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Articles 31 - 60 of 61

Full-Text Articles in Rhetoric and Composition

Genre Across The Curriculum, Anne Herrington, Charles Moran Jan 2005

Genre Across The Curriculum, Anne Herrington, Charles Moran

All USU Press Publications

American first-year college writing courses operate without a powerful context: they are designed to teach academic writing, but what kind of academic writing? Which of the many particular discourses, and, within those discourses, which recurring social situations? Lacking a clear context to refer to, textbook authors inevitably privilege form. Genre across the Curriculum will function as a "good" textbook, one not for the student, but for the teacher, and one with an eye on the context of writing. Here you will find models of practice, descriptions written by teachers who have integrated the teaching of genre into their pedagogy in …

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First Time Up: An Insider's Guide For New Composition Teachers, Brock Dethier Jan 2005

First Time Up: An Insider's Guide For New Composition Teachers, Brock Dethier

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First time up?—an insider's friendly question from 1960s counter-culture—perfectly captures the spirit of this book. A short, supportive, practical guide for the first-time college composition instructor, the book is upbeat, wise but friendly, casual but knowledgeable (like the voice that may have introduced you to certain other firsts). With an experiential focus rather than a theoretical one, First Time Up will be a strong addition to the newcomer's professional library, and a great candidate for the TA practicum reading list. Dethier, author of The Composition Instructor's Survival Guide and From Dylan to Donne, directly addresses the common headaches, nightmares, and …

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On Location: Theory And Practice In Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, Candace Spigelman, Laurie Grobman Jan 2005

On Location: Theory And Practice In Classroom-Based Writing Tutoring, Candace Spigelman, Laurie Grobman

All USU Press Publications

Classroom-based writing tutoring is a distinct form of writing support, a hybrid instructional method that engages multiple voices and texts within the college classroom. Tutors work on location in the thick of writing instruction and writing activity. On Location is the first volume to discuss this emerging practice in a methodical way. The essays in this collection integrate theory and practice to highlight the alliances and connections on-location tutoring offers while suggesting strategies for resolving its conflicts. Contributors examine classroom-based tutoring programs located in composition courses as well as in writing intensive courses across the disciplines. While earlier scholarship has …

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Innovative Approaches To Teaching Technical Communication, Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Richard Selfe Jan 2004

Innovative Approaches To Teaching Technical Communication, Tracy Bridgeford, Karla Saari Kitalong, Richard Selfe

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Innovative Approaches to Teaching Technical Communica- tion offers a variety of activities, projects, and approaches to energize pedagogy in technical communication and to provide a constructive critique of current practice. A practical collection, the approaches recommended here are readily adaptable to a range of technological and institutional contexts, as well as being theoretically grounded and pedagogically sound. Throughout the collection, its editors and contributors demonstrate the importance of critically engaging students through creative and innovative pedagogies. Programs in technical writing, technical communication, and/or professional communication have recently grown in enrollment as the demand among employers for formally prepared technical writers …

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Westwater Lost And Found, Mike Milligan Jan 2004

Westwater Lost And Found, Mike Milligan

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Upstream from Moab on the Colorado River, near the Colorado state line, there is a relatively short, deep canyon that has become one of the most popular river-running destinations in America. The canyon is known as Westwater. Its popularity is largely due to the thrill provided by possibly the most, certainly one of the most, dangerous and challenging stretches of white water on the Colorado-Skull Rapid. Near the head of the canyon are the remnants of the tiny town of Westwater, which has had an interesting and eventful history of its own, partly because of the river and canyon, partly …

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Process This: Undergraduate Writing In Composition Studies, Nancy C. Dejoy Jan 2004

Process This: Undergraduate Writing In Composition Studies, Nancy C. Dejoy

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In Process This, Nancy DeJoy argues that even recent revisions to composition studies, cultural studies, service learning, and social process movements--continue to repress the subjects and methodologies that should be central, especially at the level of classroom practice. Designed to move student discourses beyond the classroom, these approaches nonetheless continue to position composition students (and teachers) as mere consumers of the discipline. This means that the subjects, methodologies, and theory/practice relationships that define the field are often absent in composition classrooms. Arguing that the world inside and outside of the academy cannot be any different if the profession stays the …

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Coming To Terms: A Theory Of Writing Assessment, Patricia Lynne Jan 2004

Coming To Terms: A Theory Of Writing Assessment, Patricia Lynne

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In a provocative book-length essay, Patricia Lynne argues that most programmatic assessment of student writing in U.S. public and higher education is conceived in the terms of mid-20th century positivism. Since composition as a field had found its most compatible home in constructivism, she asks, why do compositionists import a conceptual frame for assessment that is incompatible with composition theory? By casting this as a clash of paradigms, Lynne is able to highlight the ways in which each theory can and cannot influence the shape of assessment within composition. She laments, as do many in composition, that the objectively oriented …

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The Private, The Public, And The Published: Reconciling Private Lives And Public Rhetoric, Barbara Couture, Thomas Kent Jan 2004

The Private, The Public, And The Published: Reconciling Private Lives And Public Rhetoric, Barbara Couture, Thomas Kent

All USU Press Publications

At the 2003 "Rock the Vote" debate, one of the questions posed by a student to the eight Democratic candidates for the presidential nomination was "have you ever used marijuana?" Amazingly, all but one of the candidates voluntarily answered the question. Add to this example the multiple ways in which we now see public intrusion into private lives (security cameras, electronic access to personal data, scanning and "wanding" at the airport) or private self-exposure in public forums (cell phones, web cams, confessional talk shows, voyeuristic "reality" TV). That matters so private could be treated as legitimate-in some cases even vital-for …

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Faithful Transgressions, Laura L. Bush Jan 2004

Faithful Transgressions, Laura L. Bush

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The central issue Bush finds in these works is how their authors have dealt with the authority of Mormon Church leaders. As she puts it in her preface, "I use the phrase 'faithful transgression' to describe moments in the texts when each writer, explicitly or implicitly, commits herself in writing to trust her own ideas and authority over official religious authority while also conceiving of and depicting herself to be a 'faithful' member of the Church." Bush recognizes her book as her own act of faithful transgression. Writing it involved wrestling, she states, "with my own deeply ingrained religious beliefs …

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What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics In Teaching And Assessing Writing, Bob Broad Jan 2003

What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics In Teaching And Assessing Writing, Bob Broad

All USU Press Publications

The result of a long-term study of one university's introductory composition program, Broad's approach to mapping the values that inform writing evaluation is empirically grounded, painstakingly analyzed, yet flexible, human, and pedagogically wise. Not simple, but surely practical, his method yields a more satisfactory process of exploration and a more useful representation of the values by which compositionists actually evaluate their students. With this important study, Broad moves the field far beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then …

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Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering The Place Of Invention In Composition, Anis S. Bawarshi Jan 2003

Genre And The Invention Of The Writer: Reconsidering The Place Of Invention In Composition, Anis S. Bawarshi

All USU Press Publications

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the …

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Landscape Of Desire: Identity And Nature In Utah's Canyon Country, Greg Gordon Jan 2003

Landscape Of Desire: Identity And Nature In Utah's Canyon Country, Greg Gordon

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Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.

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The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, Michael A. Pemberton, Joyce Kinkead Jan 2003

The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives On Writing Center Scholarship, Michael A. Pemberton, Joyce Kinkead

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In The Center Will Hold, Pemberton and Kinkead have compiled a major volume of essays on the signal issues of scholarship that have established the writing center field and that the field must successfully address in the coming decade. The new century opens with new institutional, demographic, and financial challenges, and writing centers, in order to hold and extend their contribution to research, teaching, and service, must continuously engage those challenges. Appropriately, the editors offer the work of Muriel Harris as a key pivot point in the emergence of writing centers as sites of pedagogy and research. The volume develops …

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A Field Of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs And The Future Of Composition Studies, Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, Larry W. Burton Jan 2002

A Field Of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs And The Future Of Composition Studies, Peggy O'Neill, Angela Crow, Larry W. Burton

All USU Press Publications

One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.

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(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment For Teaching And Learning, Brian Huot Jan 2002

(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment For Teaching And Learning, Brian Huot

All USU Press Publications

Brian Huot's aim for this book is both ambitious and provocative. He wants to reorient composition studies' view of writing assessment. To accomplish this, he not only has to inspire the field to perceive assessment—generally not the most appreciated area of study—as deeply significant to theory and pedagogy, he also has to counter some common misconceptions about the history of assessment in writing. In(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment, Huot advocates a new understanding, a more optimistic and productive one than we have seen in composition for a very long time. Assessment, as Huot points out, defines what is valued by a teacher …

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English Composition As A Happening, Geoffrey Sirc Jan 2002

English Composition As A Happening, Geoffrey Sirc

All USU Press Publications

From the Introduction: "Contemporary Composition is still inflected by the epistemic turn taken in the 1980s, convincing me that we need to remember what we've forgotten—namely, how impassioned resolves and thrilling discoveries were abandoned and why. I'd like to retrace the road not taken in Composition Studies, to salvage what can still be recovered... I want to inspect the wreckage, in order to show what was the promise of the Happenings for Composition, as well as the huge gray longueur of its pale replacement, Eighties Composition. In so doing, I hope to begin a reconfiguration of our field's pre- and …

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Writing With Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, Sheryl I. Fontaine, Charles Moran Jan 2002

Writing With Elbow, Pat Belanoff, Marcia Dickson, Sheryl I. Fontaine, Charles Moran

All USU Press Publications

Peter Elbow is one of those scholars who had such an impact on his field that by mid-career he had already attained icon status. As an early proponent of what became known as process theory, Elbow, with others working along similar lines, developed a powerful body of theory that gradually reoriented instruction in writing toward an emphasis on invention and revision-toward the process of writing as a mode of thinking-and consequently toward a focus on the interaction between writer and audience, instead of on the traditionally conceived product of writing, the text. It is not too much to claim that …

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Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations?: Learning To Teach Underprepared Writers Across The Curriculum, Stephen M. Fishman, Lucille Mccarthy Jan 2002

Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations?: Learning To Teach Underprepared Writers Across The Curriculum, Stephen M. Fishman, Lucille Mccarthy

All USU Press Publications

Ever since Horace Mann promoted state supported schooling in the 1850s, the aims of U.S. public education have been the subject of heated national debate. Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? joins this debate by exploring clashing educational aims in a discipline-based university classroom and the consequences of these clashes for "underprepared" writers. In this close-up look at a White middle-class teacher and his ethnically diverse students, Fishman and McCarthy examine not only the role of Standard English in college writing instruction but also the underlying and highly charged issues of multiculturalism, race cognizance, and social class.

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Reinventing The University: Literacies And Legitimacy In The Postmodern Academy, Christopher L. Schroeder Jan 2001

Reinventing The University: Literacies And Legitimacy In The Postmodern Academy, Christopher L. Schroeder

All USU Press Publications

Schroeder argues that, for students, postmodern instability in literacy and meaning has become a question of the legitimacy of current discourse of education. Schroeder is committed, then, to constructing literacies jointly with students and by so doing to bringing students to engage more deeply with education and society. To accomplish this, of course, he must advocate rebalancing instruction to a more radically student-centered curriculum. This does not mean he abandons traditional discourse or traditional practice in the classroom; rather, tradition becomes only one voice among many in the classroom, instead of being the dominating one. ReInventing the University is an …

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Saying And Silence: Listening To Composition With Bakhtin, Frank Farmer Jan 2001

Saying And Silence: Listening To Composition With Bakhtin, Frank Farmer

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Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do …

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(First Person)2: A Study Of Co-Authoring In The Academy, Kami Day, Michele Eodice Jan 2001

(First Person)2: A Study Of Co-Authoring In The Academy, Kami Day, Michele Eodice

All USU Press Publications

In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been …

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Personal Effects: The Social Character Of Scholarly Writing, Deborah H. Holdstein, David Bleich Jan 2001

Personal Effects: The Social Character Of Scholarly Writing, Deborah H. Holdstein, David Bleich

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In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers. They contend that humanistic inquiry cannot develop successfully at this time without reference to the varieties of subjective, intersubjective, and collective experience of teachers and researchers. In composition studies, they point out, an important strand of theory has continuously mined the personal experience of individual writers ("where they stand" even in a destabilized sense of that …

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Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm For Rhetoric And Composition, Cindy Johanek Jan 2000

Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm For Rhetoric And Composition, Cindy Johanek

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In Composing Research, Cindy Johanek offers a new perspective on the ideological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and the theories of knowledge that inform them. With a paradigm that is sensitive to the context of one's research questions, she argues, scholars can develop less dichotomous forms that invoke the strengths of both research traditions. Context-oriented approaches can lift the narrative from beneath the numbers in an experimental study, for example, or bring the useful clarity of numbers to an ethnographic study.

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Teaching Composition As A Social Process, Bruce Mccomiskey Jan 2000

Teaching Composition As A Social Process, Bruce Mccomiskey

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Bruce McComiskey is a strong advocate of social approaches to teaching writing. However, he opposes composition teaching that relies on cultural theory for content, because it too often prejudges the ethical character of institutions and reverts unnecessarily to product-centered practices in the classroom. He opposes what he calls the "read-this-essay-and-do-what-the-author-did method of writing instruction: read Roland Barthes's essay 'Toys' and write a similar essay; read John Fiske's essay on TV and critique a show." McComiskey argues for teaching writing as situated in discourse itself, in the constant flow of texts produced within social relationships and institutions. He urges writing teachers …

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Passions, Pedagogies, And 21st Century Technologies, Gail E. Hawisher, Cynthia L. Selfe Jan 1999

Passions, Pedagogies, And 21st Century Technologies, Gail E. Hawisher, Cynthia L. Selfe

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Once again, Gail Hawisher and Cynthia Selfe offer a volume that will set the agenda in the field of computers and composition scholarship for a decade. The technology changes that scholars of composition studies face as the next century opens couldn't be more dramatic or deserving of passionate study. While we have always used technologies (e.g., the pencil) to communicate with each other, the electronic technologies we now use have changed the world in ways that we have yet to identify or appreciate fully. Likewise, the study of language and literate exchange, even our understanding of terms like literacy, text, …

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Under Construction: Working At The Intersections Of Composition Theory, Research, And Practice, Christine Farris, Chris M. Anson Jan 1998

Under Construction: Working At The Intersections Of Composition Theory, Research, And Practice, Christine Farris, Chris M. Anson

All USU Press Publications

Few composition scholars two decades ago would have imagined the rate at which their field is now developing, expanding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for research and generation of knowledge. In their introduction to this volume, Farris and Anson argue that, faced with a welter of competing models, compositionists too quickly dichotomize and dismiss.

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Composition Studies As A Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration, Lynn Z. Bloom Jan 1998

Composition Studies As A Creative Art: Teaching, Writing, Scholarship, Administration, Lynn Z. Bloom

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This work focuses on the creative dynamics that arise from the interrelation of writing, teaching writing, and ways of reading—and the scholarship and administrative issues engendered by it. To regard composition studies as a creative art is to engage in a process of intellectual or aesthetic free play, and then to translate the results of this play into serious work that yet retains the freedom and playfulness of its origins. The book is fueled by a mixture of faith in the fields that compose composition studies, hope that efforts of composition teachers can make a difference, and a sense of …

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Wiring The Writing Center, Eric H. Hobson Jan 1998

Wiring The Writing Center, Eric H. Hobson

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As computers have brought important developments to composition studies, writing centers have found themselves creating and improvising applications for their own work and often for the writing programs and institutions in which they live. Online tutorials, websites with an array of downloadable resources for students, scheduling and email possibilities--all of these are becoming common-place among writing centers across the country. However, in spite of impressive work by individual centers, exchange on these topics between and among writing centers has been sporadic. As more writing centers approach getting "wired" and others continue to upgrade, the need for communication and collaboration becomes …

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Between Talk And Teaching: Reconsidering The Writing Conference, Laurel Johnson Black Jan 1998

Between Talk And Teaching: Reconsidering The Writing Conference, Laurel Johnson Black

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The teacher-student conference is standard in the repertoire of teachers at all levels. Because it's a one-to-one encounter, teachers work hard to make it comfortable; but because it's a pedagogical moment, they hope that learning occurs in the encounter, too. The literature in this area often suggests that a conference is a conversation, but this doesn't account for a teacher's need to use it pedagogically. Laurel Johnson Black's new book explores the conflicting meanings and relations embedded in conferencing and offers a new theoretical understanding of the conference along with practical approaches to conferencing more effectively with students.

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Reflection In The Writing Classroom, Kathleen Blake Yancey Jan 1998

Reflection In The Writing Classroom, Kathleen Blake Yancey

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Yancey explores reflection as a promising body of practice and inquiry in the writing classroom. Yancey develops a line of research based on concepts of philosopher Donald Schon and others involving the role of deliberative reflection in classroom contexts. Developing the concepts of reflection-in-action, constructive reflection, and reflection-in-presentation, she offers a structure for discussing how reflection operates as students compose individual pieces of writing, as they progress through successive writings, and as they deliberately review a compiled body of their work-a portfolio, for example. Throughout the book, she explores how reflection can enhance student learning along with teacher response to …

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