Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Writers Who Care: Advocacy Blogging As Teachers - Professors - Parents, Leah A. Zuidema, Sarah Hochstetler, Mark Letcher, Kristen Hawley Turner

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Because we believe strongly that writers develop through authentic writing instruction - and because we see policies that drive practices away from these goals - we have decided to speak up and to speak out through advocacy blogging. Teachers, Profs, Parents: Writers Who Care (writerswhocare.wordpress.com) was born from our frustration with current mandates that limit teachers and students to reductive writing. We know what good writing instruction looks like, and we want to share that knowledge with an audience beyond academia. In doing so, we hope to redefine what it means to be an academic writer and to encourage others …

Where Writing Happens: Elevating Student Writing And Developing Voice Through Digital Storytelling, Jane M. Saunders

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

A Late Adopter's Chance To Take An Esl Program Multimodal, Erin K. Laverick

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article outlines an ESL program's journey in revising its curriculum to include multimodal compositions as a means to help non-native speakers of English improve their language proficiency by offering them greater means to communicate with wide audiences. The article also discusses means to provide faculty with the proper rhetorical and technology training, so they could use multimodalities in their own teaching.

Writing For The Audience That Fires The Imagination: Implications For Teaching Writing, Denise K. Ives, Cara Crandall

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Great authors embody their audiences through the language of their texts. Good readers learn to recognize and respond to the cues such writers embed in their texts about the kind of audience they are expected to be. They also learn from other authors how to fictionalize in their minds audiences like those they have experience being. In this article through an analysis of two texts, we showcase how two middle school writers through their texts, embody their audiences and cue readers to the roles they are expected to play. We then trace the rhetorical moves made by the writers to …

“This Erstwhile Unreadable Text”: Deep Time, Multidisciplinarity And First-Year Writing Faculty Mentoring And Support, Denise K. Comer

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Despite the otherwise rich multidisciplinary terrain of writing studies, the strategies most often used with first-year writing teacher teaching mentoring and support tend to remain discordantly anchored to a comparatively narrow version of writing pedagogy. I argue in this article that the geologic concept of deep time offers a way of infusing a multidisciplinary dimension into first-year writing faculty teaching mentoring and support that will enrich the ways faculty and students think, write, and talk about first-year writing. This article discusses deep-time pedagogy, providing specific strategies for infusing multidisciplinary dimensions into first-year writing faculty teaching mentoring and support. Such a …

Re-Thinking Personal Narrative In The Pedagogy Of Writing Teacher Preparation, Mary M. Juzwik, Anne Whitney, April Baker Bell, Amanda Smith

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

How can teacher educators mobilize contemporary understandings of personal narrative -- as socially and dialogically shaped in the context of culture and as instrumental to sociocultural processes of self-authoring -- in the teaching of narrative writing and, more specifically, in the work of teaching teachers to teach narrative writing? Rarely do teachers teach strategies that might result in good narratives. Rarely do narrative texts written in school (or any other kinds of texts written in school, for that matter) actually go anywhere beyond the teacher, thus failing to offer students experience in negotiating meanings with readers, working out the versions …

First-Year Composition And The Common Core: Educating Teachers Of Writing Across The High School-College Continuum, Justin A. Young

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article will discuss the implications of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) on the education of writing instructors at the college level. The article suggests that, with the adoption of the CCSS, the most effective models of the training of writing teachers in higher education will now include collaboration with educators at the K-12 level. A model for this kind of collaborative work is described, based on an effort the author is currently leading as the Director of English Composition at my institution. A brief overview of the CCSS, and the shifts in the teaching and learning of English …

Reframing Responses To Student Writing: Promising Young Writers And The Writing Pedagogies Course, Michael B. Sherry, Ted Roggenbuck

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This article describes an attempt to provide future teachers with an opportunity to practice evaluating and responding to student writing through a collaboration among members of an NCTE committee, a blended writing pedagogies course composed of education, creative writing, and professional writing students, and middle school teachers and their students in two states. Students’ texts were drawn from the NCTE’s “Promising Young Writers” contest, for which college students acted as judges and provided feedback to the middle school writers. We argue that the experience of responding to actual student writers about the texts they had submitted provided potentially important opportunities …

Teaching/Writing, Winter/Spring 2014 - Full Issue

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

A Rhetorical Examination Of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’S First Inaugural Address, Halee Morris

Scholarly Horizons: University of Minnesota, Morris Undergraduate Journal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) was the 32nd president of the United States of America. He served an unprecedented four terms in office and delivered four inaugural speeches. He set himself up for success in his first inaugural address, claiming, “there is nothing to fear but fear itself.” This famous passage, among others in FDR’s first inaugural address, worked as rhetorical maneuvers meant to both introduce FDR to the presidency as well as leave a lasting impression on the citizens of the United States facing hardship due to the Great Depression. Through the application of Lloyd Bitzer’s “rhetorical situation,” Edward Corbett …

Engaging Engagement: Framing The Civic Education Movement In Higher Education, Chad Woolard

Theses and Dissertations

Civic education in higher education is housed in various types of institutions (i.e. community colleges, four year universities, public and private institutions), institutional offices, academic departments, and larger, cross-campus initiatives and organizations. Civic education programs promote numerous activities to foster student engagement both inside and outside the classroom. Many in higher education have embraced the civic education movement; however, as with other social movements, the civic education movement is still a contested area. Defining civic education (i.e. civic engagement, service learning, political engagement, community engagement, etc.) becomes problematic because there seems to be as many terms for civic education as …

"I Don't Know If That Was The Right Thing To Do": Cross-Disciplinary/Cross-Institutional Faculty Respond To L2 Writing, Lindsey Ives, Elizabeth Leahy, Anni Leming, Tom Pierce, Michael Schwartz

Publications

This chapter investigates faculty expectations for student writing, specifically L2 writers of English, across disciplines at a flagship university and an urban community college in the southwest. Drawing from a faculty survey and follow-up interviews with faculty from various disciplines, the authors argue that study participants tend to hold multilingual writers to a monolingual standard, but that they are conflicted and/or ambivalent about this practice. The survey and interview data show, first, that markers of nonnative speaker status or any features that depart from Standard American Academic English often discourage and even preclude engagement with higher order concerns like ideas …

Reflections On The Introduction Of Quantitative Assessment In Persuasive Writing Classes, Paul H. Grawe, Robin J. Grawe

Numeracy

If quantitative reasoning is to be a legitimate part of composition curricula, it must be seen as a valuable tool for composition instructors to use in exploring their own subject. Composition instructors must see the relevance of QR not merely to their students in other subject areas but also directly in their literary and rhetorical studies and careers. Here we reflect on a highly successful program of using quantitative techniques in teaching advanced levels of professional rhetoric, namely persuasive speech and writing. We recount our 15-year experience of running an in-class, empirical and progressive experiment in group negotiations, the Legislative …

Just Ask Teachers: Building Expertise, Trusting Subjectivity, And Valuing Difference In Writing Assessment, Paul Walker

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

No abstract provided.

Generating Law: Learning How To Take Care Of What One Has Started, Thomas D. Eisele

Faculty Articles and Other Publications

In this chapter from Living In A Law Transformed: Encounters With The Works Of James Boyd White, Professor Eisele discusses the inspiration provided him by White's writing.

Tutoring Esl Students For Improvements In Language Skills, Hollie R. Craddock

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Much research has been conducted from the framework of Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory, and on the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). SCT has a wide application in many fields, including Second Language Acquisition (SLA).

This study collected and analyzed audio-recordings of voluntary, one-on-one tutoring sessions that took place over a six-week period in an Intensive English Program at an American University. The participants included both faculty and peer tutors and English Language Learners (ELLs) in the IE program. The recordings were analyzed to determine if any patterns emerged regarding the target language features on which the tutoring sessions …

Reporting The Irish Famine In America: Images Of "Suffering Ireland" In The American Press, 1845-1848, James M. Farrell

Communication

This chapter is a study of American newspaper reporting on the Great Irish Famine. The study examines six master narratives that constrained the image of Ireland and the Irish people presented to American readers. Those narrative constraints predisposed Americans to respond with hostility when Irish Famine refugees began to arrive in the United States.

One And Inseparable: The Union And Deliberative Conduct In Webster's "Reply To Hayne.", James M. Farrell

Communication

In Daniel Webster's view, the survival of the Union required not only an orator who could defend the Constitution as he did against Robert Hayne, but one who could embody the spirit of the constitution in deliberative performance. Webster uses his performance in debate not only to assail his opponent, defend New England, and expound on the Constitution, but further to demonstrate with his own oratory the abiding value of decorum, prudence, and eloquence in the national life. Webster becomes the ideal of deliberative performance as he contrasts his own conduct in debate with that of his Southern opponent. Webster’s …

The Child Independence Is Born: James Otis And Writs Of Assistance, James M. Farrell

Communication

This chapter is a reexamination of the Writs of Assistance speech by James Otis. In particular, it is a reconsideration of the evidence upon which rests the historical reputation of Otis’s address. Are the claims by historians who credit Otis with sparking the Revolutionary movement in colonial America warranted or not? That reassessment begins with a detailed review of the nature and function of writs of assistance within the political, legal, and economic environment of colonial Massachusetts. It then turns to an analysis of the legal dispute over writs of assistance in the 1761 trial. From there we will reconstruct …

This White Rose: Virginity In The Bloody Chamber, Kate Laurens

The Corinthian

Angela Carter’s book, The Bloody Chamber is one of the most interesting takes on fairy tales that there is. Upon first hearing about this book, some people may think that she has re-written some fairy tales or that she has made more “adult” versions of them. However, Carter insists that this is not the case. “My intention was not to do ‘versions’ or, as the American edition of the book said, horribly, ‘adult’ fairy tales, but to extract the latent content from the traditional stories and to use it as the beginnings of new stories.”