Best of the Independent Journals in Rhetoric and Composition 2012, The. Группа авторов

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      Introduction

      Questioning, Challenging, and Advocating: Advancing Knowledge in Composition and Rhetoric

Julia Voss and Beverly Moss

      In his 2012 Kairos webtext “Views from a Distance: A Nephological Model of the CCCC Chairs’ Addresses, 1977-2011” (featured in this collection), Derek N. Mueller uses word clouds as a way to make sense of composition and rhetoric as a field, to systematically notice trends, patterns, connections. Mueller suggests that “there is a value in network sense: an aptitude enriched by this tracing of linkages across an assortment of people, places, things, and moments.” In the introduction to this anthology, we attempt a sort of network sense on a smaller scale. That is, the articles collected here create a snapshot of one year’s trends, questions, themes, people, places, and moments in the field. Though the eleven articles in this collection vary in topic, questions, and methodology, there are ties—linkages—that bind them, painting a larger picture of current discussions in composition and rhetoric.

      Although we offer a visual representation of these linkages through our own word cloud near the end of this chapter, our introduction focuses on the connections that emerge from the articles that follow. The pieces featured in this collection coalesce around key rhetorical moves that 1) question and challenge accepted practices and beliefs; 2) move from questioning and challenging to advocacy; and 3) illustrate and propose new methods and approaches for advancing the field. As we suggest below, most of the featured articles make at least two of these rhetorical moves. And while the scholars whose work is showcased here employ multiple methods (empirical, historical, discourse analysis, philosophical) and concern themselves with a variety of locations (classrooms; writing centers; and community, digital, and discursive spaces) their work consistently pushes composition to re-examine its boundaries and its purpose.

      The articles in Part 1: Questioning and Challenging Accepted Practices and Beliefs cause us to stop, reflect, and re-see the field. The scholars featured in this section challenge philosophical, pedagogical, and curricular practices that have dominated our field. Matthew Pavesich, in “Reflecting on the Liberal Reflex: Rhetoric and the Politics of Acknowledgment in Basic Writing,” challenges what he identifies as the prevailing liberal ideology found not only in colleges and universities, but especially in basic writing programs. He suggests that liberalism’s commitment to the “equal treatment of everyone” ignores historical and current inequities that make the equal treatment approach complicit in perpetuating inequities and injustice. Pavesich examines how Roosevelt University, an institution committed to social justice, interrogated the liberal ideology underpinning its basic writing curriculum and has begun taking steps to differentiate its writing curriculum in response to the varied needs of a diverse student population. This case study models one way to incorporate a rhetorical approach—long endorsed in composition and rhetoric—in the basic writing subfield.

      Advocacy on behalf of basic writing students who enter with fewer resources than many of their peers is fundamental both to the questions Pavesich raises about the liberal ideologies in basic writing curricula and to the rhetorical solution he proposes. He calls for a pedagogy that repositions the students and the work they do. We see Kelly Bradbury doing similar interrogation and re-situation work in “Positioning the Textbook as Contestable Intellectual Space.” Bradbury challenges the messages conveyed to students by textbooks, a longtime staple in writing classrooms and a billion-dollar industry in the United States, pointing out how the ideological control textbooks exert over student learning runs counter to the “libratory and ‘student-centered’ pedagogies we employ in our classrooms.” In the classroom-based study she describes, Bradbury asked students to assume responsibility for and control of their own learning by creating the textbook for their composition course. Having students choose their own readings and write their own discussion questions makes the textbook a “contestable space” for Bradbury. Doing so repositions both students and textbooks: students are elevated to the role of intellectuals, and textbook authors and contents are redefined. By questioning the role of the textbook, Bradbury calls us to see first-year writing students as intellectuals capable of “co-authoring classroom pedagogy.”

      Like Pavesich and Bradbury, in “Writing Time: Composing in an Accelerated World” Jeanne Marie Rose challenges the way that English Studies, and composition in particular, understands, interprets, and uses time as a concept and tool in the writing classroom. She argues that while process pedagogy tends to view time as a limitless resource, the global capitalist world in which we live places considerable demands on writers’ time. As a result, Rose calls compositionists to “situate time in the context of our students and classes” and “examine the material realities of time.” Rose proposes that composition teachers rethink process pedagogy. She argues that the classic version of process assumes that students have more time than they actually do in today’s fast-paced global society. Therefore, Rose suggests that

      students need to examine the materiality of time and weigh its consequences for their lives as writers, students, workers, and citizens. We as teachers, meanwhile, need to be open to learning about our students’ particular ways of experiencing time, and we need to bring this awareness to our course design and delivery.

      Rose calls us to question typical classroom approaches to process pedagogy as well as to cultivate students’ awareness of time as a valuable resource that is sought after by multiple audiences (capitalist, media, educational, et cetera).

      Rose’s questioning of how writing teachers and writing process pedagogy make use of time is, at its very core, a question about how we, students and teachers, are socialized to use time and efficiency. We also see this focus on socialization practices in the articles in Part 2: From Questions and Challenges to Advocacy. In “‘So what are we working on?’ Pronouns as a Way of Re-Examining Composing,” Kate Pantelides and Mariaelena Bartesaghi analyze the use of pronouns in writing center consultations to challenge how writing center scholarship has socialized its consultants to think about collaboration in the writing center session. Dissatisfied with the way that collaboration has been characterized in previous writing center scholarship, Pantelides and Bartesaghi argue that “rarely are [writing center consultants] presented as they are in practice—chameleons that change their colors dependent on the moment-by-moment requirements of the consultation.” The authors assert, in other words, that collaboration in the writing center consultation is a dynamic process that cannot be dictated by rigid guidelines about how directive/non-directive a consultant should be. In their semester-long study of graduate student consultants and clients in the writing center, Pantelides and Bartesaghi examine how consultants and clients use pronouns—especially we and I—to indicate shifts in authority throughout the session. The authors propose that consultants’ use of we to refer at various times to themselves and the client, to the writing center as an organization, and to academic writing as a discipline is “multifunctional: signaling collaborative affiliation and disaffiliation by sharing and distancing oneself from a text.” The relationship Pantelides and Bartesaghi draw between collaboration and asymmetry in writing center sessions ultimately challenges the field to extend its ongoing thinking about collaboration (reflected, for example, in Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s twenty-year engagement with the concept) to the writing center.

      While the articles we’ve introduced so far question and challenge accepted practices in traditional educational sites like composition classrooms and writing centers, the remaining essays in Part 2 move these challenges beyond the university classroom to alternative sites, namely community and corporate spaces. In doing so, these articles continue the field’s interest in community literacies and composing in the public sphere. In some instances, by virtue of linking literacy to particular community spaces, these scholars challenge traditional views of literacy. Melvette Melvin-Davis’s “Daughters СКАЧАТЬ