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 Friday, April 8 and Saturday, April 9. For a list of presentations on Thursday, please see the blog post below. See you in Houston!
Friday, April 8
Maria Carvajal
Spanglish in the Composition Classroom: Leveraging Students’ Rhetorical Code-Switching Practices for Academic Writing
Even though composition scholars and instructors are increasingly aware of the importance and potential benefits of code-switching, code-meshing, and bilingualism, as a discipline, composition studies does not do enough to make students’ language diversity visible and productive in writing classrooms, and, by extension fails to uphold students’ right to their own language. More specifically, we haven’t yet developed sound pedagogies that might use the code-switching skills multilingual speakers develop outside of school in our classrooms to help them become better academic writers (Canagarajah). Traditional ways of teaching tend to ignore students’ everyday language use and, rather than celebrating the knowledge students bring to composition classrooms, lead to assimilation (Villanueva). I see incorporating our students’ everyday linguistic practices, including code-switching, into the composition classroom as an alternative to assimilationist pedagogies that expect students not only to speak and write in ways that are considered “proper” and “standard,” but that are also alienating to students who in reality possess impressive rhetorical skills developed through “non-standard” language practices.
In this talk I argue that bilingual students who use Spanglish (code-switching between Spanish and English) outside of school develop important rhetorical skills that can help them in the writing classroom. By making connections between the language students use outside of schools and the rhetorical moves used in academic writing, instructors can ensure that students realize they already possess important rhetorical skills and knowledge that can be applied to academic writing. For this reason, writing instructors can and should find ways to leverage students’ code-switching skills for academic writing. I contend that allowing Spanglish in the composition classroom is one productive way in which instructors can help bilingual students make connections between rhetorical skills they have learned through their code-switching practice and academic writing. A second goal of this presentation is to demonstrate how often-marginalized language practices can provide instructors and students new avenues to engage in important conversations about language, rhetoric, and writing. While I focus on Spanglish, I also argue that by giving students, including monolingual students, opportunities to explore and learn more about their individual and their peers’ linguistic repertoires, instructors can show students that they truly value their right to their own language. More specifically, in this talk I will discus some of the rhetorical skills Spanglish users posses, explain why composition instructors are uniquely positioned to leverage students’ code-switching practices, and begin to outline how this can be achieved in the composition classroom. I will also provide a handout outlining potential ways of incorporating code-switching practices into academic writing assignments so that audience members will be more prepared to help students engage with the rhetorical skills they bring to college-level academic writing.
F.27 Friday 4/8 8:00 AM - 9:15 AM
We are Not Colorblind: Empowering Spanglish and Other Types of Codeswitching
Eileen Lagman
Literacy Remains: Transnational Ethnography and Literacy as Loss
Speaker 1 discusses how a transnational multi-sited methodology allowed her to understand loss associated with literacy in a way that a single-sited study could not. Literacy studies has focused on the acquisition of literacy, but has obscured literacy loss—when one path for literacy means losing out on another, when the social capital acquired through literacy can means losing friends or family after we’ve “moved up” or “moved on,” or what Victor Villanueva has described as “that which had been lost on the road to assimilation.” To account for loss means expanding the research site from the “here and now” to the “what-could-have-been”—a move that took Speaker 1 across spaces and temporalities. Speaker 1 draws on her multi-sited ethnographic study of “brain drain” from the Philippines where she conducted ethnographic research in vocational training classrooms, government offices, recruitment agencies, and homes across the US and the Philippines. This decentered, constantly in motion, and unsettled sense of place mirrored the way that her participants, as neocolonial subjects, experienced the pursuit of literacy. Speaker 1 began to see her own movements as a researcher as attempting to piece together the “remains” (Eng & Kazanjian) of what had been lost on the path to literacy and modernization. For Speaker 1, a transnational field site illuminated the far-reaching consequences to communities, families, and nations, including how those left behind frame their own relationship to literacy, when people move from one place to another.
H.28 Friday 4/8 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Transnational Ethnography in Action: An Updated Framework for Studying the Global Circulation of People and Writing
Peter Mortensen
Revisiting Assumptions in Historical Research on Literacy: A Necessary Prelude to Activism
As our discipline’s public activism matures, as it becomes more strategic and sophisticated, we would do well to revisit the assumptions that inform our most powerful arguments. One such assumption is encapsulated in Harvey J. Graff’s 1979 critique of the “literacy myth.” Surely in our time there is good reason to speak up when the literacy myth is invoked to motivate unreasonable expectations about the social and economic good that literacy can deliver for individuals, for communities, and for nations. But just because evidence from our time supports Graff’s claim, we should not assume his claim to be valid for all time. Indeed, recent studies of economic trends emergent in the U.S. after the turn of the twentieth century suggest that we should look again at the relationship between literacy as produced in schools and the high and singular value that people at that time associated with it. This second look reveals that 100 years ago a growing segment of the U.S. population, particularly white people living in the Midwest, had good reason to expect that the literacy gained in high school would translate into wage and wealth premiums never seen in previous generations. I argue that the rhetorical legacy of this economic reality informs the literacy myth as we know it today. Further, I contend that recognition of this legacy should cause us to modulate what often comes across publicly as the sort of counterfactual—and condescending—argument that non-academics believe academics are pleased to make.
Detail of my critique of Graff’s critique of the “literacy myth”:
The Literacy Myth—the book—turned 30 in 2009, which occasion presented Graff (2010) the opportunity to assess his critique’s influence on scholarship across a range of academic disciplines. To be sure, that influence has been considerable, but not—as Graff himself hints—without challenge. He asserts that it is “hardly surprising that discussions of literacy are characterized by persistent fears of decline,” fears that reflexively command belief in the literacy myth.
To which I say, maybe, but isn’t another explanation possible? Might it be the case that the literacy myth has purchase on the American imagination precisely because its promise was realized—realized and deeply felt—at some point in the memorable past? And could it be that this affecting combination of memory and loss is what motivates the hope, however foolish, that conditions will once again obtain under which advanced literacy unambiguously rewards those who attain it with advantages over those who do not? To be clear, my interest in answering these questions is not grounded in any expectation that we can find truth in the myth today, nor that will we find truth in it tomorrow, or even ever again. Rather, my aim is simply to seek a better explanation for people’s abiding faith that literacy, in and of itself, can pay dividends. For me, that explanation begins in a brief review of the evidence that led Graff to his conclusions in The Literacy Myth, and it progresses from there to a consideration of evidence that lies beyond the scope of Graff’s study.
Graff anchors The Literacy Myth in a painstaking study of Canadian manuscript census returns for 1861 and 1871, returns that cover the industrially burgeoning small cities of Hamilton, London, and Kingston, all in what is now the province of Ontario. Graff’s findings, he insists, “contradict much of our received wisdom and expectations, with respect to social ascription and its relationship to achievement, mobility, economic development, social order, and broader cultural themes.” Consequently, “[l]iteracy study,” Graff says, should be recognized as constituting “a valuable mode of analysis for students of society.”
Sociologist Michael Schudson could not have agreed more. Writes Schudson (1982), “Of course, Graff is absolutely right that there is a strong and widespread belief in Western culture in the importance of the ability to read and write.” But that’s where all agreement ends. Schudson complains that “Graff seeks to make of his modest proposal an immodest declaration and, in the effort, nearly buries the monographic strengths of his work in rhetorical overkill,” in part because Graff takes a set of “complex data but mines it only for the proposition that there is not a perfect correlation between success and literacy, failure and [il]literacy. But who ever could have imagined otherwise?” Schudson asks. He goes on to fault Graff for imagining literacy too narrowly: “The belief in literacy is not and never was a belief in a perfect correlation between literacy and occupational status. It is, as Graff stated originally, a faith in the relationship between literacy, rationality, rational control over one’s life, and human progress. It remains a faith to reckon with.”
While not fully agreeing with Schudson’s criticism, I do wish to recognize that he is onto something. It was risky for Graff to extend his claim about the “literacy myth” past the turn of the twentieth century, and I explain why. I do so by appealing to a recent and very important work of quantitative economic history, Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz’s The Race Between Education and Technology (2009), which takes as its centerpiece the amazingly detailed 1915 Iowa State Census. The result? Based on extrapolations from the 1915 census and coordination with federal and other states’ data, Goldin and Katz are able to argue that, between 1890 and 1910, the number of students enrolled in high schools across the nation increased sharply, as did the number of high schools they attended. During this time, for individuals, the “return” on a year of high school education, measured by wages earned, was considerable—and the premium for a high school diploma was extraordinarily high. Unsurprisingly, this differential contributed to wage-earning distinctions between those in positions that required manual labor and those in professional positions. But a differential also emerged within categories; years of high schooling contributed to wage-earning even within the laborer category. After 1914, however, returns to education began declining, and continued to decline for most of the rest of the twentieth century. Why was this? Goldin and Katz show that this decline had mostly to do with the increased number of high school graduates available for jobs that required and rewarded the knowledge and skills attained in high school: in other words, supply outstripped demand, and the financial reward for attainment in high schooling decreased.
H.03 Friday 4/8 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Revisiting, Recovering, and Revising Literacy
Andrea Olinger
When self-report contradicts practice: Understanding the tenacity of writers’ beliefs
Speaker 2 examines instances when writers’ self-reports contradict their textual practices. In text-based interviews, writers are asked to explain choices they made as they worked on a particular text. What happens, however, when a writer’s beliefs about the features of their writing conflict with actual language use in their texts as revealed through discourse analysis? This gap in writers’ metalinguistic awareness has not been adequately theorized. Using interview and textual data collected for a larger qualitative study of disciplinary writers, I examine cases in which two writers’ reports about textual features in their or others’ writing diverged from what was actually written in the texts shared. One PhD student in literature said that he felt he repeated words too much; an assistant professor of film said that an admired writer did not rely on rudimentary transition words to create “flow.” As I, the researcher, analyzed the texts under discussion, I felt that the use of repetition was not problematic, and I noticed that the admired writer did use transition words. Yet bringing this up with the writers did not change their minds about the characteristics of good writing. Drawing on language ideologies research in linguistic anthropology (e.g., Kroskrity, Silverstein), I seek to explain the tenacity of these beliefs. I argue that the styles they felt they should practice were linked to idealized images of “good writers” like an advisor. In this way, the language ideologies held by these writers are not simply incomplete; they are also productive, allowing people to produce texts that they hope will gain them membership in particular communities. Ultimately, this presentation provides conceptual tools for better understanding why writers’ beliefs might conflict with their practices.
H.15 Friday 4/8 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Bringing Tacit Writing Knowledge to Light: On the Possibilities and Limitations of Fostering Explicit Awareness of Disciplinary Writing Practices
Heather Blain Vorhies
H.23 Friday 4/8 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Roles for Writing Studies in Graduate Writing Support: Three Sites for Action
Undergraduate writing support traditionally receives the most scholarly attention from writing studies, yet various exigencies suggest we pay more attention to the ways in which graduate students develop as writers. Not only are graduate students often co-producing research with their professors, but they are also a population directly invested in learning the moves and conventions of the academic discourse community (Bieber and Worley). Writing is a central part of graduate students’ work in the academy; supporting graduate students to develop as academic writers in their disciplines is necessary for their professional development as scholars and researchers. We acknowledge that in recent years, writing studies scholars have become increasingly interested in graduate level writing support (Vorhies, Powers, Fredericksen and Mangelsdorf, Phillips). In 2014, both The Writing Lab Newsletter and Across the Disciplines issued calls for papers about graduate writing support, while 2015 saw the first meeting of the Consortium on Graduate Communication, a newly formed community of educators focused on providing professional development in academic written and oral communication to graduate students.
This panel aims to advance this conversation by offering approaches, tools, and critical perspectives for composition and rhetoric scholars interested in taking action on their own campuses. We propose three different ways of taking action to support graduate student writers in their endeavors across the curriculum.
Amelia Herb
(En)acting the Discipline: Decoding the Visual Rhetoric of Physics
Studies of disciplinary discourses (e.g. Bazerman, Hyland, Prior, Swales, Russell, Gross, Myers) over the past several decades have focused primarily on written texts, and writing and reading practices within the disciplines. These studies have uncovered disciplinary discourses, argumentation patterns, reading approaches, and the evolution of the scientific article, which have afforded informed pedagogies for teaching scientific writing. Too, scholars of visual rhetoric, new media, digital literacies, and digital rhetoric (e.g. Kress, Bolter, Grusin, Hawisher, Selfe, Ball) have surveyed the landscape of writing technologies and possibilities for visual meaning making, showing us the challenges and affordances that face our students to make meaning in these digital textual environments, as well as the complex semiotic navigations that are necessary for them to create meaning simultaneously through image and text in digital and visual media environments.
My project combines these worlds, researching the nexus between new media/visual rhetoric and disciplinarity. Specifically, my project decodes the visual rhetoric existing in the field of physics and presents examples from an advanced experimental physics course of how students learn, produce, and innovate in the digital medium of multimedia presentations. Professional physicists' presentations served as guides for the communications instructor to decode disciplinary expectations and patterns. What emerged was not only a schema of professional visual rhetoric in the field of physics, but also a pedagogy informed by this analysis of disciplinary visual rhetoric practices.
Ultimately, this work offers an alternative to assertion-evidence approaches to multimedia presentations and visual rhetoric, such as that of Michael Alley et al. (2009). I argue that for advanced undergraduates or students seeking to professionalize, learning principles of visual rhetoric enables them to decode professional multimedia presentations, affords them a greater understanding of multimedia communication practices, and equips them to produce disciplinary specific visual rhetoric within their respective fields.
I.20 Friday 4/8 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
Tasting the Golden Waters: Exploring Different Writing Rhetorics
Allison Kranek
In a Writing Habit of Mind: College Mission Statements and the WPA Framework for Success
While some scholars in the rhetoric and composition community work with institutional and educational rhetoric, much of this work is done by education scholars in education journals, rather than in rhetoric and composition publications. Composition scholars of course study writing within the university setting, but much of this work is situated in classrooms or writing programs, rather than within the institutional discourse of the university. I am to more extensively analyze mission statements through the lens of composition and rhetoric. Using the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing, I analyze the mission statements of 25 top national universities, 25 top liberal arts colleges, and 25 top community colleges for evidence of the eight habits of mind the Framework advocates as essential to cultivating successful college writing. Overall, I argue that there are differences in which habits of mind are stressed (and the way they are framed) across the types of institutions, a pattern that is not surprising given the differences in the focus of national, liberal arts, and community colleges. Additionally, I show that liberal arts colleges articulate critical thinking and writing skills more explicitly within their mission statements as essential components of the curriculum and learning environment. I will spend 5 minutes introducing the topic and explaining my methodology, then I will discuss specific examples from mission statements, allotting approximately 4 minutes for each type institution. I will conclude with a few minutes of conclusions about how my findings can come to bear on the work of writing program administrators, composition instructors and institutional rhetoricians situated within the university. Additionally, I plan to supplement my presentation with a handout outlining additional examples that I will not have time to address.
I.30 Friday 4/8 12:30 PM - 1:45 PM
WPAs in Action: Navigating Institutional Infrastructures, Cultivating Relevant Textual Practices
Amber Buck
A Life Lived Socially: Longitudinal Studies of Social Media Use
Paul Prior (2015) recently argued for studies tracing literate activity across longer timescales, considering how individual moments of composing create trajectories of literacy development across lifespans. Literacy research has a long tradition of relying on life histories (Brandt, 2001; Marshall Bowen, 2011; Selfe & Hawisher, 2004), yet research examining social media literacies has been narrower in focus, emphasizing particular sites or activity within short time frames. Facebook and Twitter’s 10th anniversaries offer opportunities to examine individuals’ experiences with social media over longer time scales. Speaker 5 considers longitudinal approaches to social media research from a case study of a young adult’s personal and professional literacy development on social media. Building from original data collected in 2010, Presenter 5 updates this case with 2015 data and traces the influence of social media as this individual moves beyond the university. This presentation suggests a fruitful approach that considers a longer view of lived writing practices on social media sites.
J.25 Friday 4/8 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
Just Going to Leave This Here: Empirical Study of Social Media
Melissa Larabee
Best Unfriends: Ferguson, Facebook, and the Perils of Knowing Thy Enemy
There have been ample studies of conflict on the Web, much of it focused on interchange between strangers: flame wars (e.g. Postmes et al.), trolling (e.g. Hardaker; Phillips), the freedoms and dangers of anonymity. But for most people, online interaction isn’t in anonymous spaces. For most people, when conflict plays out on the Internet, it starts with a coworker, a high school friend, or a relative.
In this session, I look at Facebook fights, or more specifically, at how users address problematic content when it comes from Grandma. For instance, “don’t feed the troll” is Internet Commenting 101 for avoiding pointless circular arguments, but silence as tactic has different dimensions on Facebook. In this context, is abstaining from interacting with a given post considered tacit approval or tacit disapproval? How does this distinction position you in relation to the problematic content should you choose to simply hide someone’s posts rather than unfriending them? The web of effects is surprisingly complex to negotiate and made even more so by the architecture of Facebook, which allows for upvotes (likes) but no corresponding downvotes. Public dissent, then, must be enacted either through writing or through the liking of someone else’s written words.
This project investigates how the pressure of offline connection shapes the form that these interventions can take and what discursive possibilities they might enable. Throughout, I draw on interviews (in progress) with regular Facebook users about their commenting practices, with a focus on discussions relating to the past year’s police brutality in Ferguson, Baltimore, and throughout the United States. Using these fraught interactions as an entry point, I consider how participants weigh the effects of writing in such heightened rhetorical situations and what motivates them to take action—desire to change the individual, desire to curate the record, or something else? By teasing out the nuances of these diverse conceptions of effectiveness in writing (and silence) and placing them in context with current scholarship on audience and digital publics (e.g. boyd, Litt), I aim to expand our notions of the work of public discourse online.
Speaker 4: Online spaces present opportunities and challenges alike for feminists: while they may enable the creation and circulation of feminist knowledge, often, they can invite gendered hostility and resistance (Jane, Mantilla, Megarry). The response to Feminist Frequency, a web series created and hosted by Anita Sarkeesian, exemplifies this dynamic. While Sarkeesian has managed to gain supporters, raise money, and spark discussions about women’s representation in pop culture media, she’s also faced mass online harassment. As composition studies more fully embraces the affordances of internet technologies, we must consider how ethical it is to ask our students to write themselves into these potentially racist, sexist, or abusive networks. While online spaces provide students with “real” publics and “real” rhetorical situations, we must also recognize how such publics may attempt to silence students who inhabit gendered and/or raced bodies. How, then, can we and our students safely make use of digital spaces? And how can we do so while recognizing, negotiating, and resisting gendered hate online?
In this presentation, I will examine Sarkeesian’s case—both the hatred directed at her as well as her response to it—in order to understand the causes of gendered attacks online and, more importantly, how we might resist it. Sarkeesian is a particularly valuable example because she enacts what Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady term “feminist rhetorical resilience,” a responsive, networked model of rhetorical agency that allows her to navigate the gendered structures that might otherwise silence or restrict a single rhetor. Sarkeesian’s awareness of the many material and discursive locations that enable and constrain rhetorical agency, I argue, can serve as a model to help us and our students understand and take action against “e-bile” (Jane). Through this enriched approach to rhetorical agency, I will offer specific tools and strategies to help ourselves and our students recognize, analyze, and contend with gendered networks of power online. Ultimately, a more robust theory and pedagogy of networked rhetorical agency will not only work to resist gendered harassment, but will eventually legitimize feminist rhetorics and rhetors online.
J.03 Friday 4/8 2:00 PM - 3:15 PM
Digital Activism Toward Social Justice
Evin Groundwater
The Egalitarian Rhetoric of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs)
The swift rise of the massive open online course, or MOOC, has seen administrators, instructors, and students developing and participating in these classes through a variety of institutions across the country. The ability to access many of these courses cheaply or for free has generated the idea that these MOOCs represent an egalitarian effort to democratize education across the globe. And while scholars have been quick to consider many of the pedagogical implications of the MOOC (The Invasion of the MOOC, published in 2014 is a prime example), there has been little discussion regarding whether this egalitarian rhetoric accurately reflects the manner in which MOOCs are being developed and utilized by the companies and universities that create and manage them. In this paper, I analyze the egalitarian rhetoric of MOOCs through a rhetoric of space, examining how such a discourse heralds the MOOC as a means to open up educational and financial spaces in the university for students previously barred from such spaces. Drawing from Jessica Enoch’s definition of rhetorics of space as “those material and discursive practices that work to compose and enhance a space,” I argue that proponents of MOOCs often declare a MOOC’s space to be egalitarian and democratizing, even as MOOCs reconstruct many of the barriers in the physical university classroom. I construct my paper around the analysis of key texts used by MOOC developers (such as edX, Coursera, and Udacity) to communicate their visions of MOOCs as egalitarian. For example, edX’s “How it Works” video intends to sell prospective registrants on the idea of the MOOC and convey that MOOCs such as theirs are the “ultimate democratizer.” By examining these texts, I articulate how MOOC spaces identify themselves as alternative to the university through their accessibility and lower cost, despite maintaining many practices and attitudes that prevent truly open access to those spaces. I also scrutinize the claim that MOOCs are about learning and not profit, connecting such logic to the corporatized university and attempts to phase out general education classes (like first-year writing/composition) from the physical university. Arizona State University’s newly announced “Global Freshman Academy,” developed in concert with edX, is a timely example of how MOOCs provide the corporatized university with a means to quickly and efficiently reap profits from students who may never be able to set foot on the physical campus. I will discuss how we might rethink these egalitarian rhetorics into more productive forms of representation, as well as potential outcomes (both positive and negative) such rhetorics portend. In the presentation I will spend 5 minutes detailing what a MOOC is and what rhetorics of space are, as well as how I’m utilizing them. I’ll then take about 5 minutes to provide key examples of the egalitarian rhetoric of MOOCs using videos and documents from certain MOOC developers. Last, I’ll spend about 10 minutes analyzing these documents and how their rhetoric aligns with (or doesn’t) the spaces MOOCs create and the manner in which they’ve been built/deployed. Ultimately, I hope to complicate the discussion surrounding MOOCs while still considering how they might be productive spaces for university pedagogy.
K.07 Friday 4/8 3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
Mass Education and Unbundled Access: MOOCs and the New BA
Saturday, April 9
Kristi McDuffie
Negotiating Whiteness in Parent Reports of Child Racial Awareness
Speaker 2 investigates the ways that race, and particularly racialized whiteness, are constructed, defined, and negotiated in parent reports of child racial awareness. In our increasingly transracial society, parents, and particularly parents of children of color, look to the web to share and discuss their experiences about guiding their children through racial awareness. By examining parenting blogs and respondent comments for what they reveal about contemporary racial ideologies and their associated rhetorical strategies, Speaker 2 seeks to identify the ways that whiteness is constructed and negotiated in these digitally mediated conversations. Speaker 2 also aims to report on the ways that folk theories of racism (Hill, 2008) and colorblindness (Bonilla-Silva, 2006) are in contention with socio-historical (Smedley & Smedley, 2002) and systemic (Feagin, 2006) understandings of race and racism. Finally, Speaker 2 will discuss the possibilities for social justice activism that are illuminated through these online parental narratives.
L.24 Saturday 4/9 9:30 AM - 10:45 AM
Interrogating Digitalized Whiteness: Renderings of Whiteness in Mediated Writing Spaces
Patrick Berry
The Romance of Prison Writing and Public Responsibility
When one thinks of prison writing, what comes to mind? No doubt for many it will be Malcolm X and his remarkable experiences learning to read and write in prison. The problem with such stories, this speaker argues, is not that they are untrue, but that attention paid to them leads to neglect of the diverse compositions produced in prison. The speaker will explore what he calls “the romance of prison writing,” a somewhat uncritical belief that positions prison writing as an absolute good and an unquestionable pathway to freedom. What is gained and lost through maintaining this overly hopeful view of literacy? What does it mean to put forth such a view in public forums? This speaker explores and answers these questions through his research with a college-in-prison program, ultimately arguing that while we cannot predict how our work will be interpreted by diverse audiences, we do ourselves a disservice if we do not go public with the complexities of literacy research.
M.04 Saturday 4/9 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
What Does it Mean for Prison Research and Teaching to Go Public?
Cory Holding
No Other Argument Is Possible
In collaboration with writers who are incarcerated, the authors of this paper consider whether critical writing pedagogy is possible in carceral settings and, if so, what shapes it can take. Critical writing pedagogy can be designed, for example, to help foster awareness of the role that educational institutions play in maintaining the “racial caste system” at the root of U.S. national culture, which typically happens outside of carceral institutions. While prisons are logical places for enacting such pedagogy, they are also built to discourage rebellion. As educators, students, and activists, we tentatively explore tactics for moving justice-oriented pedagogy through and from this space to publics while considering the fragile question of “movement.” We invite the audience to help us think through forms for critical writing pedagogy under constraint and, following James Berlin (quoting Goran Therborn), the affordance of ideology to such a bind: “What exists? What is good? What is possible?”
M.04 Saturday 4/9 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
What Does it Mean for Prison Research and Teaching to Go Public?
Maggie Shelledy
“A Significant and Transformative Struggle”: Rhetorical Agency in the Prison Classroom
Recently, scholars within the field of Rhetoric and Composition have turned their attention to writing and writing instruction in prison classrooms. These scholars of prison writing are increasingly critical of cultural logics of incarceration and seek critical, even abolitionist pedagogies (Jacobi 2011; Berry 2013; Plemmons 2013; Wilkey and Cleary 2015). These scholars demonstrate the ways that literate practice, especially life writing, can help incarcerated people resist the isolating and dehumanizing effects of incarceration. However, these studies, while foundational and crucial for understanding the social value of literacy programs in carceral settings, are limited in their scope, focusing only on individual courses or workshops, and rhetorical agency remains under-theorized. The trouble with this limited scope is that it leads the field to over-estimate the emancipatory effects of formal writing instruction, focusing primarily on the rhetorical agency of writing instructors and of literacy itself and rendering the students of literacy instruction passive recipients of knowledge. If the field of Rhetoric and Composition is invested in emancipatory or critical pedagogies, then we must be suspicious of our own motivating narratives and literacy myths. Little is known about the ways incarcerated people themselves take up and negotiate academic literacy to create identities and social connectedness that are authentic, legible, and resistant to the social mechanisms and logics that would reduce them to absence, automation, and powerlessness.
In an effort to better understand the rhetorical action of incarcerated students, I employ recent theories of rhetorical agency, particularly those that draw from Actor-Network Theory and New Materialism (Cooper 2011; Rickert 2013, among others). While these theories have been especially important in considering the rhetorical agency of nonhumans, I argue that they also illuminate the rhetorical agency of people whose humanity has been questioned or denied. In this paper, I present representative data from my qualitative study, comprised of semi-structured interviews with formerly incarcerated people about their experience with writing and higher education during their period of incarceration. I argue that the literate and rhetorical practices of these formerly incarcerated students help us to recognize the limitations and possibilities for counter-hegemonic writing instruction. I propose a framework for understanding the messy, networked nature of rhetorical action and for locating possibilities for social action in the dynamic intersection of the university and the prison. This framework reveals the political significance of literate practice and the emergent, tactical agencies of both the carceral and traditional writing classroom.
M.13 Saturday 4/9 11:00 AM - 12:15 PM
Writing for Advocacy and Agency