do in response to their teaching.
The Idea of a Writing Laboratory is a book about possibilities, about teaching and learning to write in ways that can transform both teachers and students.
Author Neal Lerner explores higher education’s rich history of writing instruction in classrooms, writing centers and science laboratories. By tracing the roots of writing and science educators’ recognition that the method of the lab––hands-on student activity—is essential to learning, Lerner offers the hope that the idea of a writing laboratory will be fully realized more than a century after both fields began the experiment.
Beginning in the late nineteenth century, writing instructors and science teachers recognized that mass instruction was inadequate for a burgeoning, “non-traditional” student population, and that experimental or laboratory methods could prove to be more effective. Lerner traces the history of writing instruction via laboratory methods and examines its successes and failures through case studies of individual programs and larger reform initatives. Contrasting the University of Minnesota General College Writing Laboratory with the Dartmouth College Writing Clinic, for example, Lerner offers a cautionary tale of the fine line between experimenting with teaching students to write and “curing” the students of the disease of bad writing.
The history of writing within science education also wends its way through Lerner’s engaging work, presenting the pedagogical origins of laboratory methods to offer educators in science in addition to those in writing studies possibilities for long-sought after reform. The Idea of a Writing Laboratory compels readers and writers to “don those white coats and safety glasses and discover what works” and asserts that “teaching writing as an experiment in what is possible, as a way of offering meaning-making opportunities for students no matter the subject matter, is an endeavor worth the struggle.”
Drawing on diverse sources of data, Jacobs offers a new theory of liberal arts disciplines such as biology, economics, and history that identifies the organizational sources of their dynamism and breadth. Illustrating his thesis with a wide range of case studies including the diffusion of ideas between fields, the creation of interdisciplinary scholarly journals, and the rise of new fields that spin off from existing ones, Jacobs turns many of the criticisms of disciplines on their heads to mount a powerful defense of the enduring value of liberal arts disciplines. This will become one of the anchors of the case against interdisciplinarity for years to come.
Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)
Moving student writing beyond academic discourse and into larger public spheres is a difficult task, but Christian R. Weisser’s study challenges composition instructors to do just that. This highly accessible book does what no other study has attempted to do: place the most current, cutting-edge theories and pedagogies in rhetoric and composition in their intellectual and historical contexts, while at the same time offering a unique, practical theory and pedagogy of public writing for use both inside and outside of the classroom.
By positing a theory of the public for composition studies, one which envisions the public sphere as a highly contested, historically textured, multilayered, and sometimes contradictory site, Weisser offers a new approach to the roles that compositionists might assume in their attempts to initiate progressive political and social change.
After first providing a historical context that situates composition’s recent interest in public writing, Weisser next examines recent theories in composition studies that consider writing an act of social engagement before outlining a more complex theory of the public based on the work of Jürgen Habermas. The resulting re-envisioning of the public sphere expands current conversations in rhetoric and composition concerning the public.
Weisser concludes with a holistic vision that places greater political and social import on addressing public issues and conversations in the composition classroom and that elucidates the role of the public intellectual as it relates specifically to compositionists in postmodern society.
New Natures broadens the dialogue between the disciplines of science and technology studies (STS) and environmental history in hopes of deepening and even transforming understandings of human-nature interactions. The volume presents richly developed historical studies that explicitly engage with key STS theories, offering models for how these theories can help crystallize central lessons from empirical histories, facilitate comparative analysis, and provide a language for complicated historical phenomena. Overall, the collection exemplifies the fruitfulness of cross-disciplinary thinking.
The chapters follow three central themes: ways of knowing, or how knowledge is produced and how this mediates our understanding of the environment; constructions of environmental expertise, showing how expertise is evaluated according to categories, categorization, hierarchies, and the power afforded to expertise; and lastly, an analysis of networks, mobilities, and boundaries, demonstrating how knowledge is both diffused and constrained and what this means for humans and the environment.
Contributors explore these themes by discussing a wide array of topics, including farming, forestry, indigenous land management, ecological science, pollution, trade, energy, and outer space, among others. The epilogue, by the eminent environmental historian Sverker Sörlin, views the deep entanglements of humans and nature in contemporary urbanity and argues we should preserve this relationship in the future. Additionally, the volume looks to extend the valuable conversation between STS and environmental history to wider communities that include policy makers and other stakeholders, as many of the issues raised can inform future courses of action.
For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars.
The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, meaning, even truth; that it is not congruent with research; that it ignores 100 years of scholarship establishing composition's intellectual territory beyond "service."
The discussion is stuck there, and all sides have been giving it a rest in recent scholarship. Yet style remains of vital practical interest to the field, because everyone has to teach it one way or another.
A consequence of the impasse is that a theory of style itself has not been well articulated. Johnson and Pace suggest that moving the field toward a better consensus will require establishing style as a clearer subject of inquiry.
Accordingly, this collection takes up a comprehensive study of the subject. Part I explores the recent history of composition studies, the ways it has figured and all but effaced the whole question of prose style. Part II takes to heart Elbow's suggestion that composition and literature, particularly as conceptualized in the context of creative writing courses, have something to learn from each other. Part III sketches practical classroom procedures for heightening students' abilities to engage style, and part IV explores new theoretical frameworks for defining this vital and much neglected territory.
The hope of the essays here—focusing as they do on historical, aesthetic, practical, and theoretical issues—is to awaken composition studies to the possibilities of style, and, in turn, to rejuvenate a great many classrooms.
Laura Wilder fills a gap in the scholarship on writing in the disciplines and writing across the curriculum with this thorough study of the intersections between scholarly literary criticism and undergraduate writing in introductory literature courses. Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies is the first examination of rhetorical practice in the research and teaching of literary study and a detailed assessment of the ethics and efficacy of explicit instruction in the rhetorical strategies and genre conventions of the discipline.
Using rhetorical analysis, ethnographic observation, and individual interviews, Wilder demonstrates how rhetorical conventions play a central, although largely tacit, role in the teaching of literature and the evaluation of student writing. Wilder follows a group of literature majors and details their experiences. Some students received experimental, explicit instruction in the special topoi, while others received more traditional, implicit instruction.
Arguing explicit instruction in disciplinary conventions has the potential to help underprepared students, Wilder explores how this kind of instruction may be incorporated into literature courses without being overly reductive. Taking into consideration student perspectives, Wilder makes a bold case for expanding the focus of research in writing in the disciplines and writing across the curriculum in order to grasp the full complexity of disciplinary discourse.
“Accessible, inspirational and practical plans that make storytelling a portal to multifaceted insights about culture, history, geography and identity.”
– Janice M. Del Negro, Ph.D., GSLIS Dominican University
This volume represents the collective experiences and insights of writing consultants involved in the large-scale curriculum reform of the entire College of Engineering; they collaborated closely with faculty members of the various departments and taught writing to engineering students in engineering classrooms. Collaborators developed syllabi that incorporated writing into their courses in meaningful ways, designed lessons to teach various aspects of writing, created assignments that integrated engineering and writing theory and concepts, and worked one-on-one with students to provide revision feedback. Though interactions were sometimes tense, the two groups––writing and engineering––developed a “third culture” that generally placed students at the center of learning.
Sojourning in Disciplinary Cultures provides a guide to successful collaborations with STEM faculty that will be of interest to WPAs, instructors, and a range of both composition scholars and practitioners seeking to understand more about the role of writing and communication in STEM disciplines.
Contributors:
Linn K. Bekins, Sarah A. Bell, Mara K. Berkland, Doug Downs, April A. Kedrowicz, Sarah Read, Julie L. Taylor, Sundy Watanabe
Written by faculty engaged in the design and delivery of interdisciplinary courses, programs, and experiential learning opportunities in the small college setting, The Synergistic Classroom addresses the many ways faculty can leverage their institutions' small size and openness to pedagogical experimentation to overcome the challenges of limited institutional resources and enrollment concerns and better prepare students for life and work in the twenty-first century. Taken together, the contributions in this volume invite reflection on a variety of important issues that attend the work of small college faculty committed to expanding student learning across disciplinary boundaries.
While local conditions remain at the forefront of writing program administration, transnational activities are slowly and thoroughly shifting the questions we ask about writing curricula, the space and place in which writing happens, and the cultural and linguistic issues at the heart of the relationships forged in literacy work. Transnational Writing Program Administration challenges taken-for-granted assumptions regarding program identity, curriculum and pedagogical effectiveness, logistics and quality assurance, faculty and student demographics, innovative partnerships and research, and the infrastructure needed to support writing instruction in higher education.
Well-known scholars and new voices in the field extend the theoretical underpinnings of writing program administration to consider programs, activities, and institutions involving students and faculty from two or more countries working together and highlight the situated practices of such efforts. The collection brings translingual graduate students at the forefront of writing studies together with established administrators, teachers, and researchers and intends to enrich the efforts of WPAs by examining the practices and theories that impact our ability to conceive of writing program administration as transnational.
This collection will enable writing program administrators to take the emerging locations of writing instruction seriously, to address the role of language difference in writing, and to engage critically with the key notions and approaches to writing program administration that reveal its transnationality.
Ever since Horace Mann promoted state supported schooling in the 1850s, the aims of U.S. public education have been the subject of heated national debate. Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? joins this debate by exploring clashing educational aims in a discipline-based university classroom and the consequences of these clashes for "underprepared" writers.
In this close-up look at a White middle-class teacher and his ethnically diverse students, Fishman and McCarthy examine not only the role of Standard English in college writing instruction but also the underlying and highly charged issues of multiculturalism, race cognizance, and social class.
Addressing how composers transfer both knowledge about and practices of writing, Writing across Contexts explores the grounding theory behind a specific composition curriculum called Teaching for Transfer (TFT) and analyzes the efficacy of the approach. Finding that TFT courses aid students in transfer in ways that other kinds of composition courses do not, the authors demonstrate that the content of this curriculum, including its reflective practice, provides a unique set of resources for students to call on and repurpose for new writing tasks.
The authors provide a brief historical review, give attention to current curricular efforts designed to promote such transfer, and develop new insights into the role of prior knowledge in students' ability to transfer writing knowledge and practice, presenting three models of how students respond to and use new knowledge—assemblage, remix, and critical incident.
A timely and significant contribution to the field, Writing across Contexts will be of interest to graduate students, composition scholars, WAC and writing-in-the-disciplines scholars, and writing program administrators.
No text in composition has made such a sweeping attempt to place the multiple areas of translingualism, anti-racism, anticolonialism, interdisciplinarity, and disability into conversation or to represent the field as broadly unified around the concept of difference. The chapters in this book specifically explore how monolingual ideology is maintained in institutions and how translingual strategies can (re)include difference; how narrative-based interventions can promote writing across difference in classrooms and institutions by complicating dominant discourses; and how challenging dominant logics of class, race, ability, and disciplinarity can present opportunities for countering divisiveness.
Writing Across Difference offers writing scholars a sustained intellectual encounter with the crisis of difference and foregrounds the possibilities such an encounter offers for collective action toward a more inclusive and equitable society. It presents a variety of approaches for intervening in classrooms and institutions in the interest of focalizing, understanding, negotiating, and bridging difference. The book will be a valuable resource to those disturbed by the bigotry, violence, and fanaticism that mark our political culture and who are seeking inspiration, models, and methods for collective response.
Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Jonathan Benda, Megan Callow, James Rushing Daniel, Cherice Escobar Jones, Laura Gonzales, Juan Guerra, Stephanie Kerschbaum, Katie Malcolm, Nadya Pittendrigh, Mya Poe, Candice Rai, Iris Ruiz, Ann Shivers-McNair, Neil Simpkins, Alison Y. L. Stephens, Sumyat Thu, Katherine Xue, Shui-yin Sharon Yam
The chapters comprehensively examine the ways writing centers make the most of sharing common ground. Directors, coordinators, administrators, and stakeholders draw on past and present attention to writing center studies to help shape the future of the learning commons and narrate their substantial collective experience with collaborative efforts to stay centered while empowering colleagues and student writers at their institutions. The contributors explore what is gained and lost by affiliating writing centers with learning commons, how to create sound pedagogical foundations that include writing center philosophies, how writing center practices evolved or have been altered by learning center affiliations, and more.
Writing Centers and Learning Commons is for all stakeholders of writing in and across campuses collaborating on (by choice or edict), or wishing to explore the possibilities of, a learning commons enterprise.
Contributors: Alice Batt, Cassandra Book, Charles A. Braman, Elizabeth Busekrus Blackmon, Virginia Crank, Celeste Del Russo, Patricia Egbert, Christopher Giroux, Alexis Hart, Suzanne Julian, Kristen Miller, Robby Nadler, Michele Ostrow, Helen Raica-Klotz, Kathleen Richards, Robyn Rohde, Nathalie Singh-Corcoran, David Stock
“To understand the ways students learn to write, we must go beyond the small and all too often marginalized component of the curriculum that treats writing explicitly and look at the broader, though largely tacit traditions students encounter in the whole curriculum,” explains David R. Russell, in the introduction to this singular study. The updated edition provides a comprehensive history of writing instruction outside general composition courses in American secondary and higher education, from the founding public secondary schools and research universities in the 1870s, through the spread of the writing-across-the-curriculum movement in the 1980s, through the WAC efforts in contemporary curriculums.
Wendy Strachan documents this campus cultural transformation, exploring successes and impasses with equal interest. The study identifies factors to be considered to avoid isolating the teaching of writing in writing-intensive courses; to engender a university-wide culture that naturalizes writing as a vital part of learning across all disciplines; and to keep the teaching of writing organic and reflected upon in a scholarly manner across campus.
A valuable case history for scholars in writing studies, WAC/WID, and curricular change studies.
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