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Author Archives: vanderso


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Sweeney, Meghan A., and Maureen McBride. “Difficulty Papers” as Insights into Students’ Reading Practices. CCC, June 2015. Posted 07/06/2015.

Sweeney, Meghan A., and Maureen McBride. “Difficulty Paper (Dis)Connections: Understanding the Threads Students Weave between Their Reading and Writing.” College Composition and Communication 66.4 (2015): 591-614. Print.

Meghan A. Sweeney and Maureen McBride, collaborating as teacher-researchers, explain the use of “difficulty papers” to investigate the problems students experience as they try to read complex materials. Designed by Carnegie Scholar Mariolina Salvatori, the difficulty-paper assignment asks students to explore in writing the components of the reading experience that interfered with their comprehension and engagement. Sweeney and McBride posit that the “mismatch” (595) between what students are told about effective writing in their writing courses and the practices of the writers of the “difficult” essays leads to struggles as the students try to navigate the complex texts.

Sweeney and McBride note a movement toward reconsidering reading as it affects writing in composition studies (391). In their book The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty, Salvatori and co-author Patricia Donahue propose that uniting attention to reading and writing through students’ self-reflection on their own experiences will increase “metacognitive reading awareness” (593). Sweeney and McBride contend that such practices will give teachers insight into better methods for encouraging critical reading (593).

They used the assignment in a “new critical reading course at a midsize four-year public university,” where students also took a course in composition and one in “editing-for-style” (593). The authors share the reading-course outcomes, which centered around developing students’ abilities to interact productively with a range of texts; the course textbook, M. Neil Browne and Stuart Keeley’s Asking the Right Questions, addressed various aspects of critical thinking. The authors used “grounded-theory method” to assess 209 difficulty papers over two years. This methodology involved withholding the development of a theory until data had been collected, coded, and categorized. Reading and rereading the papers and discussing their process, Sweeney and McBride reduced the categories of student comments from fifteen to five to one: “mismatch between expectations of readers and writers” (595; emphasis original). They found that two of the readings, Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker essay “Offensive Play” and Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” yielded the “strongest examples and individually highlighted certain subcategories of difficulties” (595). The students’ difficulty papers addressed their experiences reading these texts (593-95).

In reading the Gladwell essay, which discussed brain trauma in football through analogous discussions of dogfighting, students reported that the characteristics of the essay that most impeded their understanding and engagement were Gladwell’s nonlinear organizational strategy, his failure to make his thesis explicit, and his inclusion of extensive detail. The students expected clear, visible transitions explaining the connections between paragraphs and topics ( 596-98); they expressed “anxiety” when they couldn’t immediately discern the purpose of the article (598-99); and in their words, found the supporting “statistics and facts” both “boring” and “off topic” (599-600).

Students responding to “A Modest Proposal” struggled with vocabulary, finding that having to look up words distracted them and that using context to define words was problematic (601-02). Swift’s use of satire also stymied students, who tried to draw on their own experiences to understand Swift’s purpose (602-03). The clash with the instruction they had previously received and were receiving in writing classes led to problems negotiating Swift’s organization: Students tended to read the essay as a model and tried to align it with schemas with which they were familiar, becoming frustrated as well because Swift’s punctuation practices did not match what they had come to see as correct (603-04). In analyzing their problems engaging with the text, the students revealed expectations that, in the words of one, “The story’s job is to captivate the reader, and make them interested as the story goes on” (605). Similarly, objections to the length of the piece led Sweeney and McBride to conclude that students’ classroom experiences had led them to believe that reading should be easy, and that making it easy is the writer’s task (606). Students came to the reading experience with the impression that writing and reading should function similarly, with reading not imposing any additional challenges (606, 607).

In their discussion, Sweeney and McBride highlight the difficulties students faced in trying to make “cultural connection[s]” with readings that did not immediately resonate with their worlds or selves. This difficulty persisted despite class discussion of the context and history reflected in the pieces. They emphasize again that students assess what they read in light of the instruction that they have received as writers, sometimes taking on a teacherly tone in advising the authors about their perceived weaknesses (607). An important recommendation that emerges from the study is the need for teachers to explain much more clearly why students are being asked to read a particular piece and how that reading experience will relate to their own writing (608). Teachers can also be more alert to the tensions set up by different reasons for reading: rhetorical analysis, critical analysis, or “reading-to-write,” and can clarify what to ask students to attend to (608). They contend that the insights provided by the “difficulty paper” assignment allow them to share with students more fully the complexities of the writer/reader relationship as students compose different kinds of writing (609-10); the exercise enabled them, as teachers, to recognize the need for more explicit guidance as they ask students to engage with unfamiliar, complex texts.


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Kuebrich, Ben. Community Organizing for Change. CCC, June 2015. Posted 07/02/2015.

Kuebrich, Ben. “‘White Guys Who Send My Uncle to Prison’: Going Public within Asymmetrical Power.” College Composition and Communication 66.4 (2015): 566-90. Print.

Ben Kuebrich writes about the limits of civil rhetoric in the efforts of communities to bring about true social change; he urges compositionists to take a more direct but cautious role in the kind of locally driven community organizing that he believes can address power inequities.

To develop his position, he recounts a case history of efforts in the Near Westside neighborhood in Syracuse to address police behavior. These efforts consisted of a collaboration between Syracuse University and the community, resulting in the creation of the Westside Residents Coalition (WRC) and the Gifford Street Community Press. During Kuebrich’s involvement with the community, the press published I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Near Westside, a collection of citizen voices. The activism that led to the book resulted most immediately from the proposed installation of surveillance cameras in the Westside neighborhood without consultation with the residents (571, 588n4). Residents felt that the decision to mount the cameras epitomized the disdain with which the police regarded the neighborhood and served as a call for residents to confront the existing power relations (571). The police responded by agreeing to meet with the WRC in conjunction with the Westside Police Delegation (571). Kuebrich became involved through a graduate course with Steve Parks; he was enlisted to help develop the book, which would make the perspectives of the citizens visible and possibly result in “greater communication and accountability” (572). He collected interviews beginning in 2011 and served as editor until the book’s publication in 2012 (567).

Central to Kuebrich’s concerns is the role that activist composition scholars have taken in promoting effective civic interventions. Drawing on Edward P. J. Corbett’s terms (568), he contrasts calls for rhetoric’s “open hand” as an effective means of influencing power asymmetries with situations in which the “closed fist” has emerged “tactically” (577) as a tool for promoting change. To analyze this distinction, Kuebrich draws on anthropologist James C. Scott’s work on “public” and “hidden transcripts” developed in Domination and the Arts of Resistance (569). The public transcript is the discourse created and “policed” (573) by the elites and the entities in power, generating a “self-portrait of dominant elites as they would have themselves seen” (Scott, qrd. in Kuebrich 569; emphasis original). In contrast, the hidden transcript expresses the actual perceptions and responses of the less powerful, “beyond direct observation by power holders” (Scott, qtd. in Kuebrich 569-70). Kuebrich enlists the work of Parks and Christopher Wilkey to contend that the “notions of civility and propriety” promoted by organizations like the Community Literacy Center (CLC) in Pittsburgh,, designed to move oppressed groups from what Linda Flower calls “a rhetoric of complaint and blame” (qtd. in Kuebrich 576) to a rhetoric more suited to public discourse, fail to empower citizens to make effective use of public channels (575-76).

This is so, Kuebrich argues, because the demands that the hidden transcript be made public by citizens “speaking out” entail serious risks for individual speakers and ultimately are dismissed within the extant power structures (574). The silence of oppressed groups, Kuebrich contends, is not “false consciousness,” in which the oppressed blindly subscribe to the conditions that oppress them, but rather a true critical awareness of the conditions under which they live. In contrast, rhetorical actions that elicit a response to the hidden transcript and gain power are those in which the speakers contribute to a collective voice (572, 574). Civil rhetoric and the “community think-tank” model (576) only earn such a response when they operate hand in hand with collective effort that “presents a credible threat to established power” (575). Kuebrich cites Nancy Welch’s exhortation to study effective social movements to understand why they succeed (569) and advocates assessing rhetorical strategies based on how well they actually produce results (576). Kuebrich’s case study of the WRC and I Witness explores how anger and resentment can be remodeled into effective collective action as the residents of the Near Westside developed strategies for engaging with the police (577). Important to this process, Kuebrich argues, is the progress toward concrete action (578).

Kuebrich explores the relationship between the public and hidden transcripts and their effects on action by analyzing two rhetorical engagements between the Near Westside residents and the police: the release event for the book attended by about a dozen officers and forty residents, and the book itself. The release gathering featured readings from the book, small group discussions over lunch, and a full-group discussion afterward. Kuebrich argues that this event did not become the kind of event at which the hidden transcript took center stage for active, open analysis (583); rather, it revolved around “loose terms like ‘dialogue,’ ‘communication,’ and ‘respect'” (581). The burden for effecting change fell upon the residents rather than on the police, who did not acknowledge the need to correct their own behavior; most issues on the table were the concerns of the police, not of the residents (582). However, Kuebrich writes, the engagement did leave the police “unsettled”: he believes the meeting “pushed the boundaries of public speech . . . without taking too many risks” (583). He argues that in such situations, activists hoping for a more confrontational moment should defer to citizens’ own assessment of the risks and benefits involved in speaking out (579-80).

I Witness, in contrast, makes public the specific concerns and perspectives of the residents in explicit language. Kuebrich illustrates, however, how one resident author acknowledged audience by softening his claims with an added introduction that focused not so much on the validity of “horror stories,” though some were aired, but rather on the importance for police to understand how their actions made people feel (584). Again, the emphasis is on the importance of the book as a collective statement, not as an example of a single heroic individual going public (587). Kuebrich closes with two small incidents where the police modified the public transcript to show deference they might not have shown before the book and the meeting; he argues for the existence of a “slowly shifting dynamic” that disrupts the carefully scripted public transcript that might otherwise pertain (587). Kuebrich urges composition scholars to study such events to better understand how to follow the lead of communities working as collectives to initiate change (587-88).


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Link for Ortoleva and Betrancourt, Journal of Writing Research

Giulia Ortoleva wrote suggesting that I share the link to the article I summarized (articulating vocational and academic learning), since the Journal of Writing Research is an open-access source that others may not be able to locate immediately. I am glad to do so:

http://www.jowr.org/abstracts/vol7_1/Ortoleva_Betrancourt_2015_7_1_abstract.html


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Walters, Shannon. Valuing ASD Students. RTE, May 2015. Posted 06/23/15.

Walters, Shannon. “Toward a Critical ASD Pedagogy of Insight: Teaching, Researching, and Valuing the Social Literacies of Neurodiverse Students.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.4 (2015): 340-60. Print.

Shannon Walters examines the experiences of students with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS students) and students on the Autism Spectrum (ASD students) in college writing classes. (She notes that many autistic people prefer the “identity-first rather than person-first language” [357n4] and uses this nomenclature throughout her article.) Walters argues that many of the difficulties these students face derive from the failure of educators to listen to them and incorporate their insights about themselves into classroom practice. A more productive learning environment for these students, Walters contends, will involve rejecting stereotypes, not least by redefining what is accepted as “social.”

Walters sees current research on the effects of autism on college students’ experiences as sparse, with what does exist seldom including the points of view of the AS and ASD individuals being studied (340-41). Problematic approaches in the education literature include a tendency for teachers who believe they have encountered autistic students to engage in diagnosis and discussion of the students without engaging the students themselves in exploring their needs and perceptions (341):

Discussions about ASD become stories about how teachers heroically accommodate students perceived as on the spectrum, rather than about how self-identified ASD students navigate largely neurotypical writing classrooms in the face of unacknowledged challenges. (341)

To address the lack of research that takes into account the actual voices of these students, Walters conducted a case study of two self-identified AS students enrolled in first-year writing classes in the program in which Walters taught. Walters provides a detailed account of her study design, including semi-structured interviews and coding, and her role as a researcher guided by the tenets of critical disability studies, which recognizes disability as a source of possibility and requires the recognition of people with disabilities as crucial agents in policies and conversations about them (342, 345). Such an approach, Walters argues, can lead teachers to “value writing practices and pedagogies that encourage socially neurodiverse ways of writing” (342). Valuing neurodiversity, in turn, leads to a recognition of disability as a source of “insight” (342). In service of this goal, the case studies asked how the students “characterized themselves as writers inside and outside of the classroom,” how they perceived their first-year courses, and what the decision to foreground their insights could tell educators about pedagogical best practices (343).

Although Walters’s student participants, Jen and Jon, both enjoyed writing extensively outside of the classroom. they “struggled” in their first-year writing courses (347). Jen took her course in a summer session, while Jon, who had been homeschooled since third-grade, took his individually in a modified format with a university teacher (345). Walters records each student’s definitions of “language” and “normal,” as well as their definitions of AS, which they consciously chose in contrast to what Walters describes as the tendency of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to “subsume AS into the broader category of ASD” (346). The definition of neurodiversity as “social acceptance of neurological difference as part of the broad landscape of human diversity,” from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), highlights the view that adhering to rigid definitions of “normal” that define difference as deficit precludes valuing the possibilities inherent in difference (346).

In Walters’s view, the “process or stage writing model” accepted widely by composition teachers did not serve the two students well. Jen found the pace of the summer course troubling and fell behind, although she ultimately passed. Jon resisted writing about issues that did not interest him and “just filling in details” as required by mandated revision (347-49). Walters argues that the process model labels different ways that individual students work as abnormal (349). She posits that her participants’ difficulties “differed not necessarily in kind but in degree” from those most students face (349).

To emphasize the degree to which the process model affects neurodiverse students’ activities as writers, Walters contrasts their struggles in the courses with the writing they enthusiastically pursue outside of the classroom. In each case, Walters explores how the students’ preferred writing activities functioned as the kinds of critical and social literacies composition teachers hope to encourage. Jen hosted both a private and a public blog addressing different audiences, wrote extensive fan fiction, and had made considerable progress on a novel (351, 354). Jon, who planned to major in geography, developed diverse community contacts “on his own terms” in order to create a local history and branch into a piece of historical fiction (352). Walters finds that the kinds of writing in which these students chose to invest their efforts and at which they succeeded did not meet what she views as the limited definitions of “social” and “critical” that governed classroom assignments (353-54). For example, Jen did not feel as if topics like anime, science fiction, and fantasy in which she was interested qualified as suitable for a rhetorical analysis of popular culture (354). Jon’s “lists of dates and maps” inspired his more extensive writing but, in Walters’s view, would not have been accepted as valid activities in a first-year writing class (355).

Both students, she argues, lived in rich social worlds that simply differed from those built into a process-model classroom. Thus, the perception that ASD students are “unconnected and asocial” did not capture these students’ achievements or personas (354). Not only did the students’ activities define them as good writers and demonstrate that they could interact with a range of audiences, recognizing the different uses of writing in different situations, their work also revealed their critical engagement with the power relationships embedded in the public conversation about AS and ASD, the kind of engagement called for by writing pedagogy (354). Walters recommends supporting the diverse ways that neurodiverse students meet the expectations of college writing courses, for example by a range of adjustments to the typical curriculum and scheduling of process pedagogy. Writing communities like Jen’s fan-fiction communities can become topics of discussion and study for students for whom they offer a more receptive writing environment (356). Instead of assuming that ASD students are limited in their abilities to respond socially, teachers can develop their own social responsiveness through activities like “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe, cited in Walters 357), which will foster the “social acceptance of neurological difference” (ASAN, qtd. in Walters 351), valuing rather than reshaping the particular forms of interaction and creativity that such students bring to writing classes.


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Giulia Ortoleva and Mireille Bétrancourt. Articulation of School and Workplace Learning. Journal of Writing Research, June 2015. Posted 06/18/2015.

Ortoleva, Giulia, and Mireille Bétrancourt. “Collaborative Writing and Discussion in Vocational Education: Effects on Learning and Self-Efficacy Beliefs.” Journal of Writing Resaarch 7.1 (2015): 1-28. Web. 6 June 2015.

Giulia Ortoleva and Mireille Bétrancourt, researchers in Switzerland publishing in the Journal of Writing Research, address articulation between school and workplace activities for students in a “vocational” program in Geneva. The 40 students were in their first or second year of study in the School for Social and Health Care Assistants. Two teachers with professional histories as nurse practitioners participated in a project to investigate the effects of writing, discussion, and collaboration in preparing these students for careers (8).

Ortoleva and Bétrancourt discuss the skills necessary for “[p]rofessional competence,” distinguishing between “hard skills” like mastery of concrete procedures and “soft skills” such as the ability to communicate and develop productive interpersonal relations (2). Ortoleva and Bétrancourt contend that the common practice of combining academic training and workplace experience to impart this range of competences can fall short because the two contexts are often “disconnected” and because workplace experiences can vary widely (2-3).

To address this problem, Ortoleva and Bétrancourt turn to an “integrative pedagogy model” developed by P. Tynjala and D. Gijbels, which outlines the necessary interaction of “four types of knowledge: practical, conceptual, self-regulative, and sociocultural (knowledge that is embedded in the social practices of workplaces and is learned through participation in these practices)” (3). The intervention tested by Ortoleva and Bétrancourt draws on two elements of this model, writing and collaboration. They argue that although the role of writing in promoting “deep processing” that encourages more intensive and productive learning is widely cited, clear demonstrations of this effect have been elusive, perhaps because assessment has focused on memorization and not the actual production of transformative knowledge (4). Moreover, to be most effective, writing must be part of a broader set of activities that include personal and social connections, such as personal reflection and class discussion to prompt students to consider a range of perspectives and revise their own (4-5).

Collaboration in the study involved peer feedback, but Ortoleva and Bétrancourt note the need for well-designed interaction if such feedback is to prove effective. They reference guidelines from the field of computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) to suggest that computers can facilitate peer interaction if appropriate prompts and combinations of individual and group activities are in place (5).

Ortoleva and Bétrancourt hoped that their intervention would not only increase students’ acquisition of a range of professional competences but would also enhance self-efficacy beliefs—students’ perceptions that they could do well in their workplace settings (6-7). They review research on self-efficacy from Albert Bandura and others. They considered growing self-efficacy a marker of a maturing professional identity (7).

To measure the effects of writing, peer feedback, and class discussion on students’ professional capabilities and self-efficacy beliefs, Ortoleva and Bétrancourt used two pre/post measures: a test of “declarative” knowledge that asked students how they would respond in a specific situation they were likely to encounter in their workplace; and a self-efficacy instrument. The test of declarative knowledge comprised two parts: multiple-choice questions about the best handling of the situation and an open-ended discussion of the student’s reasons for his or her choices. Ortoleva and Bétrancourt caution that they will be unable to “disentangle the effect of each component alone” (8), but they see a correlation between a student’s level of participation and any gains the student makes as a useful measure of the effects of the intervention as a whole (8). Students also evaluated their experiences as participants in the activities.

The three components were scheduled in ninety-minute sessions two weeks apart. In the first phase, writing and peer feedback, students wrote about a “critical incident” they had experienced, responding to specific questions about how they had responded to it; using a wiki program, other students responded, following guidelines for effective feedback. Students then followed directions to respond to the suggestions made by peers (9-10). Class discussion constituted the second phase, while in the third phase, second-year students returned to their accounts to reflect further. This variation of the third phase appeared to be “too repetitive,” so the phase was reconceived for the first-year students, who read research materials on the relevant issues before revisiting their written accounts (11).

Post-test results for second-year students indicated no gains in the multiple-choice component of the declarative knowledge test but minor gains in responding to the open-ended questions. First-year students improved significantly in their ability to choose the best handling of the scenarios but no gains in the open-ended response (13-14). Similarly, second-year students’ self-efficacy beliefs did not change, but those of first-year students improved (14-15). Participation was measured by assessing the length of written components and by number of contributions to class discussion. This measure showed that students who wrote more in their first-phase accounts performed better on both the pre- and post-test competency assessment (16). The teachers, who had noted problems with participation in class discussion in previous classes, felt that the intervention generated more student engagement and better participation (15). The student response to the project was positive (16).

In general, Ortoleva and Bétrancourt judge the intervention “partially” successful both as a means of enhancing and articulating school and workplace learning and as a way of developing higher self-efficacy (17-18). They posit that the different outcomes for first- and second-year students, in which second-year students did not improve on the multiple choice or self-efficacy measures but first-year students did, result from the degree to which second-year students knew more about workplace options because of their more advanced schooling and also had already developed “more stable (and accurate) image[s] of themselves” as professionals (18). The researchers judged that participation in the written phases was quite high and the feedback phase was well-received. They note that students who wrote more were less active in the oral discussion phase, implying that a mix of the two types of participation accommodates differing communication preferences (18).

Among the study’s limitations, they note the small sample size, lack of a control group, and especially the lack of an adequate measure of the kind of complex learning they hoped to promote (19). Recommendations from the study include beginning with individual writing activities to foster later engagement; providing clear guidance for feedback sessions; and using wikis to generate and record collaboration (19-20).


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Feigenbaum, Paul. Coalition between Math and Rhetoric. CE, Spring 2015. Posted 06/09/15.

Feigenbaum, Paul. “Rhetoric, Mathematics, and the Pedagogies We Want: Empowering Youth Access to Twenty-First Century Literacies.” College English 72.5 (2015): 429-49. Print.

Paul Feigenbaum advocates for the development of a “Rhetoric Project” similar to and in conjunction with the “Algebra Project” created in the 1980s by civil-rights leader Robert Moses and described in Radical Equations, by Moses and Charles Cobb Jr. For Feigenbaum, composition and mathematics can productively partner because both are targets of the ongoing standardization movement, in which the practices of repetitive drill and subsequent high-stakes testing work to diminish the chance of college and career success for less-privileged students. According to Feigenbaum, the Algebra Project seeks to instill a sense of efficacy in underprivileged students by making visible the role of mathematics in everyday activities, making the math knowledge to analyze that role accessible, and showing how mathematical knowledge can strengthen communal struggles for social justice. Feigenbaum draws on Joanna Wolfe’s essay “Rhetorical Numbers: A Case for Quantitative Writing in the Composition Classroom” to further argue that mathematics are used rhetorically in civic life and policy-making and that an understanding of rhetoric can energize students’ ability to think critically about how mathematics are being deployed as well as how to use them to further progressive causes (430). An important focus in both the Algebra Project and Feigenbaum’s proposed Rhetoric Project is the shift from a view of education as a competitive, “market-driven” venue “in which everything depends on individual success and failure” to a view in which individual success and common welfare become interdependent, complementary goals (435).

Feigenbaum recounts the growth of the Algebra Project from a K-8 school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Moses established a program to teach his daughter and her classmates algebra during regular class hours even though the subject was not officially part of the curriculum. The AP grew to a national nonprofit that develops “Math Literacy Workers” who spread enthusiasm for math among younger students. The article provides examples of how the Algebra Project uses “experiential learning” to make math meaningful—for example, by generating equations to denote physical community locations. Similarly, facility with math allowed students in Baltimore to analyze a school district’s budget and exact fairer funding practices (437-38).

In Feigenbaum’s view, there are “clear areas of overlap” between such efforts and what rhetorical education can offer (438). Mathematical knowledge can combine with rhetorical knowledge, for example, to further understanding of how standardized tests are constructed and how they are used as vehicles for ideologically driven policy (438). Further, he argues in support of “logomechanics” (438; emphasis original), a curriculum espoused by Jenny Edbauer Rice that emphasizes multimodal communication in which students become increasingly proficient at managing and even designing “the means of production” (438) in order to exploit the burgeoning power of new rhetorical forms. Students with such facility, Rice contends, can take on the role of “potential inventors of actions and ideas, rather than the invented products” (Rice, qtd. in Feigenbaum 439; emphasis original). Feigenbaum compares logomechanics to a University of Illinois project, Writing with Video, that gives students the tools to produce multimodal messages. These expanded skills, which Feigenbaum argues would be enhanced by a coalition between mathematics curriculum and rhetorical education, encourage student collaboration as students and teachers jointly become both experts and learners. For advocates of these projects, students not only learn to see video and film as rhetorical; they also acquire the capabilities that allow them to become more effective rhetors in the multimodal public sphere (439-40).

Feigenbaum’s discussion of a Rhetoric Project pilot site in an underserved community points to the promise he sees in the venture and the challenges to be addressed. The project paired Florida International University graduate students who wanted to extend their learning in Feigenbaum’s “Community Writing” course with ongoing AP activities in Miami-Dade County public schools. Transportation issues required the Project to function as an extracurricular activity rather than as part of the regular class day; the need for participating students to remain after school required revision of the intended rhetorical curriculum from one in which theoretical concepts such as ethos, kairos, and exigency could be explicitly foregrounded into a curriculum of “theory-through-play” activities that would energize students after their long day (442). An example of “theory-through-play” is a board game modeled on an AP game, Flagways, designed by Moses. The AP game allows students to apply mathematical concepts to sports to engage students in a “culture of mathematical literacy” (Moses and Cobb, qtd. in Feigenbaum 443). The RP game, Circumstances: The Game of Rhetorical Situations, was invented by Feigenbaum and graduate-student collaborators; players used avatars to progress through school to career and beyond. Feigenbaum reports that the high-school participants enjoyed the game, although some planned components had to be curtailed for lack of time.

Funding and coordination problems deferred continuation of the pilot, but Feigenbaum hopes to re-establish it through a writing studies master’s degree at FIU, which will attract public-school language arts teachers. Feigenbaum hopes these teachers will strengthen the presence of the AP/RP collaboration across more area educational settings (445).

Efforts like the RP, Feigenbaum emphasizes, may not lead to a formal research agenda, but he endorses the view of Jeffrey Grabill that establishing relationships within communities in and of itself is a vital form of research, essential to the “community building” needed to empower local communities to resist the negative effects of standardization (444). Feigenbaum proposes that advocates for activities like the RP take seriously the need within public schools for tools to raise standardized test scores; he suggests that research projects growing out of the RP could address the ways in which the Project and other pedagogical endeavors like it can contribute to recognized measures of student success like high-school completion and college attendance (444). Ultimately, Feigenbaum sees in the Rhetoric Project an answer to calls from scholars like David Fleming and Wayne Booth for expanded rhetorical education, both in undergraduate and public school settings. He envisions the joint community-serving efforts of the Rhetoric and Algebra projects as enhancing “young people’s power to stand up for their interests against the harms wrought by standardization” (445).


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Shameless Personal Plug (posted 06/08/15): My Books Online!

Just a quick note to announce that my mystery/suspense novels, published in the 1980s and 1990s before I went back to school, are now available online as ebooks. As it happens, they’re about horses and horse racing, so they’re sort of timely. They will be available for pre-order until July 1 at $0.99 at Barnes &Noble, iBooks for Apple devices, and Kobo, and then at other online retailers for $2.99. To learn more and read sample chapters, please check out http://www.virginiasanderson.com. Tag under “summer reads”!


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Sealey-Morris, Gabriel. Rhetoric of Comics. CS, Spring 2015. Posted 06/04/15.

Sealey-Morris, Gabriel. “The Rhetoric of the Paneled Page: Comics and Composition Pedagogy.” Composition Studies 43.1 (2015): 31-50. Web. 28 May 2015.

Gabriel Sealey-Morris argues that comics can enrich college students’ rhetorical education, supplying opportunities for students to meet the outcomes called for by the WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition and the NCTE Position Statement on Multimodal Literacies. In Sealey-Morris’s view, although the recognition of comics as a complex form of literary activity has been well noted in critical circles, rhetoric and composition has been slow to take up the benefits offered by using comics as a pedagogical tool in the writing classroom (32).

Sealey-Morris examines competing definitions and critical takes on comics by specialists and artists, exploring such issues as the relative priority of words and images (34). He presents comics as a vehicle for enhancing students’ rhetorical and critical abilities by arguing that they meet each of four WPA outcomes—rhetorical knowledge; critical thinking, reading, and writing; knowledge of conventions; and processes—as well as the call for more intensive attention to digital literacy and production in both documents.

Sealey-Morris presents comics as an enhancement to rhetorical knowledge by virtue of the medium’s demands for a “radically different kind of literacy” (33) in which the juxtaposition of words and images expands the interpretive possibilities as well as their complexity. He notes also the role that the medium often elicits from authors (36). He argues from sections of the NCTE position paper and from work by Scott McCloud that the separation of word from image required by conventional prose and represented as “maturation” elides the degree to which children naturally combine words and images to communicate. Sealey-Morris sees comics as operating on a rhetorical level that foregrounds more choices and possibilities than either words or images alone can permit snd re-opens the potential for a “rhetorical richness” that may be lost as children are weaned away from seeing images as equal components of expression (35). Sealey-Morris explores comics authors’ relationships to their own work as they create their “authorial ethos” in the process of interacting with varied audiences in different ways, often by depicting themselves as characters in their comics (36). Such recognition of the effects of a wider range of rhetorical choices than prose can allow as well as of the options for designing oneself as a visible component of a communicative act, Sealey-Morris argues, lend increased range and depth to the rhetorical knowledge college writing students are asked to acquire.

The interpretive complexities Sealey-Morris discusses also encourage critical thinking and reading, as well as critical attention to writing as students begin to produce their own comics. Critics present a range of views of how the relation between panels and their contents affects readers’ construction of narratives, their impressions of time, and their choices of reading strategies (37). Sealey-Morris argues that comics cannot be read “superficial[ly]” (38); they demand constant work as readers move between language and images within panels, additionally assessing the overall relationships established by the arrangement of different components on the page (37). Readers, moreover, must choose among a range of possible orders for encountering the text (37). For Sealey-Morris,

[i]mmersion in a comics page is more difficult than in prose, which is temporal and necessarily sequential, or in the presence of image only, which is static and visible within a self-created context. (38)

Such challenges to reading result in a “critical distance” in which conventional responses to reality become unavailable; at the same time, exposure to images of body language and gesture simulate “the work of interpreting real life” (38). For Sealey-Morris, these contributions to the activity of reading encourage students to develop a much more varied rhetorical and critical repertoire.

Comics, Sealey-Morris contends, can also help students develop knowledge of conventions. He presents examples from Understanding Rhetoric: A Graphic Guide to Writing, by writers Elizabeth Losh and Jonathan Alexander and artists Kevin and Zander Cannon to illustrate how a comics presentation can both lay out an academically sophisticated argument and teach an academic convention like citation (39-40). He further draws on examples of work by comics artists to argue that the intensive revision and recursive development of a comics page instills in students both an understanding of the importance of writing processes and an appreciation for the ways collaboration can increase rhetorical choices and effectiveness (41). Collaboration, in this view, is becoming more and more central as multimodal literacy assumes heightened importance in literacy education (42).

To argue for the effectiveness of comics as a means of enhancing students’ digital literacy, Sealey-Morris draws on Richard Lanham’s contention in The Economics of Attention that print “is marked by ‘fixity’ and ‘invisibility,’ as it delivers meaning without calling attention to itself as a medium” (45). In contrast, the image/word juxtaposition and tension unavoidable in comics demands awareness of the role of the medium in the communication process, thus alerting students to the complex pressures inherent in rapidly changing communicative technologies (45-46).

Sealey-Morris points out that the technical difficulties students might face in actually generating comics within classroom environments have been addressed by the recent distribution of a number of relatively simple, cheap, or even often free apps that can be used to create the necessary images (46). Such production is important for the college writing classroom, he argues, not just for its contribution to critical thinking and rhetorical knowledge, but also for the degree to which it can support student ownership of their work. Quoting Jared Gardner, Sealey-Morris sees words as easily available for passive consumption and thoughtless deployment in “an environment in which, for writers, the ‘choice of tools (pen, typewriter, laptop) have become irrelevant'” (48). Sealey-Morris again contrasts the effects of producing comics, an activity in which the multitude of complex elements and choices make rhetorical action a much more demanding and absorbing effort than, in his view, print generation has become, thus encouraging increased thoughtfulness and awareness of the effects of each choice (49).


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Horner, Bruce. Rewriting Composition. CE, May 2015. Posted 05/28/15.

Horner, Bruce. “Rewriting Composition: Moving beyond a Discourse of Need.” College English 77.5 (2015): 450-79. Print.

Bruce Horner responds to recent calls for composition to shift its focus in ways that are presented as radical departures but that Horner believes ignore composition’s history, endorsing and perpetuating reductionist dominant views of the field. Among Horner’s principal concerns is that these calls remove composition from the “material social practice” in which it is embedded (457). These calls, in his view, constitute a “discourse of need,” depicting composition as deficient, thus requiring “abandonment or supplement” (451).

Horner critiques David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies and Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition. Horner presents Smit as arguing that the goal of composition courses—providing “general writing skills” that will allow students to succeed in varied contexts—is unachievable because people learn to write only in the specific environments with which they engage. As a result, Horner writes, Smit recommends that composition should relinquish its focus on general writing skills and replace that focus with a writing-in-the-disciplines approach that will result in “real writing” that will be judged successful or unsuccessful by publics, editors, and employers (455-56).

Horner objects to this call because it accepts an inadequate definition of “writing” that reduces the content of composition to “a single, codified and fixed set of skills and knowledge.” This definition accords with the definition promoted by the market place, to which, in Horner’s view, Smit yields the right to define writing and to which he assigns the right to determine what good writing is (454-55). For Horner, this view leads to what Anthony Giddens has called a “normative functionalist reading of institutions and social practices: things are as they are and operate as they do because that is what their appropriate function is” (455). In such an endorsement of what is, Horner contends, students are cast as making rational, unitary choices about what kinds of writing will best serve their goals “as (simply, only) future employees” (454-55, 457). In Smit, according to Horner, this ascendancy of the free market is contrasted with the failure of the academy as an institution assumed to exist primarily to meet the market’s needs (455)

Horner argues that Dobrin’s Postcomposition similarly accepts dominant definitions of the work of composition despite the book’s claims to promote a rethinking of the field (458-59). According to Horner, Dobrin’s “debased view of the work of composition” (459) echoes dominant reductionist definitions of what writing pedagogy and practice ought to be. Dobrin sees that work as constrained by issues of “training” and “management”; unlike Smit, he rejects a doubling down on more effective pedagogy, choosing instead to call for an escape from pedagogical concerns by reframing the field as “writing studies” (459). Horner expresses dismay that Dobriin does not examine myriad previous work on what “writing studies” might entail (459); he is particularly concerned with Dobrin’s reduction of “writing” to an “abstraction” that Horner contends he does not define or recognize in its material contexts (460). Thus, in Horner’s view, Dobrin accepts capitalism’s expectations for what writing pedagogy should be and replaces this inadequate and inaccurate definition with an “idealist” alternative that is not anchored in material practice (459). Horner writes that Dobrin particularly accedes to the dominant view by accepting the technological demands of “fast capitalist ideals” (461) as the preferred focus of writing studies; Dobrin argues that composition must follows this lead, subjecting its “outmoded” past to “creative destruction,” or be left behind (Dobrin, qtd. in Horner 462). In Horner’s view, composition is seen as lacking by these writers because they allow it to be defined through the consumerist lens of the dominant culture.

Horner acknowledges that composition faces challenges like those Smit and Dobrin outline, but contrasts their handling of these challenges with the approaches of an economist team, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and a sociolinguist, Theresa Lillis. He illustrates his view of how theory might function productively in composition by discussing how these theorists do not choose to overturn their fields’ missions but rather seek to understand what prevents these fields from achieving their desired ends. Gibson-Graham rewrite capitalism to deny it the kind of power dominant views assign it; Horner compares this “hegemonic” view of capitalism to the way reductive views of composition take on hegemonic force in critiques like Smit’s and Dobrin’s. Lillis addresses the way writing is positioned in sociolinguistics by tackling a longstanding binary between speech and writing posited by the field (462-64).

To his critique of Smit’s and Dobrin’s calls for “a prospective future beyond, or following the end of, composition” (469), Horner adds responses to three efforts to supplement composition with what are presented as new or extended content: the call to reframe it as rhetoric, to expand coursework to include “multimodal” approaches, and to rename the field “writing studies” (469). Horner is concerned that these proposed responses to composition’s apparent need ignore the history in which these approaches have long been integral to composition; moreover, in his view, these proposals do not challenge the reductive views of composition that portray it as lacking: for Horner, the field must continue the difficult

efforts to retrieve what the hegemonic denies and to learn to recognize, in forms and practices we are predisposed to understand in limited ways, the accomplishment of more and other than what is claimed. (469)

Horner’s conclusion calls for a recognition of the value of what is seen by the dominant as inconsequential or useless, for example to recognize the learning that occurs even in small student gains. He endorses David Bartholomae’s exhortation to “pay attention to common things” (qtd. in Horner 472). His project resists the tendency to designate academic settings as “something from which students (and others) need protection” (472); on the contrary, he argues, the composition classroom offers a unique space where teachers and students can experiment precisely by exploring what the dominant is likely to see as beneath its notice (472-73). Rather than search for the new and the other, he contends, the field will be well served by recognizing its difference from standard academic disciplines and by re-examining constituent terms like “writing, pedagogy, theory, rhetoric, modality, and composition itself” (473; emphasis original).


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Hirsu, Lavinia. Tag Writing as Cultural Script. C&C, Spring 2015. Posted 05/19/15.

Hirsu, Lavinia. “Tag Writing, Search Engines, and Cultural Scripts.” Computers and Composition 35 (2015): 30-40. Web. 27 Apr. 2015.

Lavinia Hirsu writes about the need to examine the process of tagging as a social and cultural process capable of generating community and identity as search-engine users categorize objects, people, and concepts. Composition studies, she argues, has generally relegated attention to tags and search engines to research, in her view taking too narrow an approach to this everyday activity, in contrast to fields like media and information studies and economics (30-31).

To illustrate her claim that tagging can be a source of social action and agency for users, she presents the case of Romania, which, after joining the EU in 2007, found itself the object of ridicule and prejudice. This prejudice was largely circulated through tags that completed phrases like “Romanians are. . . ,” so that an online searcher looking for information about Romania would find negative categorizations at the top of both the suggested search-term list and the search results. Through the advocacy of an advertising agency and a Romanian business, citizens were enlisted to join a campaign called “Romanians are Smart” by replacing the negative characterizations with positive ones. Over time the online references to Romania shifted to create images of Romanians as not just “smart,” but also “beautiful,” “educated,” and “hard-working” (33-34). International media recognized this project as successful, with Business Magazine proclaiming Romania “[t]he first country that changes its image on the Internet” (qtd. in Hirsu 34).

Hirsu discusses both the negative and positive Romanian characterizations as “folksonomies,” a term that contrasts with “taxonomies.” In the latter, the characteristics of the entity being described are “fixed” (32); in a folksonomy, the characteristics are fluid, responsive to user choices that result in “popularity and circulation,” creating a feedback loop as users replicate, tweak, and re-circulate tags (32). Hirsu argues that tags, which create folksonomies, can be applied to many digital objects other than photographs or blog entries. In the Romanian example, tagging functioned somewhat like “Googlebombing,” as one folksonomy replaced another (39).

For Hirsu, the importance of tagging as a cultural and social activity lies in the insights it can provide into the effects of electronic discourse as that discourse becomes a common shared rhetorical landscape. The Romanian project succeeded, she argues, in part because it was so universally accessible; entry into the public sphere did not require complicated technical knowledge or even much effort (36). The existence of folksonomies foregrounds how human action can impact a process like search-engine results that seems to be random or unbiased; Hirsu cites criticism that reveals that search results can be the product of and evidence for “sustained collective user behavior” (32). The use of tags to shift perceptions and visibility of entities and topics enables user agency as people actively build online personas (38). Despite concerns that a single user’s choices are inconsequential, Hirsu provides examples of how such agency can act locally and even extend beyond national borders (39). She argues that user interventions in the ways search engines organize information creates a de facto “alternative public rhetorical education” (36; emphasis original) as people discover how to manipulate processes that may seem “merely functional” but that in fact have the power to reshape culture (32). The study of tagging also illustrates how the power of a discourse may be as much a product of the way it is delivered as of the actual content, as higher-ranked search results tend to be seen as more authoritative (37-38).

For Hirsu, the flexibility that makes tagging a vehicle for cultural discourse also gives it a “fragility” that can result in productive folksonomies losing ground to problematic ones unless users actively sustain their efforts at “training” search engines to avoid simplistic categorization (36; emphasis original). The agency users experience is not necessarily ethical (37); only consistent work to link topics to a range of descriptors can prevent them from coalescing into unreflective stereotypes. Similarly, some tags risk valorizing one referent by denigrating another, as when “Roma” gypsies are contrasted with “Romanians” in order to elevate the profile of the Romanians (36). Other dangers include the ability of search engines to learn and foreground individual search patterns, so that users risk being exposed only to the patterns they have inadvertently created (38).

Hirsu argues that avoiding these limitations is an important reason for students in composition classrooms to investigate the role of such apparently meaningless activities as tagging (38). By examining various tagging trends to see how they shape a conversation, students can become not just consumers of online discourse but can find ways to become what Alexander Halavais designates “an informed user” who is “a producer of media, a willing interlocutor in the distributed conversation of the web” (qtd. in Hirsu 38). In other words, changes in technology’s role in democratic public life mean that agency in the public community involves participating in activities like tagging; composition studies, in Hirsu’s view, should more proactively embrace the task of helping students think about how their engagement in this process “creates content and builds cultural discourses” for which they share responsibility (35).