College Composition & Communication - Volume 62, Issue 3, 2011

Individual agency is necessary for the possibility of rhetoric, and especially for deliberative rhetoric, which enables the composition of what Latour calls a good common world. Drawing on neurophenomenology, this essay defines individual agency as the process through which organisms create meanings through acting into the world and changing their structure in response to the perceived consequences of their actions. Conceiving of agency in this way enables writers to recognize their rhetorical acts, whether conscious or nonconscious, as acts that make them who they are, that affect others, and that can contribute to the common good. Responsible rhetorical agency entails being open to and responsive to the meanings of concrete others, and thus seeing persuasion as an invitation to listeners as also always agents in persuasion.

I use Burkean analysis to show how neoliberalism undermines faculty assessment expertise and underwrites testing industry expertise in the current assessment scene. Contending that we cannot extricate ourselves from our limited agency in this scene until we abandon the familiar “stakeholder” theory of power, I propose a rewriting of the assessment scene that asserts faculty and student agency and leadership for writing assessment.

Calling for an explicit commitment to graduate-level writing instruction in English studies, the authors describe a critical writing workshop that serves this purpose. The aim of the course is to create a formal curricular space through which students can brainstorm, create, and sustain a wide variety of critical writing projects.

The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech W. Ross Winterowd gave at the CCCC meeting in Louisville on March 18, 2010. We’re sorry to report that Winterowd died on January 21, 2011.

2011 marks the Centennial of the National Council of Teachers of English, and to commemorate this milestone, CCC will publish two Symposia, one in this issue of the journal, and a second in June. Here we learn from Erika Lindemann about the founding of both NCTE and CCCC; about how both groups have developed; and, drawing from these histories, about how we might move into the next hundred years. From Keith Gilyard, who authors the second Symposium article, we learn about how activism has been at the heart of both organizations; about how language activism in particular has separatedNCTE and CCCC—and brought us together; and about how current concerns can evoke a shared agenda as we move forward into NCTE’s second century.

Reviewed are:

The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner

Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors

The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau

College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort