Wednesday, September 27, 2006

Black Dog of Fate

At the Nottingham Senior Living Community (in Jamesville, NY) where I run a writing group for the residents, Professor Peter Balakian (Colgate University) visited us and gave a talk on his memoir _Black Dog of Fate_ (1998), a story of growing up in America and gaining a growing awareness of how the Armenian genocide affected his family. He characterized his memoir as addressing and coming to terms with the transmission of intergenerational trauma. His grandmother was a survivor of a forced death march in Turkey in 1915 (part of the killing of over a million Armenians by the Turkish government). She survived and her two daughters survived, but everyone else in her family perished by murder or starvation. Balakian's story addresses the silences in his family about the massacres and the decoding of meanings that unfolded for him over time. In his twenties, he started to read about the genocide, then he began to write about it later in life, and then to lecture and teach about it.

Dr. Balakian's presentation was extremely powerful: as a historical overview of the genocide, the reasons for it being forgotten or denied, but also as a story of coming to terms with it as a second generation after the survivor generation.

I'm sure we'll be reading Dr. Balakian's memoir in the writing group. We all wanted to run out to purchase it.

Monday, September 25, 2006

Mired in Case Study

Reading Janet Emig the distance of thirty five years, I can't help but wonder about the reach of case study. Tanya's question/response to Laura's blog has prompted my late night musings when I should be planning my 105 class instead of yammering on my blog.

Case study writing research may seem like a quaint method to us at the distance of thirty-five years, but it's really not. Case study is still a bread and butter approach in social science research, and, in some ways, in writing research as well. Case studies are the stuff of popular psychology books, too; we're raised on the stuff. Case study is the basis for comparison, for theorizing about applications, for understanding concrete details of limited cases. Case study is currently used quite a bit in writing program administration research: a program is studied as a model for others to think about and theorize about and work for/against. Syracuse's writing program gets used/cited in this way frequently: our program is a model for other ind. writing programs or ones that are striking out to become independent.

Of course, case study is full of problems: reliability, generalizability, bias, you name it.

Yet think of case study in practical terms. Case study is a way to deal with all the giant problems of trying to do a wide-scale study. Let's face it, time and resources are limited. Case study is a way to try to understand a complex set of circumstances in real and concrete ways. Case study can be exploratory, reflective, and a way to examine patterns.

Yet let's face it: Emig's study had a lot of artificial components. What would it have been like to do a case study of the students negotiating their "real writing demands" in the high school classroom vs. researcher-imposed ones? It's easy to pick holes and think about gaps. In fact, Emig herself points out a lot of the gaps and is willing to be reflexive.

Well, some might say, we're post-process now. We don't need to go back and try to re-do this research or revisit it. This is just an interesting artifact. Well, it is, and it isn't. How people make meaning in writing still involves their processes of making meaning. What has perhaps changed is the idea/hope/belief that we can find the right way to intervene in those processes. But what seems to still be operative is the idea that those processes are often individualized with some collective components and yet adapted to different contexts.

More tomorrow...

Composing as a Given

Terri and Laurie, you have made me a happy blogger! Thanks for posting--finally, eastcoast-westcoast has some traffic.

Terri, since you know _Cross-talk_, I hope you'll talk with us more about what works and what doesn't about the book. I was intrigued about your story about your presentation. I've taught using the book three times now, and each time I find new resources/new points of view that I did not deploy in past versions of the course, so I contine to find this a good resource.

Laurie, your question about "process" being a given is useful to me, and it's useful to think about what other terms we might substitute for its primacy. "Primacy"--there it is, and Royster and Williams would remind us to question and critique primacy. What does making "process" a given provide (or not)? Is process the given? Maybe it is a given term, but is it a given practice that is theoretically informed? The histories we read the last couple of weeks would dub "freshman English" the given in the conversation. So what would Cross-talk look like if the book began with the histories of composition and rhetoric? We wouldn't be getting modern composition studies, but a more historically focused initial take on composition studies. The other given in the histories is the idea of "current traditional rhetoric," which was assumed to be the main theory of rhetoric and writing guiding composition pedagogies via textbooks and classroom instruction.

I think that beginning with the histories means that we know that process was around before--think of the progressive era with John Dewey as a focus and Fred Newton Scott. What I want to understand is why process was so important. What cultural and social influences urged us to process?

I have more to say about that, but I have to get Autumn to daycare and eat breakfast. Ah, the necessities of material life.

Laurie, I hope you didn't delete the line about putting Cross-talk in there with your cookbooks!

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Cooking and Composing?

What is about writing and writing research that makes people want to talk about "cooking"? Are we in the feminized composition kitchen?

Peter Elbow once famously likened writing to cooking. Victor Villaneuva begins the "Preface to the First Edition" of _Cross-talk_ with a discussion of making healthy pancakes for his children. I know Victor knows how to cook because he has moonlighted as a short order cook to supplement his once-inadequate professor's salary when he was at Northern Arizona University. He talks about this in his book _Bootstraps_. In the Preface to _Cross-talk_the egg added the touch of leavening needed for the pancake, and Villaneuva modified his cooking process, adjusting it to a more successful result. He did so because he had an "understanding of how eggs work in cooking." He "understood the theory." But many of us who teach writing don't understand the theory. We're busy mixing and matching theories with wild abandon, so that we end up in interview rooms, saying that we are Marxists who align ourselves with Peter Elbow and Ken Bruffee (xiv). We end up not being able to navigate composition's "currents," as Villaneuva puts it. _Cross-talk_ is intended as a guide for those us who teach graduate courses in comp theory, those of us who take those courses, and those of us who have taught comp for a long time and want a refresher (xiv). The book is dedicated to Sam and Tom, two graduate students, and all other graduate students, the users of the book, who have commented on the book's inner workings and logic.

To get back to the pancake/cooking metaphor, through reading this book, we "should be able to come up with quite the pancake recipe, something you [we] can swallow" (xiv).

We get a perspective in this volume, but we don't get a single-point of view. Villaneuva lets us know all the things he has left out in the first edition and all the things he added to address those omissions in the second edition. We get the "Son of Cross-Talk" (hey Victor, what about "Daughter" of Cross-Talk") who has more to say about writers of color, feminists, technology studies, and service learning among others.

I think this is a damn good book, a very useful overview without a lot of apparatus bells and whistles. The sections are set up around the conversation metaphor, with the idea of talk anchoring all of the segments.

The Givens in Our Conversations: The Writing Process
Talking in Terms of Discourse
Scientific Talk: Developmental Schemas
Talking about Writing in Society
Talking about Selves and Schools: Voice, Voices, and Other Voices
Continuing the Conversation

These are broad rubrics with diverse essays housed within. The conversation begins with writing process, which locates composition history in the mid-twentieth century instead of the 19th century or earlier. This locates the reader more in our current historical moment--modern comp studies.

The "given" in the conversation is the writing process. I don't know if it is still the given. Perhaps it functions as the "given" to react against now with the "post-process" movement? But here goes to try to give an overview of the Villanueva overview. In short, the writing process history is narrated briefly and succinctly:

1959: "the National Academy of Sciences sponsored the Woods Hole Conference" with Jerome Bruner at the helm. There was a shift "for all schooling to a process of cognitive development. 'Process' became the new catchword" (1).

1963: Braddock, Lloyd-Jones, and Schoer call for research on writing (not just product or pedagogy) itself in their book _Research in Written Composition_.

1966: The Dartmouth Conference where "fifty teachers of English from England and the United States met to discuss common problems" (1). The Yanks discovered that the Brits taught writing as "individual development, a matter of self-discovery" (1).

1971: Janet Emig answers the "call" issued by Braddock et al by studying the composing processes of eight twelfth graders.

We're reading Emig's call this week and blogging the chapters, but there were other calls as well: Perl, Murray, Sommers, Lunsford and Ede, Kaustman Breuch, even Ong (?). Where's Elbow?

But what is the backdrop for this interest in process?

Politics?
Social movements?
Art and literature?

Here is a quick speculation: The U.N. with a focus on negotiating and international responsibility for global affairs. The process of global diplomacy.
Civil rights, feminism, gay rights, human rights: all have highly process-oriented components
Art and literature, the avant garde, experimental film, stream of consciousness in fiction, etc
Progressive educational theory stemming from John Dewey's idea of "experience as education" and even earlier notions
Psychological theories that emphasize process-oriented therapies and theories

I think there is much more to say about why process is a "given."

Tom has just informed me is turning off the power to fix an outlet, so I must sign off now as I have no computer battery (it has been recalled).

Friday, September 22, 2006

Feminizing

The discussion thread on Laura's blog revolutionlullabye about women's status in academe is useful. Laurie posted a great comment about National Labor Bureau stats and about the AAUP Report on the Status of Women. Much of what is said in that report augments/affirms Sue Ellen Holbrook's insights about women's publication records in "Women's Work: The Feminizing of Composition." Holbrook offers this rather grim observation:

"Saturated by women practitioners, focused on pedagogy, allied with education departments and school teaching, conceived as having a 'service' and elementary place in the curriculum, and pervaded by paraprofessionalism, composition has become women's work. And so it will remain--disproportionately the work of women and work of lesser value--as long as these conditions remain" (Holbrook 211).

Holbrook is right that all of these factors have come into play to create a "feminized field," but there is the larger question of what this means. She goes on to remark:

"The transformation of composition from women's work to an esteemed profession can come only as part of the larger complex processes of raising the status of taching itself and the other service occupations in a capitalist society, breaking down the sexual division of labor, achieving social and economic equity between women and men, and revalorizing socially produced differences between the masculine and feminine genders" (211).

That statement gives us some hope, and she does point toward the presence of feminists in composition studies. Theresa Enos's book _Gender Roles in Faculty Lives in Rhetoric and Composition (SIUP, 1996) and my book _Gypsy Academics and Mother-teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction_ (Boynton/Cook-Heinemann, 1998) strive to shed light on the situation in the late 90s for women faculty in composition studies. I argued in my book that faculty unionism was a way to combat the poor pay and working conditions of part-time and non-tenure-line faculty, in particular. However, there is also the question of how women in senior ranks in composition--and there are a number of us now--are making a difference in how composition as work gets valued. I think that an updated survey article needs to be written about women's presence/status in composition. There is a book underway on the topic. Diane Davis, Michelle Ballif, and Roxanne Mountford have been working on a book about Women's Ways of Making it in composition and have conducted interviews with successful, tenured women scholars. I'm not sure of their argument, overall, but I think the question of how women have made a difference in addressing workplace inequities and feminization might be on the table. There is also a CCCC Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, which takes up these issues.

Yet we should overlay some globalized concepts onto this issue/ essay since we're reading Holbrook now in 2006.

"Service" occupations are often devalued MORE in a globalized society. When there are unionized populations of "care workers" or those in the "helping professions," wages and benefits will be better. Collective bargaining can improve working conditions in significant ways for some groups of caring workers: teachers, nurses, contingent faculty in higher ed. , clerical workers (accounting for differences between groups). Social movement unionism present in groups like Jobs for Justice and United Students Against Sweatshops are indications of the kind of melding that can happen between social justice movements and labor organizations. But this is in the West, often in highly developed, capitalist countries. There is now the globalization-feminization of labor.

Care work (nannies and elder care work) and pink collar clerical work are new frontiers in globalization. Nannies and elder care workers are brought in and clerical work and factory work is outsourced to other parts of the globe where workers (mainly women) are not organized into unions. This work has gendered and racialized dimensions as many of these workers are people of color, women of color. There is even more opportunity for exploitation when there is a highly exploitable class of workers (usually young women from developing countries). So we are in an uneven space with improvements of the status and working conditions of those who perform caring work. The book _The Globalized Woman_ deals with many of these issues.


Also to get back to our immediate disciplinary context, there is also the question of instituionalized racism that Royster and Williams mention. Our field has, for many years, ignored the histories and literacy practices of African Americans, equating African American students with the position of basic writing students. This is also the case with other people of color, Latinos/as and Native American students who also have been grouped in the basic writing rubric. Asian American students have been typed as ESL students or as model minorities. So clearly there is work to be done to re-direct the gaze of the field and redress the gender inequities and instituionalized racism, which are intertwined and intersected in ways we haven't yet begun to discuss in the field.

Monday, September 18, 2006

Scatterings on Comp Histories: Where are we going, Where have we been?

I have a lot going through my head tonight, and I know I won't get this into one single blog post. First off, the whole weekend was interrupted wireless service. Our router went out, so I haven't had a chance to blog since Friday. I must admit, that I've missed it! So I'm catching up now!

Tonight I've been reading blog posts from the 601 class, and I'll try to work on some gleanings plus some thoughts I've had as I've worked on this week's readings.

First, I've been thinking about the question I posted last week: "Why Harvard?" That question has been turned around in my mind to "Why not Howard University? Why not Oberlin? Why not the female academies that Holbrook might call our attention to" Well, the answer might be that Harvard is the "oldest" and most "prestigious" institution, they had the Boylston Chair of Rhetoric, and they had the long and illustrious history of testing/placing people into freshman English. Harvard is the "trendsetter," and other institutons follow suit. But Royster and Williams raise doubts about that. Were HBCUs imitating Harvard? Were co-educational institutions like Oberlin imitating Harvard? Maybe in some ways, but probably not as much as one might think, given the "Harvard-centric" model of our composition histories These instituions had specific missions tied to their student populations, to their pursuit of certain models of education, and to their affiliations with particular kinds of civic literacies. So we have a serious "primacy" flaw (to paraphrase Royster and Williams) in many of our composition and rhetoric histories.


Trish asked about Berlin's characterization of University of Denver, and I'd like to talk more about that. How to account for the history of a program in a few pages in a larger history without resorting to a quick sketch model that will simplify the complexity of a program? Trish's questions also made me think about the role of extra-institutional history in relation to institutional histories? How have our histories of the field portrayed a deep understanding (or not) of outside forces impinging upon the academy?

Also, what about Tanya' s question, paraphrased: "What has really changed?" Are we stuck in the overwork, underpay, lack of respect version of the field? What about the double-meaning of feminization? How far have we really come? I think that's an important question because in some ways, we've come really far--this Ph.D. program and your/our presence in it is proof of that. But then there are the teaching conditions of the majority of many writing faculty who work off the tenure-track. We need to account for that in relation to any sort of progress narrative of the field.

Immy asked an interesting question in her blog about the end of Royster and Williams, essay, and I'd like us to pursue that further in class.

I liked Laurie's question about Berlin writing 1985-2006.? What would he say about that period? How would he build on his categories at the end of the book or would he have exploded them? Stewart faintly criticized Berlin in the preface to _Rhetoric and Reality_ for putting things in boxes. What "boxes" would we create to characterize 1985-2006? Would we resist the primacy that Williams and Royster decry?

I've got more to say, but I have to put a four year old to bed. I'll log on again because I'd like to say more about the blog posts and about our readings. See ya!

Friday, September 15, 2006

Conferencing, and why do you teach writing?

I had conferences with my 105 students this week on Thursday and Friday. We discussed their drafts-in-progress about the novel _The Kite Runner_. Inevitably, though, we talked about other topics even though the bulk of the discussion focused on their drafts: developing their claims, evidence paragraphs, sentences, etc. Here are the top "around the edges of the writing conference" topics that came up this week:.

--about the fact one student had not done laundry in three weeks. I admitted that I hadn't done laundry in about 10 days--so watch out for some weird outfits.
--about eating habits: One of my students brought his breakfast to our conference: Gatorade and chips. I must admit, I was envious. It looked pretty good to me, and I had just come from the gym!
--about the fact my grandmother went to Occidental College--don't ask me how it came up. I'm sure the student who heard that factoid was not even faintly impressed. I forgot to mention that my grandmother dropped out her sophomore year to get married. Maybe I can bring that up at the next conference.
--about a student going home to visit family (this student was radiant)! I want to go home, too!
--about another student's athletic travel schedule and what it was like to juggle being a student-athlete these first few weeks.
--about my 105 class last fall. Two of my former 105 students rushed into my office while I was talking to a current 105 student and introduced themselves to the current student and shook his hand. They proceeded to take over the conference I was having with my current student, and we began reminiscing about last fall's class and the lives of the past 105 students. The current student looked on with amusement, or at least I hope it was amusement. Interesting situation....the past meets the present.

There are more stories, but I'm running out of energy here...here's the finale.

A student was talking with me about a teacher in high school who didn't like to teach writing. I remarked that it's hard to teach writing and that many people don't like to do it because they find it time-consuming and difficult (the "Overwork" theme from all the 601 readings). "Why do you do it?" the student shot back. It was one of the those questions that I think I always have an answer to, but it got me for a few seconds. I said something lame about how much I love language (true), reading, and writing (all true), but I also said that I thought I was good at it. The student nodded. At least I wasn't contradicted about that last statement --yet......

Anyway....

Saturday, September 09, 2006

Rhetoric and Reality: questions and stories

This week’s readings in 601 include the first half of Berlin’s book and also essays/chapters by Sharon Crowley, Bob Connors, and John Brereton. All three fit in nicely with Berlin’s book, but they provide different perspectives, remixes, or departures from Berlin’s overview. A thread I’m trying to pull through is about the histories, theories and practices behind modern composition, but also questions about how history gets written (historiography). Why have we told these stories they way we’ve told them? What are our historical narratives and their major plots (what Hayden White would call modes of emplotment)?

Why do we locate Harvard as the originary narrative? Harvard is all over the place. What are the costs and benefits of telling the Harvard story as one of our main stories?

What is the difference between writing a history of the discipline that is based on the rise of the freshman English course vs. a history that accounts for changing literacy practices and the changing demands of literacy (whether academic literacy or other types of literacies)?

Labor is a central theme in the readings. How is the status of the field related to the status of those who labor in the fields of “freshman English”? What are the major narratives about labor and composition and rhetoric’s status? How do those narratives create a particular psychology and set of moral and ethical claims for the field? What might be the other narratives about labor and status that are currently missing? Where might we look to find those narratives?

Which brings me to another question: What counts as evidence in these histories? What are the major sources drawn upon?

It's hard to not see the "great man" theory operating in these histories, a veritable who's who of white male faculty figures. While there is no refuting that the university was a male dominated place until of late, how can one rethink the locations and spaces of the history of the field to better account for gender and race? (next week's readings will help us do that, too).

Since we are reading _Rhetoric and Reality_, I will share a story.

Rhetoric and Reality: Meeting Jim

James Berlin came on the greyhound bus from West Lafayette to visit the graduate program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in February of 1993. It was six years after he published Rhetoric and Reality, and he came to give a talk about a new book he was writing on cultural studies and composition. We were happy to hear about Jim’s newer work, but what we all wanted to talk about was Rhetoric and Reality. My fellow graduate students and I had read Rhetoric and Reality many times over. It was and still is a sheer rock cliff of a history that we scaled in our seminars, feeling a sense of triumph after we’d mastered (or tried to master) the parade of dates, names, institutions, and categories. We simply referred to the book by the author: “Berlin.” I’ve been rereading “Berlin,” someone would intone, and he… “ Or in a seminar someone would say, “Berlin argues that….” Everyone would pause. Rhetoric and Reality carried weight with us. It was on everyone’s exam list and dissertation bibliography.

As is the case when any personage visits a graduate program, we steeled ourselves for what we might expect. Would Jim be stuffy? Tweedy? Pompous? Angry? Polemical? Condescending? Touchy-feely (nah, we knew he wouldn’t be that). Would he diss us? I was excited because Jim and I shared a passion for Marxist theories. Granted, I was more interested in socialist feminisms and materialist feminisms, but I felt a kindredship with his orientation toward historical materialism.

We quickly saw that Jim was disciplined and passionate about ideas, but easy going. A real person. His visit to Milwaukee included a lot of visits to restaurants and smoky bars with graduate students and assorted faculty. He was fun to be around. He wasn’t serious or stuffy; he joked a lot, and I gave him a hard time for telling a sexist joke one night. He was gracious about getting a feminist upbraiding. I liked him even more. We talked about Maxine Hairston’s critique of his work in her infamous essay “Diversity and Ideology.” He seemed truly hurt by Maxine’s characterization of his work.

Jim ran while visiting us in Milwaukee, making his way through the icy streets near Lake Michigan. I was impressed that he ran 5 miles almost everyday, especially in the midst of a Midwest winter.

Running, taking the Greyhound, hanging out in smoky bars. We could relate to him. We were sorry when he got back on the Greyhound and went back to Purdue.

Jim collapsed and had a heart attack about a year after he visited us in Milwaukee. He had just come home after one of his daily runs. At Virginia Tech where I was a new assistant professor, my colleague Mike Fainter came into my office that day and casually mentioned that someone named Jim Berlin had passed away. I was sitting there with a graduate student. I asked Mike if it was true. He said it was and that the news of Jim’s death was on a national listserv.

“Did you know him?” Mike asked.

I couldn’t speak, couldn’t move for a while, but eventually I nodded. The graduate student I was meeting with excused herself, Mike went down the hall to tell other faculty, and my office mate shut the door so I could be alone. I couldn’t believe it. I don’t think any of us who met Jim or were fortunate enough to work with him could believe it. It just didn’t seem possible. Jim had a book to finish, dissertations to direct, conference papers to write and read, graduate students to meet and influence, and many miles to run.

There’s a fun run and pub crawl at CCCC every year in honor of Jim. It’s a good event, a good chance to stretch the legs after being shut away in the carpeted rooms of the Hilton or the Hyatt. After the run, participants gather at a local pub to enjoy a beer and conversation. People often tell Jim stories, and there is a lot of laughter. One of my favorite stories is about Jim writing his conference papers on airplanes. He would emerge from a flight with a yellow legal pad, his paper scrawled in longhand. The paper would always make sense, and he’d be ready to have a good time at the conference, attending sessions and staying up late while others sweated over their papers in their hotel rooms.

For a long time (and arguably still to this day), Jim’s book Rhetoric and Reality defined the conversation about rhetorical history for many of us in the field. After reading Berlin, most of us eventually read Kitzhaber’s dissertation If you read Kitzhaber, you see how indebted Jim is to that initial dissertation project. There have been critiques and revisions of Jim’s thesis in Rhetoric and Reality and different histories produced, but the book is still a standard must read—a good place to start to make sense of how the first-year course developed and how the field developed alongside the course.

Thursday, September 07, 2006

Plan 9 from Syracuse, Chasing a Dream

I've got to give a shout to Ryan Dacko, our very own local Syracuse documentary filmmaker/hometown boy, who is running (yes, running) from Syracuse to Hollywood in the hopes of securing a meeting with an unmentioned Hollywood producer. He is also making a documentary about his run across the country. He calls it "Plan 9." Any Ed Wood fan will recognize the reference.

Ryan is chasing his dream, but I think the chase is just as interesting as the dream he has of making it big and getting a movie deal. I'm hooked on reading about his daily mileage (a marathon plus), aches and pains, and passage through small towns and weather systems. Ryan, keep running!

You can read his blog.

http://www.plan9fromsyracuse.com/

Tuesday, September 05, 2006

Location, Location, Location

A bit of a preface is needed for this entry. I'm starting to blog with my CCR 601 course this semester. We're all establishing individual blogs, and we'll blog our responses to readings, notes, ideas about class projects, etc.

This week we focused on the idea of situating/locating ourselves in relation to composition and rhetoric as a field. We read Part I of Lisa Ede's book _Situating Composition_ , Louise Phelp's encyclopedia entry on "Composition Studies," and the proposal for the start-up of the CCR doctoral program. Location was the main focus of all the readings; how do we locate the field? What are its parameters and spaces and concerns? How do we locate ourselves in those spaces?

Ede’s discussion of location is drawn from feminist theory, namely Adrienne Rich’s important essay (1984) “Notes Toward a Politics of Location,” reprinted in Rich’s Blood, Bread, and Poetry collection. Understanding where the subject is located socially and materially in a body, in place, and time is a hallmark feature of feminist thought. Indeed, Ede discusses transnational feminist theorist Caren Kaplan’s work on location, quoting her as saying on p. 28 that location is “discontinuous, multiply constituted, and traversed by diverse social formations” (Questions 182). Ede goes on to say in her own words that location is “multiply constituted and cannot helpfully be characterized as a single place or identity” (28). Her point is not to say that location is a matter of discussing the local, but it is an inquiry, a “rhetorically and materially grounded effort to think through some issues of scholarly practice in composition” (28).

Ede attempts to “locate” herself and her scholarly practices and institutional life in her opening scenarios and in her careful attention to the ways that specific narratives of composition have “located” the field and us in particular ways. She is interested in questioning and interrogating those “locations.” She cites landmark studies such as Crowley’s Composition in the University and Miller’s Textual Carnivals as those that name where we are and why, but she resists pointing toward those studies as the definitive answer.

What I like here is her careful, painstaking work to try to question what our field is and where we might locate it. In many ways, her point is that we can’t fix the field because where we locate it depends on our own situated discourses, vantage points, interests, institutional histories.


The same kind of fluidity and flux in naming and accounting for composition studies can be found in Phelps’ s encyclopedia entry. I always marvel at the multi-layered accounting for composition studies that happens in this entry. I sense in Phelps’s entry a similar commitment to the idea of location—locating ideas in traditions, in contexts, in competing discourses and tensions across those discourses: “No brief definition can capture the complexity and indeterminacy of composition studies in its current stage of development” (123). Expansion and differentiation.
Phelps notes that we seek to explain and impose order on composition studies by deploying the strategies of dominance, inclusion or pluralism, and dialogue. We try to impose order by mapping, creating dichotomies, defining key concepts, and creating schematic histories (128-29). Much of this course (601) tries to do this work, but, as Phelps points out, privileging multimodality and diversity in approaches—a “radical pluralism_-- is valuable and so is the impulse toward dialogue—keeping open a play of understandings about what composition studies is and where it is going (129).
“There is a growing sense that, in a disciplinarity so unstable, scholars must construct the field anew and must negotiate their constructions continually with those of others to achieve some common (but always evolving) understanding of composition studies” (130). I think this is an apt way of describing what goes on in our graduate program and at professional conferences; the stable ground is the constant inquiry and negotiation. This constant inquiry, though, can make people feel as if the ground is fault-ridden, a virtual peace of Southern California, constantly shifting on its plates.

Phelps works us out of this sense of “cacophony” into a metaphor we can follow: a river with branching streams and tributaries feeding it and a sense of common tensions and distinctive features of composition. Thus we move out of a sense of expanding possibilities and openness to a sense of common features and problems. Phelps is careful to avoid mapping and hierarchizing these tensions and features, though. I’m interested in Phelps’s idea that the American origins of composition studies give it a distinctive character and flavor: the constant reinvention, borrowing, sense of individual choice. I wonder, though, if nationality is as key as it might seem to be. Perhaps a great factor is capitalism, which encourages the social relations of the field as much as nationalism might.

Like Ede, Phelps is interested in interrogating practice. “Like concepts of writing, practice. . . has expanded its reference, becoming a generic term for symbolic activities and for professional and everyday activities that share with rhetoric such features as uncertainty…..”(133). She raises the idea of praxis (133).


The CCR proposal enacts an understanding of the field that is based, in large part, on the idea of situated practices.” There are a lot of echoes in the proposal to Phelps and Ede’s notions of situating and locating oneself in relation to the field. I quote from the proposal at length:

• Characterizing activities, functions, conceptualizations, and modes of teaching and learning written language as culturally and historically specific

The discussion of “cultural rhetoric” together with the concept of “situated practices” indicate a focus in the program on investigating the dynamic, dialectic relations among socially organized language activities, individual language users and events, and their cultural contexts. This theme directs attention to questions like these: how practices interact with (not simply respond to) theory; how local phenomena of discourse (practical instances and accomplishments of writing or talk) connect to global “contexts” (settings, group identities, ideologies, institutions); how writers and texts act upon and constitute contexts as well as being embedded in and shaped by them; and how participants of different cultures perform and understand communication behavior differently, or transport such culture-specific knowledge into intra- or intercultural situations. [25] The curriculum poses such questions pervasively, not only about writing activities but about rhetorical teaching, learning, criticism, and theory itself. This theme is reinforced in part by the requirement for historical perspective, discussed below (section I.C.3.d).

CCR, then, as it was designed was to encourage a situated, contextual, culturally aware understanding of writing, rhetoric, literacy, and communication. I don’t think we always get there, but the program itself pulls through the thread of location. I worry that situated practices often get read as “situating theories,” though. Another issue to discuss!

Friday, September 01, 2006

trouble posting

I'm having trouble posting. Is this showing up?

This has to be a record, sadly

Hey, this has to be an almost record of blog continuity. I have posted twice in the same week! Planning to blog with my 601 class is a big motivator to keep this account going. I may move the blog to another site--we shall see. I'm going to talk to Collin about it because it's clear this is a pretty rudimentary space (at least the way I'm working with in it).

Well, I made it through the first week of classes. I'm looking forward to the semester, but I must admit I was absolutely sick by Thursday night with a headache. My theory is that three days of not getting in a run didn't help matters. I plan on a long run today to remedy that situation--maybe 6 miles at Beaver Lake Nature Center today. Or maybe I'll run three and crawl the rest.

I'll be blogging later this weekend about the readings for 601, and today is a "research day" so my focus is on my book _New Agrarian Rhetorics_. I was pleased to see that the _Nation_ focused its recent issue on Food Politics. There are a series of mini-essays by leading lights like Alice Waters, Eric Schlosser, Michael Pollan, Vandana Shiva, and others on what is going on with the Food and Farming system with recommendations about how to change the food system. This issue is a great example of the new agrarian literacy that public interesting journalists, scientists, and farmers are trying to foster among the general public. I'm sure the issue will make it into the new agrarian literacy chapter of the book.

Here's a brief description of the book I'm working on from the prospectus:

New Agrarian Rhetorics will analyze, from a rhetorical perspective, the public debates, surrounding the ongoing loss of small family farms in the U.S, the rise of the food industrial complex, and the constellation of local food movements currently underway. The book will analyze media treatments of the contemporary farm crisis, public policy documents (including farm bills), nonfiction books and essays on the food industrial complex, alternative agrifood advocacy movements (local food, slow food, organic farming, community-supported agriculture, local farmers’ markets, farm to cafeteria programs), and efforts to sponsor alternative agrarian literacies through critical literacy education. The book argues for an alternative agrarian literacy as a significant component of the public rhetoric on agriculture; it also offers one of the first book-length rhetorical analyses of the public discourses surrounding the transformation and debate over the food and farming system in the U.S.

Anyway, on to reworking chapters 1 & 2 of the book and to that run, which I consider to be a form of prewriting and invention.