College Composition & Communication - Volume 69, Issue 2, 2017

This essay advances same-sex romantic correspondence as a pre-Stonewall site of rhetoric’s queer extra curriculum. Grounded in archival research on African American women Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, I argue their epistolary exchange was animated by queer erotics that enabled their participation in self-education for racial uplift.

This article proposes embodied and multimodal readings of student compositions from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School as a way to illuminate processes of assimilation and resistance. Drawing on Gerald Vizenor’s concept of survivance and the ways that the field of composition has taken up Vizenor’s work, I argue that the project remains incomplete if we confine our history of cultural rhetoric to resistant, individual, alphabetically literate voices as the sites of rhetorical sovereignty and rhetorics of survivance.

Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have highly negative effects on AAL (African American Language) speakers. Thus, as an alternative to code-switching pedagogical practices, I introduce a comparative approach that may be applied across all minority language groups and that highlights African and African American contributions to standardized American written communication structures and demonstrates the value of AVT in academic settings. This comparative rhetorical approach may have a positive impact on student language attitudes toward AAL by illustrating that many academic writers from varied racial/ethnic backgrounds often use AVT in their writing for rhetorical purposes and to produce lively, image-filled, concrete, readable essays.

This article shares findings from a qualitative study on the experiences of students with disabilities in college-level writing and writing-intensive classrooms. I argue that normative conceptions of time and production can negatively constrain student performance, and I offer the concept of crip time (borrowed from disability theorists and disability activists) as an alternative pedagogical framework.

This essay reports on a writing-based formative assessment of a university-wide initiative to enhance students’ global learning. Our mixed (and unanticipated) results show the need for enhanced expertise in writing assessment as well as for sustained partnerships among diverse institutional stakeholders so that public programming—from events linked to classroom-level learning to broader cross unit mandates like accreditation—can yield more rigorous, responsive, and mixed method assessments.