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Sumpter, Matthew. Linked Creative Writing-Composition Courses. CE, Mar. 2016. Posted 05/01/2016.

Sumpter, Matthew. “Shared Frequency: Expressivism, Social Constructionism, and the Linked Creative Writing-Composition Class.” College English 78.4 (2016): 340-61. Print.

Matthew Sumpter advocates for “tandem” creative-writing and composition courses as first-year curricula. To support this claim, he examines the status of both composition and creative writing in the academy through the “dual metrics” of expressivism and social constructionism (341).

Sumpter characterizes the two types of writing classes as separate enterprises, describing creative writing as “an almost anti-academic endeavor” (Tim Mayers, qtd. in Sumpter 340), exhibiting a “lack of reflectiveness about what, how, and why one teaches creative writing” (340). He portrays composition, in contrast, as highly theorized and “characterized by a greater dedication to informed pedagogy” (340). He contends that both areas would benefit from increased communication: creative writing could draw on composition’s stronger critical and theoretical grounding while composition would be able to offer students more “tools with which to manipulate language’s rhythm, pace, sound, and appearance” (340).

He locates the roots of expressivism and social constructivism respectively in the work of Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae. In Sumpter’s view, Elbow’s project involved placing students and their lives and thoughts at the center of the classroom experience in order to give them a sense of themselves as writers (342), while Bartholomae saw such emphasis on students’ individual expression as a “sleight of hand” that elides the power of the teacher and the degree to which all writing is a product of culture, history, and textual interaction (qtd. in Sumpter 342). For Sumpter, Bartholomae’s approach, which he sees as common in the composition classroom, generates a teacher-centered pedagogy (342-43).

Sumpter points to ways in which current uses of these two approaches merge to create “a more flexible version of each philosophy” (341). By incorporating and valuing diverse student voices, expressivism gains a critical, socially aware component, while social constructionists exploit the de-emphasis on the genius of the individual author to welcome voices that are often marginalized and to increase student confidence in themselves as writers (344). Yet, Sumpter argues, attention to the differences in these two philosophies enables the implications of each to be explored more fully (344).

Sumpter presents a history of the relationship between creative writing and composition, beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when, according to D. G. Myers, there was no distinction between the two (cited in Sumpter 345). The next part of the 20th century saw a increasing emphasis on “efficiency,” which led writing classes to a focus on “practical activities” (Myers, qtd. in Sumpter 345). Creative writing, meanwhile, allied itself with New Criticism, “melding dual impulses—writing and literature, expression and ideas, art and social practice” (345). This liaison, Sumpter writes, gave way fairly quickly after World War II to a new role for universities as they tried to assert themselves as a “haven for the arts” (Myers, qtd. in Sumpter 346), leading to a rupture between creative writing and criticism (346).

Sumpter states that this rupture, establishing as it did that creative writing was “something different from an academic discipline” (Tim Mayers, qtd. in Sumpter 346; emphasis original), coincided with composition’s development as an academic field. As composition studies continued to evolve theoretically, according to Sumpter, creative writing pedagogy retreated into “lore,” disappearing from discussions of the history of writing instruction like those of Gerald Graff and James Berlin (347).

Sumpter references moves during the latter decades of the 20th century to question the divorce between the two fields, but posits the need to examine creative-writing pedagogy more carefully in order to assess such moves. He focuses in particular on criticism of the workshop model, which scholars such as Patrick Bizarro and Michael McClanahan and Kelly Ritter characterize as built around a dominating teacher who imposes conformity on student writers (348). Moreover, according to Sumpter, the pursuit of consensus in the workshop model “will reflect a dominant ideology” (348) that excludes many students’ unique or marginalized voices and experiences (349). In Sumpter’s view, theory like that informing composition studies can disrupt these negative practices (349).

Sumpter examines a number of scholarly proposals for bridging the gap between creative writing and composition. Some adjust pedagogy in small ways to integrate expressivism and social-contructionism (353-54). Others more aggressively redesign pedagogy: for example, Tim Mayers proposes a course built around “craft criticism,” which he says can meld creative writing with “sociopolitical understandings of literacy” to locate it in “a more general intellectual framework concerning literacy itself” (qtd. in Sumpter 354). Wendy Bishop’s “transactional workshop” includes “strong components of exploratory and instrumental writing” as well as self-reflection to introduce theory while retaining students as the pedagogical center (qtd. in Sumpter 355).

Other models revise workshop design: for example, Hal Blythe and Charlie Sweet have students respond to each others’ work in small groups, meeting with an instructor only occasionally to diminish the dominance of the teacher (355). Sumpter discusses other models that ask composition to encourage risk-taking, originality, and experimentation (357).

Sumpter expresses concern that some models, such as Mayers’s, ultimately fail to put expressivism on equal footing with social constructionism (354) and that efforts to inject social-constructionism into creative writing courses can impose “certain pedagogical traits that just about every theorist of creative writing pedagogy wants to avoid,” such as increased teacher dominance (353). His solution is a two-course curriculum in which the two courses are taught separately, though coordinated, for example, by theme (358) and each infused with aspects of its counterpart (351, 359).

He grounds this proposal in claims that what creative writing offers is sufficiently different and valuable that it deserves its own focus and that, if simply added to composition classes, will always risk being eclipsed by the theoretical and analytical components (350-352). He addresses the institutional burden of staffing this extra course by adapting Bythe and Sweet’s model, in which most of the feedback burden is taken on by students in small groups and the instructor’s role is minimized. In such a model, he argues, current faculty and graduate instructors can take on an additional course assignments without substantially increasing work load (358-59).

The virtues of such a model, he contends, include allowing each course to focus on its own strengths while addressing its weaknesses and “formalizing” the equal value of creative writing in the academy. He believes that realizing these goals “will give students a deep, diverse exposure to the world of written discourse and their place in it” (359).


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Lamos, Steve. Writing Faculty Job Security and “Negative Affect.” CE, Mar. 2016. Posted 03/27/2016.

Lamos, Steve. “Toward Job Security for Teaching-Track Composition Faculty: Recognizing and Rewarding Affective-Labor-in-Space.” College English 78.4 (2016): 362-86. Print.

Steve Lamos addresses the need for improved job security for “teaching-track” faculty: “faculty members whose jobs primarily or exclusively consist of delivering undergraduate instruction off of the tenure track” (362). Lamos argues that the ongoing discussion of this need, especially within composition studies, fails to adequately address the degree to which pervasive “negative affect” (363) prompts constituencies within higher education to devalue the kinds of work these teachers do.

Lamos reviews the literature on labor conditions for teaching-track faculty, which often advocates for tenure for these positions (362). He underlines the exigency of this concern with statistics showing that in today’s “neoliberal environment” of higher education, 75% of all hires and 95% of hires in composition do not include tenure (363).

To define “affect,” Lamos turns to discussions by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth as well as Sara Ahmed. Their work theorizes what Lamos calls a “precognitive sensation” that exists below conscious levels and “circulate[s]” in ways that, in Ahmed’s words, “mediate the relationship between the psychic and the social, between the individual and the collective” (qtd. in Lamos 363). Such circulation of emotional forces around teaching-track work, Lamos writes, is predominately negative, rendering the labor involved in this work “unimportant, uninteresting, and ultimately unworthy of attention” (363).

Lamos contends that efforts to promote job security must address this negative affect if they are to succeed, but many advocates for improved labor conditions fail to do so. For example, he argues that the claims of Marc Bousquet that solidarity with other labor movements will result in change actually requires the field to downplay its unique commitment to emotional work in order to align with larger groups, thus failing to acknowledge the ways in which negative attitudes toward emotional work within higher education will spur resistance to productive change (369-70). Similarly, calls for various forms of review and credentialing, including one of his own, fail to explain how such a credential, even if awarded, can come to be seen as valuable enough to improve the status of teaching-track work (371).

To progress, in Lamos’s view, composition theorists must develop means of making the various constituencies with the power to address teaching-track status “feel good” (363) about the work such teachers do. His article particularly focuses on larger institutions that generally privilege research over teaching because these institutions function as “higher education trendsetters” (364). Although emotional labor is devalued across most educational contexts, Lamos writes, within more prestigious research universities it is especially “subject to a kind of gendered dismissal” based on a sense that it involves work that women find “inherently satisfying” and thus not in need of other compensation and that, by its nature, consists more of “pandering to difference” rather than enforcing academic standards (366).

For Lamos, negative affect revolves, first, around this view that emotional work is peripheral to the mission of higher-education (365-66), and second, around a failure to understand that the success of emotional labor requires “educational spaces” where students’ minds and bodies can engage with “smart environments” (367) in which students can experience the pleasure of intellectual work. However, such spaces are seen by the institutional elite as “idiosyncratic,” needing to be replaced by spaces that produce “universal, acontextual, and easily assessable” results (367).

Lamos makes the case, however, that the work done by teaching-track faculty in these contexts is essential to learning. Emotional labor in general works to make students “comfortable enough to learn” (364); the kind of emotional labor specific to composition, moreover, strives to “mak[e] writing processes themselves . . . feel good and right and natural” (365). To argue for the value of this kind of work within the overall education mission, he presents the “‘studio’ model of basic writing instruction” developed by Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson and the “Accelerated Learning Program (ALP)” promoted by Peter Adams and colleagues.

These program augment “‘regular’ curricula” with the specific kinds of support needed for all students to advance (372). The example of a specific engineering student in Grego and Thompson’s project sheds light on Lamos’s view that affective work with students enhances learning when it makes them “more comfortable” in academic settings and helps them understand how interpersonal components color learning environments (372-73). A second focus of these programs has been demonstrating their ties to retention and graduation rates. Lamos presents data indicating that ALP in particular has generated quantitatively documented evidence that providing students with affective support can reduce attrition and costs (374).

Lamos makes three “assertions” about how best to improve job security for teaching-track faculty engaged in what he calls “affective-labor-in-space” (375). He first recommends explicitly imbuing this labor with the kinds of associations that larger constituencies within higher education will feel good about. Doing so means not only citing evidence on retention and graduation but also continuing to make the case to authoritative stakeholders that emotional labor is “profoundly important to the future of higher education” (377) and that it is “unique,” a kind of intervention unlikely to be undertaken elsewhere in the academy (375, 377, 379, 380). He argues for the effectiveness of such an approach at his own institution.

Next, he urges that the ability to perform such labor be “institutionalized” as a factor in assessment and hiring (377). Expecting documentation of this ability allows it to be “emplac[ed]” so that it becomes “part of our institutional fabric” and thus becomes a stepping-stone to more secure employment (377).

Finally, he advocates emphasizing the importance of job security to teachers providing this kind of instruction. However, he notes that there is little likelihood that tenure will rapidly follow (379). Political barriers such as “right-to-work” laws often prevent direct activism, and some skeptics may note that faculty have demonstrated that they can perform affective labor well without substantive reform (381). To counter such resistance, faculty have worked instead to promote improvements such as “soft reappointments” and “‘evergreen’ contracts,” measures that make securing ongoing employment less onerous and less contingent (381).

While Lamos urges national educational organizations like NCTE and MLA to make job security a focus, he emphasizes finally that “[s]uch work must be made to feel good and right and essential to individuals from across the political spectrum” if progress is to be made (383).


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Lu and Horner. Introduction: Translingual Work. CE, Jan. 2016. Posted 02/28/2016.

Lu, Min-Zhan, and Bruce Horner. “Introduction: Translingual Work.” College English 78.3 (2016): 207-18. Print.

In their Introduction to the symposium on translingualism in the January, 2016, issue of College English, Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner address the complexities of defining and implementing a translingual pedagogy. The Introduction previews the contributions of the participants, who were among those invited after a “conversation among four of us—Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Anis Bawarshi, and Juan Guerra . . . .” that pointed to the need to explore translingualism as “one possible entry point for work contesting the monolingualism that continues to dominate the teaching and study of college writing and reading in the United States and elsewhere” (207).

Participants received a list of “tenets for a ‘translingual approach'” developed from a list compiled by Lu. Among the concerns noted were attention to

  • “language . . . as performative: not something we have but something we do”;
  • “users of language as actively forming and transforming the very conventions we use. . . .”;
  • “communicative practices as not neutral or innocent but informed by and informing . . . cultural relations of asymmetrical power”; [and]
  • “all communicative practices as mesopolitical acts, actively negotiating and constituting complex relations of power. . . .” (208)

These tenets also posit “difference as the norm of all utterances”; translingualism, in this view, does not address solely “deviations from the norm” (208).

Participants were further invited to consider the question of which tenets were important in their own work and how further work on these issues might “enhance the work of composition in each of the areas” (209).

Following their discussion of the contributions, Lu and Horner address a number of broad questions that they feel shape and emerge from the symposium. They describe translingualism not as it is sometimes construed—as a focus on L2 learning or other apparent deviations from standard usage; rather, they see it as addressing the use of language by “ordinary people” in daily lived experience, naming as its true “other” the claim that there is, indeed, a monolinguistic norm that sets universal standards (212).

They particularly address what they describe as a “conundrum” addressed in a number of the symposium articles: whether a translingual approach can be understood as an extension of approaches already in use in writing studies and classrooms, or whether it ought to be seen as calling for a more active engagement to “combat” the “deleterious sociocultural effects of the monolingual ideology” (213). They endorse the idea of translingualism as a forceful “rejection” of this ideology and its effects, arguing that the work of Mina P. Shaughnessy and others in exploring the language uses of students in 1960s and 1970s constituted “a sociopolitical movement” that, in Shaughnessy’s words, “pedagogically radicalized” writing instruction (qtd. in Lu and Horner 213).

To further address the conundrum, they explore the claims of Louis-Jean Calvet, who contends that, in fact, “languages do not exist” (qtd. in Lu and Horner 213; emphasis original); what does exist are “representations—what people think about languages and the way they are spoken” (qtd. in Lu and Horner 213; emphasis original). Understanding language this way leads Lu and Horner to the view that this process of representation itself makes users active in creating the languages they use. Recognizing the agency of users through their practice, the authors believe, can enable action on the power relations that govern these representations and can, in the words of two contributors, “open up” possibilities within language, genres, and modes that had previously been closed off (214).

Understanding language as “always emergent” rather than “time-less” (214) or fixed, Lu and Horner argue, requires as its corollary understanding that a translingual approach does not point to a particular set of language practices that can be identified in usage or texts. Rather, translingualism itself, as a representation, will be subject to “inevitable reworking,” not just by scholars attempting to apply it but also by “students at the pedagogical site” (215). Translingual pedagogy requires a “shift” from a transmission model of language instruction “to a more dialogical course of study” (215).

Lu and Horner caution that a focus on dialogic classrooms as sites of translingual teaching will not, in itself, upend the dominant monolingual ideology or ensure increased social justice or reorientations of power; instead, it is “an occasion for labor, the labor of revision,” a set of practices that “can be reworked” toward desirable ends (216). They call for readers of the symposium to see the contributions as a call to join in that labor of ongoing reworking and as examples of the kinds of work that can be done (216).


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Trimbur, John. Translingualism and Close Reading. CE, Jan. 2016. Posted 01/30/2016.

Trimbur, John. “Translingualism and Close Reading.” College English 78.3 (2016): 219-27. Print.
The January 2016 issue of College English addresses the question of “translingualism,” a term that Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, in their Introduction to the issue, see as “one possible entry point” for overcoming the perception that there is only a single form of English that is universally standard and acceptable (207). They discuss at length the challenges of defining translingualism, presenting it in part as the recognition that difference in language use is not just a phenomenon of L2 learning but rather is a feature of “the normal transactions of daily communicative practice of ordinary people” (212).
In this issue, John Trimbur “traces a branch of translingualism to its source” (220). He focuses on texts by Mina Shaughnessy, David Bartholomae, Bruce Horner, and Min-Zhan Lu. He locates the origin of this translingual impulse in the evolution of open admissions at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1960s and 1970s, as writing teachers confronted evidence that the edifice of “monolingualism” in English was an ideology of exclusion rather than a fact.
Trimbur argues that, far from being an accurate description of United States English prior to the turmoil of the 1960s, “monolingualism is not a possible linguistic condition at all” (220). He contends that all speakers move among various dialects and registers; the heterogeneous voices that are now becoming more audible demonstrate the existence of “a plurilingual periphery within the Anglophone centers” such as London and New York (219; emphasis original).
Trimbur recounts the history of CUNY from its birth in 1847 as the Free Academy, documenting that despite initiatives such as Search for Excellence, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK), the system remained largely White (220). In the late 1960s, demands from groups like the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community (BPRSC), in concert with growing civil-rights activism, pressured CUNY administrators to establish a true open-admissions policy (221). This shift introduced writing teachers to student writing that many considered worthy only of “eradicat[ion]” (221). In this new environment, Trimbur writes, “literature MAs and PhDs,” among them Mina Shaughnessy, began to draw on their expertise in New Critical close reading “to find order . . . in the language differences of students formerly excluded by selective admissions” (221).
Trimbur contrasts Shaughnessy’s work to understand the logic behind apparently anomalous usage with the approach of Bartholomae, one of the scholars Trimbur designates as members of the “Pitt school” (222). These scholars, Trimbur writes, recognized that literary theorists routinely constructed meaning from arcane texts by literary authors such as Donald Barthelme or e. e. cummings; the Pitt school critics “placed an extraordinary pressure on themselves” to apply these same approaches to student writing in order to understand “evidence of intention” (222).
To clarify this contrast, Trimbur hypothesizes Bartholomae’s response to an example of student writing addressed by Shaughnessy in her 1977 Errors and Expectations: A Guide to the Teacher of Basic Writing. Whereas Shaughnessy argued for “a logic of nonstandard English” in the essay by noting its use of the conventions of an “evangelical sermon,” Trimbur posits that Bartholomae would see the student practicing rhetorical strategies that positioned him as an applicant to academic authority, such as “moves up and down the ladder of abstraction” from concepts to examples and a gesture toward academic citation (223). In Trimbur’s view, Bartholomae would interpret this student’s effort as a sign not of a writer unable to abandon his “home language” bur rather as a writer “activated by his intention to ‘invent the university'” (223).
Trimbur then compares Bartholomae’s contribution to the approaches of Horner and Lu. Though he contends that both Horner and Bartholomae viewed language difference as socially and historically constructed (220), he contends that Bartholomae maintained in some part a view of standard English as a destination toward which students evolved, somewhat as an L2 learner might move toward a “target language” (224). In Trimbur’s contrast, Horner develops a “dialectical and resolutely social sense of error” in which editing becomes a “negotiation in situations of unequal power and authority”; in this view, teachers might look at student writing “not just for its errors but for the possible rhetorical effects of its language differences” (224).
Trimbur argues that Min-Zhan Lu further complicates the idea of a monolingual center for English by challenging the integrity of standard usage itself. In Lu’s view, Trimbur states, supposedly standard language is inherently “unstable, fluctuating, and hybrid” (225). The resistance of monolingual ideologies to the unconventional and different is the product of a “struggle among conflicting discourses with unequal sociopolitical power” (224-25). In this view, linguistic hierarchies become “momentary hegemon[ies}” (225), within which close reading can locate the value of elided difference.
Trimbur sees an important benefit in such approaches to student writing in their power to bring basic and second-language writing in from “the margins,” where they have been “orbiting around the mainstream English at the center in first-year composition” (226). He calls on composition to cease seeing difference as a reason to isolate the unacceptable but rather to recognize the degree to which difference actually inhabits all language use, thus “dismant[ing] these divisions and the pernicious judgments about language differences and about the differences between people that they have rested on” (226).


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Rice, Jenny. Para-Expertise in Writing Classrooms. CE, Nov. 2015. Posted 12/07/2015.

Rice, Jenny. “Para-Expertise, Tacit Knowledge, and Writing Problems.” College English 78.2 (2015): 117-38. Print.

Jenny Rice examines how views of expertise in rhetoric and composition shape writing instruction. She argues for replacing the definition of non-expertise as a lack of knowledge with expanded approaches to expertise open to what Michael Polanyi has called “tacit knowledge” (125). Rice proposes a new category of knowledge, “para-expertise,” that draws on tacit knowledge to enable students and other non-experts to do activities related to expertise.

Rice cites a number of approaches to expertise in rhet/comp’s disciplinary considerations. Among them is the idea that the field has content that only qualified individuals can impart (120). Further, she sees expectations in writing-across-the-curriculum and writing-in-the-disciplines, as well as the view that composition courses should inculcate students in “expert [reading and writing] practice[s]” (121), as indications of the rhetorical presence notions of expertise acquire in the field (120-21).

She opposes the idea of novice practice as a deficiency with other attitudes toward expertise. Within the field of composition studies, she points to the work of Linda Flower and John Hayes. These scholars, she writes, found that the expertise of good writers consisted not of specific knowledge but rather of the ability to pose more complex problems for themselves as communicators. Whereas weaker writers “often flatline around fulfilling the details of the prompt, including word count and other conventional details,” expert writers “use the writing prompt as a way to articulate and define their own understanding of the rhetorical situation to which they are responding” (121).

This discussion leads Rice to a view of expertise as meaningful problem-posing, an activity rather than a body of knowledge. In this view, students can do the work of expertise even when they have no field-specific knowledge (122). Understanding expertise in this way leads Rice to explore categories of expertise as laid out in “the interdisciplinary field of Studies of Expertise and Experience (SEE)” (123). Scholars in this field distinguish between “contributory experts” who “have the ability to do things within the domain of their expertise” (Harry Collins and Robert Evans, qtd. in Rice 123; emphasis original); and “interactional experts,” who may not be able to actively produce within the field but who are “immersed in the language of that particular domain” (123). Rice provides the example of artists and art critics (123).

Rice emphasizes the importance of interactional expertise by noting that not all contributory experts communicate easily with each other and thus require interactional experts to “bridge the gulf” between discourse communities addressing a shared problem (124). She provides the example of “organic farmers and agricultural scholars” who function within separate expert domains yet need others to “translate” across these domains (124-25).

But Rice feels these definitions need to be augmented with another category to encompass people like students who lack the domain-specific knowledge to be contributory or interactional experts. She proposes the category “para-expertise,” in which para takes on its “older etymology” as “alongside (touching the side of) different forms of expertise” (119).

In Rice’s view, the tacit knowledge that fuels para-expertise, while usually discounted in formal contexts, arises from “embodied knowledge” gleaned from everyday living in what Debra Hawhee has called “rhetoric’s sensorium” (cited in Rice 126). In Rice’s words, this sensorium may be defined as “the participatory dimension of communication that falls outside of simple articulation without falling outside the realm of understanding” (126). She gives the example of not being able to articulate the cues that, when implicitly sensed, result in her clear knowledge that she is hearing her mother’s voice on the phone (125)

Rice’s extended example of the work of para-expertise revolves around students’ sense of the effects of campus architecture on their moods and function. Interviews with “hundreds of college students” at “four different university campuses” regarding their responses to “urban legends” about dorms and other buildings being like prisons lead Rice to argue that the students were displaying felt knowledge of the bodily and psychological effects of window and hallway dimensions even though they did not have the expert disciplinary language to convert their sensed awareness into technical architectural principles (127-31). In particular, Rice states, the students drew a sense of a problem to be addressed from their tacit or para knowledge and thus were embarking on “the activity of expertise” (131).

In Rice’s discussion, para-expertise can productively engage with other forms of expertise through the formation of “strategic expertise alliances” (131). By itself para-expertise cannot resolve a problem, but those whose tacit knowledge has led them to identify the problem can begin to address it via coalitions with those with the specific disciplinary tools to do so. As a classroom example, she explains that students on her campus had become concerned about intentions to outsource food options, thus endangering connections with local providers and reducing choices. Lacking the vocabulary to present their concerns to administrators, a group of students and faculty joined with local community organizations that were able to provide specific information and guidance in constructing arguments (132-33).

Rice’s own writing students, participating in this campus issue, were asked to gather oral histories from members of a nearby farmers’ market. The students, however, felt “intimidated and out of place” during their visits to the farmers’ market (136), partly because, as students from other areas, they had seldom had any reason to visit the market. Rice considers this tacit response to the market the opening of a problem to be addressed: “How can a community farmers market reach students who only temporarily reside in that community?” (136; emphasis original).

Rice writes:

[T]he solution calls for greater expertise than first-year students possess. Rather than asking students to (artificially) adopt the role of expertise and pose a solution, however, we turned to a discussion of expert alliances. Who were the “pivot points” in this problem? Who were the contributory experts, and who had the skills of interactional expertise? (136)

Ultimately, alliances resulting from this discussion led to the creation of a branch of the farmers’ market on campus (136).

Rice argues that this approach to expertise highlights its nature as a collaborative effort across different kinds of knowledge and activities (134). It de-emphasizes the “terribly discouraging” idea that “discovery” is the path to expertise and replaces that “myth” with an awareness that “invention and creation” and how “[e]xperts pose problems” are the keys to expert action (122; emphasis original). It also helps students understand the different kinds of expertise and how their own tacit knowledge can become part of effective action (135).

 


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Hassel and Giordano. Assessment and Remediation in the Placement Process. CE, Sept. 2015. Posted 10/19/2015.

Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Baird Giordano. “The Blurry Borders of College Writing: Remediation and the Assessment of Student Readiness.” College English 78.1 (2015): 56-80. Print.

Holly Hassel and Joanne Baird Giordano advocate for the use of multiple assessment measures rather than standardized test scores in decisions about placing entering college students in remedial or developmental courses. Their concern results from the “widespread desire” evident in current national conversations to reduce the number of students taking non-credit-bearing courses in preparation for college work (57). While acknowledging the view of critics like Ira Shor that such courses can increase time-to-graduation, they argue that for some students, proper placement into coursework that supplies them with missing components of successful college writing can make the difference between completing a degree and leaving college altogether (61-62).

Sorting students based on their ability to meet academic outcomes, Hassel and Giordano maintain, is inherent in composition as a discipline. What’s needed, they contend, is more comprehensive analysis that can capture the “complicated academic profiles” of individual students, particularly in open-access institutions where students vary widely and where the admissions process has not already identified and acted on predictors of failure (61).

They cite an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education stating that at two-year colleges, “about 60 percent of high-school graduates . . . have to take remedial courses” (Jennifer Gonzalez, qtd. in Hassel and Giordano 57). Similar statistics from other university systems, as well as pushes from organizations like Complete College America to do away with remedial education in the hope of raising graduation rates, lead Hassel and Giordano to argue that better methods are needed to document what competences college writing requires and whether students possess them before placement decisions are made (57). The inability to make accurate decisions affects not only the students, but also the instructors who must alter curriculum to accommodate misplaced students, the support staff who must deal with the disruption to students’ academic progress (57), and ultimately the discipline of composition itself:

Our discipline is also affected negatively by not clearly and accurately identifying what markers of knowledge and skills are required for precollege, first-semester, second-semester, and more advanced writing courses in a consistent way that we can adequately measure. (76)

In the authors’ view, the failure of placement to correctly identify students in need of extra preparation can be largely attributed to the use of “stand-alone” test scores, for example ACT and SAT scores and, in the Wisconsin system where they conducted their research, scores from the Wisconsin English Placement Test (WEPT) (60, 64). They cite data demonstrating that reliance on such single measures is widespread; in Wisconsin, such scores “[h]istorically” drove placement decisions, but concerns about student success and retention led to specific examinations of the placement process. The authors’ pilot process using multiple measures is now in place at nine of the two-year colleges in the system, and the article details a “large-scale scholarship of teaching and learning project , , , to assess the changes to [the] placement process” (62).

The scholarship project comprised two sets of data. The first set involved tracking the records of 911 students, including information about their high school achievements; their test scores; their placement, both recommended and actual; and their grades and academic standing during their first year. The “second prong” was a more detailed examination of the first-year writing and in some cases writing during the second year of fifty-four students who consented to participate. In all, the researchers examined an average of 6.6 pieces of writing per student and a total of 359 samples (62-63). The purpose of this closer study was to determine “whether a student’s placement information accurately and sufficiently allowed that student to be placed into an appropriate first-semester composition course with or without developmental reading and studio writing support” (63).

From their sample, Hassel and Giordano conclude that standardized test scores alone do not provide a usable picture of the abilities students bring to college with regard to such areas as rhetorical knowledge, knowledge of the writing process, familiarity with academic writing, and critical reading skills (66).

To assess each student individually, the researchers considered not just their ACT and WEPT scores and writing samples but also their overall academic success, including “any reflective writing” from instructors, and a survey (66). They note that WEPT scores more often overplaced students, while the ACT underplaced them, although the two tests were “about equally accurate” (66-67).

The authors provide a number of case studies to indicate how relying on test scores alone would misrepresent students’ abilities and specific needs. For example, the “strong high school grades and motivation levels” (68) of one student would have gone unmeasured in an assessment process using only her test scores, which would have placed her in a developmental course. More careful consideration of her materials and history revealed that she could succeed in a credit-bearing first-year writing course if provided with a support course in reading (67). Similarly, a Hmong-speaking student would have been placed into developmental courses based on test-scores alone, which ignored his success in a “challenging senior year curriculum” and the considerable higher-level abilities his actual writing demonstrated (69).

Interventions from the placement team using multiple measures to correct the test-score indications resulted in a 90% success rate. Hassel and Giordano point out that such interventions enabled the students in question to move more quickly toward their degrees (70).

Additional case studies illustrate the effects of overplacement. An online registration system relying on WEPT scores allowed one student to move into a non-developmental course despite his weak preparation in high school and his problematic writing sample; this student left college after his second semester (71-72). Other problems arose because of discrepancies between reading and writing scores. The use of multiple measures permitted the placement team to fine-tune such students’ coursework through detailed analysis of the actual strengths and weaknesses in the writing samples and high-school curricula and grades. In particular, the authors note that students entering college with weak higher-order cognitive and rhetorical skills require extra time to build these abilities; providing this extra time through additional semesters of writing moves students more quickly and reliably toward degree completion than the stress of a single inappropriate course (74-76).

The authors offer four recommendations (78-79): the use of multiple measures, use of assessment data to design a curriculum that meets actual needs; creation of well-thought-out “acceleration” options through pinpointing individual needs; and a commitment to the value of developmental support “for students who truly need it”: “Methods that accelerate or eliminate remediation will not magically make such students prepared for college work” (79).


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Tarsa, Rebecca. Online Interface as Exordium. CE, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/29/2015.

Tarsa, Rebecca. “Upvoting the Exordium: Literacy Practices of the Digital Interface.” College English 78.1 (2015):12-33. Print.

Rebecca Tarsa proposes strategies for creating an effective “exordium” for writing classrooms by examining how the digital interface works as an exordium in online participatory sites in which students voluntarily contribute writing. She draws on Teena Carnegie’s work to argue that the interface of an online site meets Cicero’s definition of the exordium as an appeal designed to “make the listener ‘well-disposed, attentive, and receptive’ to the ensuring speech” (25). In the case of an online site, the interface as exordium accomplishes this goal by “project[ing] to users the potential for interactivity within the site that matches their desired engagement while also supporting the ends of the site itself” (25-26).

To determine how interfaces affect students’ writing decisions, Tarsa drew on interviews with thirty students at two institutions, one a two-year college and the other a research university (15). The students were members of the general-education population and not necessarily advanced online writers (16). Using grounded theory methodology, Tarsa developed her observations after coding the interviews (16-17). More than three-quarters of the students voluntarily raised the issue of the effects of a site’s interface, leading Tarsa to recognize it as an important element in students’ online participation (17). She notes that her conclusions about student activities were based on self-report and cannot be considered generalizable, but argues that using “students’ own perceptions” is valuable because it provides useful additions to “our understanding of digital participatory cultures” (18).

Tarsa introduces the concept of “affordances,” which she defines as “the potential interaction offered to users by a tool or feature of a site’s interface” (18). She focuses on two kinds of affordances, “[e]ntry” and “qualitative” (18, 22). Entry affordances, she writes, affect student decisions about participation long before they have accessed any content. Such affordances involve the appearance of a site, which the students Tarsa interviewed often seemed to judge as inviting or uninviting, perhaps ‘boring” (student, qtd. in Tarsa 19). A second important feature of an interface that influences participation is the registration process, if one is in place. Tarsa found that students might use a site extensively yet resist the step of signing up, in some cases because they felt they already had too many accounts and passwords (20). Tarsa found that “usability” was not a determining factor in students’ decisions; rather, they were likely to judge whether or not a particular feature or requirement was “useful” (20). For example, acquiring the ability to access a site on a mobile device was useful to some of the students interviewed (20-21).

Students who ultimately decided to register, Tarsa reports, tended to do so either because they “had something in particular they wanted to contribute” or because “they wanted to customize their interface experience or vote on content” (21). In such cases, the students had regularly visited the sites before deciding to sign up. She posits that although a desire to write was not necessarily the primary motivation, having registered cleared the way for future engagement, for example writing (21).

Tarsa depicts “qualitative affordances” as invitations to interact, initially through voting on the quality of content. She writes that such judgments of quality can involve sharing, “liking” (a “one-way” judgment), or voting up or down (a “two-way” assessment) (22). Tarsa argues that the ability to vote offers users a safe, visible, easy-to-use means of becoming a contributor to an online community. Such actions by users become a form of agency, as audiences determine what content will become successful.

The existence of qualitative affordances, Tarsa posits, is one factor in overcoming users’ resistance to entry affordances, like registration (23). Eliminating this resistance positions users to take the next step of writing. Regular involvement in voting activities “create[s] higher levels of comfort with and investment in a site overall” (24), necessary components if a user is going to risk the “range of anxieties” (23) inherent in writing. Thus, the ability to vote on content drew the students Tarsa interviewed into sites where “all but one” of those who had registered for the purpose of voting “eventually went on to participate within those sites via writing” (23).

Invoking Carnegie’s theory, Tarsa proposes that the work of motivating writing begins with the features of the interface working as exordium, particularly in promising and facilitating the “interactivity” that leads to a sense of “connection” and “acceptance” (Carnegie, qtd. in Tarsa 26). Interacting with other users through the qualitative affordances enabled by the interface leads writers to an awareness of audiences beyond their immediate sphere (28). While the threat of being voted down may discourage some writing, in Tarsa’s view, the familiarity with interaction that results from these affordances is more likely to encourage writing than to “quash” it (27). She notes that a particular exordium will not appeal to every user; each online culture competes with so others that any site seeking to prompt participation must hone its interface with careful attention to its intended audience (26-27).

Tarsa sees challenges in creating a classroom exordium that makes use of the features that interfaces provide in online cultures. She states that the ability to write on impulse with little cost or risk fuels participation in online interaction; this “spontaneity” is difficult to reproduce in the classroom (29). Options like blogging, while promising, must be designed so as to reduce entry barriers like “schedul[ing] time to write the assigned post, navigat[ing] to the site, and log[ging] in before they can write” (29). Making entry routines part of a regular class day is one possible step toward encouraging participation. Similarly, class discussion does not mimic the interactivity offered by qualitative affordances because of the risk speaking up poses and its inability to indicate spontaneous reactions.

Tarsa suggests incorporating versions of more popular qualitative affordances like “liking” or supplying links to related material into such activities as selection of material for a digital bibliography (29-30). Finally, the features of online participatory sites can play “an ongoing part in rhetorical inquiry” into “the relationship between author and audience” (30). In Tarsa’s view, such efforts to exploit the features of the online exordium that invite writing can also encourage it in classrooms.


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VanHaitsma, Pamela. Student Inquiry through Archives. CE, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/08/2015.

VanHaitsma, Pamela. “New Pedagogical Engagements with Archives: Student Inquiry and Composing in Digital Spaces.” College English 78.1 (2015): 34-55. Web. 2 Sept. 2015.

Pamela VanHaitsma discusses an approach to involving students in archival research that she developed in first-year-writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh. Maintaining that students explore as well as create archives throughout their activities both in and outside of class, VanHaitsma hopes to connect the kinds of inquiry that archives make possible with the focus on student interest and lives that informs writing pedagogy. She also investigates how digital collection and dissemination options affect the process of using and building an archive (36).

She notes that the term “archives” might designate a range of collections, such as databases students use in research for classwork, broader collocations of information like Wikipedia, and even sites housing student material for plagiarism detection. VanHaitsma chooses to avoid resolving this definitional debate that, on the one hand, recognizes any collection of information as an archive, but on the other, insists on specific content and formal organization. Instead, she wants to “work between the . . . extremes of broad and narrow definitions” (35), drawing on the relationship between collections “from the past” as well as “present-day spaces” where archives might exist or be created (35). The specific assignment she presents calls on students to use collections that fit the traditional model while also developing their own collections in order to ground inquiry in their writing classes (36).

In VanHaitsma’s view and that of other scholars she cites, archival methods and research inherently encourage inquiry, simultaneously evoking critical attention to methodology (36-37). Practicing these methodologies has the added effect, VanHaitsma argues, of drawing both undergraduates and graduate students into the kind of scholarly work done and valued beyond the classroom: Students can “transform from thinking of themselves as students to seeing their insights and their work have value to an academic field” (Wendy Hayden, qtd. in VanHaitsma 37).

In her view, exploring digital archives has added benefits. She cites the collaborative work across areas of scholarly emphasis enabled by access to many different digital collections (37); she quotes James P. Purdy to stress that digital archives “eliminate many temporal and spatial obstacles” as students explore connections across disciplines (qtd. in VanHaitsma 38).

In particular, VanHaitsma points to scholarship that argues for the value of digital tools in helping students contribute their own collections to the growing universe of archives. Daniel Anderson contends that students’ ability to gather and store materials without expert technical knowledge makes them “producers and consumers, or ‘prosumers'” (qtd. in VanHaitsma 38). VanHaitsma provides examples of such “prosumer” behavior across communities and within classrooms, for instance the use of MediaWiki software to generate collaborative collections (38).

Her students explored the topic of “language use in romantic relationships” (40) through two traditional archives of nineteenth-century letter-writing instructions and then through materials available to them today that offered similar instruction. Her goals included encouraging comparison of these rhetorics while also asking students to consider how new technologies affected the dissemination and effects of the information they were examining (40, 42). Students concluded the project with an essay analyzing similarities and differences. Thus, for VanHaitsma, the assignment led to substantive inquiry at many levels. The students’ archives were collected in the Blackboard Course Management system in use at the university; the results were not made public 40-41).

VanHaitsma stresses that substantial learning resulted from her decision to allow students to develop their own archives rather than provide them with present-day materials of her choosing. Teachers, she argues, may not clearly anticipate what students will find useful or relevant; moreover, pre-empting students’ agency in choosing what to include in the archive stifles the kind of active inquiry the assignment is intended to promote.

VanHaitsma notes that students’ choices were not all “overtly instructional” like the letter-writing manuals; although how-to articles were included, students added other diverse options such as YouTube music videos, excerpts from novels, and film clips (43). She provides five examples of essay topics, for example, a comparison of a letter-writing manual to “present-day Chinese TV dating shows” that noted how both “focus on a man’s ‘wealth’ and a woman’s ‘appearance'” (student, qtd. in VanHaitsma 44); and an examination of the manuals through the lens of Jersey Shore, noting the shift from “courtesy” to “language and tactics . . . for hooking up” (student, qtd. in VanHaitsma 44). Two students noted that the earlier manuals did not admit the possibility of gay relationships (44-45).

VanHaitsma illustrates the critical analysis encouraged by the assignment: Students explored both the advantages and limits of both rhetorics as well as the effects of the media used. For example, a student analyzing a clip from the film He’s Just Not That Into You used the term “bombarded” to describe current-day techniques for creating relationships while other students noted that relationships today have been made “too easy” as people turn to online media to convey thoughts that were once written out with great care (46-47). Students also noted the limitations of the nineteenth-century process, contending that there are virtues to today’s more expansive options (47).

However, VanHaitsma’s ultimate focus is not on the content of the archives and essays themselves; rather, she hopes to foreground the degree to which the work of examining traditional archives while simultaneously creating related archives from materials of interest to students promotes “the sort of scholarly inquiry that teacher-scholars have emphasized as a potential for pedagogical engagements with brick-and-mortar archives. . . . ” (48).

VanHaitsma recommends that despite the ease of use of familiar platforms like Blackboard, students will benefit from trying out other systems, especially those like Archive-It and Omeka, which are specifically intended for the generation and dissemination of archives (49). While encouraging the option of taking student-created archives public, VanHaitsma cautions that teachers will need to address “questions about the audiences, purposes, and effects of such publication, as well as copyright issues relevant to archiving artifacts” (49).

Her final caution is for teachers to remember that when they provide archival materials for student study, they may come with “preconceived ideas” about how the materials should be valued. Again, she believes that student agency in selecting and evaluating collected material is paramount to the learning such assignments foster (50).


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Kopelson, Karen. Workplace Guides for ASD Individuals. CE, July 2015. Posted 07/30/15.

Kopelson, Karen. “‘Know thy work and do it’: The Rhetorical-Pedagogical Work of Employment and Workplace Guides for Adults with ‘High-Functioning’ Autism.” College English 77.6 (2015): 553-76. Print.

Karen Kopelson examines workplace advice guides designed to help adults on the autism spectrum enter the workforce. She argues that, in the process of explaining how such adults can reinvent themselves to meet workplace demands, these guides underscore worker traits that fit a capitalist ideal, presenting ASD workers* as perfect embodiments of this ideal; they diverge from disability-rights agendas in advising ASD adults to downplay or even reject their identity as a disabled person; they participate in the American narrative of individual accomplishment and personal responsibility; and they disseminate an implicit but very visible rhetorical education in ways that shed light on tensions between composition and disability studies.

To illustrate these claims, Kopelson draws on Amazon rankings to select recent and/or prominent examples of these texts. With the exceptions of works by Temple Grandin and Kate Duffy, which she includes because of their prominence, she focuses on guidebooks published since 2010 in order to understand how the most recent research and terminology are presented and employed by these books (555-56).

Kopelson notes the disproportionate attention given to children with autism-spectrum disorders, suggesting that a recent proliferation of workplace guidebooks reflects the fact that once these “children grow up,” their lives will intersect with the larger culture, in particular the job market (553-54). The books, she contends, direct their arguments to multiple audiences: to ASD individuals and their health-care communities but also to employers, who may not recognize that the supposed deficits that accompany an ASD diagnosis are actually the kinds of qualities employers should value (554). Among these traits are the ability to focus, to be absorbed and satisfied by repetitive tasks, to concentrate on work rather than social interaction (558-60), to work long hours and accept “internal motivation” (560) in lieu of high wages, to remain loyal to an employer: in fact, to define themselves, as Grandin does, by the work they do (561).

In Kopelson’s view, the worker thus constructed is the capitalist “fantasy worker in possession of qualities valued most by contemporary workplaces” (571). At the same time, she illustrates through examples from several texts that in order to succeed in workplaces that continue to be structured around neurotypical expectations, ASD individuals must remake themselves, taking it upon themselves to “adapt” and “fit in” (564).

Kopelson includes examples from many of the texts under study that demonstrate the ways in which this adaptation is predicated on attention to the rhetorical principles of “imitation, delivery, invention, and, especially, to audience and context” (564). Foregrounding books by Barbara Bissonnette, Kopelson detects a pedagogic focus on eliminating the “hermeneutic deficiency” that makes autistic individuals struggle to “objective[ly] and accurate[ly] . . . interpret” situations and people (Bissonnette, qtd. in Kopelson 567-68). This exhortation to read workplace audiences accurately and objectively, Kopelson writes, seems at odds with Bissonnette’s insistence that “meaning comes from context” (qtd. in Kopelson 566). Bissonnette’s pedagogy involves providing examples and heuristics that ASD individuals can use to gauge audience and context as they work to overcome the “mindblindness” that dominant depictions ascribe to them and that reportedly prevents them from understanding others’ perspectives (559. 567-69).

In Kopelson’s view, larger issues emerge from her study of how rhetorical principles in line with much implicit composition pedagogy are used in the workplace guides. Among her questions is whether rhetoric is “inherently normative” (566), imposing pressure to match external standards of propriety, in the process engaging in the “the manipulation of subjectivity itself” (566). Kopelson, citing Paul Heilker and Melanie Yergeau, sees in this function a tension with a view more in line with those expressed in disability studies that “autism is its own ‘way of being in the world through language'” (qtd. in Kopelson 571). Kopelson compares this view of autistics’ methods of intersubjective interaction with other examples of difference in language and with efforts within composition studies to both expand students’ linguistic capacity and value their home languages (572). Kopelson further considers competing views as to whether mainstream rhetorical pedagogy like that practiced in the workplace guides can in fact transform ASD individuals in the ways Bissonnette and others envision or whether entirely new methods of rhetorical education must be invented to meet the needs of autistic students (570-71). Ultimately, Kopelson calls for more study and analysis to understand the intersections of ASD individuals with the larger culture, while urging composition scholars to recognize the realities that have fueled the proliferation of guides like Grandin’s and Bissonnette’s:

And so, while our field may be invested in such notions as “rhetorical accommodation” ([Jenell] Johnson 476, [qtd. in Kopelson 572]), or a “revised” and “expanded understanding of rhetoricity” ([Cynthia] Lewiecki-Wilson 157, [qtd. in Kopelson 572]), and while we may be committed to . . . facilitating access to languages of power while valuing languages of culture or nature, we need to be aware that pedagogies far more public and powerful than those of writing studies, or of higher education at large . . , conspire to ensure that neurotypical and other monolithic norms of language and selfhood are sustained. (572)

*Kopelson notes that the preferred choice of major disabilities-rights groups like ASAN (Autistic Self Advocacy Network) is “identity-first” language rather than the “people with” language often used by the guidebooks  (556-57; emphasis original).


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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).