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Essays from Forum: Contingent Faculty Issues, in CCC, Sept. 2015. Posted 10/06/2015.

Pytleski, Patricia Davies. “Contact Zones and Contingent Faculty: An Argument for Conversion.” Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 19.1 (2015): A4-A8. Print.

Patricia Davies Pytleski argues that the relationship between contingent faculty and tenure-track/tenured faculty functions as an example of what Mary Louise Pratt described as a “contact zone,” a space governed by “highly asymmetrical relations of power” (Pratt, qtd. in Ptyleski A5). In Pytleski’s view, these relations affect the material conditions in which contingent faculty function, for example with regard to “office space, meeting inclusion, voting privileges, and program development” (A5). These power differentials, she writes, affect what institutions are able to offer students. Her article explores conversion of part-time positions to tenure-line positions as a solution in some cases and presents her own experiences as an example of how such a conversion can enhance curriculum.

She notes national data showing the degree to which institutions respond to economic pressure by increasing their dependence on contingent faculty (A4). She stresses the “irony within the definition” of contingent, quoting Dictionary.com, in which the term denotes something “dependent for existence . . . on something not yet certain; conditional” when in fact, it is the universities that are dependent on their part-time instructors (A8). Of the two solutions she sees generally offered to redress the problems faced by temporary faculty, long-term security versus conversion to tenure track, Pytleski argues for conversion because exclusion from the tenure-track community affects faculty practice in negative ways: “Only possible advancement or conversion to tenure-track lines would improve the asymmetrical power relations” (A6).

Pytleski discusses how, throughout her five years as contingent faculty, she contributed to the program at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania via her special credentials as a rhetoric and composition specialist with secondary certification and teaching experience (A6). She recounts her generally positive experiences at Kutztown while detailing the degree to which her contingent role created material impediments to serving students fully, for example her lack of regular office space (A7), and noting also how the uncertainty of her status resulted in her awareness, each year as her standing was re-evaluated, of “my placement within the power relations of this contact zone” (A7).

Pennsylvania, she writes, provides for the conversion to tenure track of part-time faculty who have worked in the same department for five consecutive years and who receive the approval of their programs (A6). Only such provisions, she contends, can alleviate the degree to which contingent faculty remain burdened by their status within a contact zone.

Dorfeld, Natalie M. “National Adjunct Walkout Day: Now What?” Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 19.1 (2015): A8-A13. Print.

Natalie M. Dorfeld details the events of the National Adjunct Walkout Day (#NAWD), which took place on February 25, 2015. Inspired by “an unassuming suggestion from Leah Griesmann, a lecturer at San Jose University in California,” the event provided a number of opportunities nationwide for instructors and students to call attention to the working conditions of part-time university teachers (A9).

Dorfeld recounts events at three institutions, Seattle University, San Francisco Art Institute, and the University of Arizona, at which groups numbering in the hundreds publicly advocated for greater job security, better pay, participation in faculty governance, and benefits (A9-A10). Dorfeld notes the contributions of students, such as speaking at the rallies or producing a YouTube video (A9-A10). Many students had not known of the plight of their instructors and voiced their awareness that the working conditions these teachers face affects the quality of education the institutions are able to offer (A10).

Dorfeld notes the alternative options open to faculty who could not walk out of class due to contract provisions or state right-to-work laws. Some instructors made academic labor issues the topic of class discussion, while others participated in “grade-ins,” publicly grading papers to emphasize their lack of office space. Information tables or “day-in-the-life reenactments” also gave advocates a way to draw attention to their claims (A11).

Dorfeld notes the range of administration responses to adjunct concerns and the NAWD events. Seattle University is battling unionization on the grounds that it should be allowed a “religious exemption from labor law” (Alex Garland, qtd. in Dorfeld A9). At the University of Arizona, the vice provost of faculty affairs, Tom Miller, noted that “we can expect that we’re going to need these people, and we should be thinking long-term how we’re going to support their development” (qtd. in Dorfeld A10). Dorfeld cites the emergence of more than thirty adjunct unions and reports increased solidarity over labor issues across the higher-education landscape (A12).

She frames her article with the tragic death of Duquesne University French instructor Margaret Mary Vojtko, who passed away penniless after teaching at the institution for 25 years (A9, A12). She credits this event, which earned widespread media coverage, with “sparking an outcry both in and out of academia” (A12); such publicity, for example, may have contributed to efforts like “the Service Employees International Union’s . . . goal of securing adjuncts $15,000 per course in pay and benefits” (Peter Schmidt, qtd. in Dorfeld A12).

LaFrance, Michelle. “Making Visible Labor Issues in Writing Across the Curriculum: A Call for Research.” Forum: Issues about Part-Time and Contingent Faculty 19.1 (2015): A13-A16. Print.

Michelle LaFrance is concerned that research in rhetoric and composition has paid inadequate attention to labor issues connected to the increasing reliance on contingent faculty in writing across the curriculum (WAC ) programs. She cites a range of topics that have been investigated by composition scholars examining working conditions, including “the impact of contingency upon pedagogy” (A13), but argues that “few researchers have explicitly addressed the special issues of contingency that subtend WAC programs” (A15).

After illustrating the rise in the use of contingent faculty at George Mason University, where she directs the WAC program, La France supports her claim about the dearth of research specifically directed at WAC labor concerns by reviewing extant studies that discuss questions of enrollment and urge “recognizing faculty’s professional development efforts” (A15) but give short shrift to the particular problems that face adjunct instructors. Among the documents she reviews is the “Statement of WAC Principles and Practices,” a position paper endorsed by the International Network of Writing Across the Curriculum Programs. This document, LaFrance writes, “completely elides” specific issues faced by part-time faculty working to meet the unique demands of a WAC appointment (A15).

Thus, LaFrance calls upon rhetoric and composition as a whole to address more concretely how the challenges facing contingent faculty play out in WAC environments. She expresses particular concern that the attention paid to “the institutional investment, infrastructure, and planning necessary to ensure the sustainability of these often decentralized and highly localized programs” will go for naught if the factors associated with increasing “adjunctification” are not included in the growing body of research meant to support WAC as a vital subfield of composition (A15).


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Sullivan, Patrick. Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Class. CCC, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/15/2015.

Sullivan, Patrick. “The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 67.1 (2015): 6-34. Print.

Patrick Sullivan urges composition scholars to embrace creativity as a fundamental component of an enriched writing curriculum. In Sullivan’s view, although researchers and scholars outside of composition have steadily moved creativity to the core of their models of cognition and of the kinds of thinking they feel are needed to meet 21st-century challenges, writing scholars have tended to isolate “creativity” in creative-writing courses. Sullivan presents a “most essential question”: “Might there be some value in embracing creativity as an integral part of how we theorize writing?” (7).

A subset of questions includes such issues as current definitions of creativity, emerging views of its contribution in myriad contexts, and the relationship between creativity and important capacities like critical thinking (7).

Sullivan surveys works by educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others on the value of creativity and the ways it can be fostered. This work challenges the view that creativity is the special domain of a limited number of special people; rather, the research Sullivan presents considers it a “common and shared intellectual capacity” (12) responsible for the development of culture through ongoing innovation (9) as well as essential to the flexible thinking and problem-solving ability needed beyond the classroom (8-9, 15).

Scholars Sullivan cites position creativity as an antidote to the current focus on testing and accountability that promotes what Douglas Hesse calls the “extraordinarily narrow view of writing” that results from such initiatives as the Common Core Standards (qtd. in Sullivan 18). Sullivan draws on Ken Robinson, who contends that current models of schooling have “educated out” our natural creativity: “[M]ost children think they’re highly creative; most adults think they’re not” (qtd. in Sullivan 9).

Other scholars urging the elevation of creativity as central to cognition include intelligence researcher Robert J. Sternberg, for whom creativity entails three components: “synthetic ability (generating ideas), analytical ability (evaluating ideas, critical thinking), and practical ability (translating ideas into practice and products)” (10). Sullivan compares models of “habits of mind” developed by other scholars with the habits of mind incorporated into the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” collaboratively generated by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project; he notes that many such models, including the “Framework,” consider creativity “an essential twenty-first-century cognitive aptitude” (12). He recommends to composition scholars the international view that creativity is equal in importance to literacy, a view embodied in the Finnish educational system and in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which would replace testing for memorization with testing for students’ ability “to think for themselves” (Amanda Ripley, qtd. in Sullivan 13).

Importantly, Sullivan argues, incorporating creativity into classrooms has crucial implications for overall cognitive development. According to the researchers Sullivan cites, expanding the kinds of activities and the kinds of writing students do enhances overall mental function (14), leading to the “rhetorical dexterity” (Shannon Carter, qtd. in Sullivan 20) essential to negotiating today’s rapidly changing rhetorical environments (21).

As further evidence of the consensus on the centrality of creativity to learning and cognition, Sullivan presents the 2001 revision of Bloom’s 1956 Taxonomy. This revision replaces “synthesis and evaluation” at the pinnacle of cognitive growth with “creating” (19). Discussing the revised Taxonomy to which they contributed, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl note that the acquisition of the “deep understanding” necessary to “construction and insight” demands the components inherent in “Create” (qtd. in Sullivan 19-20).

Such deep understanding, Sullivan argues, is the goal of the writing classroom: “[I]ts connection here to creativity links this luminous human capacity to our students’ cognitive development” (20). Similarly, concern about students’ transfer of the intellectual work of academic writing to other domains and a recognition of the importance of metacognition to deep learning link the work of creativity scholars to recent composition theory and applications (20). Sullivan suggests shifting from “critical thinking” to “creative and critical thinking” because “[a]ll good thinking . . . is creative in some way” (16).

Sullivan sees the increased focus within writing studies on multimodal and other diverse uses of writing as a move toward reframing public conceptions of academic writing; he presents “desegregat[ing] creative writing” as one way of “actively expanding our definition of academic writing” (21). He lists many ways of incorporating creativity into classrooms, then provides the unit on creativity that he has embedded in his first-year writing class (22). His goal is to “provide students with an authentic experience of the joys, challenges, and rewards of college-level reading, writing, and thinking” (22-23). To this end, the course explores what Paul Hirst calls “knowledge domains,” specifically, in Sullivan’s class, “traditional assignments” examining how knowledge functions in history and the human sciences (23-24), with the unit on creativity “[s]andwiched” between them (24).

In this unit, students consider the definition of creativity and then write poems and stories. The centerpiece is an individual project in which students produce “their own work of art” such as “a sculpture, a painting, a drawing, a photograph, a collage, or a song” (24). Sullivan furnishes examples of student work, including quotes illustrating the metacognitive understanding he hopes to inculcate: “that creativity, and the arts in particular, provide a unique and important way of looking at the world and producing knowledge” (25).

The final assignment is an “unessay,” which bans standard formats and invites students to “[i]nvent a new form!” (26). Sullivan shares examples of student responses to this assignment, many involving multimodal components that gesture toward a more inclusive embrace of what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls “what our students know as writing” (qtd. in Sullivan 28). Ultimately, Sullivan contends, such diverse, creatively rich pedagogy will realize David Russell’s hope of casting writing not as “a single elementary skill” but rather “as a complex rhetorical activity embedded in the differentiated practices of academic discourse communities” (qtd. in Sullivan 29), and, importantly, Douglas Hesse’s hope of communicating to students that writing is not an isolated academic exercise but rather “a life activity with many interconnected manifestations” (qtd. in Sullivan 18).


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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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Durst, Russel K. James Britton’s Contributions. CCC, Feb. 2015. Posted 05/05/15.

Durst, Russel K. “British Invasion: James Britton, Composition Studies, and Anti-Disciplinarity.” College Composition and Communication 66.3 (2015): 384-401. Print.

Russel K. Durst explores the contributions of James Britton to the field of composition studies during its formative years from the 1960s through the 1980s. Durst posits that although Britton’s work powerfully affected the development of the field as a scholarly discipline, Britton himself did not value the move toward disciplinarity in which he participated. According to Durst, of particular focus in Britton’s resistance to the field’s emergence were the pedagogy/theory dichotomy and the role of personal writing in students’ literacy growth.

Durst aligns Britton’s view of writing with that of “progressive educators” like John Dewey, contrasting that view with the prevailing approaches of Noam Chomsky and Jean Piaget, who posited “context-independent” theories of language and cognitive growth. According to Durst, Britton emphasized the social nature of writing, drawing on wide reading and research to valorize personal, “expressivist” writing in which students used informal registers to explore personally meaningful topics. Incorporating the work of Lev Vygotsky, Britton argued for the fundamental role of the social uses of language in learning, encouraging pedagogies that allowed students to write for purposes other than evaluation (388-89).

Durst recounts Britton’s role at the 1966 Dartmouth conference, where he represented a break with traditional and classical views of writing instruction (387), and summarizes Britton’s important empirical study, The Development of Writing Abilities (11-18). The premise of Britton and his colleagues in conducting this study was that informal, personal writing to varied audiences and to “the teacher as a trusted adult” would appear frequently in the more than two thousand samples of school writing in Britain that they collected (389-90). However, although the “discourse category” terminology of “transactional,”, “expressive,” and “poetic” writing proved valuable to composition studies, Britton et al.’s research revealed very little writing other than reproducing textbook and lecture material for the teacher to evaluate (390-91). Britton argued that teachers should recognize and more extensively exploit the value of personal and social uses of writing, which he saw as the starting point for writing and learning (390). Studies in the United States based on Britton’s categories by Arthur Applebee and others showed an even greater dearth of meaningful writing in American schools (389-90).

Durst cites four areas in which Britton’s contributions furthered the growth of composition studies (391-93):

  • the use of expressivist writing and talk that continues to inform activities like group work and conferencing;
  • the development of writing across the curriculum as an area of pedagogical focus;
  • the development of “facilitative response” as elaborated by C. H. Knoblauch and Lil Brannon to encourage a view of the teacher as a supportive learning collaborator;
  • the legitimation of collaborative research and publication that Durst speculates resulted from Britton’s location in schools of education.

In order to explore the “paradox” of the “anti-disciplinary” attitude of such a major contributor to a solidifying discipline, Durst distinguishes Britton’s sense of the expressive from the type of writing James Berlin categorized as “expressionistic.” For Durst, the focus on the personal that Berlin critiqued was individualistic, in contrast to Britton’s view of a kind of writing that engaged students’ personal interests through social activity (391). Similarly, Durst finds that Britton’s approach differs from that of “figures associated with expressionism” like Peter Elbow, Ken McCrorie, and Donald Murray (395). Britton’s concept of student-centered teaching, which rejected tradition and received knowledge, was similar to the views of these scholars and writers in that it accorded with the spirit of the 1960s: it appealed to the ethos of composition theorists who saw writing and learning as “liberating” activities and who were then breaking free from a limiting relationship with literary studies (394-95). But, Durst contends, Britton’s theories were more firmly grounded in his wide-ranging scholarly explorations, including empirical research (396). Yet Durst spots another crucial similarly between Britton and the expressionist writers. Elbow, McCrorie, and Murray, like Britton, focused on classroom practices and pedagogy in contrast to recent scholars like Sidney Dobrin, who contends that “writing theory must move beyond composition studies’ neurosis of pedagogy, must escape the shackles of classrooms, students, and management” (qtd. in Durst 397). In Durst’s view, the expressionists’ emphasis on students and classrooms makes them less than fully respected members of the current composition community. For Durst, this evidence that the field resists a focus on pedagogy affirms Britton’s sense that composition would not be well served by becoming a traditional academic discipline in which theory and scholarship took center stage (395-96).

In proposing “doubling down on pedagogy” in composition studies, Durst defines Britton as a scholar for whom writing instruction enabled broad intellectual growth and “liberation from society’s oppressive forces” (397); he sees in Britton’s example the possibility of solidly grounded scholarship specifically aimed at meeting the new challenges faced by students and teachers as diversity increases, technology expands, and the pressure to prepare students for careers escalates (398). Britton’s contributions illustrate that scholarly inquiry and a focus on student-centered pedagogy need not be competing activities; they can function jointly to enrich composition as an academic field.


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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).


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Pigg, Stacey. Mobile Composing Habits. CCC 12/14. Posted 3/2/2015.

Pigg, Stacey. “Emplacing Mobile Composing Habits: A Study of Academic Writing in Networked Social Space.” College Composition and Communication 66.2 (2014): 250-75. Print.

Stacey Pigg reports on an ethnographic case study of student “composing habits” (257) as they use technology to pursue their academic work in public spaces. Pigg observed activity at two spaces, a Wi-Fi-equipped off-campus café and an on-campus “Technology Commons” (258-59). Observations were followed by interviews of twenty-one students with diverse majors and at different academic levels; interviews and video-recordings of their processes were transcribed and coded (257). Pigg presents two of her participants in detail, one at the café and one at the commons.

Pigg’s study emphasizes the material aspects of such use of social space to accomplish focused work outside of the classroom. She argues that all students need an external space where they can distance themselves from distractions such as TV, pets, and family and extend their classroom learning, thereby bolstering the academic state of mind that leads to success (270). She explores how the use of public spaces by the two students she features allows them to develop work and mental habits that support their academic goals.

Pigg reviews research that argues that technology has changed the relationship between people and space. Technology expands space by making available knowledge and contacts outside of the immediate surroundings. It also enables control of space by making it possible to use varied spaces as “sites of academic learning” (252), and by providing means of limiting access to social interactions, as public places become specifically adapted to individuals’ focus on their screens. In such spaces, writers can choose their desired degree of social interaction as well as interaction with their devices.

Pigg is concerned that lack of access to spaces outside of the classroom where learning can take place will disrupt the “stability” of a student’s academic experience and degrade “persistence,” which the WPA Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing establishes as key to academic success (269-70). The harder it is for students to continue their learning outside the classroom, the less exposure they experience to the learning strategies Pigg identifies in the two subjects she portrays in detail.

For example, writing and learning, as embodied processes, become associated with memory and imbued with personal resonance: the extended extracurricular engagement with classroom material allowed by the two students’ merging of public spaces with the virtual access enabled by their computers and other devices encourages increased time on task as well as the use of virtual locations like an outline template to insert information into personally meaningful frameworks (263, 268). The two students’ preferred spaces allow the creation of routines that enhance productive “stability” (267) as “they returned to familiar places that had yielded positive results over time” (263).

Pigg emphasizes that her two subjects are not necessarily typical (269); rather, they illustrate how materiality can become an active force in learning, as the material components of scenes in which writing takes place assume an “agentive” function, playing a role in how the writing unfolds (255). Simply urging students to develop study and time-management skills is inadequate when material conditions do not lend themselves to the kinds of learning strategies that make use of the new configuration of space enabled by technology (270). Factors such as a good laptop and easy physical access to spaces outside of the classroom privilege those who have them. Moreover, such spaces need to be not only physically easy to access, but also psychically available, because not all spaces are equally welcoming to all students (262). Writers must be able to appropriate space to accommodate notebooks, books, and computers (268). Environments where studying is the norm also facilitate academic focus (260).

Pigg contends that most scholarship of writing processes has addressed the cognitive, internal aspects of composing and the effects of the devices themselves (254, 268); the effects of student processes may visible, but with the changing landscape, the processes themselves may be lost (271). She argues that increased study of how the negotiation of space and technology interacts with literacy practices can enable compositionists to become more active in efforts to construct appropriate spaces where all students can establish a fruitful version of what Kazys Varnelis and Anne Friedburg call a “mobile sense of place” (qtd. in Pigg 253, 270-71).