Rhetorical Recipes: Women’s Literacies In and Out of the Kitchen

Drawing on interview data regarding literacy practices done in tandem with housework, this article presents an array of recipe uses among retirement-age women. Given their backgrounds as professionals who came of age during second-wave feminism, the women see little value in “domestic” practices such as cooking literacies (Barton & Hamilton). However, the women’s uses of recipes for a variety of rhetorical purposes, in and out of the kitchen, are valuable material and social reflections of the women’s success in acquiring traditional literacies in school and at work

Mapping Tutorial Interactions: A Report on Results and Implications

At the University of Rhode Island (URI), we believe that assessment of writing center interactions can be useful beyond conventional efforts to measure the effects and effectiveness of tutoring strategies in sessions with student writers. In fact, we believe that assessment may be useful for developing knowledge about tutoring interactions in ways far more general but no less applicable to our field. Elsewhere, we have argued that engaging groups of tutors in assessment of tutoring strategies can yield multiple benefits for writing centers as organizations, such as establishing a writing center as a center for research in the University and fostering the disciplinary knowledge of tutors (Siegel Finer, White-Farnham, and Dyehouse). As a second step in reporting on a multi-year writing center research project, this article shares some results using a new instrument for assessment: tutorial interaction maps. We offer our model of assessment as one that shows promise for facilitating tutors’ understanding and discovery of the work that happens in writing centers, and we suggest that such a model might form a basis for new kinds of tools for use in writing center assessment.University Writing Cente

“She Has a Vocabulary I Just Don’t Have”: Faculty Culture and Information Literacy Collaboration

The authors describe difficulties pertaining to discipline-specific discourse and identity among collaborators during the process of revising the information literacy component of a first-year writing program. Hardesty’s term “faculty culture” offers a frame through which to understand resistance and tension among otherwise engaged faculty and situates this experience within the uncomfortable history between faculty and librarians who may be perceived as “inauthentic” faculty. The authors suggest ways to improve communication between librarians and writing program faculty when collaborating on information literacy instruction

We Could Convert the Lines, But Not The People: A Postmortem on Changing Working Conditions in a Writing Program

In the conversion of part-time adjunct instructor positions at a small college, institutional limits and personal perspectives on what it means to be an adjunct instructor clashed with both newer principles and decades-old arguments in rhetoric and composition to improve working conditions

Praxis, Volume 09, No. 02: Multiliteracy and the Writing Center

Contents: A Letter from the Editor / by Andrea Saathoff -- An Ongoing ESL Training Program in the Writing Center / by Jessica Chainer Nowacki -- Developing Tutor's Meta-Multiliteracies Through Poetry / by Kathleen Vacek -- Tutor Handbooks: Heuristic Texts for Negotiating a Difference in a Globalized World / by Steven K. Bailey -- The Idea of a Multiliteracy Center: Six Responses / by Valerie Balester, Nancy Grimm, Jackie Grutsch McKinney, Sohui Lee, David M. Sheridan, and Naomi Silver -- Access for All: The Role of Disability in Multiliteracy Centers / by Allison Hitt -- Mapping Tutorial Interactions a Report on Results and Implications / by Jamie White-Farnham, Jeremiah Dyehouse, and Bryna Siegel FinerUniversity Writing Cente

Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts

Radiant Figures: Visual Rhetorics in Everyday Administrative Contexts presents an approach to writing program administration that understands, accounts for, and embraces the rhetorical potential in the creation and circulation of everyday visual artifacts. This edited collection shares visuals (representations of curricula, visual metaphors for administrative work, graphics representing student demographics, etc.) created by contributors within their own contexts, for their own purposes. Each of the twelve chapters included in the collection discusses the visual-rhetorical strategies utilized in the invention of such graphics and highlights the affordances of visuals as administrative tools. Additionally, Radiant Figures has two hallmark features. The first is a table of contents that offers seven polyvocal paths, and each chapter in the collection is featured in at least two of the paths. These paths, such as “Mapping in/as Administration” and “Visualizing Change,” emphasize the complex and overlapping nature of visual administrative work. Second, each path includes a response from an experienced administrator-scholar in writing studies. These responses draw connections, highlight promising questions, and speculate about possibilities for the update and adaptation of everyday visual artifacts. The collection presents a compelling case for the advantages of visual-rhetorical administrative strategies and offers concrete ways that readers can take up those strategies in their own contexts.https://nsuworks.nova.edu/hcas_dcma_facbooks/1059/thumbnail.jp