College Composition & Communication - Volume 61, Issue 1, 2009

Academic institutions mediate online literacy practices in meaningful and significant ways. This essay explores the nature of that mediational process, using a visual-spatial method to map out and conceptualize dynamics and structures that have a bearing on the work of composition. A key argument is that composition teachers are intellectually positioned to influence institutional approaches to academic computing.x

This article explores the literacy narratives of two “gamers” to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula. Ultimately, the author argues that we should use complex computer games as primary “texts” in composition courses as a way to explore with our students transformations in what literacy means.

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency’ their ownership of their developing ideas and texts.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

This article examines how the South African Committee for Higher Education used the resources of print culture to design forms of writing and delivery systems that provided students and post-literate adults in the anti-apartheid struggle of the 1980s with the means to recognize and represent themselves as rhetorical agents, for whom reading and writing were tools of deliberation and social action to participate in building a non-racial political future.

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

Our article seeks to integrate alternative voices into traditional rhetorical study by turning to Bitch and BUST, two mainstream zines that serve as dynamic examples of young women’s rhetoric in action. We believe these zines are shaping the present and future of women’s rhetoric. Their most significant contribution to the understanding of women’s rhetoric is located in the way they accommodate ethotic constructions that are at once contradictory and complementary. While these texts can seem abrasive and perhaps even outrageous, the ways in which the writers shape their ethe can teach rhetoricians and teachers of rhetoric and writing about the modes of argumentation practiced by this subculture of the current feminist movement, one which is firmly grounded in the larger public sphere.

This article examines the various uses to which Stephen Toulmin has been put in composition studies. It presents data on citations of Toulmin in nine journals, considers appeals to Toulmin in several strains of composition scholarship, and argues that composition scholars ought to attend more carefully to Toulmin’s later works.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

This article argues that the ideas of “play” and “abduction” in Charles Peirce’s work represent an inventive theory of argument that opens up the kinds of activities that can be called “arguments” and avoids some of the struggles over imposed beliefs with which recent argument theory has grappled.

This essay offers an earlier chapter in the history of African American literacy by examining colonial literacy campaigns within the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. The discussion focuses on one such transatlantic effort spanning from London to Barbados, South Carolina, and West Africa, which used enslaved teachers as agents of literacy.

Because the ideological and methodological aims of post-process theory could distort the progressive agenda that has been connected to composition since the early twentieth century, we must look at this theory through the historical lens that Weaver and Hairston provide in order to maintain the progressive potential of post-process theory.

As writing-program administrators and faculty are being called upon more frequently to help design and facilitate large-scale assessments, it becomes increasingly important for us to see assessment as integral to our work as academics. This article provides a framework, based on current historical, theoretical, and rhetorical knowledge, to help writing specialists understand how to embrace assessment as a powerful mechanism for improved teaching and learning at their institutions.

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”

This article describes an interdisciplinary professional writing program and its benefits for students (in terms of knowledge, habits of mind, and developing careers). The authors present qualitative research findings about habits of mind and knowledge domains of successful students, which may prove valuable for faculty teaching in similar programs as they consider curriculum design, or for faculty pondering issues of career development for master’s degree graduates.

This article initiates scholarly discussions of undergraduate research, an educational movement and comprehensive curricular innovation, in composition and rhetoric. I argue that by viewing undergraduate research production and authorship along a continuum of scholarly authority, student scholars obtain authorship and authority through participation in undergraduate research. I then address several implications of this continuum for the discipline.

Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

This article provides an analysis of Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore’s The Medium Is the Massage, a visual-verbal text that is generally acknowledged as innovative but seldom taken seriously or read carefully. The analysis draws on the visual language vocabulary developed by Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics and argues that the field of composition studies would benefit from more sustained and sophisticated readings of visual-verbal academic texts even as the field shifts from analysis to design.