Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2011, The

Description

The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2011 represents the result of a nationwide conversation—beginning with journal editors, but expanding to teachers, scholars and workers across the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition—to select essays that showcase the innovative and transformative work now being published in the field’s independent journals.

Sujets

• Language Arts
• Disciplines
• Writting

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 06 mars 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602353145
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals
Series Editor: Steve Parks
Each ye ar, a team of editors selects the best work published in the independent journals in the field of Rhetoric and Composition, following a competitive review process involving journal editors and publishers. For additional information about the series, see http://www.parlorpress.com/bestofrhetcomp.


The Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2011
Edited by Steve Parks, Brenda Glascott, Heather Christiansen, Brian Bailie, and Stacey Waite
Parlor P ress
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2013 by Parlor Press. Individual essays in this book have been reprinted with permission of the respective copyright owners.
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
ISSN 2327-4778 (print)
ISSN 2327-4786 (online)
1 2 3 4 5
Cover design by David Blakesley.
Printed on acid-free paper.
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper and digital formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Introduction
Steve Parks, Brenda Glascott, Brian Bailie, Heather Christiansen, and Stacey Waite
Across the Disciplines
1 The Pittsburgh Study of Writing
David Bartholomae and Beth Matway
Community Literacy Journal
2 “Phenomenal Women,” Collaborative Literacies, and Community Texts in Alternative “Sista” Spaces
Beverly J. Moss
Composition Forum
3 E-Book Issues in Composition: A Partial Assessment and Perspective for Teachers
Michael J. Faris and Stuart Selber
Composition Studies
4 Changing Research Methods, Changing History: A Reflection on Language, Location, and Archive
Jessica Enoch
Enculturation
5 Exposing Assemblages: Unlikely Communities of Digital Scholarship, Video, and Social Networks
Alex Reid
Journal of Second Language Writing
6 A Biliteracy Agenda for Genre Research
Guillaume Gentil
The Journal of Teaching Writing
7 Flow and the Principle of Relevance: Bringing Our Dynamic Speaking Knowledge to Writing
Deborah Rossen-Knill
Journal of Writing Research
8 Writing in Natural Sciences: Understanding the Effects of Different Types of Reviewers on the Writing Process
Melissa M. Patchan, Christian D. Schunn, and
Russell J. Clark
Kairos
9 How the Internet Saved My Daughter and How Social Media Saved My Family
Marc C. Santos
Pedagogy
10 New Media Scholarship and Teaching: Challenging the Hierarchy of Signs
Ellen Cushman
Reflections
11 “Found” Literacy Partnerships: Service and Activism at Spelman College
Zandra L. Jordan
Writing on the Edge
12 “In Our Names”: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty
Kimberly K. Gunter
About the Editors


Intr oduction
Steve Parks, Brenda Glascott, Brian Bailie, Heather Christiansen, and Stacey Waite
As scholars and teachers in Rhetoric and Composition, we often talk about engaging our students with the process of revision; we might even hear ourselves explaining revision as a kind of looking again, a continual process of re-examination—even re-imagination. And perhaps one of the most important aspects of our scholarship is that we reflect that very revision we ask of our students in our own writing about them, about our field, and about the difficult work of composing. The essays gathered here, and representing the best of the independent journals in 2011as selected by teacher-scholars representing the diverse identities and career trajectories of our field, reflect, in the best possible ways, our field’s most treasured asset—the desire to revise our own histories, terms, and methodologies, to see again (and perhaps question) what we know or what it means to know in the first place.
Jessica Enoch’s, “ Changing Research Methods, Changing History: A Reflection on Language, Location, and Archives,” for example, articulates (through a reflective consideration of her own scholarship that focuses on three Chicana teachers and their contribution to our understandings of rhetorical education) actual methodologies that might enable scholars of composition to revise dominant histories of the field, to compose histories that “account for marginalized rather than enfranchised students and teachers.” And it is difficult to read this collection of essays without noting writers like Beverly Moss and Zandra L. Jordan, who each seem to answer Enoch’s call. Moss’s essay, “’Phenomenal Women,’ Collaborative Literacies, and Community Texts in Alternative ‘Sista’ Spaces,” engages in an ethnographic study of an African-American women’s community club called Phenomenal Women Incorporated . While Moss’s essay is not explicitly interested in rewriting history in the precise way that Enoch’s is, her close analysis of this alternative literacy site actually illustrates how Enoch’s research methodologies might also be thought of as a means of researching the present, seeing the current moment again, seeing it better.
Additionally, Jordan’s “’Found’ Literacy Partnerships: Service and Activism at Spelman College” asks us to not only consider the places literacy happens outside the institution but to also move our students outside their institutional locations through service learning that creates a dynamic and politically powerful “partnership” through community engagement. Rhetoric and composition’s move into the realm of public rhetoric and community partnerships has directed the discipline’s gaze away from conventional histories, understandings, and locations, and consequently, focused the work of scholar-teachers within the field on both the scholarly and pedagogical enrichment that results in exploring spaces outside the academy. An example of this is Kimberly K. Gunter’s “In Our Names: Rewriting the U.S. Death Penalty,” which thinks carefully about how students might respond to moving out of the classroom and into a world that asks them to write for specific purposes with real, material world goals and consequences. This movement, Gunter’s piece suggests, is quite different from a teacher asking students to write about the world outside the classroom—a world they can see, but not touch from inside the classroom location.
As we revise and reconsider the field and move outside of classrooms, we must also contend with the idea of moving outside of alphabetic texts, of imagining reading and composing that privileges sound, image, video, and motion. New media and digital composition scholars ask of us perhaps the ultimate revision: to, at times, move composing away from texts. Ellen Cushman’s essay, “New Media Scholarship and Teaching: Challenging the Hierarchy of Signs,” enacts this movement in her discussion of “learning new sign systems” as we learn to de-privilege the alphabetic text as the primary mode for literacy. In “E-Book Issues in Composition: A Partial Assessment and Perspective for Teachers,” Michael J. Faris and Stuart Selber offer a provocative case study, exploring the impact of the Sony Reader as the “text” of their course and offering up both the pleasures and difficulties of electronic texts as they become more integral to the teaching of writing and reading. In a focused discussion of video composition, Alex Reid’s “Exposing Assemblages” encourages scholars to produce scholarship in a variety of media and articulates how digital media might offer scholars a unique opportunity to compose and think in new ways, ways that will enrich the field itself. Reid mentions the journal Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology and Pedagogy as a place where this new media scholarship takes place. This is no surprise given that one of this year’s selected essays appeared there: “How the Internet Saved My Daughter and How Social Media Saved My Family” by Marc Santos—a multi-media essay that makes its argument both through its content and through the reader’s engagement with its various components of photographs, hyperlinks, page composition, narrative, and theory. Its multi-media form allows its multi-dimensional arguments about media, about suffering, about writing, and about philosophy and rhetoric to sound off in their different registers creating a unique symphony of argument, sound, image, and motion.
In order for any field to continue to revise itself, its scholars and teachers must be willing to call into question their most taken for granted terms, to ask questions about what it means to know in a given field and about how they come to know what they know. In this sense, to be a scholar in composition is almost always to be invested in epistemologies. Guillaume Gentil, in “A Biliteracy Agenda for Genre Research,” calls into question traditional notions of genre as they connect to conventional understandings of language competence. We cannot read Gentil’s essay without asking important questions a