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Flowers, Katherine S. CCCC's National Language Policy Revisited. Sept. CCC. Posted 10/24/2019.
Flowers, Katherine S. "Writing Studies' Concessions to the English-Only Movement: Revisiting CCCC's National Language Policy and Its Reception." College Composition and Communication 71.1 (2019): 31-59. Print.
Katherine S. Flowers reports on the creation and reception of the National Language Policy (NLP) approved by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in 1988. Noting that a large body of scholarship has addressed the 1974 statement on "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (32), Flowers contends that her focus on the NLP highlights the "potential pitfalls" inherent in some of the moves she traces in the creation and dissemination of the NLP (33).
Policy development for CCCC, Flowers writes, is about "engagement" with important stakeholders and issues surrounding writing studies, but she argues that scholars contributing to the creation of policy may not always accord perfectly with each other as to exactly what the policy is meant to do or what it means in practice (32). In the case of the NLP, Flowers sees in it a desire to find common ground across constituencies, which, in her view, led to a problematic policy that should be re-examined and revised (36, 51).
Flowers traces the NLP's inception from the early 1980s, when Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson advocated for "a new policy that 'would reassert the legitimacy of languages other than English, and American dialects other than standard'" (qtd. in Flowers 35). Though some argued that the "Students' Right" document was sufficient, the rise of the "English-only" movement inspired increased attention to the question (36). Chairing the new Language Policy Committee, Smitherman-Donaldson pressed for the new statement, and the policy was passed at the Annual Business Meeting, March 19, 1988 (36, 54).
Flowers examines the policy and its reception through a "sociocultural linguistics approach" that explores "what meanings are being presupposed and created, and by whom, and how those meanings evolve, and to what ends" (37). She analyzes the NLP itself along with archival contents held at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) (37).
A decade of correspondence in these archives detailed the development of the policy over time as well as a mailing done in 1991 to disseminate the policy to a wide range of stakeholders, including "school district superintendents," "the state director/supervisor of language arts in each state," "every member of Congress," "every governor"—in short, a long list of recipients (37-38). Responses arrived from governors, representatives, and education professionals from twenty-six states, Puerto Rico, and Washington, D.C., as well as from the executive director of the prominent English-only group, U.S. English (37).
Flowers explores scholarship contending that English-only policies advance the oppression of marginalized groups while obscuring the degree to which communication consists of more than languages. This scholarship points out that multiple languages have always been a part of U.S. classrooms and communities and sees the existence and encouragement of diverse language use as a strength. Yet, Flowers argues, "many of writing studies' policies and pedagogies" adhere to what Xiaoye You and Suresh Canagarajah call a "monolingual orientation" (34-35). Flowers sees signs of this orientation in the language of the NLP itself, for example in that it twice refers to English as "the language of wider communication" and promotes "respect" for English, which, in Flowers's view, does not need enhanced respect (36).
The main focus for Flowers is the response to the 1991 mailing. Noting that many of the responses were almost certainly written by staff, she assigns authorship according to "whose office or organization sponsored that letter" (38). Her research question was "How did public policymakers interpret CCCC's stance on English-only policies?" (38).
Expecting her coding to lead to many variations, Flowers writes that in fact each of the 60 responses she examined could be assigned to one of four categories (40). The largest category, represented by 24 letters, was "Noncommittal." Respondents in this column may have sent standardized forms or, as she says about the example from a Michigan state representative, "grappled with" the issue (47), writing only that they "remain[ed] flexible" (qtd. in Flowers 47). Such responses, Flowers posits, may indicate that the writers may have been persuadable.
The next largest category, consisting of 18 responses, praised CCCC's anti-English-only stance. Responses from officials and public figures like Texas Congressman Henry B. Gonzalez reinforced concerns about the negative effects of English-only policies and echoed contentions about the importance of multilingualism to the United States' place in the global community (39-40). Others envisioned putting the policy statement to use in developing future initiatives, although Flowers suggests that such hopes may have been overly optimistic (41).
In eleven responses, Flowers's coding revealed a view of CCCC as a "hesitant critic of English-only policies" (41). Flowers cites replies from Alaska and Hawai'i as examples of the argument that American culture has always been multilingual (42). In Flowers's view, "the NLP essentially calls for English Plus" while the superintendent of the Hawai'i Department of Education references "programs that do not center English at all," such as courses taught in and requiring immersion in the Hawai'ian language (43). The emphasis in such responses, Flowers writes, is on promoting "language rights and diversity" (43).
Flowers finds most troubling "how easily" (47) knowledgeable policy makers such as Senators Paul Simon and Dennis DeConcini found the NLP to be supportive of English-only positions. Flowers quotes instances in which the seven who took this view drew on the text of the policy itself to depict it as advocating monolingualism as an aid to widespread "communication" and as an antidote to "segregation" (43). Flowers foregrounds the response from the executive director of the English-only organization, U.S. English, who writes that his group "fully supports the resolution adopted by CCCC" (qtd. in Flowers 43). In her view, the text itself "was so focused on the English language" that even careful readers could arrive at such conclusions (46).
As remedies, Flowers suggests research into how such public engagement by writing studies is developed and functions as well as how such policies are read across time (49-50). In terms of action, she proposes, first, that "[d]ecentering English" should lead policy writers to "abandon the notion that English is a necessary component of composition" rather than, in Ellen Cushman's words, "one of many language assets available to writers in this world" (qtd. in Flowers 51). Second, scholars should refocus on "Students' Right to Their Own Language," recognizing challenges to the assumptions behind language as a right while promoting "a reflexive, practice-based approach" that accords users agency in determining their own language needs (52).
Finally, writing studies can more fully endorse the existence and value of "translingual practice," which would "focus less on particular codes and more on creating opportunities for students to learn to communicate across languages and modes" (53).
Categories: CCC, civil rhetoric, composition studies, difference, Diversity, History of composition, public rhetoric, translingualism, writing studies | Tags: Ellen Cushman, English-only movement, Geneva Smitherman-Donaldson, monolingual orientation, monolingualism, NCTE, Students' Right to Their Own Language, Suresh Canagarajah, U.S. English, writing, Xiaoye You | Permalink.
Schey and Blackburn. Queering Normative Literacy. RTE, Aug. 2019. Posted 10/16/2019.
Schey, Ryan, and Mollie Blackburn. "Queer Ruptures of Normative Literacy Practices: Toward Visualizing, Hypothesizing, and Empathizing." Research in the Teaching of English 54.1 (2019): 58-80. Print.
Ryan Schey and Mollie Blackburn discuss a study of their students in an "arts-focused charter high school in a Midwestern city" (64) as the students responded to Steve Brezenoff's novel Brooklyn, Burning. The course was an "LGBTQ-themed" (58) literature course for juniors and seniors (64). The authors argue that the book created "ruptures" of normative literary practices, highlighting how readers' responses to these ruptures could either shut down discussion or provide opportunities for learning (59).
Schey and Blackburn detail their research methodology, in which they combined ethnography and teacher research (63). Schey acted as participant-observer while Blackburn conducted "practitioner inquiry," designing curriculum and assessment procedures (64). Materials for analysis included curriculum documents and student work, as well as field notes, audio and video recordings, and entrance and exit interviews (67). Thirteen of the fourteen enrollees in the course participated. Schey positions himself as a "white straight cis man" and Blackburn identifies as a "white queer cis woman" (66). Both have extensive experience working in support of LGBTQ groups.
The authors differentiate between LGBT scholarship and queer theory. The former, they write, "tend[s] to characterize sexuality and gender as stable, using positivist and modernist lenses" (60). In contrast, queer studies "destabilize fixed notions of gender and sexuality" (60). The authors review a number of studies that they feel can endorse not only "heteronormativity" but also "homonormativity," when "binary framings" lead to "oversimplification" of students' perceptions of sexuality and gender (61).
Literacy, for these writers, is itself ideological, influenced by context and extant power relations; they discuss how differently a student might read a text with friends as opposed to under the scrutiny of teachers (61). Classroom power relations make some forms of literacy response "normative and dominant"; queer theorists like those reviewed by Schey and Blackburn attempt to disrupt such processes and open the way for alternatives (62).
Reading experiences that confront students with ruptures in their normalized expectations, in the authors' view, force them to attend to inherent possibilities that are otherwise obscured (63). Rather than addressing confrontations with such ruptures as "individual cognitive experiences," the authors argue for a perspective contextualized within a social environment, an approach that they write requires more attention to race than is often provided (62). They turn to R. A. Ferguson as a scholar who, by "vehemently den[ying] the discreteness of any category such as gender, sexuality or race" offers a lens through which students can encounter generative ruptures (63).
Arguing for their ethnographic approach as a means to address "oppressive power relations," the authors write that of their thirteen students, one was "white and Asian," while the rest were white (64). A chart classifies the students, with a caveat that the students' gender and sexual identities were "mulitiple, variable, and fluid," with some changing after the study ended. Five were straight and cis gendered; a gay trans man was not named in the study, while another woman identified as queer and another as a lesbian (65). Three of the named students are listed as fluid in gender.
Brezenoff's book, Ryan and Blackburn contend, functions as queer in that the "ruptures" it creates resist normative modes of literacy. They follow a brief plot summary with the statement that the novel "queers gender . . . but it also queers sexuality, families and homes, and time" (66). The gender of two of the main characters cannot be ascertained, nor can their sexuality. The novel contrasts the heteronormative contexts from which these characters emerge with a context in which characters play changing roles as partners and caregivers; moreover, an unusual chronology defies attempts to impose "order and stability" (66).
In the introduction to the article, Brezenoff suggests that his work reacts to attempts to assign fixed gender and sexuality through stereotypical, sexist characteristics; the authors write that his refusal to gender the two characters "destabilized not only sexist practices and ideologies but also those grounded in cisnormativity" (59).
The authors recount classroom discussions in which students grappled with "seeing" versus "visualizing," "understanding" versus "hypothesizing," and "connecting" versus "empathizing." Some students expressed frustration that Brezenoff's handling of characters made it hard to "gaze directly at the characters and find them legible according to [their] normative definitions of gender and sexuality" (69). The authors contrast other students who used the textual ambiguity to "visualize alongside" the characters, as if "looking over [their] shoulders," thereby adopting new perspectives (69). Ambiguity, one student suggests, invites more readers to identify with the characters because they can imagine different characteristics.
Similarly, some students wanted to understand definitive answers to questions raised by the text, such as the cause of a fire (71). The authors contrast this need with the willingness of other students to "hypothesize" alternatives in which concrete characteristics were seen as contextual and fluid rather than fixed in specific bodies (72). According to the authors, the need to reduce ruptures to "fixed, stable, and singular knowledge" cast ruptures as "problems" rather than as "expanded epistemological practices" that invited "different ideas through different pathways" (76).
The authors recount a single mention of race as a rupture students struggled to address. One of the more resistant students said that he could not deal with ambiguity in race along with his uncertainties about gender and sexuality (72-73). Other students explored various ways of finding empathy across what the authors see as "white homonormative interpretations" (73), but the bell rang and ended the discussion. In contrast, the authors argue that the book's depiction of a character's addiction encouraged students to visualize the addiction as only one part of the character's situation, thus allowing them to empathize in ways a narrower portrayal would have curtailed (74-75). Schey and Blackburn contend that the ability of several students to connect with characters with addictions but not people of color reflects national attitudes that equate addiction with criminality in Black people but with illness in need of care in whites (76).
In the authors' view, presenting students with texts that create ruptures in their normal reading processes imposes risks, but that such ruptures can become "opportunities" rather "obstacles," means, they contend, that "reading with ruptures is a risk worth taking" (77).
Categories: CCC, Course design, culture, difference, Diversity, Epistemology, Gender, LGBTQ, literacy, Race, Students' Reading and Writing Practices, Teaching Reading | Tags: LGBT theory, literacy practices, literacy studies, queer theory, R. A. Ferguson, reading as a literacy practice, teaching writing, writing | Permalink.
Lauer and Brumberger. Workplace Writing as Multimodal Editing. CCC, June 2019. Posted 07/30/2019.
Lauer, Claire, and Eva Brumberger. "Redefining Writing for the Responsive Workplace." College Composition and Communication 70.4 (2019): 634-63. Print.
Claire Lauer and Eva Brumberger received a grant from the Conference on College Composition and Communication to study workplace writing. They recruited nine professional writers and shadowed them in the workplace for twelve hours each for a total of more than a hundred hours (642). The study included pre- and post-observation interviews that the authors believed not only allowed them a nuanced view of the writers' work experiences but also afforded a glimpse into features of current workplace writing that the writers themselves may not have recognized (643).
Participants included content and media strategists, technical writers and editors, communications directors, and "UX" or user-experience analysts (642).
The authors describe the current state of professional workplace writing as characterized by ongoing, often rapid and unpredictable change (638). They cite past studies that found that the ability to collaborate with team members and experts, to innovate and adapt to evolving contexts and audiences, to use a range of developing technologies across platforms, and to produce multiple genres were widely valued by employers (638-39). While "writing" continued to be a much-sought-after capability, studies of job descriptions found that new positions such as "content developer" or "social media writer" increasingly appeared. Desirable traits included time management, critical thinking, and "detail orientation" (639).
The authors argue that traditional understandings not only of "writing" but also of "editing" no longer align with what students can expect to find in the workplace. The model of writing taught in classrooms, proceeding from invention of original material through drafting and revision, they contend, is "isolated and siloed" in comparison to what will actually be required (639, 647). Lauer and Brumberger find that in the current workplace, a writer's job shifts from classical invention and production to finding the best use of information to further an employer's goals within time and budget limitations (644).
To describe this shift, the authors argue that "editing" can on longer be considered a "review" process separate from writing and intended to improve clarity or correctness or to ensure quality (640-41). Rather, they claim that workplace writing now is "writing-as-multimodal-editing," in which writers "work with myriad modes of content—often encountered in medias res after the content has been originated by coworkers or consultants" (637).
Multimodal editors are responsible for modifying, adapting, designing, editing, selecting and constructing content in ways that are dispersed, nonlinear, collaborative, and responsive. (637)
To show writers "Working with Existing Content," they depict "Tom" "extract[ing]" multiple genres from a press release received overnight (645) and "Connie" working with a video provided by a client (646). Though the writers characterized their work as "writing," the authors contend that "writing-as-editing" more accurately captured their activities (647).
The importance of "Specific Constraints" is depicted by the need to produce video segments with a demarcated time frame and to meet exact requirements for original words in "site content" in order to improve search-engine optimization (648-49). The authors illustrate "Versioned Communication" via Tom's need to convert press releases and technical documents to forms accessible to "your regular person" and suitable for social media, as well as for audiences in the organization's "internal education, sales, and management teams" (649-50).
The use of press releases also serves as a demonstration of the "Hybridization of Genre Conventions" (650). Lauer and Brumberger's observations note how such conventions may be tweaked, as when a printed manual that has been converted to a tablet app for technicians is structured with chapters to more nearly fit what the users found familiar (651). The authors also contend that genre rules may be "ignored" if necessary to meet the required purpose in the given context (653). For example, Madison, a communications director for a small nonprofit, no longer issues conventional press releases because reporters resisted such extensive documents. Instead, she communicates in smaller chunks like emails and on the phone (651-52).
Moreover, when Madison writes press-release language, she now produces it with a more informal tone that can be reused as a blog post, saving herself time and effort (652). The authors write that Madison's decision to downplay the traditional press release illustrates the ways in which "editing" often involves choices about what "not" to write before any material is produced at all (653; emphasis original).
Participants also perform "Analytic Optimization," which the authors describe as micro-level analysis of user responses to seemingly minor decisions via analytical software (653). Conducting "A/B testing of a live website" using two versions of a single menu falls under Ryan's job responsibilities, while Madison assesses the "various click-through rates of email campaigns and messages," a task that requires her to stay up-to-date with Facebook algorithms (654). The authors note that these tasks must adhere to budgetary limitations so that the writers must prioritize strategically when choosing among the many small changes that may affect audience responses. They argue that "writers (not developers) have the rhetorical training" for these decisions and can highlight the value of their rhetorical skill in their workplaces (655).
Participants also undertook "Image Considerations," for example, deciding about the rhetorical effects of using emojis and animations to convey tone, capture attention, and follow changing communication conventions even in official texts (655-57). The need for this rhetorical awareness, in the authors' view, should encourage writing programs to introduce students to "the rhetoric of a range of modes" (657).
Among suggestions for preparing students for these tasks are methods of acquiring content for manipulation from businesses and organizations and the creation of "sprint assignments" that help students recognize the importance of working within time and length constraints (657-58). Assignments that focus on "repurpos[ing] content" for a variety of contexts, genres, and audiences can encourage an awareness of the rhetorical possibilities and decisions inherent in the original text (659). The authors contend that this focus on multimodal editing privileges revision in ways that more traditional composition instruction may not (658).
The authors write that students learn the rhetorical skills required by workplace writing in composition classrooms, but could also benefit from recognizing the value of multimodal editing skills they already practice on their own. They could be better encouraged to see their knowledge and learning as assets in future professional writing contexts (660).
We need to rethink our notions of authorship, reconsider our assumptions about the traditional writing/editing process, and modify the ways in which we prepare our students for this kind of professional work. (657)
Categories: Audience, CCC, collaborative learning, Course design, Design, Disciplinarity, Multimodality, process pedagogy, Professional writing, rethinking composition, Technical communication, Technology, Writing Processes | Tags: content development, editing as writing, genre, genre conventions, invention in writing, responsive workplace, the writing process, UX analysis, workplace writing, writing, writing on the job | Permalink.
Serviss and Voss. Researching WPA Expertise in 21st-Century Paradigms. CCC, Feb. 2019. Posted 03/13/2109.
Serviss, Tricia, and Julia Voss. "Researching Writing Program Administration Expertise in Action: A Case Study of Collaborative Problem Solving as Transdisciplinary Practice." College Composition and Communication 70.3 (2019): 446-75. Print.
Tricia Serviss and Julia Voss urge writing studies to recognize that "twentieth-century disciplinary paradigms" (448) have been replaced by twenty-first-century approaches to research that offer opportunities for rhetoric and composition/writing studies (RCWS) to assert the field's disciplinarity in ways that highlight its particular expertise.
The authors draw on long-standing scholarship in RCWS to argue that the twentieth-century approach, in which "research" primarily involves building "agreed-upon content knowledge" (450), has "historically pitted RCWS's teaching, research, and administrative mandates against one another" (446). They document efforts to develop recognition of writing studies as an academic field with intellectual weight that have led scholars to define administrative work as research or, in some cases, to suggest that RCWS practitioners engaged in cross-disciplinary work should consider "strategically downplaying" the field's shared content (449).
In the authors' view, conflicted views of what constitutes research in RCWS have further led writing professionals to focus on local, small-scale actions as sources for knowledge claims and to rely on "experiential narratives of WPA work" (448), strategies that the authors feel limit awareness of the transferability of WPA expertise.
Serviss and Voss cite Karen Bishop in designating the divide between research and administrative activity as a "false binary" (448). They argue that the shift in research paradigms specifically aligns with what they consider the expertise that RCWS is especially positioned to offer (449-50). They contend that new paradigms focus on activity and collaboration, the hallmarks of WPA work:
[T]wenty-first-century disciplinarity [is] characterized by a focus on wicked problems that demand the expertise of multiple disciplines, an emphasis on practical and applied research addressing real-world needs, and accountability of researchers to stakeholders. (450)
The authors cite Michael Gibbons, who claims that new research approaches must shift from benefitting only a specific discipline in order to address "the needs of society, government, or industry" and must circumvent "hyperspecialization" to allow experts from different disciplines to pool their abilities and "produce work that is greater than the sum of its parts" (471n4).
Among the concepts examined by Serviss and Voss is "new disciplinarity" in which disciplines become "communities of practice"; in such approaches, activity becomes central to a discipline's identity (450-51). The authors further apply the precepts of "transdisciplinarity" in which the focus shifts to "how" disciplines deploy their expertise (451; emphasis original). They analyze the transdisciplinary approach of Justin K. Rademaekers, who proposes that in working together on a problem, disciplinary contributors "transcending" their disciplinary identities can create a narrow area of consensus that will enable collaboration for the problem at hand (451-52).
The example the authors present of RCWS specialists working across disciplines in problem-solving, in their view, demonstrates that disciplinarity need not be transcended and prior consensus is not necessary. They argue that their example illustrates how RCWS specialists can participate as experts in a transdisciplinary project, asserting their legitimacy in twenty-first-century research (452-53).
Serviss and Voss were two of the seven members of an interdisciplinary group with a shared concern about student writing, critical thinking, and information literacy. In addition to the two RCWS specialists, the group included faculty at different levels and professional staff expert in cross-campus learning initiatives, assessment, and quantitative measurement. One member specialized in comparative politics, another in communication, and a third in civil engineering.
This group, based at Santa Clara University, a "midsized private liberal arts university in northern California," attended the four-day 2016 Teaching and Learning National Institute at Evergreen State College's Washington Center for Undergraduate Education (454). During the Institute, the group developed "a three-year plan that became the SWIRL (Success in Writing, Information, and Research Literacy) Initiative." This initiative addressed issues with student writing across campus, focusing on upper-level writing (455).
The authors report on SWIRL to highlight the "rarely documented methods of writing-program building in real time" (455), emphasizing how "activities rooted in rhetorical practices of RCWS" were integral to the team's efforts (456).
The article recounts the roles of different disciplinary approaches in the first step of defining the problem, as members drew on different kinds of evidence, such as large-scale assessment data versus direct assessment research advanced by the RCWS faculty (457). The authors present the emphasis on problem development and an understanding of the social nature of problem "invention" as integral to the RCWS expertise contributing to the group (456). Team members had to "persuade" their colleagues of the validity and relevance of their data in order to "incrementally" arrive at a "shared understanding" from which to proceed (458).
The writers' intent is to provide a thorough, concrete analysis of how "WPA program-building heuristics" functioned in a transdisciplinary context in which the diversity of disciplinary expertise enabled the development of a cross-campus initiative (460). A central feature of such twenty-first-century processes, the authors contend, is the way in which disciplinary difference brought a wide range of expert views into the collaborative effort without requiring team members to downplay their expertise (468).
Among the features of the collaboration drawn from WPA expertise are the use of "backward design," that is, beginning with outcomes and working backward to determine how they can be met (472n9). WPA practices like "collaborative visual invention" (for example, the use of chalkboards to capture ideas and processes) (464), and "collaborative programmatic scaffolding and planning" (WPAs were among those recommending the use of a GANTT chart) (461, 466) were central to this effort. The authors emphasize that the choice of these tactics did not emerge from prior discussion but rather from the diverse expertise brought to bear as the team defined and worked toward its goal (461). The focus was on "a common problem" rather than "common knowledge, vocabulary, and methods" (469; emphasis original).
The authors urge more explicit research on the WPA practices that align with the twenty-first-century paradigm. Such research, they argue, can make more visible "the value of the complicated work we do" (467).
Like all research traditions, WPA scholarship needs to account not only for our work as deliverable products . . . but also the expert methods that we develop, refine, adopt, adapt, and master as we work with others on these deliverable products. (467)
Categories: CCC, composition studies, Disciplinarity, Expertise, rethinking composition, writing studies | Tags: backward design, collaborative visual invention, Evergreen State College, GANTT charts, Justin K. Rademaekers, Karen Bishop, Michael Gibbons, new disciplinarity, RCWS, research methodology in writing studies, rhetoric and composition/writing studies, Santa Clara University, Teaching and Learning National Institute, transdisciplinarity, writing, writing research | Permalink.
Daniel, James Rushing. Student Debt and Composition Classes. CCC, Dec. 2018. Posted 01/30/2019.
Daniel, James Rushing. "'A Debt Is Just the Perversion of a Promise': Composition and the Student Loan." College Composition and Communication 70.2 (2018): 195-221. Print.
James Rushing Daniel addresses "debt" as a pervasive force in current culture and in the lives of students in writing classes. He argues that a course based in the study of debt's history and effects is a useful and pedagogically appropriate composition option.
Daniel presents statistics illustrating the increasing financial pressure associated with a college education, in particular the influence of the student-loan industry. For example, in the early 1990s, 51% of students graduated with debt averaging $10,200, while in 2012, 71% owed loans averaging $29,400. Time to repayment has risen from 10 years to 19.7 years (196).
In Daniel's view, this phenomenon is part of a larger component of the neoliberal "fast capitalist economy" discussed by Tony Scott in Dangerous Writing: Understanding the Political Economy of Composition (199). Daniel writes that debt, in such theories, is "an ideological apparatus with significant bearing on the agency of subjects in contemporary global society" (197). As such, it drives choices of educational environment and direction, career, and life events such as marriage or home-owning (197, 215). Debt also carries moral weight that further reduces citizens' abilities to resist the pressures of neoliberal culture (201). Moreover, it forces students to view education "increasingly . . . through an economic framework" (198). Daniel sees debt as a ubiquitous and pervasive element students will face in college and beyond.
To Daniel, composition scholars and the academy in general have failed to properly attend to debt as a component of students' lives (215). He cites robust efforts to retain students that ignore these students' financial burdens and thus actually exacerbate the conditions that drive many students to leave college without completing their degrees (201). While, for Daniel, scholars like Marc Bousquet, Chase Bollig, and Pegeen Reichert Powell address debt as a factor in the political economy of writing classrooms, with some exceptions such theorists tend to "gloss its enduring effects while overstating composition's capacity to prepare students to navigate it" (201). He quotes Bollig, for example, as arguing that a critically active writing class can help students "resist and thrive" in the face of capitalist exigencies (qtd. in Daniel 201).
The author cites scholars from varied fields, such as anthropology, sociology, and philosophy as well as literary studies to enlarge his discussion of debt. Among insights gleaned from those fields is a critique of "debt's most disempowering aspect," which is "its narrative of impermanence" (204). Accepting that most people will be "in debt forever," in this reading, means disabling the illusion that any debt is a "temporary financial transaction" on the path toward an affluent, entrepreneurial future, replacing it with a more accurate awareness of the function of debt in fast capitalism (205).
Daniel asks compositionists to recognize how writing programs are "necessarily entwined with the problem of student debt" and to consider the costs that students ultimately pay to join a college writing class (202). He presents his own intervention, a course designed to introduce students to the ways debt functions in neoliberal society. He contends that this course stops short of promising to free students from debt's powerful influence. Rather, he hopes that by bringing the issue of debt to the foreground, the course can provide students with a deeper awareness that may lead to more informed choices and one day inspire them to "strive for financial justice in public contexts" in whatever ways they feel are open to them (203).
Suggesting the first-year students will need more scaffolding than students taking the course in later semesters (206), Daniel responds to several potential critiques of his course plan. To the concern that the topic may be too narrow, Daniel responds that because of its influence in all aspects of current life, the topic of debt speaks to the field's goal of making coursework meaningful to all students (207). While Daniel notes that some students may find the topic irrelevant if they haven't borrowed to attend college, or if they have already made debt commitments they can't change, he points out that many may need to borrow later and will benefit from the broader awareness that can inform future decisions (207-08). Some students, he argues, may be reluctant to share personal information, but this resistance can be addressed with work on personal writing as part of a composition curriculum (207).
He responds as well to concerns that a focus on a single topic may not teach the more general competences that have been defined as the field's obligation to students (213). Drawing on the scholarship of Patricia Bizzell and others, Daniel argues that "taking up social issues and viewing them rhetorically" aligns with compositionists' goal of creating writers who are critically aware of the power of writing as social action and able to engage in public discourse effectively (213-14).
The course Daniel introduces begins with an introduction to basic economic concepts, then moves to personal writing that encourages students to situate themselves in the matrix of capitalist economics by sharing their experiences of the financial system (208-10). A third unit may involve rhetorical analysis of financial documents and advertisements so that students can assess how debt is presented as impermanent and empowering when it may be a more complex factor in students' lives (211-12). As a final focus, the course examines possible ways of negotiating or resisting common narratives about and normalized interactions with debt to present "models and opportunities for activism that could be emulated if students so desired" (213). He provides readings, assignments, and examples of student work.
In Daniel's view, it may not be possible for students to "resist" and "thrive" simultaneously (214). He reiterates that writing professionals should temper their expectations that critical awareness can free students from capitalist exigencies. He encourages the "short term" goal of "present[ing] students with more agentive modes of thinking and acting in the context of neoliberalism while being clear that there are no panacea" (214). To this end, he urges writing studies to respond to his claim that the field "has largely failed to acknowledge debt's vast material and ideological function" (215).
In particular, he notes, future research should address how debt as a necessary adjunct to education affects how students understand and value the writing they find themselves viewing "through a financial lens" (216). By correcting its neglect, he claims, the field can address the degree to which debt as a permanent reality in capitalist culture has endangered "the fundamental connection between education and democracy" (215).
Categories: capitalism, CCC, civil rhetoric, Course design, public rhetoric | Tags: Chase Bollig, Dangerous Writing, fast capitalism, Marc Bousquet, neoliberalism, Patricia Bizzell, Pegeen Reichert Powell, political economy of composition, social justice, student debt, student loans, student retention, teaching writing, Tony Scott, writing | Permalink.
Sills, Ellery. Creating "Outcomes 3.0." CCC, Sept. 2018. Posted 10/24/2018.
Sills, Ellery. "Making Composing Policy Audible: A Genealogy of the WPA Outcomes Statement 3.0." College Composition and Communication 70.1 (2018): 57-81. Print.
Ellery Sills provides a "genealogy" of the deliberations involved in the development of "Outcomes 3.0," the third revision of the Council of Writing Program Administrators' Outcome Statement for First-Year Composition (58). His starting point is "Revising FYC Outcomes for a Multimodal, Digitally Composed World," a 2014 article by six of the ten composition faculty who served on the task force to develop Outcomes (OS) 3.0 (57).
Sills considers the 2014 article a "perfectly respectable history" of the document (58), but argues that such histories do not capture the "multivocality" of any policymaking process (59). He draws on Chris Gallagher to contend that official documents like the three Outcomes Statements present a finished product that erases debates and disagreements that go into policy recommendations (59). Sills cites Michel Foucault's view that, in contrast, a genealogy replaces "the monotonous finality" (qtd. in Sills 59) of a history by "excavat[ing] the ambiguities" that characterized the deliberative process (59).
For Sills, Outcomes 3.0 shares with previous versions of the Outcomes Statement the risk that it will be seen as "hegemonic" and that its status as an official document will constrain teachers and programs from using it to experiment and innovate (75-76). He argues that sharing the various contentions that arose as the document was developed can enhance its ability to function as, in the words of Susan Leigh Star, a document of "cooperation without consensus" (qtd. in Sills 73) that does not preclude interpretations that may not align with a perceived status quo (76). Rather, in Sill's view, revealing the different voices involved in its production permits Outcomes 3.0 to be understood as a "boundary object," that is, an object that is
strictly defined within a particular community of practice, but loosely defined across different communities of practice. . . . [and that] allows certain terms and concepts . . . to encompass many different things. (74)
He believes that "[k]eeping policy deliberations audible" (76) will encourage instructors and programs to interpret the document's positions flexibly as they come to see how many different approaches were brought to bear in generating the final text.
Sills invited all ten task members to participate in "discourse-based" interviews. Five agreed: Dylan Dryer, Susanmarie Harrington, Bump Halbritter, Beth Brunk-Chavez, and Kathleen Blake Yancey (60-61). Discussion focused on deliberations around the terms "composing, technology, and genre" (61; emphasis original).
Sills's discussion of the deliberations around "composing" focus on the shift from "writing" as a key term to a less restrictive term that could encompass many different ways in which people communicate today (61). Sills indicates that the original Outcomes Statement (1.0) of 2000 made digital practices a "residual category" in comparison to traditional print-based works, while the 3.0 task force worked toward a document that endorsed both print and multimodal practices without privileging either (63).
Ideally, in the interviewees' views, curricula in keeping with Outcomes 3.0 recognizes composing's "complexity," regardless of the technologies involved (65). At the same time, in Sills's analysis, the multiplicity of practices incorporated under composing found common ground in the view, in Dryer's words, that "we teach writing, we're bunch of writers" (qtd. in Sills 65).
Sills states that the "ambiguity" of terms like "composing" served not only to open the door to many forms of communicative practice but also to respond to the "kairotic" demands of a document like Outcomes. 3.0. Interviewees worried that naming specific composing practices would result in guidelines that quickly fell out of date as composing options evolved (64).
According to Sills, interviews about the deliberations over genre revealed more varied attitudes than those about composing (66). In general, the responses Sills records suggest a movement away from seeing genre as fixed "static form[s]" (67) calling for a particular format toward recognizing genres as fluid, flexible, and responsive to rhetorical situations. Sills quotes Dryer's claim that the new document depicts "students and readers and writers" as "much more agentive"; "genres change and . . . readers and writers participate in that change" (qtd. in Sills 67). Halbritter emphasizes a shift from "knowledge about" forms to a process of "experiential learning" as central to the new statement's approach (68). For Harrington, the presentation of genre in the new document reflects attention to "habits of mind" such as rhetorical awareness and "taking responsibility for making choices" (qtd. in Sills 69).
Brunk-Chavez's interview addresses the degree to which, in the earlier statements, technology was handled as a distinct element when genre was still equated primarily with textual forms. In the new document, whatever technology is being used is seen as integral to the genre being produced (69). Moreover, she notes that OS 3.0's handling of genre opens it to types of writing done across disciplines (70).
She joins Yancy, however, in noting the need for the document to reflect "the consensus of the field" (72). While there was some question as to whether genre as a literary or rhetorical term should even be included in the original OS, Yancy argues that the term's "time has come" (71). Yet the interviews capture a sense that not every practitioner in composition shares a common understanding of the term and that the document should still be applicable, for example, to instructors for whom "genre" still equates with modes (71).
In addressing this variation in the term's function in practice, Sills notes Yancey's desire for OS 3.0 to be a "bridging document" that does not "move too far ahead of where the discipline is," linking scholarly exploration of genre with the many ways practitioners understand and use the term (72).
Sills considers challenges that the OS 3.0 must address if it is to serve the diverse and evolving needs of the field. Responding to concerns of scholars like Jeff Rice that the document imposes an ultimately conservative "ideology of generality" that amounts to a "rejection of the unusual" (qtd. in Sills 75), Sills acknowledges that the authority of the statement may prevent "subordinate communities of practice" like contingent faculty from "messing around with" its recommendations. But he contends that the task force's determination to produce flexible guidelines and to foster ongoing revision can encourage "healthy resistance" to possible hegemony (76).
He further recommends specific efforts to expand participation, such as creating a Special Interest Group or a "standing institutional body" like an Outcomes Collective with rotating membership from which future task forces can be recruited on a regular timetable. Such ongoing input, he contends, can both invite diversity as teachers join the conversation more widely and assure the kairotic validity of future statements in the changing field (77-78).
Categories: CCC, composition studies, Course design, Disciplinarity, First-Year Writing, History of composition, Multimodality, Technology, WPA, WPA Outcomes | Tags: Beth Brunk-Chavez, boundary object, Bump Halbritter, Chris Gallagher, composing and writing, Council of Writing Program Administrators, Dylan Dryer, genre, Jeff Rice, kairos, Kathleen Blake Yancey, Susan Leigh Star, Susanmarie Harrington, WPA Outcomes Statement, writing | Permalink.
Cox, Anicca. Full-Time Lecturers and Academic Freedom. Forum, Fall 2018. Posted 10/05/2018.
Cox, Anicca. "Collaboration and Resistance: Academic Freedom and Non-Tenured Labor." Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 22.1 (2018): A4-A13. Web. 01 Oct. 2018.
Anicca Cox, in the Fall 2018 issue of Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty, discusses a case study of her institution's decision to replace non-tenure-track part-time faculty (PTLs) with full-time, non-tenure-track lecturers (FTLs) on two-year contracts. She interviewed three of the ten new full-time hires and three part-time instructors who taught in the program (A6).
Noting that the percentages of FTLs in higher education is increasing, Cox reports that this change has entailed better working conditions, more access to benefits, and more job security, among other positive effects (A5, A7). She suggests that this trend may reflect institutions' "response to the increasingly publicized problems of an outsized reliance" on contingent labor that constitutes a "seemingly altruistic move" (A5). She writes that the more stable teaching force provides institutions with more predictable costs than hiring based on shifting enrollments (A5).
Cox focuses on how the PhDs most likely to be preferred for such positions negotiate possible constraints on their academic freedom and professional identifications. The program she studied hired ten new FTLs, nine of which were either literature PhDs or were completing doctorates, as well as a new tenure-track writing program administrator (WPA) to implement a revised first-year writing program (A6). Part-time instructors who had previously taught at the institution were not hired for the new lines.
The new WPA "designed a heavily scripted curriculum" in which all components, including textbooks, were prescribed (A6). The full-time instructors were given office space and professional development specific to the program; they were evaluated much more broadly than the part-time faculty and often included ongoing research in the evaluation dossiers they prepared (A7).
Cox's study asked how these instructors
perceived themselves fitting into the institution and department relative to their own sense of professional identity, and how those feelings shaped and otherwise intersected with their work as instructors both inside and outside classroom. (A6)
Her study, part of a larger analysis, emphasized both the effects on professional identity of the new context and the question of how collaboration among teaching professionals was impacted by the new alignment (A7).
Interviews with FTLs revealed that they "did not feel like hired mercenaries" but did not feel fully integrated into the department (A8). A focus of their concern was the sense that they were not considered "intellectual contributors" and were enlisted to perform a "role" that did not jibe with their professional preparation (A8). One respondent expressed concern about being issued a "teacher proof" curriculum dismissive of her scholarship and expertise (A8). In comparison, the PTLs, while accustomed to being given scripted curricula, expressed concern that the new program materials were not appropriate for the actual student population they were used to teaching (A9). These teachers felt less conflicted over identity issues because they saw themselves primarily as teachers, not researchers (A9-10).
Tensions in the FTL position also affected collaboration in that the new lecturers felt constrained from "simply asserting their purported academic freedom" and, rather than challenging the program structure, began devising ways to adjust the curriculum without "getting caught" (qtd. in Cox A10-11). Collaboration, in this study, became a way of "spread[ing] the blame" so that renewal at the end of the two-year contract would be less likely to be threatened (A11). Part-time lecturers, in contrast, relied on long-standing patterns of "informal collaborations," sometimes making "radical changes" in the prescribed teaching materials (A11), despite having lost the opportunity to share practices with many of their colleagues in the new configuration. These teachers posited that the failure to hire from within their ranks reflected a desire on the part of administrators to eliminate "the baggage they carried over from previous iterations of the first-year writing program" (A11); Cox posits that they acted to modify the curriculum despite recognizing the precarity of their situation in the new program (A11).
Cox supports the shift toward more full-time positions but notes that the particulars of the arrangement she studied drove instructors to invest energy in sustaining a coherent professional identity rather than working together to improve student outcomes (A12). She writes that the benefits of the full-time jobs were "not enough to neutralize the frustrations" engendered by the lecturers' compromised fit within the department (A12). She recommends that should these kinds of readjustments become more common, they be constructed
in a way that recognizes and honors the laboriously forged and deeply felt professional identities of workers by supporting continued professional development and encouraging autonomy in curricular design. (A12)
Categories: CCC, contingent faculty, Disciplinarity, Forum, labor issues in composition, Professional Development | Tags: contingent labor, Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty, full-time lecturers, graduate preparation for teaching writing, part-time labor, part-time writing teachers, students, teaching writing, writing | Permalink.
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Boler, Megan. Affect and Media Literacy. RTE, Nov. 2019. Posted 01/09/2019.
Andrus et al. Teaching for Transfer at Two-Year Colleges. TETYC Sept. 2019. Posted 12/13/2019.
Canagarajah, Suresh. A History of Orientations to Text. CE, Sept. 2019. Posted 11/24/2019.
Elbow, Peter. Text and Time. CE, Sept. 2019. Posted 11/07/2019.
Borgman & McClure. Advantages of Online Teaching and PhD Studies. FORUM Fall 2019. Posted 10/30/2019.
King, Carolyne M. Reading as Embodied Practice. Comp Studies, Spring 2019. Posted 09/16/2019.
Fleming, David. Fear of Persuasion in English Language Arts. CE, July 2019. Posted 09/02/2019.
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