Logan, Shirley Wilson. “Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking Silences

Logan, Shirley Wilson. “Changing Missions, Shifting Positions, and Breaking
Silences.” College Composition and Communication 55 (2003): 330-342.

Summary: “An earlier version of this article was delivered as the Chair’s Address at the Opening General Session of the CCCC Convention in New York, March 2003. I review the current mission and position statements of the organization by calling attention to the ways in which our current social and political climate challenges our ability to meet our goals and support our positions. I weave into my text the “voices” of historical black women who called for response in their own time and even in ours” (330).

Methodology: Discourse Analysis
Citation: Executive Committee CCCC, CCCC, hooks, Hurston
Provocative Quotes:
“Our revised mission statement, as approved by the EC, reads as follows:
CCCC, as a conference of NCTE, supports and promotes the teaching and study of college composition and communication by (1) sponsoring meetings and publishing scholarly materials for the exchange of knowledge about composition, composition pedagogy, and rhetoric; (2) supporting a wide range of research on composition, communication, and rhetoric; (3) working to enhance conditions for learning and teaching college composition and to promote professional development; and (4) acting as an advocate for language and literacy education nationally and internationally.

We are living up to some aspects of this mission better than others. We do sponsor meetings, and we support and publish the results of a wide range of research in rhetoric and composition. The last two goals, however, are much more difficult to accomplish and sustain” (332).

“What we are doing is substituting some version of “diversity” for the hard work of acting affirmatively to correct the consequences of past discrimination and denial of rights, particularly of African Americans” (334).

“CCCC needs to play an active role in overturning such legislation as that passed by the ESEA, requiring English language learners to take standardized tests in English within three years of entering the school system” (334).

“At my own University of Maryland, all preservice English teachers are required to take a course designed to help them understand the challenge of teaching diverse learners in the English classroom, mainly ESL learners but, in fact, all students, since, as I was recently reminded, “Everyone learns a new dialect when learning to write.” (336).

“What are we doing with our rhetorical skills that makes a difference? Does anybody know we’re here?” (337).

“I strongly believe that we can respect linguistic differences and teach our students various dialect options, particularly the option of edited American English (EAE)-the dialect power and privilege-at the same time” (339).

Himley, Margaret. “Writing Programs and Pedagogies in a Globalized Landscape.”

Himley, Margaret. “Writing Programs and Pedagogies in a Globalized Landscape.”
WPA: Writing Program Administration 26 (2003): 49-66.

Summary: “As educators, we are forced to address this globalized landscape in which we and the students we teach are becoming global actors—as con¬sumers, as workers, as producers. In this essay I want to provide my account of the changes going on in the required lower-division writing sequence in the writing program at Syracuse University (SU), and then to speculate about how we might better analyze these changes by embedding them more explicitly in the processes and effects of globalization. The site for this very initial exploration is authorship, starting from this fundamental claim: as writing teachers and as a discipline, we have shifted our thinking and our tropes—from a domestic classroom, focused on the creative moment of the student composing process, to a globalized classroom, engaged in multime¬dia and multimodal textual production, distribution, and consumption” (49).

Methodology: Analysis, bibliographic

Citation: Trimbur, Howard, Ahmed, Horner, Hesford, Gunner, Schell

Provocative Quotes:

“Rebecca Howard’s charge to review the introductory writing sequence was a response to the shifts in disciplinary knowledge produced by the social turn in composition, by post-process theorizing, by the new technol¬ogies, and by the demands to address multiple literacies in the curriculum” (50).

“the writing classroom is figured as a bounded and priva¬tized space, even a domestic space, enacting a micro-version of the schol¬arly, knowledge-making practices of the university in a kinder, gentler way” (55).

“our new cur¬riculum plops students immediately into the broader complexities of the production, distribution, and circulation of texts to a greater degree than before, as a result of theory and technology—and, I will now suggest, glo¬balization” (57).

“At an expensive private school like Syracuse, more centered on profes¬sional colleges than the liberal arts, are we producing what feminist theorist Sara Ahmed cites as the new “global nomads”?…If indeed we produce mobile writers, adept at crossing disciplinary and professional and national boundaries, what might be the many results? Do students have to become comparative linguists as they make sense of the “plethora of dialects, accents, discourses and registers” they will inevitably encounter as English becomes lingua mundi (Kalantzis and Cope 140)?” (60).

Globalization depends too on the circulation of texts, technology and e-space. Students need to acquire an understanding of “rhetorical economy” (Sidler 3), or the ways texts move through production, distribution, and cir¬culation (McComiskey, Trimbur)” (60).

“As we would no longer plan a course without considering questions of gender and race, we need to consider questions of globalization” (61).

“writing that is complex, that is more about networks than grids (Taylor), that recognizes how con¬nected everything has become and how profoundly underlying tropes and paradigms have changed. It is a way of thinking and writing that recognizes what Eileen Schell calls “transnational linkages.” It is a way of thinking and writing that locates us within emerging, dynamic and global economic, cul¬tural, political, and social systems of meaning. It is a way of thinking that values the dynamic nexus of the “personal” and the “global” as intercon¬nected and complex networks of discursive and material meaning-making and that locates us all as global citizens” (64).

“I would like to see the writing program join with other departments and disciplines in rethinking the first-year courses, in moving away from the fragmented set of distribution requirements and into an integrated and challenging course of study that makes visible the linkages among fields of knowledge” (65).

Schau, Mark. “Beyond These Shores: An Argument for Internationalizing Composition

Schau, Mark. “Beyond These Shores: An Argument for Internationalizing
Composition.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature,
Language, Composition, and Culture 3 ( 2003): 85-98.

Summary: “We must maintain the prominence of international themes in our courses and continue to rethink the status of composition globally, precisely because we are in danger of returning to isolationist thinking in our classrooms. In this essay I argue that as professionals we should investigate ways to internationalize the discipline of composition by expanding our conception of the field, by making efforts to internationalize our academic conferences, and by developing opportunities for writing-related faculty and student programs or exchanges overseas. As writing instructors, moreover, we should investigate ways to internationalize our composition courses and programs, such as expanding writing assignments to encompass international interests and themes and revising syllabi to reflect a more global perspective” (86).

Methodology: Advocacy, defining, explaining, classifying, comparing
Citation: Connor, Ula, Mastuda, Muchiri, Zamel, Silva

Provocative Quotes:
“I believe that Muchiri et al. are correct in their judgment that compositionists
on the university level are overly focused on the American context. I
also agree with their charge that those in the U.S. composition community
remain largely ignorant of college writing overseas.We compositionists, both
in the United States and overseas, are in a position to change the perception
of composition as something by and for Americans; however, we must become
cognizant not only of developments abroad but of the brevity of our own
history” (86).

“The CCCC continues to be largely unknown outside North America” (87).

“My point is that our own professional networks, organizations, and supporting businesses (like textbook publishing) do not seem to concern themselves with overseas contexts” (87).

“There is a disconnect between composition in the United States and the rest
of the world.We Americans continue to behave as if composition were truly
universal.We do have a lot of knowledge about writing instruction that could
benefit the rest of the world. However, we may have even more to learn about
it from those outside this country” (91).

“those who teach writing in Malaysia or Finland or central Cairo have something to offer
writing specialists and administrators in America” (91).

“To summarize how the field of composition can expand its horizons beyond North America, I suggest the following:

1. Acknowledge the hegemony of English.

“But native-language illiteracy relative to English-language literacy is dismaying, to
say the least. Thus we should attempt to be sensitive to the linguistic background of
those of our students whose native languages are not English. In addition, we could do
a better job of putting certain issues and texts into appropriate contexts in the
classroom. When discussing a translation from a language other than English, for
example, we could engage the issue of language competition” (92).
2. Become better acquainted with overseas research and perspectives.
“In the melting pot of America, we ought to know a lot about diversity: its benefits and also its challenges. Yet we have much to learn about it from our colleagues overseas, where diversity means different things and has different effects in writing classrooms” (93).
3. Make conferences in the United States more inviting to overseas participants.

“One way to make U.S. composition conferences more international in scope is to
provide financial assistance to participants from developing countries or from
institutions less well-off than the AUC” (94).

Internationalizing the classroom:

“Indeed, internationalization allows one to teach concepts like audience and purpose
more extensively, by leading discussions on what it means to write to audiences outside the United States” (95).

Here are several ways to make our writing classrooms more global:

1. Widen the scope of our textbooks and assignments.
2. Investigate contrastive rhetoric.
3. Develop an exchange with an overseas class.

“We in the United States teach in one of the most multicultural nations in history, but it remains isolated and self-centered in a global sense.
We can change this, slowly, and we can begin now” (97).

Flower, Linda. “Talking across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for Situated Knowledge

Flower, Linda. “Talking across Difference: Intercultural Rhetoric and the Search for
Situated Knowledge.” College Composition and Communication 55(2003): 38-68.

Summary: Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community-based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an effort to build a collaboratively transformed understanding.

Methodology: Defining, theorizing

Citation: Pough, Anzaldua, Cushman, Royster

Provocative Quotes:

“As an approach to talking across difference, intercultural inquiry is both an attitude and a scaffold created by literate practices…An intercultural rhetoric based on inquiry is, then, a deliberate meaning-making activity in which difference is not read as a problem but sought out as a resource for constructing more grounded and actionable understandings” (40).

“Given the secretive habits of situated knowledge, the working hypothesis of intercultural rhetoric is that this silent knowledge could be transformed into a generous interpretative resource if people could reveal more of the richly contextualized stories behind the story at work in their own meaning making” (42).

“intercultural rhetoric operates, by definition and by choice, in a space where discourse practices and complex networks of situated knowledge are known to differ” (43).

“Intercultural rhetoric welcomes differences …in order to empower underrepresented, less authoritative, and traditionally marginalized ways of speaking” (44).

“The problem is not that this situated knowledge (rooted in each person’s cultural, social, and material history) guides interpretation of a topic such as curfew but that both this mode of knowing and the interpretation it constructs remain tacit, uncommunicated” (55).

“In a community conversation, cross talk among individuals is not about resolving their personal differences, much less winning a debate on positions. It is about the opportunity for each of the participants in the room (speaking or silent) to transform their own understanding in response to compelling and diversely situated rivals–giving what they can and taking what they need from this cross talk to build a more reflectively negotiated meaning for themselves, for their situation” (58).

“The melded genres, the shifting linguistic registers, the play with and against multiple conventions bring the expertise of youth and the situated knowledge of urban residents into intimate and authoritative contact with adult and mainstream structures of power.” (62).

“Intercultural rhetoric operates in a force field of contradictory agendas and conflicting voices… literate practice that tries to elicit real differences without polarizing people and to negotiate conflict without silencing it…talking across difference depends on an ability to listen, to question, and to stand “ready to pursue” the complexities of other people’s reading of the world” (63).