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.

Potential Apps for Teaching

Poll Everywhere

Prezi

Ooovo

Chatzy

Profile of a RIC student's mother

I would say that my participant had an interesting and long workplace journey to get to where they are now. It started when Marie came to the United States in 1988 from Haiti with her first daughter and she had to learn English right away in order to get a job. Her mother was a seamstress so she learned those skills and worked at a factory. Then, she had her second daughter and attained a GED at a Community college in Massachusetts so she could learn something new and get a better job. Marie attended Mass Bay community college and had a job as an assistant teacher at a Boston Public School working with the Bi-lingual Haitian students and special needs students.

Marie entered the nursing program and while Marie was in school, she was laid off from her job, once again. Marie then went to work at the Fernald State School, which was a school for mentally challenged individuals. One day, Marie had an accident while trying to move and carry one of her patients to another bed, where she fell and injured her back. From there, she could not continue nursing school or work on her feet.

Later, Marie recovered and got a job as a telephone support specialist for Nynex, a telephone company which today is Verizon. From there she was laid off once again and decided to go back to school. She attended Clark University to study novel network. Marie graduated and got her first support job was at Stream International in 1997. From there, her career started fishing to its stability. She worked there for three years then moved from her old job to a higher paying job called Hale and Dorr for two years. Marie left Hale and Dorr in 2002 work at a law firm called MINTZ, LEVIN, COHN, FERRIS, GLOVSKY AND POPEO, P.C. in South Boston, Massachusetts. She was doing the same job but got better pay and a better position and is currently still working there.

Rhetoric of Iraq war

Blogs, leaked docs, body counts

Iraw Body Count (website)

NY Times: The Iraq Archive: The Strands of a War

The archive tells thousands of individual stories of loss whose consequences are still being felt in Iraqi families today.

Synthesis of books which synthesize writing research

There is a terrific review essay:

Anson, CHris. "A Field at Sixty Something." CCC 62.1 (Sept 2010): 216-228.

Anson gives me some things to think about in planning a grad course in comp/rhet. Specifically, this passage near the end:

Reading any of these carefully edited volumes would be a good start. In fact, as dull as research syntheses can sometimes be in style and content, those new to the field of writing studies could do worse than plowing their way through any of the three research handbooks, and an even better graduate course might ask students to do so in parallel with selections from Miller's massive anthology. And although it's likely that each book will draw a different audience (for Smagorinsky, members of CCCC and NCTE; for MacArthur, Graham, and Fitzgerald, members of the American Educational Research Association and colleges of education; for Bazerman, scholars of literacy writ large, across disciplines; for Miller, college compositionists)... (227)