Joining a Conversation Research Project

Description: This unit is a culminating (end-of-semester) project designed to have students bring together the knowledge they have developed throughout the semester in the service of purposefully joining a real-world conversation, addressing a specific audience (or related set of audiences) who are part of that conversation. This unit has a small number of texts that the whole class reads and/or analyzes together. Instead, a lot of the work happening in this unit is project-driven and process-oriented. Time Frame: This unit was designed/paced as the last unit of the course (and it followed an earlier unit focused on rhetorical analysis of a multimodal artifact). Thus, students had some prior experience with thinking about and analyzing rhetorical situations, and with analyzing how different modes of a text work together rhetorically. In this unit, we focus on helping students identify serious issues and ongoing conversations occurring in their social spheres and local communities. Students are asked to do some research on these issues/conversations and ultimately to assess the credibility and relevance of particular sources for their rhetorical purposes. Originally, the unit was designed to take about 7 weeks but when we moved classes on line in Spring 2020, a week of class was cancelled and the unit was adapted to fit the remaining weeks. ACE 1/English 151 Aim & Scopes: This unit is built around ACE 1 and the Aims and Scopes for Engl 151 related to “gain[ing] practice at primary and secondary research as a means of developing and clarifying their stance toward their topic and/or acquiring a richer understanding of the context...of their argument” (Goal 5). Engl 150 has a similar outcome focused more specifically on inquiry and this project can be adapted to Engl 150 as well

“Always Up Against”: A Study of Veteran WPAs and Social Resilience

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments. Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the teaching of writing . . . is that they are shaped by economic forces” (Alexander 7; see also Welch and Scott; Comstock et al.; Stenberg). Historically tight budgets are now tighter. Arguments to fund writing instruction must be couched in terms of initiatives like “the Chancellor’s Goals” or “innovation for success” and articulated in the context of tuition revenue, markets, student- (or consumer-) “friendliness.” Funding for existing programs that benefit students and teachers alike, such as the writing center, is difficult to secure when it doesn’t offer the shine of a new initiative or the potential for external grant acquisition. Writing instructors and WPAs must navigate the impact of neoliberal pressures that privilege efficiency and austerity, evident in institutional calls for increased enrollments, accelerated degreecompletion rates, ease of transfer, and reduced instructional cost

“Always Up Against”: A Study of Veteran WPAs and Social Resilience

This essay reports on an interview-based study of ten veteran WPAs, whose three decades of service spans neoliberalism’s growing influence on universities. Our findings trace their enactment of social resilience, a dynamic, relational process that allowed them, even in the face of constraint, to act and to preserve key commitments. Like most compositionists, and especially WPAs, we feel the restrictive impact of austerity. This sense is reflected in a growing body of research in our field, and most recently in a CCC special issue, where Jonathan Alexander reminds us that “one of the things we know about writing and the teaching of writing . . . is that they are shaped by economic forces” (Alexander 7; see also Welch and Scott; Comstock et al.; Stenberg). Historically tight budgets are now tighter. Arguments to fund writing instruction must be couched in terms of initiatives like “the Chancellor’s Goals” or “innovation for success” and articulated in the context of tuition revenue, markets, student- (or consumer-) “friendliness.” Funding for existing programs that benefit students and teachers alike, such as the writing center, is difficult to secure when it doesn’t offer the shine of a new initiative or the potential for external grant acquisition. Writing instructors and WPAs must navigate the impact of neoliberal pressures that privilege efficiency and austerity, evident in institutional calls for increased enrollments, accelerated degreecompletion rates, ease of transfer, and reduced instructional cost

A Critical Reading and Revision Strategy: Glossing Arguments As Cultural Work

Recently compositionists have focused on how writing functions both rhe­torically and culturally in the public sphere. Amy Lee (2000), for ex­ample, frames her booklength discussion of college composition in an understanding that “writing serves as the means by which we actively construct a self and a world that are, in turn, determined by the very language we have access to” (pp. 45-46; see also Berlin, 1996; Ervin, 1999; Wells, 1996). Such a view places pressure on writing teachers to develop generative activities that extend students’ existing capacities to summarize and analyze arguments. One activity that we’ve found useful is glossing. In this chapter, we focus on glossing as a means of helping students to engage more critically with the texts they read as well as the texts they write. In doing so, we are not claiming to have discov­ered glossing. Rather we share our adaptation of a strategy that previously has been extolled by compositionists such as Ann Berthoff (1982) and Donald Murray (2000). More specifically, we describe several different glossing activities through which, in our experience, students have discovered the power of this kind of critical engagement with writing. Essentially, glossing focuses attention on a piece of writing in a way that supports students’ discovery and articulation of the logic and assumptions un­derpinning the organization of a text. Glossing asks students to work through a single paragraph or section of text at a time, noting not only what that paragraph or section says but also how it functions within the larger piece of writing. Al­though we use this activity in nearly all of our courses, adapting it to our specific pedagogical goals within various courses, as well as our students’ goals for read­ing and writing, in this chapter we focus on our use of glossing within an ad­vanced composition course at our institution

Concentrating English: Disciplinarity, Institutional Histories, and Collective Identity

Universities are increasingly pressured to model themselves after corporations. This chapter represents one effort to identify pressures that were formative in the work of a group of faculty working to develop a concentration in “Writing and Rhetoric” as part of a larger departmental initiative to revise the undergraduate major at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UN-L). By examining some of the conversations associated with the process of creating the concen tration, this microethnography suggests that while the formation of curriculum can be read in terms of corporate influences, faculty can and do intervene in administrative structures that press toward increasing corporatization. While it is true that corporate pressures represent the effects of one very powerful discourse of value and collective identity in contemporary American culture, postsecondary curricular reform can be usefully understood as a site of multiple discourses of value and identity that faculty negotiate in the process of making curricula. The point of this essay is not to provide a model curriculum, but to show how reflecting on group processes can build a collective consciousness about the multiple pressures on curriculum in one’s own institution and make visible opportunities for intervening, rhetorically, in the press toward corporate management of teaching and learning

Writing (to) work: Metaphors of fitness in contemporary arguments about literacy and work.

Through an examination of contemporary texts featuring arguments about the relationships between literacy and work, this dissertation explores literacy and work as mutually influencing forms of cultural participation. Increasingly, scholarship in literacy studies--from research in composition and literature within English Departments to scholarship from sites across the academic disciplines--analyzes texts as products and agents of social forces. Among the many manifestations of these forces are the rhetorical choices that authors make in an effort to persuade their audience. Emerging from the arguments analyzed in this dissertation are efforts at persuasion that build on metaphors of fitness, appealing to particular constructions of a broader cultural identity--an identity defined in terms of specific literacy and work practices. Among the texts under consideration in this study are judicial opinions regarding employment practices and literacy requirements on the job, government publications surrounding the establishment of the National Workplace Literacy Program, and novels featuring the inter-relationships of literacy and work including Julia Alvarez's 1991 novel, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, and Ben Hamper's 1991 memoir, Rivethead: Tales from the Assembly Line. Juxtaposing these arguments and the discursive practices of public policy, literature and law, this dissertation explores not only competing constructions of literacy and work embodied in these texts but their articulation through (and against) different kinds of discursive authorities.Ph.D.English and EducationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/105124/1/9635572.pdfDescription of 9635572.pdf : Restricted to UM users only

Pedagogical Alliances Among Writing Instructors and Teaching Librarians through a Writing Information Literacy Community of Practice

In this praxis piece, a WPA and a writing instructor describe a writing information literacy community of practice among writing instructors and teaching librarians. Through paying attention to one resulting assignment, a full class annotated bibliography, the co-authors argue this professional development program extended collaborations among the writing program and the library to center contextual notions of authority and metacognition that connect to composition’s democratic political commitments