Bouncing Back: Resilience and Its Limits in Late-Age Composing

This essay is one of a series on my mother’s late-age composing, studying a writing project she started at age 70 and worked on for more than 25 years. Her intention was to integrate extensive reading, personal experience, and cultural observations to explain changes in parenting (and, by extension, education and enculturation of the next generation) from her childhood in the 1920s through the 2000s. When she died at 97, she left behind a 75-page draft, but was unable to complete her plans for revisions and an ending. I focus here on identifying the multiple factors in the ecology of her aging literacy that interacted to interrupt, slow down, and ultimately prevent her from finishing the essay. By studying her artifacts and documenting stresses on her literacy system (defined as body/mind/environment), I constructed timelines for her aging literacy and composing, expressed in visualizations. These demonstrate a pattern of persistence and resilience, “bouncing back” from setbacks, but at progressively lower levels until she reaches the limits of her literacy system in late old age

Institutional Invention: (How) is it possible?

(First paragraph) In this chapter I want to explore several broad questions with respect to higher education: Is institutional invention possible? What are the conditions that enable it, and how can they be created and sustained? What are the obstacles to institutional invention? How can academic leadership foster institutional invention

The 1979 Ottawa Conference and It\u27s Inscriptions: Recovering a Canadian Moment in American Rhetoric and Composition

[First Paragraph] In May 1979, Aviva Freedman and Ian Pringle hosted an international conference on Learning to Write at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, featuring a concentrated assemblage of eminent scholars as speakers and respondents. Those present sensed immediately that they were part of a momentous and historic event. Janet Emig, who delivered her famous Tacit Tradition speech at the conference, remembered it later as the single most electric professional meeting I ever participated in (Emig 1983, n.p.). Many delegates saw it as the rightful successor to the landmark Dartmouth Conference of 1966, and when Anthony Adams, the closing speaker, suggested it might even eclipse Dartmouth as the most important conference ever held on English education, there was a general murmur of assent (Oster 1979, 24)

The Historical Formation of Academic Identities: Rhetoric and Composition, Discourse and Writing

(First paragraph) This talk originated in my work as a consultant at the University of Winnipeg, where I spent six weeks on a Fulbright Specialist grant in Spring 2011. I was invited to advise the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Communications on its plans for “program architecture renewal,” which included critically assessing its programs, articulating levels of the curriculum, and charting future directions for the department. The grant had larger goals as well, charging me to study the development of writing and rhetorical studies in Canada as an emerging field seeking both definition and visibility. The Winnipeg faculty hoped that the project could highlight the importance of these studies, in relation to a vibrant discipline of rhetoric and composition in the U.S. and the global growth of interdisciplinary writing studies, and contribute to their prospects for cohesion and recognition in Canada.1 In this presentation, I hope to advance some of these broader goals, informed by my dual perspective as a longtime scholar in and of American rhetoric and composition and as a new student of Canadian work in discourse and writing.

Liminal Practice in a Maturing Writing Department

[First Paragraph] In Spring 2011 I was awarded a Fulbright Specialist Grant to consult, collaborate, and inform on the future of the Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications at the University of Winnipeg, located in the city of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. The Department of Rhetoric, Writing, and Communications department (hereafter, RWC) was a pioneer in writing instruction in Canada, where it became the first unit to establish itself independently as a department with a full-‐time faculty committed to both teaching and scholarship in writing and rhetoric. It remains a rare phenomenon on the Canadian higher education scene, where studies and programs in rhetoric and writing have developed late and along a different trajectory from the discipline in the United States. Because of its unique history, the faculty is positioned to make significant contributions to the further development of writing instruction and scholarship in rhetoric and writing in Canada and beyond. At the same time, the close fit between the department’s character and the mission of the institution makes it a strategic asset to the university. This report presents my findings, analyses, and recommendations to the Department and the Fulbright Specialist Program, based on six weeks of inquiry and conversations

Learning About Scholarship in Action in Concept and Practice

[First paragraph] In her inaugural year (2005), Chancellor Nancy Cantor announced her vision of Syracuse University as a campus that would be deeply engaged with the world, in activities and partnerships with communities that she named scholarship in action. Recognizing the difficulty of fitting such public or community-engaged scholarship into the traditional framework for defining and evaluating faculty work, she called on the Academic Affairs Committee of the Senate (AAC) to study the issues related to implementing this vision. The Committee responded to this request by undertaking in Spring, 2005 a study of scholarship of action both as a concept and as a set of faculty practices on the Syracuse campus. This white paper reports on what the Committee has learned from this inquiry

Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies

Cross-Border Networks in Writing Studies coordinates mixed methods approaches to survey, interview, and case study data to study Canadian writing studies scholars. The authors argue for networked disciplinarity, the notion that ideas arise and flow through intellectual networks that connect scholars not only to one another but to widening networks of human and nonhuman actors. Although the Canadian field is historically rooted in the themes of location and national culture, expressing a tension between Canadian independence and dependence on the US field, more recent research suggests a more hybridized North American scholarship rather than one defined in opposition to “rhetoric and composition” in the US. In tracing identities, roles, and rituals of nationally bound considerations of how disciplinarity has been constructed through distant and close methods, this multi-scaled, multi-scopic approach examines the texture of interdependent constructions of the Canadian discipline. [Amazon.com]https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/english_books/1061/thumbnail.jp