Studies in Writing and Rhetoric

Hassel and Phillips take an expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, arguing for the centering of the field's research and service on first-year writing, particularly the "new majority" of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them. “Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching” takes an expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, arguing for the centering of the field's research and service on first-year writing, particularly the "new majority" of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them. The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year, open-access, multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies, Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship, research, and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.

This book combines student writing, personal reflection, and academic analysis to urge, document, and enact more transfer-conducive writing ecologies. It examines the last century of community college/university relations in composition studies, asserting that community college faculty have long been important but marginalized participants in disciplinary and professional spaces. That marginalization perpetuates class-and race-based inequities in educational outcomes. The book argues that countering such inequities requires reimagining our disciplinary relations, both nationally and locally. It presents findings from research into community college transfer student writing experiences at the University of Utah and narrates the first three years of program development with colleagues at SLCC, discussing the emergent, sometimes unexpected outcomes of our partnerships. The book offers our experiences as an extended case study of how reimagining local disciplinary relations can challenge pervasive academic hierarchies, counter structural inequities, and expand educational opportunities for students.

Collaborative learning is not only a standard part of writing pedagogy, but it is also a part of contemporary culture. “Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice: A History” examines the rich historical and political contexts of collaborative learning, starting with John Dewey's impact on progressive education in the early twentieth century. In the 1930s, for instance, collaborative practices flourished. In the 1950s, they operated in stealth, within an ideology suspicious of collaboration. Collaborative pedagogies blossomed in the protests of the 1960s and continued into the 1980s with the social turn in composition theory. Twenty-first-century collaborative practices influenced by pragmatism are found in writing centers, feminist pedagogies, and computer-mediated instruction. Mara Holt argues that as composition changes with the influence of ecological and posthuman theories, there is evidence of a significant pragmatist commitment to evaluating theory by its consequences.

D. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson offer rich academic inquiry into the idea of "the veteran" as well as into ways that veteran culture has been fostered or challenged in writing classrooms, in writing centers, and in college communities more generally. For good reasons, the rise of veterans studies has occurred within the discipline of writing studies, with its interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, pedagogy, and community outreach. Writing faculty are often a point of first contact with veteran students, and writing classrooms are by their nature the site of disclosures, providing opportunities to make connections and hear narratives that debunk the myth of the stereotypical combat veteran of popular culture. Presenting a more nuanced approach to understanding "the veteran" leads not only to more useful research, but also to more wide-ranging and significant scholarship and community engagement. Such an approach recognizes veterans as assets to the college campus, encourages institutions to customize their veterans programs and courses, and leads to more thoughtful engagement with veterans in the writing classroom.

What does it mean to teach after pedagogy? For a long time, composition's pedagogical conversation has been defined by its theoretical disagreements. Is learning a cognitive process or a social one? Is the self-expressed or distributed? Can writing be understood as a process, or is any process too messy to be understood? These debates have finally run out of steam, argues Paul Lynch, leaving composition in a "postpedagogical" moment, a moment when the field no longer believes that pedagogical theories can account for the complexities of teaching. After Pedagogy extends the postpedagogical conversation by turning to the experience of teaching itself. Though the work of John Dewey, After Pedagogy argues that experience offers an arena in which theory and practice can coexist. Most important, experience can fashion the teachable moments of postpedagogical practice into resources for further growth. "We cannot know what precisely the student will do with what we have offered, but we can think with the student about the experience of the offer itself." By turning what students and teachers know about writing into an area of intellectual inquiry, a philosophy of experience can make teaching sustainable after pedagogy.

“Reframing the Relational” examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive, sustainable initiatives. Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic, reflexive, relational activity among teacher-learners, she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines, drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise, orienting to change, and embracing play. Based on this analysis, she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

As our field of composition studies invites students to compose with new media and multimedia, we need to ask about other possibilities for communication, representation, and making knowledge-including possibilities that may exceed those of the letter, the text based, the composed. In this provocative look at how composition incorporates new forms of media into actual classrooms, Jonathan Alexander and Jacqueline Rhodes argue persuasively that composition's embrace of new media and multimedia often makes those media serve the rhetorical ends of writing and composition, as opposed to exploring the rhetorical capabilities of those media. Practical employment of new media often ignores their rich contexts, which contain examples of the distinct logics and different affordances of those media, wasting the very characteristics that make them most effective and potentially revolutionary for pedagogy. “On Multimodality: New Media in Composition Studies” urges composition scholars and teachers to become aware of the rich histories and rhetorical capabilities of new media so that students' work with those media is enlivened and made substantive.

This collection explores decolonial shifts in composition and rhetoric informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods. The discipline of composition and rhetoric stands at a crossroad in its pedagogical, research, and public commitments. Decolonial ruptures in writing and rhetoric studies work to build new horizons, new histories, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that break from Western hegemonic models of knowledge production. This collection functions as one access point within a constellation of such work, forming an ecology of decolonial shifts informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods. Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise emerge across a spectrum, from geo-and body politics of knowledge and understanding to local histories emerging from colonial peripheries. Romeo García and Damián Baca offer the expressions elsewhere and otherwise as invitations to join existing networks and envision pluriversal ways of thinking, writing, and teaching that surpass the field's Eurocentric geographies, cartographies, and chronologies.

Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT), reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado, Bell, and Williams, foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated dialogue, fantasy/allegory, and autobiography, have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method. Arguing that counterstory provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology, Martinez applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through counterstory genres, all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.

Drawing from her decade leading Salt Lake Community College's Community Writing Center (CWC), Tiffany Rousculp advocates cultivating relationships within a "rhetoric of respect" that recognizes the abilities, contributions, and goals of all participants. Rousculp calls for understanding change not as a result or outcome, but as the potential for people to make choices regarding textual production within regulating environments. The book's dynamic movement through stories of failure, success, misunderstanding, and discovery is characteristic of the way in which academic—community relationships in transition pivot between disruption and sustainability. By inquiring into the CWC's history, evolution, internal dynamics, relationships with stakeholders, and interplay between power and resistance, Rousculp situates the CWC not as an anomaly in composition studies but as a pointer to where change can happen and what is possible in academic—community writing partnerships when uncertainty, persistence, and respect converge.

Through a mix of history, theory, and story, Anna Plemons explores the fate of the Arts in Corrections (AIC) program at New Folsom Prison in California in order to study prison education in general as well as the disciplinary goals of rhetoric and composition classrooms. When viewed as a microcosm of the broader enterprise, the prison classroom highlights the way that composition and rhetoric as a discipline continues to make use of colonial ways of knowing and being that work against the decolonial intentions of the field. Plemons suggests that a truly decolonial turn in composition cannot be achieved as long as economic logics and rhetorics of individual transformation continue to be the default currency for ascribing value in prison writing programs specifically and in out-of-school writing communities more generally. Indigenous scholarship provides the theoretical basis for Plemons's proposed intervention in the ways it both pushes back against individualized, economic assessments of value and describes design principles for research and pedagogy that are respectful, reciprocal, and relational. “Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom” includes narrative selections from the author and current and former AIC participants, inviting readers into the lives of incarcerated authors and demonstrating the effects of relationality on prison-scholars, ultimately upending the misconception that these writers and their teachers exist apart from the web of relations beyond the prison walls. With contributions from incarcerated prison-scholars Ken Blackburn, Bryson L. Cole, Harry B. Grant Jr., Adam Hinds, Hung-Linh "Ronnie" Hoang, Andrew Molino, Michael L. Owens, Wayne Vaka, and Martin Williams.

Redesigning Composition for Multilingual Realities argues that students of English as a second language, rather than always being novice English language learners, often provide models for language uses as English continues to spread and change as an international lingua franca. Starting from the premise that "multilingualism is a daily reality for all students-all language users," Jay Jordan proceeds to both complicate and enrich the responsibilities of the composition classroom as it attempts to accommodate and instruct a diversity of students in the practices of academic writing. But as Jordan admits, theory is one thing; practical efforts to implement multilingual and even translingual approaches to writing instruction are another. Through a combination of historical survey, meta-analytical critique of existing literature, and naturalistic classroom research, Jordan's study points to new directions for composition theory and pedagogy that more fully account for the presence and role of multilingual writers.

Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This collection centers writing program administration (WPA) discourse as intersectional race work. In this historical moment in public discourse when race and racist logics are no longer sanitized in coded language or veiled political rhetoric, contributors provide examples of how WPA scholars can push back against the ways in which larger, cultural rhetorical projects inform our institutional practices, are coded into administrative agendas, and are reflected in programmatic objectives and interpersonal relations. Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs. Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.

Unlike much current writing studies research, “Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference” addresses conversations about diversity in higher education, institutional racism, and the teaching of writing by taking a microinteractional look at the ways people define themselves and are defined by others within institutional contexts. Focusing on four specific peer review moments in a writing classroom, Stephanie L. Kerschbaum reveals the ways in which students mark themselves and others, as well as how these practices of marking are contextualized within writing programs and the broader institution. Kerschbaum's unique approach provides a detailed analysis of diversity rhetoric and the ways institutions of higher education market diversity in and through student bodies, as well as sociolinguistic analyses of classroom discourse that are coordinated with students' writing and the moves they make around that writing. Each of these analyses is grounded in an approach to difference that understands it to be dynamic, relational, and emergent-in-interaction, a theory developed out of Bakhtin's ethical scholarship, the author's lived experience of deafness, and close attention to students' interactions with one another in the writing classroom. “Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference” enriches the teaching of writing by challenging forms of institutional racism, enabling teachers to critically examine their own positioning and positionality vis-à-vis their students, and highlighting the ways that differences motivate rich relationship building within the classroom.

Moving outside of classroom-based and English-dominant contexts, Rachel Bloom-Pojar draws from an ethnographic study of a summer health program in the Dominican Republic to examine what exactly rhetorical translanguaging might look like, arguing for a rhetorical approach that accounts for stigma, race, and institutional constraints. Within a context where the variety of Spanish spoken by the local community is stigmatized, Bloom-Pojar examines how raciolinguistic ideologies inform notions of stigma in this region of the Dominican Republic, and then demonstrates how participants and patients in this study "flip the script" to view "professional" or formal Spanish as language in need of translation, privileging patients' discourses of Spanish and health. This framework for the rhetoric of translanguaging: • Complicates language ideologies to challenge linguistic inequality • Cultivates translation spaces across modes, languages, and discourses • Draws from collective resources through relationship building • Critically reinvents discourse between institutions and communitiesUltimately, the study emphasizes how a focus on collective linguistic resources can enhance translanguaging practices between institutional and community contexts. The ILP offers both the freedom and the structure to guide students to success. Yes, letting go can be scary-but the results speak for themselves.