The 2016 Conference on College Composition and Communication is fast approaching, and we are so proud of the many scholars affiliated with the Center for Writing Studies who will be participating in workshops, roundtables, panels, and poster sessions. This year, the number of CWS faculty, graduate students, and alumni who will be presenting papers at 4Cs is so large that we cannot fit all of them in one blog post. Below is a list of those who will be presenting on Thursday, April 7. For a list of presentations on Friday and Saturday, please see the blog post above. See you in Houston!
Thursday, April 7
Michael Burns
A.31 Thursday 4/7 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Resources for Teaching Writing to Support #BlackLivesMatter at Predominantly White Institutions
Recent scholarship in rhetoric and composition has brought renewed vigor to the critique of white supremacy in higher education. Recent monographs from Condon (2013), Marshall & Ryden (2012), & Siebel-Trainor (2008) have broken new ground in anti-racist pedagogy and whiteness studies. In assessment, Behm and Miller (2012) call us to a “4th wave” that would challenge color-blind racism by “analyzing the ways in which assessment practices and interpretations of data constitute and are constitutive of a white habitus” (136). Hahn (2014), also returning to Bordieu alongside Siebel-Trainor’s insights, calls on writing teachers to design classroom environments as cultures of practice aimed at continually interrupting schooled embodiments that produce color-blind racist beliefs. And through their counter-narratives rooted in lived experience and Derrick Bell’s “racial realism,” both Kynard (2015) and Martinez (2015) remind us of the epistemological violence daily enacted upon faculty and students of color in these white-dominated higher educational spaces. With the growing #BlackLivesMatter movement burgeoning around the country, it seems a particularly kairotic and pressing moment to apply these disciplinary research trajectories to local curricular decisions that will both cultivate healthier living and learning environments for students of color while also trying to support the growth of more white allies.
This “taking action” session will report on the work of faculty members in a large writing program at a PWI (predominantly white institution) state university in the Northeast who applied a lesson-study model (Cerbin 2011) to their first year writing curriculum in order to teach in solidarity with the national #BlackLivesMatter movement and its local student-led on-campus iteration. The session will provide attendees with curricular and pedagogical resources to decenter white norms and challenge unexamined white supremacy & processes of privilege at PWIs. The three speakers will begin by presenting brief (6-8 minute) jump-start presentations on different facets of the project before facilitating a strategic-planning session for participants to work through the logistics of implementing a similar project at their home institutions.
Yu-Kyung Kang
Tracing Literacy Across Time and Borders: The Changing Global and Local Landscape of Study Abroad Experience in U.S. Higher Education
Ever since the social turn in Literacy Studies over two decades ago (e.g., Gee, Street), literacy scholarship has recognized literacy as a situated social practice that varies from one context to another and one culture to another. Complementing and evermore complicating this theory and earlier ethnographic work on situated literacy practices (e.g., Heath), literacy studies have attended to multilingual issues within a framework of globalization (e.g., Barton, Canagarajah, Duffy, Graff). More recently, scholars (e.g., Lorimer, Vieira) have complicated how and why literacy practices travel across borders with multilingual users. They have helped us see the fluid and entangled forces that both destabilize and shape literacy practices and complicate understandings of local and global (e.g., Bloomaert 2010, Latour 2005, Lemke 2000, Prior and Shipka 2003). Despite much work examining transnational literacy practices of migrants within the U.S., most have focused largely on the immigrant experience. With the more recent increase in the unprecedented number of international students in U.S. higher education institutions, more examination is needed in these multilingual students’ literacy practices across time and borders, thus complementing work of scholars (e.g. Horner, Lu, Matsuda) in Composition/Writing Studies and Second Language.
In the presentation, I will discuss the changing landscape of Korean international students in U.S. higher education from the early 1980s through the 2010s. This presentation is part of a larger two-year ethnographic/auto-ethnographic study on the literacy practices of South Korean undergraduate students with study aboard experience before entering college (henceforth, post-Early Study Abroad students). Drawing on study abroad experience of my father in the 1980s, my own since the early 2000s, and current Korean undergraduate students (my main research participants) as examples, I lay out literacy experiences of Korean international students across time and borders. With this historical perspective and in-depth exploration of current study abroad students’ literacy narratives, I consider how the strikingly transnational trajectories of this population have ironically reinforced quite traditional Korean and English language ideologies. This paradox, which has led to the focus on building national identities in the home language, complicates both the learning of English for academic purposes and social adaptation to the wider culture of the university. As the literacy experiences and needs of international students differ from those of traditional international graduate students in U.S. higher education, they complicate already established notions and remedies for academic success at the university. The post-Early Study Abroad students today foreshadow the more complex transnational trajectories that we should expect of international (and national) students in an increasingly globalized world. This academic version of the superdiversity that Jan Blommaert has analyzed in European urban spaces calls for new approaches and remedies to support academic success in higher education.
A.36 Thursday 4/7 10:30 AM - 11:45 AM
Literacy Development and Rhetorical Invention in the Multilingual Classroom
Alexandra Cavallaro
Between Women: The Curriculum of Coming Out as Queer Rhetorical Pedagogy
Speaker 2 turns to a more contemporary site of the queer extracurriculum by drawing on a year-long qualitative study of “Between Women,” an LGBTQ women’s discussion and support group. Numerous scholars have argued that we move beyond the multicultural imperative of inclusion and pay more attention to difference in our pedagogical work (e.g. Alexander, Rhodes, Wallace). While such calls are not limited to discussions of sexuality, queer identity has been a focal point for this scholarship because of the construction of queer lives as non-normative. To date, much of this discussion has been centered around the university classroom, with little attention paid to queer extracurricular sites. By examining the ways members of Between Women build their own rhetorical curriculum, I argue that these queer extracurricular spaces offer an opportunity to challenge dominant discourses of sexuality via what I have termed “the curriculum of coming out.” In doing so, the women revise and reclaim important sites of rhetorical education and literacy instruction on the margins of the university, illustrating their complex relationship to the institution that they are both a part of and yet remain critically apart from. Such activity, I argue, creates more community-relevant rhetorical pedagogies that subvert limiting constructions of sexual identity through moments of disruption.
B.02 Thursday 4/7 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Queer Action in the Extracurriculum
Kaia Simon
Literacy, Agency, and Rewriting Hmong Womanhood
Agency--the sense and enactment of self--is a concept often animated in popular and scholarly discourses that circulate about potential promises and outcomes of literate activity. In this paper, I argue for a theoretical intervention in the typical ways that feminist literacy studies imagines, constructs, and recognizes agency. Taking up the critique from transnational feminist scholars (e.g. Mohanty, Grewal, Alexander) that typical conceptions of Western feminist agency are imperialist and reductive, I argue that our field’s understanding of writing as an activity, and, therefore, the ways we engage it as a subject of study, can be enriched by transnational intersectional feminist theoretical frameworks. These transnational analytic frameworks reveal and critique the field’s most common assumptions about agency in order to demonstrate how these assumptions limit the potential for inclusivity in the types of writing and written action that we recognize, study, and value. Applying these frameworks to literacy and literate practices brings forward the multiplicity of potential “agencies” enacted when women write, challenging scholars in Literacy Studies and Composition to not only recognize what we miss when our vision is narrowed by these assumptions but to actively consider and value literate agency, as enacted by women’s writing, in our scholarship and teaching. This paper will present a broad landscape of the ways that feminist literacy and rhetorical studies has tended to represent the connections between literacy and agency (e.g. Daniell, Heller, Sohn, Glenn, Hogg, Ratcliffe, Royster, Moraga, Anzaldua et al) and the current work in transnational feminist rhetorical studies (e.g. Hesford, Schell, Wu, et al). After demonstrating how the theoretical frameworks articulated by transnational feminist theorists such as Mohanty, Grewal, and Alexander might inform data collection and analysis, I will present multiple enactments of feminist literate agency drawn from literacy history oral narratives I have gathered from a group of generation 1.5 Hmong women. These women’s literacy histories offer rich depictions of agency that demonstrate how ethnographic methods and emic perspectives make recognizing women’s agency more nuanced and therefore more inclusive. Generation 1.5 Hmong women were relocated to the U.S. from refugee camps in Thailand as the children of political refugees and U.S. war veterans (the Hmong allied with the CIA during the Vietnam War and fought what became known as the Secret War in Laos) during the late 1970s and early 1980s. They represent a bridge generation between multiple identity categories, geographies, and cultural traditions. As they have, and continue to, navigate their positionality as the first generation of Hmong women to have widespread literacy, and the generation called upon to adapt traditional Hmong gender roles to their U.S. context, these women offer specific, multiple, and different demonstrations of the ways that they use literacy to imagine and enact agency as Hmong women. By bringing these women’s voices and examples in light of this theoretical intervention, this paper demonstrates how Literacy Studies might be challenged by, and made more rich by, expanded and inclusive conceptions of agency as enacted through literacy.
B.27 Thursday 4/7 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Storytelling as a New Pathway to Social Justice
Kelly Ritter
With 'Increased Dignity and Importance': Re-Historicizing Charles Roberts and the Illinois Decision of 1956
Following on Speaker 2’s discussion of access and aspiration and marginalized populations, Speaker 3 will examine a landmark moment that illustrates the tensions behind literacy and access in basic writing curricula in the twentieth century: the so-called Illinois Decision of 1956, in which the Rhetoric Program at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign passed a resolution to discontinue remedial writing effective Fall 1960. The proposal was authored by the then-WPA, Dr. Charles Roberts, who was also a co-founder of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the first editor of CCC. The Illinois decision sparked a chain of similar decisions at other prominent universities nationwide, as memorialized in part in the 1957 CCC symposium, “Has English Zero Seen Its Day?” As a policy move heard round the nation, the Illinois Decision would be permanently affixed in the annals of composition history as proof of the longstanding disdain for basic writers deemed “not ready” for work in American universities (as seen, for example, in critiques of the decision by Lerner and also Ritter). Using additional local archival evidence surrounding the decision, and with an eye toward complicating the narrative of this critical moment in composition history and Roberts’ role in it, Speaker 3 will re-frame the Illinois Decision as a story less about punishing basic writers and more about creating conversation, opportunity, and growth for Illinois students at both the secondary and postsecondary levels. Such a re-framing, Speaker 3 will argue, is a counter-narrative to current debates over “college-ready” and the position of first-year writing in early college, dual credit, and other similar programs, wherein conversation about writing growth is replaced by efficiency mandates.
B.05 Thursday 4/7 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Histories of Action: Revisiting Composition’s Past to Understand Composition’s Present
Amy Wan
College Writing and the Post-War Legacy of Access and Aspiration
Speaker 2 will follow on Speaker 1’s argument about service versus disciplinary offerings and values by arguing that later twentieth U.S. higher education was also characterized by dueling tensions—namely, as elite certifier of advanced knowledge and as an integral part of the social engine. Her presentation will examine how these dueling tensions were produced by policy, legislative, and curricular responses to rising student populations during the decade after World War II. In particular, Higher Education for American Democracy: A Report of the President’s Commission on Higher Education (1947) supported regional institutions, community colleges and increased financial aid, all of which established a shift in thinking toward mass higher education. Speaker 2 will explain how post-war policy continues to provide a blueprint for how to respond to an influx of students, such as in the post-war era and with the current day rise of English language learners. She will argue that responses to new student populations rooted in literacy learning relies on a legacy of access and aspiration, contributing to the growing imperative for mass higher education and college-styled literacy in the United States.
B.05 Thursday 4/7 12:15 PM - 1:30 PM
Histories of Action: Revisiting Composition’s Past to Understand Composition’s Present
Lauren Marshall Bowen
Multimodal + Composition: Searching for the Fit, Not the Fix
Speaker 3 proposes that multimodal composition can be a lens for (re)focusing a program’s existing values and objectives for writing instruction. Common critiques against emphasizing multimodal composition in first-year composition include mission creep of writing programs, as well as lack of resources for implementing a media-rich curriculum. This paper examines these very concerns as they developed in relation to a composition program committed to multimodality, but whose new instructors lacked confidence in the multimodal approach.
As Bruce Horner recently suggested, embedded in arguments for multimodal composition are claims about of deficit: that composition has no proper subject, and that composition must seek out new purpose to ensure its relevance. Therefore, to avoid devaluing alphabetic writing in the process of bolstering aural/visual composition, the program opted for a year-long, inquiry-based collaborative assessment, with a particular interest in what constituted multimodal composition in the program. As agents within the assessment process (Gallagher), instructors reflected on their approaches to multimodal composition and, in doing so, developed a clearer articulation of the program’s values and environment (Burnett, Frazee, Hanggi & Madden).
Speaker 3 argues that such a process has the potential to sharpen rather than complicate the objectives of writing instruction. For example, in developing an assessment rubric for multimodal texts, the program developed nuanced, situated language for rhetorical elements of student work--elements already present in the writing curriculum. Through analysis of the documents yielded by this process (instructional materials, assessment reports, etc.) this presentation offers a blueprint for using multimodality to refresh and refract programmatic outcomes, simultaneously addressing some central reservations about multimodal approaches to composition.
C.10 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Multimodal Composition as a Strategic Approach to First-Year Writing
Kory Ching
Better Together: Faculty Collaboration and the Hybrid Teaching Commons
Working under the hybrid redesign grant, we spent one semester collaboratively designing the course and adopting technologies we could use for online lessons and activities. The following semester, we each taught one (or more) sections of the course, met weekly, and developed an online “teaching commons”— a space for pedagogical reflection and a repository for teaching materials and resources. Speaker 5 examines the role of faculty collaboration, not just in the design of the hybrid course, but also in “migrating” teachers’ pedagogical practices into online environments. While some scholars have argued for the general effectiveness of collaborative “teaching circles” (Hutchings, 1996; Marshall, 2008), I argue that key to our specific approach was a delicate balance between a common curriculum and a diversity of approaches—both pedagogical and technological—to teaching that curriculum.
C.38 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
More Than the Sum: Faculty Collaboration in Designing and Teaching a Hybrid Writing Course
Katherine Flowers
Local Policies and National Networks: Text Histories of Two County-Level English Only Policies
Recent language policy research has examined the English Only ideologies that shape US politics and education (Peters, 2013; Trimbur, 2006), the particularities of local policies (Canagarajah, 2005; Tardy, 2011), and the collaborative process of making and negotiating policies (Wible, 2013). Because these lines of inquiry have remained relatively distinct, however, less is known about the origins and nature of local English Only policies. Such policies are increasingly common: over the past decade, politicians in more than a dozen towns and counties have made English the official language of government documents. This talk will address this gap in the field by reporting findings from a discourse analytic, ethnographic study of how people create and circulate local English Only policies. Specifically, I construct “text histories” (Lillis and Curry, 2010) of two recently proposed policies from the state of Maryland: one in Frederick County that passed, and one in Anne Arundel County that did not. Each text history includes analysis of multiple drafts of each policy, recordings of planning meetings, other surrounding discourse and artifacts, and interviews with the people involved. Based on these two text histories, I argue that local English Only policies are both enabled and constrained by national networks of English Only activists and organizations. These networks connect small communities to a variety of different types of talking points, templates, and legal counsel; and local politicians also swap ideas and templates amongst themselves; all of which makes the overall movement more flexible, but also more unwieldy. Therefore, these policies do not present a united front, and their origin stories are just as complex as those of Students’ Right to their Own Language and the CCCC National Language Policy (Smitherman, 1999). I will conclude by suggesting that these findings pose new challenges and opportunities for how writing studies scholars study, conceptualize, and respond to language policies. Methodologically, a text history approach can address Wible’s (2013) call for language policy research to move beyond analysis of “stand-alone documents” (p. 169). Conceptually, the rise of local, networked English Only policies complicates the notions that the movement is fundamentally nationalist, and that local policies are inherently more progressive-leaning: scale is not a reliable proxy for politics. Practically, responses to contemporary English Only policies should focus on two of the few aspects they do have in common: a reductive vision of language and of language users.
C.09 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Translation, Linguistic Memory, and the Impact of (English-Only) Language Policy
Annie Kelvie
Writing in the Religious Professions: A Case Study
Studies of writing in the professions have proliferated across many professions in the last couple of decades in our field, from Devitt’s (1991) fine-grained investigation of how tax accountants take on more responsibility in their written work to Berkenkotter’s (2001) analysis of how writing cements an official diagnostic label on an otherwise complex and dynamic interpersonal relationship between therapist and client. However, an area of writing in the professions that has not yet been considered is that of writing in the religious professions: the minister, the rabbi, the imam. It may seem counterintuitive at first glance to conceptualize this type of spiritual labor as writing in the professions, but their professional work entails a great deal of writing. More than just sermons, these religious professionals write grants, articles, promotional materials, multimodal web content, advocacy pieces for various causes, and sometimes even books, often after going through extensive graduate level training in writing as part of their ordination process. By looking at religious writing through an unexpected lens, that of writing in the professions, I argue that we can de-familiarize a genre that is labeled mystical rather than professional, as well as learn strategies for advocacy from the writing work of these religious professionals.
Therefore, in my presentation, I will present case-study findings from the writing processes and products of two religious professionals working in progressive churches in the Midwest. Using what Lillis and Curry (2006) call a “text-based ethnographic approach,” I examine both final written products and interviews and field observations related to the creation and reception of the final written products. While I am still in the middle of the research, I tentatively expect two major relevant findings. First, the way these religious professionals use writing as a form of advocacy, especially as a way to negotiate with those in their own communities with whom they disagree, is potentially instructive for writing instructors advocating for changes within their own programs or teaching their students productive methods of advocacy. Secondly, much of the scholarship involving religion in our field is about the “mismatch” between conservative religious students and the goals of a liberal university education (e.g. Downs 2005, Vander Lei 2014). As a result of that focus, the field has missed other types of religious writing that may actually work with (rather than against) our goals as writing instructors and that enrich and enhance our understanding of what writing does and how it does it. Through my examination of these religious professionals’ day-to-day workplace writing, I hope to illustrate a new way of thinking about an old story, the relationship between religion and composition.
C.12 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Morals, Values, Emotions, and Cultures: Investigating Identity in Professional Communication Contexts
Karen Lunsford and James Purdy
Intellectual Property Stories in Writing Studies: Results from Two Empirical Studies on the Effects of IP Legislation, Policies, and Practices
In this talk, we will present findings from two related empirical projects already underway, a nationwide survey (to be completed in July 2015) and an interview-based study (to be completed by December 2015). Together, these projects examine how emergent laws, policies, and practices regarding intellectual property (IP) are affecting current research practices, publications, and pedagogy in the discipline of Writing Studies. The projects' purpose is to provide the documentation and systematic analysis needed to allow Writing Studies teacher-scholars to take action when new IP legislation (at the state, federal or international level) is proposed; when new journal and IRB policies involving IP issues are created; and when researchers and teachers feel pressured to alter their studies, publications, and pedagogical materials in response to spurious or overreaching IP claims.
Although anecdotes about teacher-scholars and editors being challenged about intellectual property (IP) issues (such as receiving spurious take-down notices or encountering challenges with Fair Use arguments) are common, little formal documentation exists regarding how widespread these challenges have been or what systemic effects they have had on the discipline. Existing scholarship on IP issues has investigated their influence on the teaching, production, and circulation of writing (e.g., Gurak & Johnson-Eilola, 1998; Lunsford & West, 1996; Rife, 2007; Rife, Slattery, & DeVoss, 2011), but only one formal study (Rife, 2010) has investigated the effects of IP (specifically, U.S. copyright law) on the scholarship, pedagogy, and editorial work of a specific group (technical communicators) of Writing Studies practitioners themselves. Reliable documentation and systematic analysis are essential to position Writing Studies scholars to understand how real and perceived implications of changes in IP laws, policies, and regulations are shaping academic activities.
Moreover, existing scholarship on IP issues has tended to focus on final publications and pedagogical texts -- the products of research and scholarship. What has been overlooked have been the effects of IP issues on the full cycle of knowledge production and dissemination: choosing topics and texts to research; collecting data; choosing where, how, and whether to publish articles and book-length studies; and employing materials in face-to-face and online classes.
In this presentation, we will provide an overview of the overall findings of the survey. Having briefly established the overall context, we will focus the talk on our analysis of the anecdotes that teacher-scholars have shared in the survey's open-ended questions and in the interviews. By reflecting on how IP issues have shaped their careers, teacher-scholars illustrate the toll that IP challenges take and the innovative responses they have generated. Together, these projects will inform how we, as a community of writing teacher-scholars, will intervene in future legislation, policies, and practices.
C.35 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Research Writing Studies: Issues of Subjectivity, Neurology, Intellectual Property, and Disciplinarity
Kim Hensley Owens
Toward a Codemeshing Pedagogy: Embracing Students’ “Wild Tongues”
Es posible escribir an academic argument in more than one language at a time, even if that choice defies tradición, even if that choice alienates some readers.* So we learn from Gloria Anzaldúa, whose “wild tongues” excerpt from Borderlands/La Frontera appears in many a composition reader. Within that excerpt, Anzaldúa argues that “as long as [she] has to accommodate English speakers rather than having them accommodate [her], [her] tongue will be illegitimate” (59). Composition teachers include this argument, this multilingual academic wordplay, in the readings for their courses. (NB: the “play” here in “wordplay” refers not to frivolity or to a lack of seriousness, but to play in the sense of free expression of identity, to play in the sense of trying things out with words to gauge their effects on both writer and reader). And yet composition courses rarely invite similar multilingual academic wordplay from students, despite the decades-old resolution “On the Students’ Right to Their Own Language.”
We compositionists hear from Vershawn Ashanti Young that codemeshing should be acceptable in academic prose, that a writer’s various tongues (languages, dialects, Englishes) are akin to a spoken accent, that “substituting one version of English for another may be impossible” and that it makes better sense to “promote integrating them” (62-3). And yet even Young, writing an academic argument for academic codemeshing, chooses to write exclusively in academic prose, even while applauding others like Geneva Smitherman who blend their Englishes in their scholarship. Adding to this list of scholars calling for blended languages and blended identities to be not only academically permissible but understood as vital, is Jacqueline Jones Royster, who asks “What might happen if we treated differences in subject position as critical pieces of the whole, vital to thorough understanding, and central to both problem-finding and problem-solving? This society has not, as yet, really allowed that privilege in a substantial way” (34).
This conference presentation takes up these issues en el contexto del composition classroom, but with an eye not only toward students who come to college classes with multiple languages or non-dominant identities, but also with an eye toward those students who do not think of themselves as belonging to any particular cultura, whose self-identifications are not explicitly tied to their race or ethnicity. For several years now, I’ve asked students (first year students as well as senior writing and rhetoric majors) to prepare papers “in their own wild tongues” after reading that excerpt of Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera. The assignment reliably produces anxiety for my students—the majority of whom who consider themselves monolingual and often acultural—but students always manage to find their own wild tongues. Siempre.
Students asked to write in their own “wild tongue” discover that they do, in fact, have one (or more), whether it’s already readily apparent to them or not. Students produce papers written in “tongues” ranging from texting language to secret twin language to plurilingual codemeshing. These papers, which are read aloud either to the whole class or en grupos, become a voiced “thing,” in the sense Royster argues for when she writes that she hopes to see “voicing as a phenomenon … that has import also in being a thing heard, perceived, and reconstructed” (30, my emphasis). The papers result in a lively sharing session and discussion, a happening, and for many students, these papers simultaneously expand their senses of what can count as language, extend their notions of identity, and allow them to practice the multilingual academic wordplay Anzaldúa and others have called for and which various scholars continue to call for.
Este presentación shares this one pedagogical strategy for including students’ many tongues/languages/dialects/codes/Englishes, and offers examples of students’ voices in these wild tongue papers. It also, however, reflects critically on the challenge of incorporating these pluralized voices in a more authentic, complete way, beyond a single assignment, beyond a single day. It asks attendees to consider whether we/they should and how we/they might take this nugget of an assignment, this tiny classroom practice, and begin to transform it, expand it, and weave it into a broader pedagogy that reflects what so much scholarship (including but far beyond what is cited in this proposal) has been calling for, but which has yet to be realized (to my knowledge) within our classrooms.
C.22 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
From Code-Switching to Code-Meshing: Validating the Brown/Black Voice
Pamela Saunders
Employing a Disability Studies Methodology to Rethink Access in Qualitative Research on Writing
Speaker Two proposes a short, reflective talk that will attempt to get at issues of access in designing a qualitative research that operates from a disability studies (ds) methodology – as Margaret Price (2012) argues, the way in which we design our studies matters because design implies an imagined participant with imagined abilities (p. 166). Speaker Two’s dissertation research examines qualitative interviews with autistic writers in higher education. The label “autistic” seemingly refers to a consolidated and homogenous population of individuals under the larger rubric of disability. However, the autism community is highly varied and includes individuals who associate and disassociate with disability in widely varied ways. Speaker Two’s reflections will consider how a ds methodology – methodology not as “prescription,” but as “movement, improvisation, revision” (Price, 2012, p. 181) – might contribute to what Alison Kafer (2013) describes as anti-ableist disability futures (p.3) while still leaving space for the complex ways in which individuals identify with disability. In addition to access, Speaker two will address her uneasy positioning with institutional inclusivity initiatives that enabled her to justify her project to her university’s IRB. She will consider why and how she built her qualitative study around “official” disclosures of disability and the access possibilities that were foreclosed by going that route.
C.24 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Negotiating Disability Disclosures in Qualitative Writing Studies Research
Niki Turnipseed
Taking the High Road: Reflective Strategies for Conscious Teacher Collaboration
Teacher collaboration, beyond its departmental and professionalizing benefits, has transformative potential for our individual pedagogies. While we anticipated adjusting our teaching practices in planning this course, myriad insights grew from classroom experimentation, and from regular group reflection and collaboration. Speaker 1 draws on this experience, and current scholarship on learning transfer, to suggest strategies faculty can employ in collaborative teaching and curriculum design. Through trial and error, our team developed strategies to honor individual pedagogical values while remaining open to learning from our peers. We might think of this as a teacherly version of modeling high road transfer, which requires conscious analysis and mindful abstraction of our values as educators. Indeed, teachers’ metacognition, an inevitable outcome of collaboration, allowed teachers to draw on their past experiences and knowledge while discovering new approaches to teaching.
C.38 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
More Than the Sum: Faculty Collaboration in Designing and Teaching a Hybrid Writing Course
Derrick Van Ittersum
Workflow Friction: Designing writing processes around difficulty
In “Workflow Friction: Designing writing processes around difficulty” Speakers 1 and 2 report on interviews with software developers and professional writers who blog about their digital writing workflows. The presentation explores how ease and difficulty co-exist within these writers’ processes. These writers describe the joys of exploring the features of difficult-to-use writing software, of minimal interfaces, of convoluted workarounds to annoying problems. The interview dataset reveals a key pattern: the desire to eliminate friction, or the moments when tools or processes come to the foreground in unwanted ways. Yet in discussing the pleasure of eliminating such frictions, many interviewees also recount enjoyment in learning and using new technologies. They describe the value of deliberately exploring and integrating new tools into their writing processes, and they position it as productive work rather than a chore or means of procrastination. Drawing from these conversations, the speakers suggest that this mindset is valuable for writers. Their presentation also offers heuristics for helping writers make productive use of frustration and difficulty in digital composing.
C.31 Thursday 4/7 1:45 PM - 3:00 PM
Difficulty as Possibility in Composing and Teaching with Digital Media
Martha Webber
D.37 Thursday 4/7 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM
Action for Whom, for How Long, and With What Impact? Raising Problems; Generating Solutions Through Community-Based Courses
Community-based courses lend themselves to action — as Thomas Deans articulates in Writing Partnerships (2000), students can take action in these courses to write for, about, and with community partners — but what do those actions look like in their broader contexts and what steps are we taking to define and assess their success?
We propose a roundtable that addresses the following questions: Who is the action for-- partners or students, and how do we balance the seeming mismatch between the parties involved? How long is the action, and is the project sustainable? What impact does the action have, and how do we know? How do we go about documenting and assessing the successes of our action steps? At the heart of all these questions is the potential for mismatch between partners-- community and academic-- and in terms of space, time, values, and goals. What action steps can / need to be taken to ensure that this relationship is one that is mutually beneficial to both parties?
Drawing on past experiences that illustrate and address these questions, presenters will each discuss an issue related to the challenges of achieving successful action within the context of community-based courses, and then - most importantly - they will engage roundtable participants to address these issues in their own community-based writing practices. As a result, participants will leave the roundtable with specific strategies to address these challenges when they return to their specific contexts and communities.
Thomas McNamara
Linguistic Difference on the Global Campus: Chinese Undergraduates, Language Ideology, and the Corporate University
Since 2005, the number of international students studying at US universities has increased 57 percent, driven by a 339 percent rise in the number of Chinese undergraduates studying in the US. Such demographic shifts have made linguistic diversity inescapable at many institutions, prompting scholars to evaluate the field’s pedagogical assumptions (e.g. Matsuda 2012) and the language ideologies undergirding their teaching and research (e.g. Canagarajah 2013, Lu and Horner 2013). Importantly, such work has drawn on the field’s history of advocacy for language rights (see Wible 2013) by contesting exclusionary language ideologies in our classrooms and on our campuses.
This individual presentation contributes to these efforts by drawing attention to the uneasy alignment of the field’s language advocacy work with higher education’s market ethos (see Mahala 2007, Slaughter and Rhoads 1998). Drawing on a qualitative study of forty Chinese international undergraduates, I argue that the internationalization and corporatization of US universities creates campus climates selectively open to the sorts of linguistic difference composition scholars have recently promoted (e.g. Horner et. al. 2011). Specifically, the Chinese undergraduates I interviewed—who attend a large university where the number of Chinese students has increased over 1000 percent since 2008—all feel little pressure to achieve “native-like” proficiency, claiming that most instructors and domestic peers are willing to negotiate meaning across languages. If they did encounter an instructor who demanded standard English prose, nearly all said that they expected the university to provide assistance. As Jingfei, one of my participants commented, “I would require the [writing center] to help me correct the grammars and tell me the vocabulary is wrong.”
Examining two case studies from my research, I contend in this presentation that these students’ resistance to monolingual ideologies provides a cautionary tale for compositionists aiming to disrupt exclusionary language ideologies on their campuses: These students' agency to negotiate meaning across languages and dialects represents not an opening space for linguistic equality but instead the consumer relationship the university forges with them. In other words, the linguistic recognition these students demand rests less on the “spirit of resistance” that has characterized composition’s language advocacy (Smitherman 1999) but instead on Chinese undergraduates’ knowledge that they are valued by universities as agents of diversity, sources of revenue, and high academic achievers (Abelmann 2013).
This presentation—which I plan to restrict to ten minutes to provide ample time for conversation—will prompt attendees to consider how their campuses have responded to increasing linguistic diversity. To do so, I conclude my presentation with questions inviting attendees to imagine how their institutions—and their composition, WAC, or writing center programs—can create spaces for language difference that resist higher education’s corporate turn.
E.15 Thursday 4/7 4:45 PM - 6:00 PM
Language Ideologies and Second Language Writing