My reading list for my dream faculty writing class

It has to begin with Gee, "Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics: Introduction." This has to be the first reading...all else can grow from there...

Multimodal Reading List

Assessment:

The New Work of Assessment: Evaluating Multimodal Compositions. Computers and Composition, Spring 2010 Elizabeth A. Murray & Hailey A. Sheets (Ball State University)
Nicole A. Williams (Virginia Tech)

The Multiple Media of Texts: How Onscreen and Paper Texts Incorporate Words, Images, and Other Media" By Anne Francis Wysocki in What Writing Does and How It Does It (Bazerman/Prior)

Borton, Sonya, and Brian Huot. "Responding and Assessing." Multimodal Composition: Resources for Teachers. Ed. Cynthia L. Selfe. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2007. 99-111.

Great Quotes for Syllabi

My preferences, my desires, my subjective states must again and again be modified and repudiated as I am dragged, kicking and screaming, out of infantile solipsism and into adult membership in an inquiring community. (Wayne Booth, Modern Dogma and the Rhetoric of Assent, p. 13)

Laurent Daloz expands on Knowles' definition: "In the end, good teaching rests neither in accumulating a shelf-full of knowledge nor in developing a repertoire of skills. In the end, good teaching lies in a willingness to attend and care for what happens in our students, ourselves, and the space between us. Good teaching is a certain kind of stance...It is a stance of receptivity, of attunement, of listening" (Daloz qtd. in Kiskis, "Reflections on Pedagogy, Andragogy, and Power" In Pedagogy in the Age of Politics, p. 60)

Before there was WAW, there was...

What can be transferred from general composition to other domains, I believe, is the idea that writing in all fields is shaped by an interactive relationship between the way an intellectual community constructs knowledge in writing and the genres it uses to configure that knowledge. In brief, here is how this dynamic works: Writers create texts to "do business" in certain communities of readers and writers. Within those communities, there are specific ideas, often tacit, about what constitutes acceptable subject matters to write about. About each of these acceptable subject matters, there are, within communities of readers and writers, certain status quo ideas, attitudes, and propositions, discursive entitlements Chaim Perelman calls the "starting points for argumentation." Within these communities there are, in addition, specific kinds of rhetorical "moves" or "transactions" that a writer is expected to make in order to lead readers to perceive a central idea or adhere to a thesis. Aristotle, for example, in teaching the art of rhetoric for fourth century Athenian orators, calls these "moves" enthymemes. Within these communities there are also definite ideas, again often tacit, about what functions written texts should serve--that is, the degree to which they should "shift the scene" from the written text at hand to some other arena of action.

All these aspects of "knowledge work"--acceptable subjects, starting points, transactions, and functions of texts--are constrained by the kinds of genres within which the community has chosen to conduct its business. Indeed, as I argue, the genres of different communities actually emerge from the knowledge-work its members must perform. In other words, whether a person writes about a specific subject matter, chooses to detail specifically what she believes her readers presently know and think about the subject, engages in certain kinds of rhetorical moves (for example, definition or comparison and causal reasoning), and urges some specific action depends on the genre she is expected to produce. The choice of genre also dictates, to a finer degree than other prescriptive rules, how the writer must construct paragraphs, sentences, and words.

This knowledge work-genre dynamic is what students can learn in general composition that can be transferred to the writing they must do in other courses. It is this dynamic that I believe ought to constitute the "content" of college writing instruction. (188-189)

Joliffe, David. "The Myth of Transcendence." Pedagogy in the Age of Politics: Writing and Reading (in) the Academy. Eds. Patricia A. Sullivan, Donna J. Qualley. Urbana, IL: NCTE, 1994. 183-194.

Quan's presentation

ReThinking WAW (order)

It seems to me that a more useful place to start a WAW course might focus on discourse community, move to academic writing to study a bit about how writing functions in academic discourse communities, and then move to individual writers, and spend a bit of time on composing processes of individual writers. I feel like the way I have been doing it has spent too much time on the individual and not enough time on the social. So, a re-organized course might look like:

• Discourse Community/Community of Practice/Activity System (including genre knowledge)
• Academic Discourse Communities
• Composing Process of Individuals

I am also thinking about how a literature review is a nice culminating assignment for this course because it is a great test of academic writing in the sense that students must organize and present a conversation on a particular topic. I'm struck by the distinction between reporting on a conversation and contributing to a conversation and not at all sure that contributing to a conversation need be a part of this course (I do believe it is possible, but I think it is a tall order for a college freshmen). So, a culminating series of assignments:

• Annotated Bibliography
• Literature Review
• Conference Presentation

To resolve the issue of conducting primary or original research, I might ask the student to write a short follow-up paper in which he suggests potential research questions, based on what he has seen in the review of literature. The idea being--now you know what we know, tell us what we should know or have missed or need to know more about, and why. This might be an interesting way to take the project one step forward without committing to an "experiment" or whatever.

My WAW Bibliography

Academic Writing

Bernhardt, Stephen. "Seeing the Text." CCC 37.1 (Feb. 1986): 66-78.

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

MacDonald, Susan Peck. "Problem Definition in Academic Writing." College English 49.3 (March 1987): 315-331.

Penrose, Ann and Cheryl Geisler. "Reading and Writing Without Authority." College Composition and Communication 45.4 (Dec. 1994): 505-520.

Haas, Christina. "Learning to Read Biology: One Student's Rhetorical Development in College." Written Communication 11 (1994): 43-84.

Haas, Christina. "Beyond 'Just the Facts': Reading as Rhetorical Action." In Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom (Eds. Ann M. Penrose and Barbara M. Sitko). New York: Oxford UP, 19-32.

Higgins, Lorraine. "Reading to Argue: Helping Students Transform Source Texts." In Hearing Ourselves Think: Cognitive Research in the College Writing Classroom (Eds. Ann M. Penrose and Barbara M. Sitko). New York: Oxford UP, 70-101.

Rhetoric of 9/11

I've long thought about a course on the rhetoric of 9/11. Plugging 9/11 into comppile reveals some interesting suggested readings...

Thinking through my own ENGL 230 course

I found this quote helpful:

Teachers can also invent projects where writing becomes more clearly a means to an end, to “constitute the class as a working group with some degree of complexity, continuity, and interdependency of joint activity” in order to mirror the rich “communicative relations that contextualize writing in the workplace” as Dias et al. (1999, p. 235) advocate. (326)

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

I think the key phrase is "where writing becomes more clearly a means to an end"--that's what I'm currently doing in my Business Writing course and, to a lesser extent, in my WAW writing 100 course.

Ketter/Hunter

I just finished reading:

Ketter, Jean & Judy Hunter. "Creating a writer's identity on the boundaries of two communities of practice." Writing Selves/Writing Societies: Research from Activity Perspectives. Eds. Charles Bazerman & David R. Russell. Fort Collins, CO: WAC Clearinghouse, 2003. 307-329.

A terrific article which nicely makes the case for the value of an internship for students. Here are the passages which spoke to me, in particular:

"Erin’s story of negotiating the transition between writing for academia and writing for work is unique. But her experience suggests one way in which students might learn about writing in different communities. Erin’s consciousness of her identity as a writer is heightened by her work on the boundaries of two contrasting communities of practice as she thinks about and comes to understand the constraints and freedoms afforded by each community. Her participation in the two communities of practice enhances her understanding of writing as a complex interaction between the writer’s identity and social cultural practices of the community. As do Dias et. al (1999), we see that the ways of learning about writing and the purposes of writing activity in academic and workplace communities of practice can differ, but we learn through this study that Erin benefits more from her participation in each because of her participation in both." (326)

"...our study shows the benefit of providing opportunities for teachers and students to explore how contrasting communities of practice define successful writing activity and how writing activity operates in the cultural and political sphere of each community. Thus, we believe, academic communities of practice should provide students with opportunities to write in non-academic contexts and should encourage students to reflect about and discuss how these non-academic contexts frame writing activity. At the same time, students may benefit from discussing how the academic contexts in which college writing often occurs also affect writing activity. Such discussions should include how writing activity, both in academia and in other contexts, is a means of operating purposively in the world." (327)

Resources about Online Teaching

Hewett, Beth L., & Crista Ehmann Powers (Eds.). (2007). Special issue: Online teaching and learning: Preparation, development, and online communication. Technical Communication Quarterly, 16, 1.

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