Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers

Description

Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers presents alternative narratives of what constitutes success in the field of rhetoric and composition from those who occupy traditionally undervalued positions in the academy (tribal college, community colleges, postdoctoral tracks), those who have used their PhDs outside of the academy (a law firm, a textbook publisher, a community center), and those who have engaged in professionalization opportunities not typical in the field (research center, a nonprofit humanities organization).

Sujets

• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Rhetoric

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 15 septembre 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781602356795
• Langue: English

Extrait

Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition
Series Editors: Catherine Hobbs, Patricia Sullivan, Thomas Rickert, and Jennifer Bay
The Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition honors the contributions Janice Lauer has made to the emergence of Rhetoric and Composition as a disciplinary study. It publishes scholarship that carries on Professor Lauer’s varied work in the history of written rhetoric, disciplinarity in composition studies, contemporary pedagogical theory, and written literacy theory and research.
Other Books in the Series
Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era by Lisa Mastrangelo
Greek Rhetoric Before Aristotle, 2e, Revised and Expanded Edition by Richard Leo Enos
Rhetoric’s Earthly Realm: Heidegger, Sophistry, and the Gorgian Kairos by Bernard Alan Miller (2011) *Winner of the Olson Award for Best Book in Rhetorical Theory 2011
Techne , from Neoclassicism to Postmodernism: Understanding Writing as a Useful, Teachable Art by Kelly Pender (2011)
Walking and Talking Feminist Rhetorics: Landmark Essays and Controversies , edited by Lindal Buchanan and Kathleen J. Ryan (2010)
Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre , edited by Lori Ostergaard, Jeff Ludwig, and Jim Nugent (2009)
Ancient Non-Greek Rhetorics , edited by Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley (2009)
Roman Rhetoric: Revolution and the Greek Influence , Revised and Expanded Edition, by Richard Leo Enos (2008)
Stories of Mentoring: Theory and Praxis , edited by Michelle F. Eble and Lynée Lewis Gaillet (2008)
Writers Without Borders: Writing and Teaching in Troubled Times by Lynn Z. Bloom (2008)
1977: A Cultural Moment in Composition , by Brent Henze, Jack Selzer, and Wendy Sharer (2008)
The Promise and Perils of Writing Program Administration, edited by Theresa Enos and Shane Borrowman (2008)
Untenured Faculty as Writing Program Administrators: Institutional Practices and Politics , edited by Debra Frank Dew and Alice Horning (2007)
Networked Process: Dissolving Boundaries of Process and Post-Process by Helen Foster (2007)
Composing a Community: A History of Writing Across the Curriculum , edited by Susan H. McLeod and Margot Iris Soven (2006)
Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo (2004). Winner of the WPA Best Book Award for 2004–2005.
Rhetorics, Poetics, and Cultures: Refiguring College English Studies (Expanded Edition) by James A. Berlin (2003)


Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers
Edited by
Amy Goodburn, Donna LeCourt,
and Carrie Leverenz
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2013 by Parlor Press
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
Rewriting success in rhetoric and composition careers / edited by Amy Goodburn, Donna LeCourt, and Carrie Leverenz.
p. cm. -- (Lauer Series in Rhetoric and Composition)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-60235-292-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-293-3 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-294-0 (adobe ebook) -- ISBN 978-1-60235-295-7 (epub)
1. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--United States. 2. Report writing--Study and teaching (Higher)--United States. 3. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--Authorship. 4. English language--Rhetoric--Study and teaching--Research. 5. Interdisciplinary approach in education. 6. Writing centers. I. Goodburn, Amy M. II. LeCourt, Donna, 1963- III. Leverenz, Carrie, 1959-
PE1405.U6R49 2012
808’.042071173--dc23
≈2012005610
Cover image © 2008 by Geoffrey Holman. Used by permission.
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, cloth and Adobe eBook 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
Donna LeCourt, Carrie Leverenz and Amy Goodburn
1 Field Notes from a Composition Adjunct at the Biomedical Engineering Outpost
Mya Poe
2 Moving Up in the World: Making a Career at a Two-year College
Malkiel Choseed
3 Nontraditional Professionals: A Successful Career with a PhD in Rhetoric and Composition?
Ildikó Melis
4 Opportunity and Respect: Keys to Contingent Faculty Success
Sue Doe
5 Disclaimer: “Professional Academic on a Closed Course: Do Not Attempt this at Home.”
Heather Graves
6 Coming to Terms: Authority in Action and Advocacy
Moira K. Amado-McCoy
7 Ten Ways English Studies Contributes to User Experience Research, or: How to Retrofit an English Studies Degree
Dave Yeats
8 Establishing a Writing Curriculum at a Law Firm
Benjamin Opipari
9 My Unexpected Success as a Technical Editor
Shannon Wisdom
10 Conversing with the Same Field: Same Questions, Different Road
Nick Carbone
11 Mentoring for Change
Cindy Moore
12 Composing a Life: Negotiating Personal, Professional, and Activist Commitments within the Academy
Jennifer Ahern-Dodson
13 Researching to Professionalize, not Professionalizing to Research: Modular Professionalization and the WIDE Effect
Stacey Pigg, Kendall Leon, and Martine Courant Rife
14 Bridging Town and Gown through Academic Internships
Lara Smith-Sitton and Lynée Lewis Gaillet
Index to the Print Edition
Contributors


Introduction
Donna LeCourt, Carrie Leverenz and Amy Goodburn
Professionalization means making your field a research discipline, with lots of journals. Making your field a research discipline means giving it a limited focus—ideally, in the humanities, one with a historical side, and one also with an empirically verifiable subject.
—J. Hillis Miller
When I started teaching basic writing, I had believed I had found a new and important context for the kind of intellectual and political work I had always wanted to do. I felt that my work teaching was part of a larger struggle for a literate and participatory democracy. Today, for better and for worse, I feel I am part of a profession that has arrived.
—John Trimbur
This collection began with a 2008 panel proposed for the Conference on College Composition and Communication in response to a 2007 featured session introducing the book Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition by Michelle Ballif, Diane Davis, and Roxanne Mountford. Women’s Ways of Making It in Rhetoric and Composition reports the results of a national survey as well as in-depth interviews with eight women leaders to illuminate the working lives of female academics in rhetoric and composition. Unfortunately, the book offers a definition of “making it” based primarily on the experiences of full-time, tenured professors and their scholarly success. (See Composition Studies 39.1, 2011, for additional critiques of this definition of “making it.”) In contrast, our panel sought to critique the assumptions that success lies primarily with scholarship and that what makes scholarship successful is its status in the field rather than its value to the researcher herself, to those who might make use of it, or to the larger public. We felt compelled to critique this limited view of success because although each of us holds tenure at a PhD-granting institution, we have also made career choices that seem to violate both spoken and unspoken guidelines for being successful. We have held administrative positions prior to tenure, have sought alternative means of scholarship, and have often rejected the advice to put our need to publish ahead of doing things that we thought were important to do. We have also allowed family responsibilities to affect our work. What we sought to demonstrate in our panel, by sharing our stories and all the messiness therein, is a deceptively simple insight: if we continue to value our academic lives primarily in terms of what we publish and its authorized effects, then what we spend most of our time doing—teaching, administering, mentoring—becomes implicitly devalued.
This panel, and the responses we received, prompted us to ask what it means to have a successful career in rhetoric and composition beyond our own stories, which are, admittedly, still located within universities and are thus perhaps overly influenced by the very model we sought to question. Although each of us must inevitably define success for herself, our answers will be influenced by the dominant discourses of the profession, by those people and texts authorized to define the field and to mete out its rewards. Ironically, many choose an academic career because of the seeming freedom to shape one’s work life, and yet the process of academic training, of securing a position, of meeting expectations, can seem anything but liberating. While this process of acculturating members into a profession’s values is inevitable, we belie