College Composition & Communication - Volume 60, Issue 4, 2009

Two authors remember a colleague

Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.

As faculty are increasingly recruited to participate in retention efforts on their campuses, I argue that composition studies professionals should pay attention to the scholarship on retention, one of the fastest growing areas of research in higher education. Moreover, the questions surrounding which of our students persist until graduation and why should qualify our arguments about access and reframe our conversations about pedagogy.

This article argues for approaching pedagogical outcomes as ends-in-view that guide, but do not determine or limit, pedagogical possibilities. Reflecting on moments from a service-learning literacy course, the writers argue that experiences of chaos in the classroom, while often uncomfortable, can open opportunities for reflection and inquiry.

There has been little discussion of hospitality as a practice in college writing courses. Possible misuses of hospitality as an educational and ethical practice are explored, and three traditional and still tenable modes of hospitality are described and historicized: Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic. Application of these modes to instructional situations may lead to new and sometimes counter-establishment methods, in terms of course objectives, shared labor of teacher and students, writing assignments, response to writing, and assessment of student work. Perhaps the most radical form is transformative hospitality, which accepts the possibility that host and guest, teacher and students, will all be changed by their encounter, a potentiality that is characterized by risk taking, restlessness, and resistance to educational entrenchments. Traditional hospitality as practiced in writing classrooms does not mark a return to student-centered pedagogies of past decades but does stake out a position that might be considered marginal apropos the current political and educational climate in the United States.

This essay offers Neil Postman’s thermostatic metaphor as a model for critical teaching. In this model, the role of the composition teacher is that of a thermostat that responds to a changing ideological environment by offering counterbalance. Such a stance is an anti-stance since it requires the teachers to enact philosophies and pedagogies, rather than holding them.

Contemporary composition classrooms have understandably distanced themselves from the elitism associated with the terms taste and propriety. However, writers do need to learn how appropriate discourse is rhetorically negotiated. Understanding and reinventing propriety’s rhetorical function can enable students and teachers to develop notions of propriety that consider complex histories and perspectives.

The goal of teaching students to write for the university assumes that in first-year composition students can be taught ways of writing (genre and genre knowledge) that they can then transfer to the writing they do in other courses across the university. This goal and its underlying assumption are problematic for a number of reasons illustrated here through a study of a large midwestern composition program. The study validates theoretical critiques of general skills writing courses made by genre and activity theorists over the past decade. The difficulties of teaching varied academic genres in only one context suggest we might better serve first-year students by reframing the goals of FYC, such that the course does not promise to teach students to write in the university but rather teaches students about writing in the university.

Creative writing workshops typically feature a gag rule and emphasize purported flaws. This structure limits students’ meaningful engagement with each other’s work; positions the author as inherently flawed; and positions other participants as authority figures, passing judgment without articulating their aesthetic standards. I propose an alternative structure in which authors lead discussion; the work is treated not as inherently flawed but as “in process”; and discussants articulate their expectations about “good” writing rather than allowing them to function as unspoken norms.

Chinese migrant narratives suggest a parodic reworking of China’s official market ideology, “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” as well as new rhetorics that bring worker solidarity and opportunities for positive change.

Kirsch explores “the connection between spirituality and civic engagement,” suggesting that “spirituality—broadly defined to include mindfulness, introspection, and reflection—can play an important role in enabling rhetorical agency.”

Sirc’s essay also uses the writing course as touchstone “this time, to wrestle initially” with the issues Allen Tate pondered in his 1952 essay . . . “The Man of Letters in the Modern World.” Sirc challenges contemporary instructors of writing, claiming that “the vox pop criticism of iTunes writing represents a new Attic style, one well worth studying and teaching to.”

The essays in this special symposium on Chinese rhetoric join the work of other cross-cultural rhetorical scholars in proposing new contrastive as well as comparative approaches and exploring structures that are dialectical and literary as well as rhetorical. In this work can be observed the formation of a new contact zone.