College Composition & Communication - Volume 63, Issue 2, 2011

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a first-year composition project emphasizing rhetorical ecologies.

In this essay, I offer William James’s notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think about the relationship between academic discourse and religious discourse. And the second adjustment relates to the stances we adopt when responding to religious students’ texts. Along with outlining these adjustments, I illustrate the ways James’s framework productively informed my response to a faith-based narrative that an evangelical student wrote in one of my first-year writing courses.

This essay examines the definitions and practices of argument perpetuated by popular composition textbooks, illustrating how even those texts that appear to forward expansive notions of argument ultimately limit it to an intent to persuade. In doing so, they help perpetuate constricted practices of argument within undergraduate composition classrooms.

Against the limitations English monolingualism imposes on composition scholarship, as evident in journal submission requirements, frequency of references to non-English medium writing, bibliographical resources, and our own past work, we argue for adopting a translingual approach to languages, disciplines, localities, and research traditions in our scholarship, and propose ways individuals, journals, conferences, and graduate programs might advance composition scholarship toward a translingual norm.

This is a written version of the address Gwendolyn D. Pough gave at the CCCC convention in Atlanta on Thursday, April 7, 2011.

Reviewed are: Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, Stuart Selber, editor. From A to : Keywords of Markup, Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, editors. Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, editors. Generaciones’ Narratives: The Pursuit and Practice of Traditional and Electronic Literacies on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, John Scenters-Zapico.