College Composition Weekly: Summaries of research for college writing professionals

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

Category Archives: Discourse Community


by 1 Comment

Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc. Scalar Analysis in Literacy Studies. RTE, Feb. 2016. Posted 03/20/2016.

Stornaiuolo, Amy, and Robert Jean LeBlanc. “Scaling as a Literacy Activity: Mobility and Educational Inequality in an Age of Global Connectivity.” Research in the Teaching of English 50.3 (2016): 263-87. Print.

Amy Stornaiuolo and Robert Jean LeBlanc introduce the concepts of “scales” and “scalar analysis” as tools for examining how people locate themselves in a stratified global context. Scalar analysis moves beyond the dichotomy between “local” and “global,” shedding light on the ways in which locations are constantly in flux and in interaction with each other, often shifting as a result of strategic moves to respond to asymmetries and inequalities.

Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc applied their analysis to five teachers in four countries—India, Norway, South Africa, and the United States—who worked with adolescent students on “a Space2Cre8 (S2C8) project,” which was “oriented to helping young people in challenging circumstances engage in cross-cultural communication” (270).

The five teachers worked with the S2C8 groups once or twice a week during the two-year duration of the project; students engaged in various forms of media to communicate with each other about their lives and cultures. During the project, the teachers met ten times via Skype, communicated in emails, and produced memos and notes; additional data came from interviews and classroom observations (271-72, 284-85). The teachers came from varied disciplines, such as technology, art, history, and design (271). Much of the work took place in English, which was the “only shared language” across the sites (270).

According to Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc, scalar research is useful for literacy studies because of its power to examine how meaning gets created and how it shifts as it moves into and through different contexts (267). Understanding literacy through scales “compels several shifts in literacy research” (268). These shifts revolve around moving from a sense of literacy actions and artifacts as fixed in time and space to understanding them as products of “ongoing and often contentious labor” that evolve through “the active and strategic working/reworking of texts in unequal globalized contexts” (268; emphasis original). Scalar analysis asks scholars to examine “how people are positioned and position themselves and their literate identities in and through literary practice” (269).

Such a focus on the “mobilities” of meaning, Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc contend, is necessary to understand how inequalities are created and sustained, how meaning becomes more or less “understandable” (269) as it enters different scalar levels, and how people negotiate the hierarchical contexts that characterize globalization and in which they inevitably locate themselves. The authors were specifically interested in the ways that educators functioned in an environment understood through the lens of scales; the use of scales as a heuristic can both “explain how difference is turned into inequality” as well as how movement within and across scales can enhance agency for individuals and groups addressing their own marginalization (266).

Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc delineate six scalar “jumps” or “moves.” “Jumps” include “upscaling,” which involves “invok[ing] a higher scale rationale to prevail over lower-scale orders of discourse” (272); for example, institutional factors might be named as a reason for a particular choice. Kgotso, working in South Africa, refers to exam schedules and a teachers’ strike “to justify how he had been using his time” (280). Via “downscaling,” an actor asserts his or her local circumstances to validate a choice (272). Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc recount how Amit, writing from India, focused attention on how local technology limitations affected his group’s participation in the project (275). “Anchoring” privileges the actor’s location in the “here-and-now” without necessarily invoking higher or lower scales. The authors cite teacher emails in the project, in which the teachers claimed authority in reference to “an issue at hand” (273).

Other moves do not necessarily involve jumps. “Aligning” occurs when actors compare scalar locations to strengthen positions. As an example of aligning, Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc present the efforts of Kgotso in South Africa to compare his concerns about the dominance of English with similar issues he saw as affecting Amit’s work in India (278). Kgotso further engaged in “contesting,” a scalar move in which he challenged the “US-centric imprint” of the project, suggesting that the curriculum be reconsidered to address the needs of the two “linguistically disadvantaged” sets of participants (qtd. in Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc 278). Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc provide an example of “embedding” in the way that Maja, in Norway, saw the project as “nested within a number of other entities” such as school and university commitments that affected her own use of time (281).

Such examples, for Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc, indicate the usefulness of scalar analysis to illuminate “gaps” that reinforce inequality. Differences in resources, such as adequate bandwidth, affected the ease with which the teachers were able to integrate the social-media exchanges the project hoped to foster (275). Another important research gap uncovered was the varied access to English as the primary language in communications among students. For example, Maja in Norway saw the need to translate S2C8 contributions into English, and Kgotso contrasted his students’ use of Afrikaans with the need to “cross over” to an outside language when working in the project. Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc consider moves like Kgotso’s and similar ones by Amit to be examples of downscaling, asserting the validity of students’ local practices and needs (277, 281).

Gaps in availability of time also figured prominently in the findings. Materials presented by Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc suggest that the teachers regularly made scalar jumps and moves to position themselves in relation to the amount of time required by the project in comparison to the demands of their local situations and of the higher-order scales in which they found themselves embedded. The teachers, Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc suggest, saw S2C8 as such a higher-order scale, one in some sense “imposed” on their immediate missions and requiring strategic negotiation of the scalar landscape (281).

Although Stornaiuolo and LeBlanc acknowledge that their account of the S2C8 project echoes “familiar narratives” about the issues that arise when the promise of digital communication across space and time is actually put into practice, they argue that these narratives “mask” what scalar analysis can illuminate: “the ongoing labor of producing texts and contexts over multiple affiliations in time and space” (283). Especially visible, they indicate, are the ways that literacy productions are valued differently as they move through different scales. The authors contend that attention to scales provides a “concrete set of tools to highlight the constructed and contingent nature of all literacy practices” (283).


by 3 Comments

Lancaster, Zak. Discourse Templates in They Say/I Say. CCC, Feb. 2016. Posted 03/13/2106.

 

Lancaster, Zak. “Do Academics Really Write This Way? A Corpus Investigation of Moves and Templates in They Say/I Say.” College Composition and Communication 67.3 (2016): 437-64. Print.

Zak Lancaster analyzes three corpora of academic writing to assess the usefulness of “templates” provided for student use in the textbook They Say/I Say (TSIS), by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein. Lancaster ultimately concludes that the most cogent critique of TSIS is not that it encourages students to use “formulaic” constructions but rather that the book does not supply students with the templates that academics actually use and hence, in fact, is not “formulaic” in ways that would most effectively shape students’ understanding of academic discourse (450).

Lancaster focuses on the book’s provision of specific sets of word strings to help students structure their arguments, in particular, first, phrases that acknowledge counter-arguments and second, those that concede to alternative points of view while, in Graff and Birkenstein’s words, “still standing your ground” (qtd. in Lancaster 440). Lancaster recounts that the use of formulas to guide students in incorporating others’ viewpoints has provoked debate, with some analysts endorsing the effort to supply students with explicit language for “moves” in the academic conversations they are expected to enter, and others characterizing the provision of such specific language as a “decontextualized” approach guilty of “reducing argumentation down to a two-part dialogue” (438).

For Lancaster, this debate, though meaningful, begs the basic question of whether the templates provided by TSIS actually “capture the tacitly valued discursive strategies used in academic discourses” (439). Lancaster finds this question important because linguistic analysis indicates that variations in wording shape “different roles for the reader . . . and different authorial personae, or stances,” conveying different values and encouraging different approaches to argumentation (440).

Lancaster cites research showing that what some linguists call “lexical bundles” are indeed common in academic writing across disciplines. “[H]ighly functional” phrases such as “it should be noted that,” or “the extent to which” are used more often by expert writers than by students (441). Lancaster’s example of “hedging formulas” such as “in some cases” or “appears to be” introduces his claim that such formulas have an “interpersonal function” in concert with their “ideational meanings” (442), supplying the same information but creating different valences in the reader/writer relationship.

Research on student texts, Lancaster reports, shows that students often succumb to what some scholars call “myside bias,” struggling to include counterarguments (443). In Lancaster’s view, evidence that students who are able to overcome this bias produce more complex, “mature” arguments (444) justifies strategies like those in TSIS to open students to a more dialogic approach to argument, which they may tend to see as a matter of “winning” rather than negotiating meaning (444). Lancaster claims, however, that TSIS could provide “more systematic attention to the details of language” to offer more substantive guidance in the ways these details affect interpersonal meanings (444).

Lancaster examines three corpora: one of expert academic writing drawing from “almost 100 peer-reviewed journals across disciplines”; one of “829 high-graded papers” by advanced undergraduates and “early graduate students across sixteen fields”; and one of “19,456 directed self-placement (DSP) essays” from the University of Michigan and Wake Forest University (444-45). Lancaster examined each body of writing using “concordancing software” to search for the exact phrases proposed by TSIS, to find other phrases serving the same functions, and to examine the precise contexts for each formula to make sure that it functioned like those featured in TSIS (445). The tables presenting the findings are based on “the normalized frequency” of occurrences rather than the raw numbers (446).

Analysis of the ways in which the writers in the corpora “entertain objections” revealed “six recurring options” that Lancaster ranks as moving from “direct” moves such as “Naming the reader” and “Naming your naysayers” (a characterization quoted from TSIS) through less direct moves that he denotes as “Unattributed” like “One might argue” or a passive-voice construction, to indirect phrases like nominalizations (“Another explanation”) or what linguist Geoff Thompson calls the “Hypothetical-Real” formula: phrases like “At first glance” or “It may appear that” that suggest that the writer will delve beneath the surface to present unrecognized truths (447-48).

Analysis indicates that first-year writers did consider alternative views at frequencies comparable to those in the more advanced work. In general, indirect phrases were much more commonly used than direct ones in all corpora; Graff and Birkenstein’s “Naming your naysayers” was the least frequently used option (448-49). Though they did “name the readers” more than the first-year writers, advanced writers preferred indirect approaches at higher levels than less advanced writers (450).

Lancaster posits that the use of more indirect choices by more advanced writers, counter to the guidance in TSIS, suggests that writers resist claiming to know what readers think, a form of “interpersonal tact” (448). Importantly for Lancaster, the specific phrasings offered in TSIS “do not appear in any of the corpora” (450). Similar but subtly different phrasings perform these functions (450-51).

Lancaster’s discussion of concession notes that while TSIS describes this move in terms of “‘overcoming’ objections” (qtd. in Lancaster 452), for linguists, such interactions create “solidarity with interlocutors by affirming and validating their views” (452). Lancaster draws on the work of James R. Martin and Peter R. White to base his analysis on the concept of “concede + counter,” in which a concession move is signaled with “high-certainty adverbials” like “undoubtedly” or “to be sure,” while the counter follows through the use of words like “yet,” or “at the same time.” Lancaster notes that in advanced samples, the opening concession phrase may not even appear (452), with the result that the move may be inconsistently tagged by the software (453).

Findings indicate more explicit use of concession by the less experienced writers (452). Lancaster proposes that this difference may result from the placement-essay writers’ sense that they were expected to “strike an adversarial stance” requiring more “direct language”; conversely, the software may not have picked up more subtle moves by more advanced writers (453). First-year samples were much more likely to include the kinds of wordings TSIS recommends, such as “It is true that. . . .” (454). However, none of the writers at any level used “personalized and overt signals” like “I concede that” or “Proponents of X are right” (454).

In investigating the “counter,” Lancaster discovered that the direct phrases encouraged by TSIS, such as “I still VERB that,” were not favored by any group; shorter, less direct wordings predominated. In fact, “On the other hand,” recommended by TSIS, tended to indicate a contrast between two positions rather than a “counter” following a concession (454).

Lancaster extracts three conclusions: all groups opted most often for indirect means of considering objections; writers consistently chose to “eagerly” endorse shared viewpoints when conceding; and less experienced writers used more direct concessions like those suggested by TSIS (455).

Differences in genre and context, Lancaster notes, may affect the validity of his findings. However, he sees “interpersonal tact” as “an implicit guiding principle” that is “pervasive” in academic writing (456-57). He notes that TSIS formulas do use hedges, but posits that the authors may not “see” these interpersonal markers because the hedging phrases have become naturalized (457).

In Lancaster’s view, TSIS often echoes a common perception of argument as a form of combat; he argues that the best academic writing more fully resembles a conversational exchange, and suggests that attention to the specific details of academic language provided by “systematic analysis” (459) such as corpora research can refocus instruction on how academics do incorporate interpersonal meanings into their discourse and how students can best use these moves when they wish to enter academic conversations (458-59).

 

 


by

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).


by

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).

 


by 1 Comment

Gruwell, Leigh. Wikipedia’s Gender-Gap Problem. C&C, May 2015. Posted 08/19/15.

Gruwell, Leigh. “Wikipedia’s Politics of Exclusion: Gender, Epistemology, and Feminist Rhetorical (In)action.” Computers and Composition 37 (2015): 117-31. Web. 28 july 2015.

Leigh Gruwell examines Wikipedia’s “gender-gap problem,” the fact that only 13% of its editors are female. Gruwell recounts interviews with three women who regularly contribute to Wikipedia to argue that a number of aspects of the Wikipedia process are not welcoming to women.

Gruwell reports that Wikipedia is widely used by both men and women and has earned the approval of a number of composition scholars who see it as “a collaborative site of writing and knowledge production that emphasizes revision and challenges traditional models of textual authority and authorship” (117). Compositionists have valued wiki technology in general and have incorporated Wikipedia into classroom assignments (119). Gruwell points to scholarship that casts Wikipedia as a way of showing how texts arise through a “socially constructed, ever-unfolding process” that does not stem from “a single, unified identity” (119). Scholars also value Wikipedia’s public nature and its message that knowledge is not limited to “credentialed experts” and is, in James Purdy’s view, “framed as up for debate” (qtd. in Gruwell 119). But Gruwell argues that Wikipedia, like any technology or text, emerges from its culture and encodes “biases and assumptions” that scholars should be alert to (119).

Gruwell examines Wikipedia as a discourse community; she notes that the scholarship on such communities demonstrates how, within the community, some modes of communication are sanctioned while others are discouraged or even denied. Gruwell argues, however, that members of one discourse community are also members of other communities and that these varied simultaneous memberships shape individuals’ relationships across communities. Wikipedia, she writes, does not acknowledge the diversity or multiplicity of the people who contribute; for example, the site does not ask editors to register and minimizes the information users have to supply. As a result, Gruwell states, “it is difficult to discern who these users are” (121). She contends that a user’s “standpoint”—his or her “allegiances . . . , politics . . . , [and] social positioning”—affect the knowledge that the user incorporates into the Wikipedia interface (121).

This dissociation from users’ lived experiences is further enforced, she writes, by the site’s style preferences. She demonstrates these preferences with a screen shot of the entry for “Feminist movement,” which is deemed unacceptable because it is “written like a personal reflection or essay” rather than in the mandated “encyclopedic style” (Wikipedia entry for “Feminist movement,” qtd. in Gruwell 118). Gruwell critiques this style choice through the lens of feminist standpoint theory, arguing that Wikipedia’s “neutral point of view” requirement, which, according to the site’s guidelines, asks writers “to describe debates rather than engage in them” (qtd. in Gruwell 121), excludes writing from an “embodied” positionality reflective of the kind of “lived experiences” that shape knowledge and that characterize a feminist approach to discourse (119).

Gruwell details her own experiences with Wikipedia. After regularly turning to Wikipedia for “quick run-down[s]” when needed, she fulfilled a graduate seminar assignment by enlisting as an editor (122). Discouraged by the difficulty of the “idiosyncratic” mark-up language then in use and by seeing her edits revised, Gruwell returned to using Wikipedia solely as a resource. However, the discovery that only 13% of editors were women encouraged her to see her experiences as grounds for investigation (122).

After promised help from Wikipedia recruiting women study participants failed to materialize, Gruwell located a “Wikimedia Australia gender gap listserv” (123) populated by women who contributed regularly to Wikipedia. Participants took a short survey on their experiences and then responded to a request for a longer interview over Skype or phone (123, 128-29).

Gruwell focuses on three interviews that provide useful insights into women’s relationships with the Wikipedia community (123). The three women were “relatively privileged . . . , well-educated, [and] economically advantaged” (123). Gruwell posits that these women’s positions may have enabled them to engage successfully with Wikipedia because they had both the time and the skills to do so (123). The women cited their emotional commitment to Wikipedia’s goals or to the community, with one explicitly expressing a political purpose, calling attention to issues she considered important. Gruwell notes that all three wrote “about topics that mattered to them, as individuals and professionals” (124) and with which they had a personal connection.

Gruwell’s interviews suggest three reasons why women fail to thrive at Wikipedia. First, her participants note that even professional women are still burdened by traditonal women’s duties and thus cannot prioritize becoming expert users (124-25). Second, though Gruwell notes that Wikipedia is making its coding simpler (123n4), historically learning to edit has presented a considerable learning curve. Her participants suggest that because IT has generally been a male-dominated domain, people comfortable using the interface may well more often be male. Finally, Gruwell emphasizes the degree to which the discourse expectations at Wikipedia exclude the kinds of knowledge many woman may bring to the project (124-25).

Gruwell explores these issues by examining how her three interview subjects have succeeded as Wikipedia editors. Beyond bringing some IT expertise, as one participant does, the women exhibit “a sophisticated sense” of how Wikipedia operates that enables them to meet the rigid community requirements (125). They recognize the mandate to direct their work to “the widest possible audience” (“Lekha,” qtd. in Gruwell 125); they copy and develop templates to structure their work in formats that will be accepted (126). Gruwell especially addresses the epistemological standards the women must meet. Of particular note is the need for “sourcing” that will be considered “reliable” (126). The women’s experiences in academia, Gruwell posits, makes meeting this standard easier for these women than it would be for others. However, she provides examples of how this standard excludes individual and local knowledge, as does the site’s sense of what constitutes the “notability” necessary for inclusion on Wikipedia (126). In Gruwell’s view, such practices create a “homogenous” body of information that claims authority as decisive when it fact it excludes rather than enables debate (127). Moreover, citing Andrea A. Lunsford and Lisa Ede, Gruwell identifies Wikipedia as an example of “hierarchical collaboration,” in which differences must be smoothed out rather than acknowledged (127).

Gruwell cites Wikipedia’s recent efforts to address the gender issue, but argues that these efforts do not challenge the limiting epistemology the site endorses (127). She introduces #tooFEW, a feminist group hoping to change the Wikipedia culture rather than simply “align with” it, and notes composition journals that do similar work (127-28). She reminds composition scholars that academic fields also value the “‘objective,’ detached writing” privileged by Wikipedia, and urges feminist scholars to take the “risks” involved in resisting such standards (128). Teachers should bring Wikipedia into classrooms for examination of the assumptions underlying its concept of knowledge and driving its discourse conventions (128). Finally, teaching Wikipedia critically can identify other excluded positionalities in its depiction of reality (128).


by 3 Comments

Drake, Kimberly. Genderqueering Language. Writing Instructor, March 2015. Posted 07/14/2015.

Drake, Kimberly. “Genderqueering Language at a ‘Women’s’ College.” The Writing Instructor (March 2015). Web. 08 July 2015. http://parlormultimedia.com/twitest/drake-2015-03

In a special edition of the online journal The Writing Instructor, Kimberly Drake, a professor of writing at Scripps College, explores the efforts of her first-year writing students to navigate the complexities of gendered language and the possibilities of “genderqueered” language. Scripps is traditionally a women’s college in the Los Angeles-area Claremont Colleges. Drake recounts efforts to refine language in official documents and in the classroom at Scripps and other colleges, in particular single-sex institutions, as they face the challenges necessitated by the increasing presence and visibility of transgender students.

Drake reports on the experience of Calliope Wong, who was denied admission by Smith College, a women’s college, because on many of her application materials she was identified as male. For Drake, this event highlighted the particular issues confronting single-sex institutions, which, she argues, have been predicated on a clear, foundational “gender binary” of “male” and “female.” Further, she writes, these colleges have traditionally presented their mission as providing a “safe space” for women to realize their potential with no interference from the patriarchy in the culture around them. Drake notes the special resonance of language use in such an environment and interrogates the concern that the missions of these institutions will be compromised if students’ efforts to alter language result in “turning the gender binary into a continuum.”

Scripps students, as Drake presents them, represent a range of feminist positions; some consider it unnecessary to insist on feminist stances because they feel these are implicit in the Scripps environment. Although Drake knew of queer students at Scripps, she felt that “cis-gendered heterosexual women were the normal Scripps students, and those not falling into this category did not have a strong public presence on campus.” As this situation began to change, however, Scripps students made the language of the Scripps Associated Students (SAS) bylaws gender-neutral so as not to “exclude and silence” a portion of the student population (Anna Salem, SAS president 2009-10, qtd. in Drake).

Drake posits that such choices are not perfect solutions to the problems of visibility and inclusion faced by students who do not fit the normative gender binary. While gender-neutral language precludes clearly sexist choices like generic “he,” it evades confronting the prevailing hierarchy that continues to assume a binary and leaves unchallenged the primacy “implicitly granted to members of historically privileged categories, such as heterosexual men” (Mimi Marinucci, qtd. in Drake). Drake writes that “[f]ull access . . . will not be gained by avoiding pronominal reference to the gender binary.”

Tracing the history of gender reference at Scripps, Drake reveals that over time, official documents and public events ranged from employing plurals to constituting students as “she” to a ceremony in which women were only mentioned twice, in the phrase “men and woman.” Members of the Board of Trustees and faculty were historically “he.” Drake posits that the often-chosen retreat to the plural may have resulted from the need to dodge the grammatical problems associated with the supposedly colloquial use of “they” in singular constructions but also possibly from the perception of some that a “representative college student” could not be female. To some students, surrendering the use of “she” as a designation for Scripps students compromises the feminist implications of such a choice. The students, however, ultimately voted to prefer gender-neutral options as a way of refusing the “gender oppression” inherent in sustaining the binary through the use of “she.”

Drake recounts the experiences of students in her first-year writing classes, which she designs around the language of social protests, creating a “brave space” for free discussion within the “safe space” Scripps provides. In particular, Drake develops readings and assignments that present the power of discourse to structure identity and culture, urging “imaginative resistance.” In exploring how language choices can provide such resistance to gender oppression, students learn that the use of “they” to address the lack of a neutral singular pronoun as well as efforts to create neutral pronouns have a long history, including the use of “yo” as a non-gendered pronoun by current-day teenagers in Baltimore.

As an example of an imaginative response to the problem, Drake’s students read Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time about a woman in a mental institution who travels in time to a utopian, egalitarian society in which “identitarian categories” disappear, with “person” and “per” replacing personal pronouns and possessives. Students experiment with Piercy’s solutions, moving on to consider other options like “ze” and “hir.” Students grappled with the claims of Judith Butler that not just “gender identity” and “gender performance” but also “anatomical gender” (qtd. in Drake) are all “socially constructed.” These efforts resulted in the conclusion that “if you are admitted to Scripps, it’s because someone in power believes you have a vagina.” The students in this class appropriated a phrase from a video game to generate a slogan, “Person’s Gender is a Lie,” which they used on T-shirts.

Ultimately, Drake argues, using language to refer to gender in ways that diverge from expectations about what is normal disrupts the ability of institutions like Scripps to subsume the diverse identities of individuals under the static gender binary. When readers found a student’s use of “ze” and “hir” in a scholarship competition “distracting,” Drake writes that this “distraction was purposeful and political,” demanding the recognition of gender as a continuum rather than a binary. Such genderqueering of language, in Drake’s view, replaces the idea of a normative, homogenous community with an acknowledgment of the differences within it.