On Location: Theory and Practice in Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring

Classroom-based writing tutoring is a distinct form of writing support, a hybrid instructional method that engages multiple voices and texts within the college classroom. Tutors work on location in the thick of writing instruction and writing activity. On Location is the first volume to discuss this emerging practice in a methodical way. The essays in this collection integrate theory and practice to highlight the alliances and connections on-location tutoring offers while suggesting strategies for resolving its conflicts. Contributors examine classroom-based tutoring programs located in composition courses as well as in writing intensive courses across the disciplines. While earlier scholarship has focused on logistical and administrative matters, emphasizing, the worthiness of such programs and how to set them up, this volume asks further questions--questions that challenge and even critique classroom-based writing tutoring practices and principles. It poses new theories and offers alternative vantage points from which to reconsider long-standing theoretical controversies. At the same time, the contributors here are cognizant of newcomers\u27 questions regarding logistical/administrative issues, especially as configurations of classroom-based writing tutoring multiply. And in a concluding chapter, the editors suggest strategies for successfully implementing this important instructional practice, and propose future sites of theoretical and practical inquiry.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1150/thumbnail.jp

Collaborative Complexities: Co-Authorship, Voice, and African American Rhetoric in Oral History Community Literacy Projects

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice

Preparing Students to Learn about Antiracism: Voices from Four Undergraduate Antiracist Learners

The authors, a professor and four undergraduates, add the dimension of preparing students for antiracist learning and to become antiracist learners to the ongoing scholarly dialogue about antiracist curricula, pedagogy, and learning outcomes, hoping to open a robust area of scholarship and practice that will include the voices of students. They consider this “pedagogy of preparation” to be an important step to readying students for the demanding intellectual, emotional, and ethical work of antiracist learning. Because college students will become the antiracist leaders in the generations to come, they need to be prepared to be antiracist learners in their classes. And if antiracist educators want to aim for the most effective pedagogies and learning outcomes, they need to understand and then help students to prepare for what Kendi (2019) refers to as “the grueling journey” of becoming an antiracist (p. 11)

Lynn Nottage’s This Is Reading: (Re)Identifying a City in a Story

This article considers This Is Reading, a multimedia storytelling public project created by Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Lynn Nottage, within the debate over public art’s capacities. I argue that This Is Reading alters perspectives by challenging what Leo Chavez calls the Latino Threat narrative. In so doing, the performance opens a space for a new, positive narrative and identity that acknowledges its Latino/a majority. I explore the impact of This Is Reading first through analysis of interviews suggesting a sense of human connection and a collective will to make change, and then by suggesting that the nature of conversations about Reading have shifted to using the language of story, indicating an understanding that through stories, people can alter their city’s identity

Undergraduate Research in English Studies

Why shouldn\u27t undergraduates in English studies have the same opportunities as those in the sciences to benefit from undertaking real research that can inform and have an impact on practitioners in the discipline? They should and can, according to editors Laurie Grobman and Joyce Kinkead, who have produced this collection to showcase the first steps being made to integrate undergraduate research into English studies and, even more important, to point the way toward greater involvement. Undergraduate Research in English Studies is a groundbreaking collection that aims to mobilize the profession of English studies to further participate in undergraduate research, an educational movement and comprehensive curricular innovation that is the pedagogy for the twenty-first century, according to the Joint Statement of Principles composed by the Council on Undergraduate Research and the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research. Students engaged in genuine research gain an insider\u27s understanding of field-specific debates, develop relevant skills and insights for future careers and graduate study, and contribute their voices to creating knowledge through the research process. Some contributors discuss the importance of mentoring, how to conduct research responsibly, and avenues for disseminating research and scholarship locally, regionally, nationally, or internationally. Others provide case studies of undergraduate research in literature and composition and rhetoric. The volume combines theory and practice, and lays the groundwork for further practice and inquiry, sending forth a call to broaden undergraduate research possibilities in all areas of English.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usufaculty_monographs/1030/thumbnail.jp

Pedagogies of Public Memory: Teaching Writing and Rhetoric at Museums, Memorials, and Archives (Routledge Studies in Rhetoric and Communication)

Pedagogies of Public Memory explores opportunities for writing and rhetorical education at museums, archives, and memorials. Readers will follow students working and writing at well-known sites of international interest (e.g., the Flight 93 National Memorial in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, and the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum), at local sites (e.g., vernacular memorials in and around Muncie, Indiana and the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania), and in digital spaces (e.g., Florida State University’s Postcard Archive and The Women’s Archive Project at the University of Nebraska Omaha). From composing and delivering museum tours, to designing online memorials that challenge traditional practices of public grief, to producing and publishing a magazine containing the photographs and stories of individuals who lived through historic moments in the Freedom Struggle, to expanding and creating new public archives – the pedagogical projects described in this volume create richly textured learning opportunities for students at all levels – from first-year writers to graduate students. The students and faculty whose work is represented in this volume undertake to reposition the past in the present and to imagine possible new futures for themselves and their communities. By exploring the production of public memory, this volume raises important new questions about the intersection of rhetoric and remembrance.https://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/englishfacbooks/1010/thumbnail.jp

Looking Backward, Looking Forward: MLA Members Speak

In 1997 I was asked to organize humanities outreach activities at the University of California, Irvine. The result was the formation of Humanities Out There (HOT). In our workshops, faculty members and graduate students supervise teams of undergraduates in order to take the methods and materials of the university into the larger community.I believe that programs like these will  become increasingly important in the next century, as economic, cultural, and educational divisions deepen in the wake of the demise of affirmative action and as the humanities fight to define their missions in a world driven by technology and its discontents. In this brave new world, what I call the new outreach may have a role to play in responding to social crises as they are visited on the life of the university. The new outreach will be driven by intellectual content, not public relations.It will take its orientation from the faculty rather than administrators. It will engage all the research disciplines rather than remain the purview of education departments. It will be integrated into the professional lives of its participants rather than rely on the spirit of volunteerism alone