College Composition Weekly: Summaries of research for college writing professionals

Read, Comment On, and Share News of the Latest from the Rhetoric and Composition Journals

Monthly Archives: April 2015


by

Gholnecsar E. Muhammad. Self-representation of African American Girls. RTE, Feb. 2015. Posted 04/29/15.

Muhammad, Gholnecsar E. “Searching for Full Vision: Writing Representations of African American Adolescent Girls.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.3 (2015): 224-47. Print.

A comprehensive abstract prefaces Gholnecsar E. Muhammad’s study of African-American adolescent girls working to define themselves against stereotypes and dominant discourses. She writes:

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. , , , Findings show that the girls [in the study] wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. (224)

For her qualitative case study, Muhammad gathered eight African American girls, aged 12 to 17, to form a “literacy collaborative” in which they worked together in an “intensive” writing environment for nine hours a week for four weeks in the summer of 2012. The writers, from a variety of school settings, were designated “Sister Authors” and given the opportunity to write a number of different genres, including personal narratives, poems, short stories, “informational pieces,” and “open letters” (230, 232). Muhammad developed lesson plans, provided readings from African American women, and facilitated sharing and feedback sessions (231-32). Data included forty-eight pieces of writing, video-taped observations, and interviews (232-33). Muhammad and a second coder established six themes that appeared in the girls’ self-representations: “community, cultural [ethnicity and gender], individual, intellectual, kinship, and sexual representations” (233). Muhammad provides examples from the girls’ work to illustrate how these themes emerged in the ways the writers constructed themselves and their lives through writing.

Most frequently addressed were gender issues. Muhammad was interested to see kinship emerge spontaneously as a major topic in many of the writings, with intellectual concerns also appearing frequently (233). Thirty-seven of the 48 pieces demonstrated resistance to power structures that the girls encountered in their lives; Muhammad classified these structures as relating to “Physical beauty,” “Education,” “Abuse and violence,” “being portrayed as a monolithic group,” “Sexualizing and objectification,” “Racial stereotypes,” and “Personal self-hood (personal struggles, such as self-confidence)” (235). The girls responded to these power structures by often depicting the need for and possibility of “agency and social change” (239).

Specific examples include Jasmine’s broadside poem and her interview about the content of the poem, in both of which she questioned why Black girls are seen as a homogenous group while White people, who similarly look alike, are seen as individuals (233-37). Violet, writing about issues coded as “sexual representation,” explored the implications of the loss of Black men in the lives of Black women (240-41). Muhammad writes that such expressions of issues important to the girls in her study signal increased agency as the girls use representation of themselves through writing to “bring awareness” to topics that matter in their lives (241).

Muhammad recommends that language-arts educators become more alert to the importance for African-American girls of developing their identities through reflective self-representation, and that teachers refine prompts and assignments to encourage these explorations. Educators must also be aware of the power of dominant discourses to direct their own perceptions of students. More nuanced understanding of the lives and histories of their students will help teachers offer these girls opportunities to develop a sense of self and agency (233-34). Muhammad establishes four goals for students encouraged to participate in such literacy practices:

(1) to advance proficiencies in literacy; (2) to make sense of their identities; (3) to build and nurture intellectual development; and (4) to gain print authority. (229)

Muhammad captures the intent of her study with an image from Anna Julia Cooper’s A Voice from the South of an eye partly covered with a bandage so that vision is obscured. Ensuring that African-American women are heard restores the sight so that the eye “sees a circle where before it saw a segment” (qtd. in Muhammad 225). Muhammad’s work envisions similarly restoring such full sight in the lives and selves of African American girls.


by

Read and Michaud. Professional Writing as Rhetorical Education. CCC, Feb. 2015. Posted 04/21/15.

Read, Sarah, and Michael J. Michaud. “Writing about Writing and the Multimajor Professional Writing Course.” College Composition and Communication 66.3 (2015): 427-57. Print.

Sarah Read and Michael J. Michaud propose an enriched version of the undergraduate professional writing course that will allow students to become more rhetorically “savvy” (432) in negotiating workplace writing contexts and to more successfully transition from school writing to writing in other environments.

Their approach incorporates the tenets of writing-about-writing (WAW), which they argue will move students beyond reproducing the standard forms of more traditional “business writing” courses, such as memos and letters. In order to function successfully in the rhetorical environments they will encounter beyond college, writers must be able to analyze how writing works in specific situations among specific audiences and stakeholders and to adjust their responses across changing contexts. Drawing on the work of Doug Brent and Doug Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, Read and Michaud posit that such rhetorical flexibility demands that learning shift from “skill transfer,” in which students can produce a particular written artifact, to “learning transformation,” in which the focus is on learning about learning: learning how to study and respond to new contexts as they occur (429, 434). Read and Michaud write that students’ ability to take what they learn in writing classes beyond the classroom is an important outcome for the field of composition studies; they argue that making the study of professional writing a study of how writing accomplishes tasks across diverse environments renders it “a rich pedagogical practice uniquely suited to the [multimajor professional writing] classroom” (429).

In order to develop their proposal for enhancing students’ rhetorical fluency in professional-writing situations, Read and Michaud review two extant models for fostering recognition of the rhetorical nature of professional writing and enabling the transfer of learning across the school/work interface. The “genre-based” model positions students as researchers of professional writing artifacts and how they function socioculturally in use outside the classroom. This model must overcome drawbacks in that analyzing genres in classrooms as isolated objects differs from studying them in authentic contexts, where they are used to accomplish “strictly instrumental” goals (432). Moreover, students may not understand the dynamics of the particular contexts well enough to recognize the nuances of genre use in a given location (432). Genre-based models overcome these obstacles by incorporating activity theory in order to locate the genre in actual use and by incorporating “structured reflection” to draw out students’ awareness of “what they have learned about learning to write” (434; emphasis original).

In “client-based” approaches, in contrast, students occupy a “protoprofessional” role in which they work on specific projects within a workplace context (435). While this approach allows students to experience writing as an authentic professional activity, it must incorporate strategies to make the experience “generalizable” beyond the specific application (435). A strength of this approach is that it allows students to share in a sociocultural interaction that develops rhetorical awareness (436). Read and Michaud argue that WAW integrates the strengths of both these approaches.

They use as a primary source Doug Downs’s “seven rationales for WAW” developed for first-year courses. Of these, the most relevant are those that emphasize “transfer” and “authentic” experiences (436-37). They each provide an overview of a course they have designed that draws on WAW to expand the rhetorical content of a professional writing curriculum.

Read’s course “teach[es] professional writing as a research activity” (438). Students choose a participant in a specific workplace site to study in depth over a semester. They are taught analytical tools used in writing studies as well as field research practices such as interviewing and data collection (440). Read provides them with an online tool, GEMviz, in order to create “genre ecology models” mapping the rhetorical context in which their participant works (441-43). Students are encouraged not only to use the analytical and online tools but also to critique and adapt them, even to the point of “abandoning [them] for a better tool” if necessary. This active critical role “foregrounds how knowledge production is a highly dynamic, recursive, and rhetorical process in both academic and professional environments” (443). Read argues that the three most relevant “rationales” from Downs’s list are difficult to teach: understanding that writing is more than “the transcription of language to print” and casting writing as “studyable” confound students’ expectations for a writing course, while designing truly authentic experiences places complex demands on the course itself (439). Similarly, the two course goals exist in tension with each other: developing “[s]trategies for encountering new workplace writing situations” at the same time students learn conventional forms and practices (440). Read finds that a reflection letter asking students to explore the ways in which they have learned the difference between rhetorical strategies and conventions reveals a heightened awareness of “the nature of learning in general” (446).

In Michaud’s course, students acquire “declarative knowledge” that they then “operationalize” through field research of a particular workplace participant and a particular genre of their choice (449). The course is built around the concept of the “knowledge society” and how writing functions in roles students themselves will adopt in such societies (447). Students read work by scholars of knowledge production like Deborah Brandt, then interview their participant and report via informal assignments and two formal reports on their use of this scholarship to learn about the participant as a knowledge worker (447-50). Reflection built into each report allows students to focus on their discoveries about the transition from academic to professional environments (450). Michaud reports that students enter the course unaware of the concept of “knowledge society” and of the importance of writing in that society (449); their reflections reveal learning not only that “there would be writing after college [but also that] there would likely be a good deal of it” (452; emphasis original), they also learn that this writing as well as the contexts in which it will occur will require “new learning” which they must approach through the application of what Doug Brent calls “flexible general knowledge” (qtd. in Read and Michaud 451). This flexible knowledge allows them to “transform” knowledge to meet new needs.

The practices of both courses, Read and Michaud contend, make a professional writing course a “rhetorical education” that functions as “another site within a liberal arts curriculum for enculturating students into the habits of lifelong learning” (454).


by

Gallagher, John R. Templates in Web 2.0. C&C, Spring 2015. Posted 04/14/15.

Gallagher, John R. “The Rhetorical Template.” Computers and Composition 35 (2015): 1-11. Web. 25 March 2015.

John R. Gallagher addresses the role of the “template” as a component of the rhetorical situation when writing for Web 2.0, a question with implications for the debate over the relationship between form and content. He bases his claim that Web templates can be used creatively, flexibly, and even subversively on his own experiences as well as the responses of students to an assignment designed to increase attention to the role of templates in guiding writers’ actions. In particular, he focuses on Facebook’s “profile” and “cover” photos to illustrate how users of these standard forms can reinterpret the possibilities they offer.

To situate the template in the form/content debate, Gallagher presents the concerns of Kirsten Arola that as a preordained form, templates allow writers to insert content without consideration of the role of form. The form becomes “invisible” (qtd. in Gallagher 1). To address this claim, Gallagher reviews the scholarship of the rhetorical situation, which has historically revolved around the question of whether the situation or the intentions of the rhetor call forth “rhetorical discourse” (2). Gallagher affirms subsequent scholarship on the rhetorical situation that maintains that rhetor and situation are not discrete entities available for analysis in isolation, but rather are components of a process in which situation and rhetor are constantly repositioned by their interactions with each other and with their contexts (3). In this view, no situation is ever self-contained; its final meaning is always deferred as it awaits “another word or idea with which to create a comparison” (3).

Application of genre theory allows Gallagher to foreground how Web 2.0 contexts develop through social interaction as users of templates share “standardize[d]” processes and options that are nonetheless open to interpretation and multiple iterations (4). Gallagher argues that users participate in the creation of the conventions that characterize Web 2.0 discourse, including the ways templates can be manipulated. Far from being a stable form that dictates particular responses, Gallagher contends, templates, like genres, “are stable only in their historical and temporal contexts” (4), always subject to updates and new uses in which the actions of writers make the form meaningful (8). While the template privileges certain decisions and choices, Gallagher writes that all forms of media require rhetors to work within constraining boundaries and to explore the possibilities within those boundaries for meeting rhetors’ goals (8).

The developers of templates are also actors within the situation of which the template is a part, updating and revising templates in response to user actions (4). Ultimately, although the template does provide “a baseline series of choices” (4), what the template invites depends on the ways writers find to use it: “A template is never complete without a writer” (8). Gallagher disagrees with Arola: the influence of a template only vanishes when writers fail to think of the template as “a rhetorical tool” (5).

Gallagher provides examples of his own use of the Facebook profile and cover photos as well as the status update template to show that the content inserted into these forms can take on varied and unexpected meanings depending on his individual decisions about selection and arrangement of the standard elements (5-7). He includes a classroom assignment, “Examining the Template on the Internet,” which asks students to take explicit notice of the role of the template as they use it: “to see design, layout, and arrangement as part of content” (9). Reflective writing on this assignment generates discussion on how changes to templates alter rhetorical opportunities, how different templates on different sites affect such opportunities, and how the privacy elements in template use affect decisions about audience (10). Gallagher argues that a fuller awareness of templates as an element in rhetorical situations will make visible the ongoing construction of meaning their flexibility and openness to iteration enable (10).


by

Williams, Mark Alan. Religious Discourse in Student Writing. CE, March 2015. Posted 04/07/15.

Williams, Mark Alan. “Transformations: Locating Agency and Difference in Student Accounts of Religious Experience.” College English 77.4 (2015): 338-63. Print.

Mark Alan Williams addresses the difficulties religious students face in the academic setting of a college writing classroom. He particularly sees this difficulty as arising from the effects of dominant depictions of religion dispensed by public media and figures like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson (339). These “official” representations insist on dogmatic or monolithic approaches to religion that lead critical scholars in composition studies to endorse a “conflict narrative” that casts religious students in negative terms and limits options for dealing with religion in student texts (341, 344-45).

Williams argues that these dominant approaches may not accord with students’ religions as they themselves see and practice these faiths in their everyday lives (341). Students attempting to position themselves in relation to their religion may feel incapable of challenging such “hegemonic” portrayals, and, Williams contends, may lack a suitable discourse or effective models for crafting a “religious middle” where more varied, even progressive practice may be pursued (340, 342). Efforts of academics to engage students in critical examination of their views often fail to recognize students’ struggles with the ways in which power and culture constrain their agency and ability to express the complex nature of their lived faiths. Williams argues for strategies that will allow students more agency to define their religious positions. Such strategies will address productive “frictions” among various religious discourses and between religious discourses and academic goals (339, 359).

Building on work by A. Suresh Canagarajah, Williams proposes “translingualism” as a fruitful approach to students’ religious discourse when it enters writing classrooms (349-51). Growing out of work on “World Englishes,” Canagarajah’s view of translingualism focuses on the degree to which language is created and determined by the everyday practice and interaction of users, who bear responsibility for the shape it takes (349). In this view, “accommodation” of varied language use allows “code-meshing” that opens the possibility of new codes that permit new social and cultural formations (349-50). Williams parallels this view of language with the “formational perspectives on religion” of anthropologists Bahira Sherif and Talal Asad, for whom religion, like language, only exists in the ways it is practiced in lived experience (351). Williams provides examples of groups within religious contexts meshing official doctrine with lived revisions to destabilize and reinvent received depictions of religious practice (352-54).

To explore translingualism’s effects in a classroom setting, Williams recounts the work of a Muslim woman who drew on different assignments, including a researched problem-analysis paper and an op-ed discussion, to explain her faith to academic readers (355). For Williams, the student’s use of the op-ed format to mesh her personal experiences as a Muslim woman in American society with the academic argumentative register effectively laid the ground for his acceptance of her redefinition of widely disseminated negative terms (357). Illustrating his claim that religion is created and recreated in use, Williams cites the student’s evocation of the personal as a demonstration of how

the religious personal becomes a critical tool enabling writers to more authoritatively flesh out the practical . . . meanings of religious life for academic peers and instructors whose representational context has predisposed them to grant greater legitimacy to monolithic, negative images of religion. (358)

Williams contends that the student’s efforts at defining herself within and against these multifaceted discourses allowed her access to the tensions between her practical enactment of Islam and the more rigid structures within which her enactment had to evolve (358). Thus, he contends, writing invites students to examine the relations between the power formations that work to constrain religion and the individual practice that can reshape it. Through writing, students can be encouraged to find a voice with which to work out their own interpretations of their faiths without sacrificing their commitments, as instructors resist “insulating them from change or . . . forcing change,” instead providing them “the opportunity to examine these relations for themselves” (359).