Best of the Independent Rhetoric and Composition Journals 2010, The

Description

THE BEST OF THE INDEPENDENT RHETORIC AND COMPOSITION JOURNALS 2010 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. Representing both print and digital journals in the field, the essays featured here explore issues ranging from classroom practice to writing in global and digital contexts, from writing workshops to community activism. Together, the essays provide readers with a rich understanding of the present and future direction of the field.

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Literacy

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 26 mars 2011
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602352308
• 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 2010
Edited by Steve Parks, Linda Adler-Kassner, Brian Bailie, and Collette Caton
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2011 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
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The best of the independent rhetoric and composition journals, 2010 / edited by Steve Parks...[et al.].
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-60235-228-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-229-2 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-230-8 (epub)
1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching. I. Parks, Steve, 1963-
PE1404.B476 2011
808--dc22
2011012459
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
Stephen J. Parks, Linda Adler-Kassner, Brian Bailie, and Collette Caton
Across the Disciplines
Writing in Central and Eastern Europe: Stakeholders and Directions in Initiating Change
John Harbord
Community Literacy Journal
Street Sex Work: Re/Constructing Discourse from Margin to Center
Jill McCracken
Composition Forum
Sustaining Writing Theory
Amy M. Patrick
Composition Studies
An Inconvenient Tool: Rethinking the Role of Slideware in the Writing Classroom
Laurie E. Gries and Collin Gifford Brooke
Computers and Composition
Recovering Delivery for Digital Rhetoric
James E. Porter
JAC
Pass It On: Revising the Plagiarism Is Theft Metaphor
Amy Robillard
The Journal of Teaching Writing
Freewriting and Free Speech: A Pragmatic Perspective
Janet Bean and Peter Elbow
Kairos
Speaking with Students: Profiles in Digital Pedagogy
Virginia Kuhn, with DJ Johnson and David Lopez
Pedagogy
Remediating the Book Review: Toward Collaboration and Multimodality across the English Curriculum
Christine Tulley and Kristine Blair
Reflections
Engaging Community Literacy through the Rhetorical Work of a Social Movement
Christopher Wilkey
Interview with Bonnie Neumeier
Christopher Wilkey
Writing on the Edge
Everything Was Going Quite Smoothly Until I Stumbled on a Footnote
David Bartholomae
About the Editors


Introduction
Stephen J. Parks, Linda Adler-Kassner, Brian Bailie, and Collette Caton
Any anthology that announces itself as offering the “best” clearly needs to explain its intent, its theory, and its rationale. From the outset, then, we want to acknowledge the inherent difficulty of defining the “best” for a field whose research begins in the classroom, but transverses programs, colleges, communities, and ultimately, national borders. Within such a simultaneously pragmatic and theoretical, local and global context, any research produced will need to address multiple concerns across multiple audiences.
Any collection of the “best,” then, should not favor one particular teaching moment or research model, but should represent the dynamic interplay of all these contexts, simultaneously moving across different domains, demands, and decision points. It should present essays that have helped form and inform the debates that mark our current field, as well as suggesting ways to shift and rearrange key terms within rhetoric and composition to allow new knowledge to be created. Nor is such work the domain of print journals only; we have also worked with digitally born journals to ensure their multimedia work could be included, representing how scholarship has been strengthened by the interaction of traditional writing genres, new media, and social networking technology. And it is for that reason that the “book” you are now reading will appear on the Web so that you can see the original digital formats in which some of the essays originated: http://www.parlorpress.com/bestofrhetcomp.
We also believed that any such anthology must emerge out of this sense of collaborative conversation. To that end, we invited any journal that identified as “independent” to select two essays published in the past year. These would be our base set of essays, from which the “best” would be drawn. This process allowed the individual editors of journals to select the work they believed best represented the goals and aims of the journal. Here we wanted to respect their work, their editorial insights. Then, instead of producing an anthology which relied upon our own sense of “best” or even a “select” group of elite readers, we decided to made the selection of essays in this volume an opportunity for a broad discussion amongst the many laborers and scholars in our field – adjunct instructors, graduate students, full time faculty, tenured professors, unionized and non-unionized workers; individuals who saw their primary identification as writing program administrators, scholars, writing center tutors, or classroom teachers. (Our one failing in this regard was not having a community college or two year faculty labor pool represented, a failing we hope to correct for the future editions.)
Working with four institutions, representing different student and teaching populations, we established reading teams who ranked the essays according to a set of opening criteria: Article demonstrates a broad sense of the discipline, demonstrating the ability to explain how its specific focus in a sub-disciplinary area addresses broader concerns in the field. Article makes original contributions to the field, expanding or rearticulating central premises. Article is written in a style that, while based in the discipline, attempts to engage with a wider audience or concerns a wider audience.
Each reading group was asked to rank the essays on a scale of 1-4, indicating which work best met the criteria. At each moment, however, we also encouraged the readers to expand our criteria. For that reason, the rankings began to intimate how institutional location affected one’s reading – graduate students looking for essays that provided both theory and practice; adjunct faculty looking for discussions of labor and teaching; writing program administrators looking for strategic insights on practice. And, as you might expect, many group participants used their multiple locations as individuals, members of particular heritages, and institutionally located workers to inform their collective decisions.
It is from this collaborative and collective process, then, that the essays in this volume were chosen. To us, then, they are the “best” because they reflect the decisions made by a broad cross-section of those active in our field’s classrooms, programs, and institutions. The selected essays represent how workers in our field chose to best represent the dynamic interchange of ideas and practices occurring in the independent Rhetoric and Composition journals.
This was our intent and theory in putting together this anthology. Our rationale, however, touches upon a slightly different sense of “our field” and how knowledge is produced. Unlike institutionally supported journals, such as College English , independent journals often do not have the resources to have a collective visible presence at our regional or national conferences. At those moments when our field “gathers” to represent its important research and scholarship, there is little public space for the work of independent journals. And as a consequence, there is little opportunity to share the insights contained in their publication and to expand their readership base (which for independent journals is often a vital element in their continued existence).
Economics, then, are impacting the sustainability of independent journals. For while certain journals might be able to attend the Conference on College Composition and Communication (4Cs), for instance, conversations with journal editors will highlight how the economics of conferences have led many to lower their profile. Exhibition booths and conference program advertising space are all too expensive. In addition, the economics of college and department budgets have also hindered the profile of independent journals in academic libraries. The recent recession has also hurt the ability of home institutions to offer internal support. All these factors hurt the long-term viability of this important network of scholarly production.
For we would argue that independent journals often serve as the place new ideas are incubated, where theories and projects begin to emerge into programmatic focus, and new frameworks for our field are a