Traditions and professionalization : reconceiving work in composition.

The derogation of the “traditional” in the discourse of academic professionalism in composition studies overlooks practices within tradition that may be counter or alternative to the hegemonic. Aspects of the Amherst College “tradition” of English 1–2 illustrate, in idealized form, alternative practices drawing from residual elements of dominant culture

Privatised academic writing: Reflections on access, knowledge, and policy

This dialogue responds to Neculai (2018) and argues for the need to recognise the character of academic literacies development and the policies governing that development as always emergent. It also reflects on the contributions that all, including students, make toward that development through their written work, as opposed to accepting the treatment of academic literacies development as a commodity to which access is given

“Students’ right,” English only, and re-imagining the politics of language.

Argues that a lack of language legislation is indicative of a pervasive, tacit policy of English Only in composition and of a constellation of assumptions about languages, and language users that continues to cripple public debate on English Only and compositionists\u27 approaches to matters of error. Proposes an approach to language and error considering the relations of language to power

Students, authorship, and the work of composition.

Reviews the dominant pedagogical strategies compositionists have devised in response to the dilemma posed by the author/student writer binary. Reviews Raymond Williams\u27s analysis of the approaches to the sociality of authorship. Describes the contradictions in which dominant composition pedagogies have become entangled

Translinguality and Disciplinary Reinvention

Dominant narratives of disciplinarity that WAC/WID confronts conflate disciplines with departments and material institutional structures, such as departments and professional organizations—what is here called “departmentality.” The relative autonomy of disciplinarity from departmentality means that challenges to foundational concepts of disciplines are in fact normal to disciplinary work and do not threaten the material institutional structures associated with those disciplines, as illustrated by the history of challenges to foundational disciplinary concepts of basic writing and second language acquisition carried out in disciplinary writing. The relative autonomy of disciplinarity enables us to accept the legitimacy of the challenges translingual theory poses to conventional notions of language, identity, writing, and their relations to one another circulating in composition studies generally and second language writing in particular as contributions rather than threats to the disciplinary work of these areas of study

Rewriting composition : moving beyond a discourse of need.

This essay argues that calls to end, move beyond, or expand composition participate in a discourse of need that accepts and reinforces the legitimacy of dominant, and restricted, definitions of not only composition but also alternatives to it: what we are led to believe is “new,” “different,” and therefore “better” than composition as conventionally defined. I analyze the operation of this discourse in David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies, Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition, and calls to make up for composition’s ostensible lacks by supplementing it with rhetoric or multimodal composition or by renaming it “writing studies.” Drawing on J. K. Gibson-Graham’s The End of Capitalism (as We Knew It) and Theresa Lillis’s The Sociolinguistics of Writing, I outline strategies by which to rethink dominant disciplinary discourse, and use James Slevin’s Introducing English and David Bartholomae’s accounts of composition to illustrate how we might enable a recuperation of composition’s potential