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Agency
Teachers have long debated the role of agency in best teaching practices, and student agency in course structure. We advocate for strong student agency in the composition classroom, including student involvement in the construction of assignments, rubrics, course organization, and syllabi.
Resources
Alan W. France. “Dialectics of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of English.”
Assessment
How do we assess the activities, habits, and products of students in our writing classes? We recommend a strong look at the expectations we create for our composition and rhetoric students, including how we privilege certain modes of writing and speaking in the classroom, and how our grading methods reflect what and we are asking our students to create and what processes we believe will get them there (and can incentivize and encourage).
Resources
Nebraska-Lincoln Writing Center resource: assessing student writing
Audience
Composition pedagogy places the issue of audience at the center of thinking about writing, and we encourage students and faculty to hold open discussions about the intended audiences of works written for class and beyond. Additionally, we encourage instructors to consider assignments that ask students to write for different audiences, and imagine audiences beyond the proverbial instructor-recipient or broadly (and often vaguely) conceived general academic body. Conversations about audience can lead to questions of the role of academic writing and what it means to write for various audiences, including those academic. Successful writing makes targeted rhetorical appeals to its audience, while other compositions may seek to use forms of rhetorical appeal to broaden a message’s audience.
Resources
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C
Classical rhetoric
Classical rhetoric, in recent years often existent as a subfield of composition and rhetoric, refers to use and interpretation of classical discourse on rhetoric; though perhaps Aristotelian ethos, logos, and pathos are most common in the composition classroom, composition instructors also often incorporate other offerings, such as those from Romans Cicero and Quintilian.
The Forest of Rhetoric, an online resource on all things Classical and Renaissance Rhetoric
Controlling idea
Frequently, in rhetoric and composition texts, the term controlling idea is attached to the topic sentence of a body paragraph. It is the point of the paragraph, as well as a useful organizational tool in that the controlling idea helps move your argument forward while limiting the scope of the paragraph. In this text, our controlling ideas are the result of a process of inquiry that generates our micro-questions.
Contact zone
Contact zone is a term coined by Mary Louise Pratt in 1991 to describe “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (34). The writing classroom functions as one of those spaces–both as a contact zone for the interactions of experiences, as well as a space by which one’s contact zones outside the classroom are articulated—a process best developed and encouraged by the instructor.
Resources
Mary Louise Pratt, “Arts of the Contact Zone”
D
Digital rhetoric
The term digital rhetoric has become a shorthand to draw attention to the ways in which communication and modes of persuasion function within digital spaces, and how those spaces have affected communication and language practices online and offline.
Resources
Douglas Eyman, Digital Rhetoric: Theory, Method, Practice
Disability
A wide range of disabilities, both “visible” and “invisible,” may impair a student’s capacity to learn in the writing classroom, and Instructors are responsible for denoting their accommodations for disabilities clearly in their syllabus as well as offering an environment open to taking action to maximize student access to learning that works best for them. We recognize the long history of discrimination against disabled students and resolve to proactively recognize disability as not only a part of the human experience, but indicative of perspectives that enrich and inform us all.
Conference on College Composition and Communication, Policy Statement on Disability
E
Ecology
The impending reality of massive global transformation before us has led to an influence on the environmentalist and ecocritical perspective across all practices of the humanities and sciences. Writing studies have explored questions of agency and power alongside ecologically minded orientations towards individual learning, diversity, and growth. Ecology-minded learning attitudes aspire to undermine homogenizing pedagogies in the classroom—for example, opting for multiple options for earning a course grade—and consider how the student desires and defines their desires of labor and literacy.
Resources
Asao B. Inoue, Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies
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Failure
In recent years, pedagogues have worked to challenge our notions of “failure” in the classroom, and consider the negative impact of an emphasized rhetoric against what is thought of as failure. We encourage instructors to destabilize common usages of “failure” in academic settings and recognize aspects of failure important and necessary in, especially, a writing classroom unrelated and non-synonymous with final grade tallies. Trial and error is an essential part of the recursive writing process. Furthermore, it should be noted that the total character of an individual should not be in any way equivocated with their individual classroom achievement, or said “achievement” be assumed related to their intellectual or work capacities.
Resources
Allison Carr, “In Support of Failure”
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Genre
Compositionists think of genre as the set of standardized or common discursive practices in a particular space for a particular audience. Conversations about genre in the writing classroom can lead students into discussion of what sites and conventions writing happens for specific contexts, and furthermore what implicit or explicit ideologies are denoted by these choices of form. Choice of genre reflects a developing understanding of context-specific writing.
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Identity
For identity formation, see “subjectivity formation”
Baruch recognizes the student’s right to their own identity, including their right to express or withhold information about their identity and define identifying terms. Instructors are required to recognize students’ self-identifications, including their preferred pronouns. Instructors should not place students in situations in which they must initially verbalize their preferred pronouns.
Ideology
A set system of ideas or beliefs within an identified group, such as a society or discourse community. An ideology may become so implicit within a society that it is not generally discussed openly, but happens as merely a set of assumptions between members of the group before they communicate.
Resources
Inquiry
Scholarship is the act of producing a good question as much as an answer. Inquiry refers to the process of generating and exploring researchable questions. In writing courses, our students engage in inquiry throughout the writing process, and we encourage faculty to give students opportunities to both formulate and revise questions, as well as to generate topics and questions of their own that branch off of the theme or focus of the writing course. Pedagogy shares an emotional value with mystery, when in a mode of exploration.
Resources
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Literacy
Up to the 1970s, the typical model of literacy was based on a singular acquisition of language literacy, now commonly called the autonomous model of literacy.
This model is often considered insufficient in considering the complexities of literacy itself. Even citizenship is not so simple of a relationship to literacy—such as citizenship application tests, which require a relative cultural literacy. Literacy is also often abused under this autonomous model, such as the use of literacy tests in voting during the Jim Crow era.
In the early 1980s, Brian Street and other “New Literacy” scholars began to question a model of literacy and wanted to provide more social relativism for such conceptions. They argued that literacies are vested inside of discourse communities, not just the “language English,” but any social community with shared habits, practices, and language—which includes dress, mannerisms, and aesthetics. Literacy has taken on a new situated morphology, and developed subsets of study, in digital literacy, cultural literacy, functional literacy, or critical literacy. This latter view is firmly rooted in the work of Paulo Freire.
This broadening of the definition of literacy leads to new ways of exploring the notion. Deborah Brandt, in “The Sponsors of Literacy,” encourages literacy studies scholars to spend time interrogating the institutions and individuals who provide literacies and their motivations for doing so. These literacy sponsors, such as the Department of Education, imply a desire to acquire a specific kind of literacy, often an autonomous model.
“Literacy studies” has hence become a robust subfield of composition and rhetoric.
Resources
James Paul Gee, “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction”
C.H. Knoblauch, “Literacy and the Politics of Education”
Deborah Brandt, “The Sponsors of Literacy”
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Medium
Evolving from the word’s connotative meaning as an occurrence/existence between or that interlinks two entities, medium refers to the physical means or agency by which communication occurs–such as a canvas, a computer word processor, or a camera lens.
Multilingualism
Refers to an individual having a repertoire of multiple particular named languages.
Multimodal
Utilizing multiple methods of expression in a given composition, such as the use of image, video, and words on a website.
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P
Performance
Purpose
In the writing classroom, purpose should not be assumed of the text but instead be identified relative to audience, and may shift if audience shifts. Purpose then provides a framework by which the voice and structural decisions of a work are made.
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Recursivity
Composition scholars, stemming from conversations from “Writing Process Movement” practitioners of the mid-20th Century, refer to writing as a recursive process, as opposed to a linear one. In other words, the writing process works in a kind of repeated and ever-moving cycle between generating ideas, producing new words, and revising.
Resources
Donald Murray. “Making Meaning Clear: The Logic of Revision.”
Rhetorical listening
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Subjectivity formation
Critical pedagogy scholar Ira Shor argues that when we engage in critical literacy, “we examine our ongoing development, to reveal the subjective positions from which we make sense of the world and act in it.” Writing studies scholars have held that the writing process serves as an identity-constructing act, in which one negotiates subjectivities in relation to socio-political phenomena.
Resources
Ira Shor, “What is Critical Literacy?”
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Transfer
“Transfer” has become a shorthand concept for both the disciplinary and university-wide concerns and assumptions about what “transferrable” skills are provided from a writing classroom into other academic coursework and professional spaces. Writing studies scholars are not only concerned with the transfer of functionalist or pragmatic writing skills but also the larger concerns of critical thinking and processes development or habit formation that occur along the path of composing and researching.
Resources
Transnationalism
Many of our students operate discursively in transnational spaces between languages and ethnicities with various relationships to citizenship and nationhood.
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W
WAC/WID
Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines refer to efforts to engage with writing and writing pedagogy among faculty outside of composition and English departments. WAC refers to the global effort to incorporate writing as a pedagogy across disciplines, and WID refers to writing as disciplinary engagement, and analysis of the genres and rhetorics of writing within disciplines.
Resources
Purdue OWL, “Writing Across the Curriculum: An Introduction”
Writing and democracy
Queens College professor and writing program director Amy Wan has discussed the role of “citizen” as a prized outcome of general education requirements following the expansion of college enrollment after World War II. At the core of general education requirements, composition has long concerned itself with the practices of composition and development of critical literacy and rhetorical skills as exercises in and preparation for democratic and civic participation. Compositionists like Wan are concerned with how the message of “global citizenry” might best be addressed by writing curriculum, and how assignments and methods can incorporate understanding of citizenship and participation in civil society.
Resources
Amy Wan, “In the Name of Citizenship”
bibliography: activism and critical pedagogy
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Work Cited
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 165–185. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/358929.
Ede, Lisa and Andrea Lunsford. “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy.” College Composition and Communication. Vol. 35, No. 2 (May, 1984), pp. 155-171.
Gee, James Paul. “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction.” Journal of Education, vol. 171, no. i, 1989.
Heilker, Paul and Peter Vandenberg. Keywords in Writing Studies. Boulder, CO: U Press of Colorado/Utah State UP, 2015. Print.
Donald Murray. “Making Meaning Clear: The Logic of Revision.” Learning by Teaching: Selected Articles on Writing and Teaching. Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1982. 88-95.
France, Alan W. “Dialectics of Self: Structure and Agency as the Subject of English.” College English. 63.2 (Nov., 2000). pp. 145-165.
Howard, Rebecca Moore. “Activism and Critical Pedagogy” (bibliography). rebeccamoorehoward.com. 2017.
Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2015.
Knoblauch, C.H. “Literacy and the Politics of Education.” The Right to Literacy. Ed. Andrea A. Lunsford, Helene Moglen, and James Slevin. New York: MLA, 1990. 74-80.
Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession. 1991, pp. 33-40.
The Purdue OWL. Purdue U Writing Lab, 2016.
Roberts, Frank Leon Roberts. Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance, and Populist Protest. 2016. Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, New York, NY. Microsoft Word File.
Shor, Ira. “What is Critical Literacy?” The Journal of Pedagogy, Pluralism and Practice. Vol. I, no. 4, Fall 1999.
“Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
Wan, Amy J. “In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship.” College English, vol. 74, no. 1, 2011, pp. 28–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/23052372.
Wardle, Elizabeth. “Understanding ‘Transfer’ from FYC: Preliminary Results of a Longitudinal Study.” WPA: Writing Program Administration, vol. 31, no. 1-2, Fall/Winter 2007. Council of Writing Program Administrators.