Rhetoric and Composition Commons^™

Embracing A Productive Rhetorical Pragmatism: Teaching Writing As Democratic Deliberation, Jennifer Clifton

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Our current points of stasis in American politics make clear: we are facing a deep crisis of imagination in public life. Our (in)ability to imagine the interests and experiences of others limits not only how we understand domestic and global citizenship but also how we enact that citizenship with others. In talk and in practice, the inability to take seriously the interests and experiences of others leads Americans – in English Language Arts classrooms and in public life – to cast those who disagree as deeply flawed in character – unpatriotic, ungodly, lazy, irresponsible, or criminal.

In this article, I …

Making The Most Of Existing Resources: An Online Rubric Database In University-Wide Writing Program Assessment, Jennifer M. Good, Kevin Osborne

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

When creating an assessment plan to measure writing outcomes for a university-wide writing across the curriculum (WAC) program, administrators considered multi-layered evaluation methods for benchmarking and measuring internal growth of students. Although assessment plans must address these needs, the actual assessment practices must be flexible, accessible to faculty, and feasible--based on existing technological structures and data systems at an institution. The writing assessment that is provided addresses all of these elements and is offered as a model for other programs.

For this particular study, the internal aspect of the assessment plan that tracks growth of students over time is the …

“Listening Across The Curriculum: What Disciplinary Tas Can Teach Us About Ta Professional Development In The Teaching Of Writing”, Tanya K. Rodrigue

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

Over the past couple of decades, a small number of compositionists have argued that disciplinary TAs are in fact teachers of writing and should be involved in writing across the curriculum (WAC) efforts and conversations. Compositionists have easily translated disciplinary teaching assistants’ (TAs’) responsibilities as those of a writing instructor and have confidently assigned TAs with the pedagogical identity of a writing teacher. Yet do TAs in the disciplines perceive themselves in the same manner? There is no existing scholarship that provides insight into how disciplinary TAs perceive and define their pedagogical responsibilities and identities, and the factors involved in …

Exploring Identity-Based Challenges To English Teachers’ Professional Growth, Heather C. Camp

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study explores identity-based challenges that can hinder secondary English teachers enrolled in Master’s degree programs from experiencing professional growth. It illustrates how identity conflicts can prevent teachers from integrating a disciplinary identity into their professional sense-of-self, thereby limiting the benefits they might gain from graduate coursework. In particular, the study suggests that dissonance between discourse norms and values, concerns about community allegiances, and assumptions about language, difficulty, and power can impede teachers from appropriating disciplinary discourse and hinder them from combining it with more familiar discourses that circulate in schools and shape teachers’ identities.

The Knowing/Doing Gap: Challenges Of Effective Writing Instruction In High School, Sylvia Read, Melanie M. Landon-Hays

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

This study explores the challenges of effective writing instruction in high school, specifically examining the perceptions of five new high school English teachers regarding their own experiences learning to write as students, their preparation to become teachers of writing, and how they teach and assess writing in their classrooms. In order to more fully understand their view of writing instruction, we interviewed and observed them. The findings are organized into two strands: teacher beliefs about their own formative opportunities with writing, both as students and in preparation to become teachers, and teacher reflections on best practices in writing instruction and …

Table Of Contents/Opening Editorial, Jonathan E. Bush

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

Teaching/Writing -- Summer/Fall 2013 [Full Issue]

Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education

No abstract provided.

The Daw And The Honeybee: Situating Metaphors For Originality And Authorial Labor In The 1728 Chambers’ Cyclopædia, Krista Kennedy

Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition - All Scholarship

No abstract provided.

A Report On The 2012–13 Composition And Rhetoric Category Of The Mla Job Information List, Christina M. Lavecchia, Janine Morris, Carla Sarr, Jim Ridolfo

Communication, Media, and Arts Faculty Articles

As part of rhetmap.org’s experiment mapping the Composition and Rhetoric (C/R) category of the Modern Language Association (MLA) Job Information List (JIL), we present the following summary of the 2012–13 job market season. Rhetmap.org scraped the MLA JIL C/R data once a week from September 2012 to July 2013. By the first week of July, 2013 there were approximately 282 listings posted. Of those listings, 205 were posted by December 31, 2012 or in the first four months of the 2012–13 job market. In the next four sections we have broken down the C/R into four categories: geography, type of …

Selected Bibliography For Work In Reading, Literacy, And Pedagogy, Geert Vandermeersche, Kris Rutten, Steven Tötösy De Zepetnek

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Video Games And Citizenship, Jeroen Bourgonjon, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Video Games and Citizenship" Jeroen Bourgonjon and Ronald Soetaert argue that digitization problematizes and broadens our perspective on culture and popular media and that this has important ramifications for our understanding of citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert respond to the call of Gert Biesta for the contextualized study of young people's practices by exploring a particular aspect of digitization that affects young people, namely video games. They explore the new social spaces which emerge in video game culture and how these spaces relate to community building and citizenship. Bourgonjon and Soetaert also examine whether these social spaces can …

Rhetorical Analysis Of Literary Culture In Social Reading Platforms, Joachim Vlieghe, Kris Rutten

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetorical Analysis of Literary Culture in Social Reading Platforms" Joachim Vlieghe and Kris Rutten present a case study of the discourse surrounding literary phenomena that are emerging within social media. The case study is part of a methodological exploration within literacy studies whereby the social media's transformative effects on literary literacies are studied by focusing on language as symbolic and situated action. Vlieghe and Rutten have identified unique social reading platforms based on a prolonged study of the social media environment. The analysis of the developers' discourse on social reading platforms shows how developers are formulating new …

Introduction To Literacy And Society, Culture, Media And Education, Kris Rutten, Geert Vandermeersche

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

No abstract provided.

Literature, Digital Humanities, And The Age Of The Encyclopedia, Gunther Martens

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Literature, Digital Humanities, and the Age of the Encyclopedia" Gunther Martens takes his cue from Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities in order to discuss the way in which literature relates to new developments in technology. Martens argues that it is useful to situate some of the fears accompanying literature's renewed (and debated) exposure to media and technology against the background of a similar discussions earlier: the historical perspective allows to identify and link three specific discourses underpinning the debate, namely: education, rhetoric, and the concept of the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia and encyclopedic literature comprise and …

Using New Media In Teaching Greek Roma Students, Fenia Frangoulidou

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Using New Media in Teaching Greek Roma Students" Fenia Frangoulidou discusses the use of media material as a supplementary teaching tool in a Roma classroom. Since 2011, Aristotle University has been running a European Union funded project that deals with a wide range of supportive measures for Roma students. Sociologists, social workers, and educators are the primary participants responsible for its implementation. In her study Frangoulidou discusses gender relations and racism and presents an analysis of the participation and interaction of six high school students in a mixed class of twenty-eight students. The purpose of the study …

About The Destruction, Continuation, And Transformation Of Art, Frank Maet

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "About the Destruction, Continuation, and Transformation of Art" Maet offers an answer to the question raised by Arthur C. Danto's thesis how to discern art from non-art? Maet considers art from the perspective of a technologically mediated reality and he distinguishes three different views on contemporary visual art: the destruction, the continuation, and the transformation of art. Maet considers these three artistic views as different strategies to deal with our current technological condition and evaluates the merits of each of them. He argues that our thoroughly designed reality turns the strategy of artistic destruction into a dangerous …

Perspectives On Literary Reading And Book Culture, Geert Vandermeersche, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Perspectives on Literary Reading and Book Culture" Geert Vandermeersche and Ronald Soetaert provide a narrative framework for analyzing literary scholars' argumentation in the debate on literature and the humanities. Starting from MacIntyre's narrative description of epistemic "crises" they analyze the stories authors construct and the positions they take and ascribe to others within larger developing (grand) narratives on the value and function of literary reading. Both traditional narratives and new alternative (i.e., enlarged) narratives are discussed in how they set up and frame the argument and how they create dichotomies.

Reading, Literacy, And Education, Mikko Lehtonen

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In his article "Reading, Literacy, and Education" Mikko Lehtonen outlines a contextual approach to literacy. He asks how the changing relations of culture and economy, transformation of nation states and national cultures and changing notions concerning affect and cognition, transform notions of literacy and reading. Relying on the results of a recent Finnish research project on new reading communities and new ways of reading, Lehtonen highlights substantial continuities in the reading habits of the so called Google generation when compared to other generations of readers. Print media is not, however, connected self-evidently to cognitive reading among the said generation. Lehtonen …

Rhetoric, Citizenship, And Cultural Literacy, Kris Rutten, Ronald Soetaert

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Rhetoric, Citizenship, and Cultural Literacy" Kris Rutten and Ronald Soetaert start from concerns in contemporary educational debates about a growing lack of civic literacy. These complaints are raised both in the public sphere, in institutions of pedagogy, and in scholarship about the form, content, and function of civic literacy and civic education. Although there is an ongoing debate about the alleged decrease of political interest and the current state of civic literacy, it is clear that civic education has become an important focus of different governmental initiatives. Rutten and Soetaert aim to move away from a straightforward …

Integrating Social Media In Education, Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe, Pieter Verdegem

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In their article "Integrating Social Media in Education" Hadewijch Vanwynsberghe and Pieter Verdegem propose a framework in order to integrate social media literacy in an educational setting. In today's networked society students are new media users and hence the relevance in curricula to include social media literacy. Vanwynsberghe and Verdegem propose a multidimensional conceptual framework of social media literacy that includes the practical, cognitive, and affective competencies needed to deal with information of social media, to communicate with others through social media, to create content on social media, and to handle the consequences related to these three activities. On the …

Practical And Theoretical Implications Of Digitizing The Middle Ages, Roberta Capelli

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In her article "Practical and Theoretical Implications of Digitalizing the Middle Ages" Roberta Capelli discusses scholarship about and the teaching of medieval culture in digital humanities. While every medieval manuscript is an individual entity, displaying a series of unique and unrepeatable material, structural and aesthetic characteristics, digital devices are able to generate only two-dimensional photographic reproductions. However, the digital medium brings about some major improvements in the study — and teaching — of medieval manuscripts because the hypertextual nature of its applications allows us to analyse simultaneously synchronic and the diachronic dynamics. From a theoretical point of view, the difference …

Honest To God: Confessions Of A Pastor's Wife, Deana Carol Nall

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an honest reflection on my experience as a minister's wife and how I have handled this role differently than my mother and grandmother, who were also married to ministers. It documents the events that have shaped my views of God, church, and politics, and how my evolving views have affected my faith. Included are observations on traditional expectations of clergy wives and the ways I and others in this role have broken with stereotypical ideas to embrace our individuality.

A Measure Of Vessels: A Memoir, Barbara J. Walker

Theses and Dissertations

In ancient times, my father's family name is believed to have designated a surveyor, designer, or `measurer' of sailing vessels. For these ancestors, most of whom dwelled on the archipelago of islands just north of the Normandy coast, known today as the Bailiwicks of Guernsey and Jersey, the mastery of both seafaring and the building of sea-worthy vessels were matters of survival, not sport. In crafting family stories about adventures living near, in, and on the water, I discovered this seafaring family history. Thus these memoir stories unfold in layers, as stories of emigrations and the joining of clans, family …

An Interdisciplinary Approach To The American Travelogue: A Brief Look At The American South During The Civil Rights Movement, Justin G. Sangster

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the interdisciplinary nature of travel writing. By focusing on American nonfiction travel writing, this study examines the historical quality of such texts. The validity of narrative nonfiction as a historical tool is addressed. Examples from John Steinbeck's Travel's with Charley and William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways, examples are given to show the historical value and social commentary associated with such literature. Specifically, can a reader formulate any historical insight of the region in America known as `The South' by reading two famous American travelogues? The answer is yes. With cautious consideration, a reader can use travel writing, …

Weightless, Heather Leigh Burnett

Theses and Dissertations

A narrative of reflective prose, "Weightless" is the story of a woman who chronicled her life in journals for more than thirty years, including twenty years after her father's gruesome murder. The story is about the power of love and forgiveness, self-acceptance and taking ownership of the struggles that manifest from grief. Through two murder trials, marriage and divorce, a sabbatical in Europe and many adventures in between, the author exposes her truth while exploring meaning that can arrive through self-awareness. Journal writing can be a profound tool during the healing process, and "Weightless" provides excerpts from the author's journals …

Secondary Literacy: Technology And The Evolution Of Composition Pedagogy, Abigail Perrine

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis presents the theory of secondary literacy to give teachers an understanding of how technology shapes the thought processes of students. Based on the foundational theoretical work by scholar Walter J. Ong, secondary literacy describes the communicative practices of our digital age. This theory offers a means for understanding how our minds have shifted based on changes in our communicative technologies and how these changes affect the way we process ideas, store information, and create knowledge. In addition, this thesis offers practical applications for secondary literacy in terms of assignments, assessment, and pedagogical goals for composition studies. By using …

The Case Of Atticus Finch: A Modern Dissoi Logoi For Lawyers, Jessica Mcwilliams

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is an interdisciplinary work which uses a combination of political science, literature, and rhetoric to form a modern dissoi logoi using the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The thesis itself is broken up into three parts: an introductory preface, and two separate arguments. The first argument uses a rhetorical analysis on its own to examine the rhetoric used by Atticus Finch in his courtroom defense to argue that Atticus's defense was a rhetorical failure, in that it failed to persuade the jurors of his client's innocence and prevent conviction. The second argument uses rhetorical analysis …

On The Defense: Reading Isocrates' Antidosis As A Response To Plato's Phaedrus, Caleb James

Theses and Dissertations

This project reviews Isocrates' defense of the charges brought against him in the Antidosis. The central claim is that the charges he lists are perceived criticisms of him and his educational program presented in Plato's Phaedrus. This project attempts to connect Isocrates' defense of those charges with passages from the Phaedrus to which it seems he is replying.

Breastfeeding: An Analysis And Community-Based Curriculum For The Contemporary Central Arkansas Audience, Jennifer Susan Atkins-Gordeeva

Theses and Dissertations

Contemporary society includes many features that impede women's decision-making about infant feeding. The Central Arkansas community is particularly affected by those features. Because informed decision-making involves an acknowledgment of the risks of formula use, breastfeeding advocates must talk about risk. This curriculum offers one way to discuss risks of formula and challenges and supports within the community, to create a supportive environment for making informed decisions, and to commit to a lactation plan, inside a supportive, community-based setting.

A New Field Of Dreams: A Study Of The Writing Major, T J Geiger

Writing Program – Dissertations

Within Writing Studies, the tension between pedagogy and theory, between teaching and disciplinary status receives much commentary. This dissertation explores that tension within the context of the undergraduate Writing major. I begin by reviewing scholarship about advanced composition, advanced Writing, and the Writing major. I read this literature in light of concerns about student subjectivity, authorship, and disciplinary participation. Through that reading, I explore the conflicted status of the student subject imagined within this literature. The subject I discern contains elements of what Susan Miller describes as the normative subject of composition as well as elements of a revised and …