bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
How Standardized Tests Shape—and Limit—Student Learning: An NCTE Policy Research Brief
Authors: Squire James R. , Gere Anne Ruggles
Published: March 2024

This NCTE policy research brief outlines some of the powerful and negative effects that standardized tests have on student learning, and provides policy recommendations for measures that can reduce these effects.
President’s Commentary
Authors: Morrell Ernest
Published: March 2024

English Teaching as Teaching Students to Read the Word and the World
Resisting Age Bias in Digital Literacy Research
Authors: Bowen Lauren Marshall
Published: March 2024

Through an eighty-one-year-old woman’s literacy narrative, I argue that literacy researchers should pay greater attention to elder writers, readers, and learners. Particularly asnotions of literacy shift in digital times, the perspective of a lifespan can reveal otherwise hidden complexities of literacy, including the motivational impact of affective histories and embodied practices over time.
Literacy Stewardship: Dakelh Women Composing Culture
Authors: Frost Alanna
Published: March 2024

This essay suggests a companion term to literacy sponsors that better mirrors the practice and protection of traditional literacies evident in the cases of two Dakelh elders. Literacy steward introduces a theoretical means to describe community members whose rhetorical decisions depend on traditions that are alternative to dominant literacies.
Ma ka Hana ka ‘Ike (In the Work Is the Knowledge): Kaona as Rhetorical Action
Authors: McDougall Brandy Nālani , Nordstrom Georganne
Published: March 2024

Drawing on Malea Powell’s “rhetorics of survivance” and Scott Richard Lyons’s “rhetorical sovereignty” as a framework, we examine how kaona, a Hawaiian rhetorical device, is employed within Queen Lili‘uokalani’s autobiography and Haunani-Kay Trask’s poetry as a call for Hawaiian resistance against American colonialism through allusions to Pele-Hi'iaka stories.
Review Essay: Ethnic Rhetorics Reviewed
Authors: Mejía Jaime Armin
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are: Mestiz@ Scripts, Digital Migrations, and the Territories of Writing Damián Baca Rhetorics of the Americas: 3114 BCE to 2012 CE Damián Baca and Victor Villanueva, editors Representations: Doing Asian American Rhetoric LuMing Mao and Morris Young, editors Writing in Multicultural Settings Carol Severino, Juan C. Guerra, and Johnnella E. Butler, editors American Indian Rhetorics of Survivance: Word Medicine, Word Magic Ernest Stromberg, editor
2011 CCCC Chair’s Address: It’s Bigger than Comp/Rhet: Contested and Undisciplined
Authors: Pough Gwendolyn D.
Published: March 2024

This is a written version of the address Gwendolyn D. Pough gave at the CCCC convention in Atlanta on Thursday, April 7, 2011.
Review Essay: New Media Affordances and the Connected Life
Authors: Blair Kristine L.
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are: Hamlet’s Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, William Powers. Rhetorics and Technologies: New Directions in Writing and Communication, Stuart Selber, editor. From A to : Keywords of Markup, Bradley Dilger and Jeff Rice, editors. Technological Ecologies & Sustainability, Dànielle Nicole DeVoss, Heidi McKee, and Richard Selfe, editors. Generaciones’ Narratives: The Pursuit and Practice of Traditional and Electronic Literacies on the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands, John Scenters-Zapico.
Inspecting Shadows of Past Classroom Practices: A Search for Students’ Voices
Authors: Sullivan Patricia
Published: March 2024

Our pedagogical histories lean on textbooks, institutional records, and the words of famous teachers. Students rarely appear in situ. Here, the voices of two very different Progressive Era students cast spotlights on the shadows of long-ago classroom practices—offering a liveliness that is difficult to recover, but worth seeking.
“Ladies Who Don’t Know Us Correct Our Papers”: Postwar Lay Reader Programs and Twenty-First Century Contingent Labor in First-Year Writing
Authors: Ritter Kelly
Published: March 2024

I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.
Reviews of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses
Authors: Arum Richard , Roksa Josipa
Published: March 2024

The Reviews (and reviewers) are: Methodologically Adrift Richard H. Haswell Everything That Rises … Jeanne Gunner Important Focus, Limited Perspective Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt An HBCU Perspective on Acaditalicically Adrift Teresa Redd
Review Essay: Resisting Entropy
Authors: Sirc Geoffrey
Published: March 2024

The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns Thomas Miller A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity Byron Hawk Toward A Composition Made Whole Jody Shipka Teaching with Student Texts: Essays toward an Informed Practice Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, Charles Paine, editors
Crossing Boundaries: Co-op Students Relearning to Write
Authors: Brent Doug
Published: March 2024

This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests that although students engage in little one-to-one transfer of learning, they draw on a wide range of internalized rhetorical strategies learned from across their academic experience.
Review Essay: The Point Is to Change It: Problems and Prospects for Public Rhetors
Authors: Welch Nancy
Published: March 2024

Books discussed in this essay: Reframing Writing Assessment to Improve Teaching and Learning, Linda Adler-Kassner and Peggy O’Neill Going Public: What Writing Programs Learn from Engagement, Shirley K. Rose and Irwin Weiser, editors The Public Work of Rhetoric: Citizen-Scholars and Civic Engagement, John M. Ackerman and David J. Coogan, editors Activism and Rhetoric: Theories and Contexts for Political Engagement, Seth Kahn and JongHwa Lee, editors
The Ethics of Archival Research
Authors: McKee Heidi A. , Porter James E.
Published: March 2024

What are the key ethical issues involved in conducting archival research? Based on examination of cases and interviews with leading archival researchers in composition,this article discusses several ethical questions and offers a heuristic to guide ethical decision making. Key to this process is recognizing the person-ness of archival materials.
In Possession of Community: Toward a More Sustainable Local
Authors: Carter Shannon , Conrad James H.
Published: March 2024

This article summarizes various applications of oral history interviews at local sites to represent the writing of underrepresented groups. The coauthors (a rhetorician andan archivist) discuss the important disciplinary implications for tending to the local, especially at sites where formal archives are hard to come by, offering three principlesfor sustaining the local by combining research design with archival development.
Data Mining: A Hybrid Methodology for Complex and Dynamic Research
Authors: Lang Susan , Baehr Craig
Published: March 2024

This article provides an overview of the ways in which data and text mining have potentialas research methodologies in composition studies. It introduces data mining in thecontext of the field of composition studies and discusses ways in which this methodologycan complement and extend our existing research practices by blending the best of whattechnology and researchers have to offer. The authors examine a process model for datamining, discuss benefits and liabilities, and link to increased calls for accountability.
Grasping Rhetoric and Composition by Its Long Tail: What Graphs Can Tell Us about the Field’s Changing Shape
Authors: Mueller Derek
Published: March 2024

Presented as a series of graphs, bibliographic data gathered from College Composition and Communication provides perspective useful for inquiring into the changing shapeof the field as it continues to mature. In its focus on graphing, the article demonstrates an application of distant reading methods to present patterns not only reflective of themost commonly cited figures in CCC over the past twenty-five years, but also attendant to a steady increase in the breadth of infrequently cited figures.
Review Essay: Making Sense of Making Knowledge
Authors: Rickly Rebecca
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are: The Changing of Knowledge in Composition: Contemporary Perspectives, Lance Massey and Richard C. Gebhardt, editors, The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric: A Twenty-First Century Guide, 3rd edition, Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Winifred Bryan Horner, editors, Rhetorica in Motion: Feminist Rhetorical Methods and Methodologies, Eileen E. Schell and K. J. Rawson, editors, The Ethics of Internet Research: A Rhetorical, Case-Based Process, Heidi A. McKee and James E. Porter, Becoming a Writing Researcher, Ann Blakeslee and Cathy Fleischer
Training in the Archives: Archival Research as Professional Development
Authors: Buehl Jonathan , Chute Tamar , Fields Anne
Published: March 2024

This article describes the rationale and efficacy of a graduate-level teaching module providing loosely structured practice with real archives. Introducing early career scholarsto archival methods changed their beliefs about knowledge, research, teaching, and their discipline(s). This case study suggests that archives can be productive training spacesfor all writing studies researchers.
Muted Rhetors and the Mundane: The Case of Ruth Mary Weeks, Rewey Belle Inglis, and W. Wilbur Hatfield
Authors: Bordelon Suzanne
Published: March 2024

This essay reveals the importance of investigating mundane internal documents, particularly when considering muted rhetors, who may use such texts strategicallyin an attempt to subvert the status quo. It does so by examining the first and second women presidents of NCTE and their efforts to professionalize the organization andto strengthen the voice of the president.
Motivation and Connection: Teaching Reading (and Writing) in the Composition Classroom
Authors: Bunn Michael
Published: March 2024

Drawing on qualitative research conducted at the University of Michigan, this article examines the extent to which composition instructors theorize and teach reading-writing connections and argues that explicitly teaching reading-writing connections may increase student motivation to complete assigned reading. The article also discusses using model texts as an effective means of teaching those connections.
From the Editor: Past as Only Prologue
Authors: Yancey Kathleen Blake
Published: March 2024

The editor introduces the articles in this issue and previews upcoming special themed issues.
Meaningful Engagements: Feminist Historiography and the Digital Humanities
Authors: Enoch Jessica , Bessette Jean
Published: March 2024

This essay explores potential connections between feminist historiography in rhetoric and the digital humanities. We investigate how specific digital innovations might invigorate feminist historiographic study, and we pause to consider how a turn to the digital might run counter to feminist methodological imperatives.
Flowing and Freestyling: Learning from Adult Students about Process Knowledge Transfer
Authors: Cleary Michelle Navarre
Published: March 2024

A study of twenty-five newly returned adult students finds that students with more process experience used more and more specific process analogies to construct their writing processes for school assignments than those with less process experience. Cues from peers and sense of academic identity also influenced transfer of process knowledge.
“Distinct and Significant”: Professional Identities of Two-Year College English Faculty
Authors: Toth Christina M. , Griffiths Brett M. , Thirolf Kathryn
Published: March 2024

Drawing on findings from three qualitative studies, this article explores the distinct professional identities of two-year college English faculty. We examine full-time faculty patterns of engagement with professional organizations, their assertion of professional authority in institutional decision making, and the role of organizational socialization in the shaping of part-time faculty professional identities.
Occupy Writing Studies: Rethinking College Composition for the Needs of the Teaching Majority
Authors: Hassel Holly , Giordano Joanne Baird
Published: March 2024

By challenging misconceptions about students and instructors at two-year campuses, this article critically examines practices of knowledge making in writing studies, arguing for the repositioning of writing instruction at two-year and open-admissions colleges from the margins to the center of the profession.
What We Really Value: Redefining Scholarly Engagement in Tenure and Promotion Protocols
Authors: Day Michael , Delagrange Susan H. , Palmquist Mike , Pemberton Michael A. , Walker Janice R.
Published: March 2024

This article argues that tenure and promotion decisions should reflect the fundamental ways in which the academy and our positions within it have changed. Calling attention to the role senior scholars can play, the article considers the challenges offered by activity in four areas: digital and new-media scholarship, editorial and curatorial work, administration and leadership, and mentoring.
Democracy, Struggle, and the Praxis of Assessment
Authors: Scott Tony , Brannon Lil
Published: March 2024

This article draws on qualitative research conducted as a part of a writing program assessment to examine the relationship between assessment, valuation, and the economics of first-year writing. It argues that the terms of labor in first-year writing complicate practices of valuation and the processes of consensus building that have become common in assessment models. It explains that if assessment is to be situated at a site and represent the work that happens there faithfully, it needs to account for how power, the economics of staffing, and differing ways of thinking about writing education necessitate struggle and the acknowledgment and representation of dissonance.
Review Essay: Pieces of the Puzzle: Feminist Rhetorical Studies and the Material Conditions of Women’s Work
Authors: Myers Nancy
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are: Networking Arguments: Rhetoric, Transnational Fitalicinism, and Public Policy Writing Rebecca Dingo Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition, 1600–1900 Jane Donawerth Fitalicinist Rhetorical Resilience Elizabeth A. Flynn, Patricia Sotirin, and Ann Brady, editors Writing a Progressive Past: Women Teaching and Writing in the Progressive Era— Lisa Mastrangelo— Fitalicinist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa E. Kirsch
Flattening Effects: Composition’s Multicultural Imperative and the Problem of Narrative Coherence
Authors: Alexander Jonathan , Rhodes Jacqueline
Published: March 2024

This essay argues that multiculturalism-inflected composition classrooms often “flatten” or efface radical alterities with which students—and teachers—should be encouraged to grapple. The authors demonstrate some of the limitations of such pedagogies, offer examples of provocative texts that celebrate difference—not identity—as a powerful critical and compositional tool for exploring subjectivity and justice, and call for a shift toward acknowledging our potential incommensurability and unknowability as a fruitful way to engage issues of social justice.
2013 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech
Authors: Gilyard Keith
Published: March 2024

The Exemplar Award is presented to a person who has served or serves as an exemplar of our organization, representing the highest ideals of scholarship, teaching, and service to the entire profession. This is a written version of the acceptance speech that Keith Gilyard gave at the CCCC Convention in Las Vegas on March 15.
Review Essay: All Writing Assessment Is Local
Authors: Gallagher Chris w.
Published: March 2024

Writing Assessment in the 21st Century: Essays in Honor of Edward M. White Norbert Elliot and Les Perelman, eds.

Race and Writing Assessment Asao B. Inoue and Mya Poe, eds.

Writing Assessment and the Revolution in Digital Texts and Technologies Michael R. Neal

Digital Writing: Assessment and Evaluation Heidi A. McKee and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, eds.
The Legal and the Local: Using Disparate Impact Analysis to Understand the Consequences of Writing Assessment
Authors: Poe Mya , Elliot Norbert , Cogan John Aloysius , Nurudeen Tito G.
Published: March 2024

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.
“The Worst Part of the Dead Past”: Language Attitudes, Policies, and Pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College, 1866–1902
Authors: Arnold Lisa R.
Published: March 2024

To underline the value of composition’s international and multilingual history, this article presents an account of language attitudes, policies, and pedagogies at Syrian Protestant College (Beirut) between 1866 and 1902, which also provides a historical dimension to contemporary conversations about international and translingual approaches to writing research and pedagogy.
2014 CCCC Chair’s Address: The Loss of the Public
Authors: Tinberg Howard
Published: March 2024

This is a written version of the address that Howard Tinberg gave at the CCCC Convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Thursday, March 20, 2014.
Review Essay: Sponsors and Activists: Deborah Brandt, Sponsorship, and the Work to Come
Authors: Parks Steve
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are: Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in American Lives John Duffy, Julie Nelson Christoph, Eli Goldblatt, Nelson Graff, Rebecca S. Nowacek, and Bryan Trabold, eds. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography Eli Goldblatt PHD (Po H# on Dope) to Ph.D.: How Education Saved My Life Elaine Richardson Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp
Remembering Sappho: New Perspectives on Teaching (and Writing) Women’s Rhetorical History
Authors: Enoch Jessica , Jack Jordynn
Published: March 2024

The authors discuss courses in which they examined with students female rhetors’ historical presence in the public imagination, investigating how rhetorical work has inscribed these women into public memory and erased them from it.
What Good Is World Literature?: World Literature Pedagogy and the Rhetoric of Moral Crisis
Authors: Smith Karen R.
Published: March 2024

We should make the case that literary study has traditionally been, and continues to be, an effective gateway into the cross-cultural awareness that a truly global campus needs. At the same time, we should draw upon our own pedagogical history to ensure that our institutions of learning do not reinforce the neo-imperialism of cultural globalization. In fact, since World War II, calls for teaching world literature have been tied to shifting moral imperatives.
The Literature of Poverty, The Poverty of Literature Classes
Authors: Marsh John
Published: March 2024

The author describes an undergraduate course he has taught on U.S. literature about poverty, but he also expresses doubt that such courses can help produce major social change.
“Me Inwardly, Before I Dared”: Japanese Americans Writing-to-Gaman
Authors: Shimabukuro Mira
Published: March 2024

Although Japanese Americans’ concept of gaman has been stereotypically associated with silent passivity, several practiced this principle as a form of resistance in personal writings about the U.S. government’s incarceration of them during World War II.
Review: Learning from the Archives
Authors: Brereton John C. , Gannett Cinthia
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are Beyond the Archives: Research as a Lived Process, edited by Gesa E. Kirsch and Liz Rohan, and Working in the Archives: Practical Research Methods for Rhetoric and Composition, edited by Alexis E. Ramsey, Wendy B. Sharer, Barbara L’Eplattenier, and Lisa S. Mastrangelo.
Empathy and the Critic
Authors: Jurecic Ann
Published: March 2024

Empathy is a much-discussed term in the humanities these days. While some critics value it and argue that literature desirably promotes it, other critics worry that appeals to this emotion will neglect important matters of social context. In the literature classroom, the best approach is to take time to consider how texts complicate the impulse to empathize.
In the Name of Citizenship: The Writing Classroom and the Promise of Citizenship
Authors: Wan Amy J.
Published: March 2024

Rather than simply invoke citizenship as an ideal for their students to achieve, writing instructors should address the various possible meanings of the term, which represent divergent traditions of political thought.
Symposium: How I Have Changed My Mind
Authors: Anson Chris , Cooper Marilyn , Desai Gaurav , Gere Anne Ruggles , Gilbert Pamela , Gilyard Keith , Harris Joseph , Lee Valerie , Miller Susan , Mortensen Peter , Shumway David , Sommers Nancy , Vitanza Victor
Published: March 2024

Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.
Review: Assent among Modern Indigenous Peoples
Authors: Bizzaro Resa Crane
Published: March 2024

Reviewed is X-Marks: Native Signatures of Assent by Scott Richard Lyons.
“What the College Has Done for Me”: Anzia Yezierska and the Problem of Progressive Education
Authors: Dayton-Wood Amy
Published: March 2024

The literary work of Anzia Yezierska is relevant to the fields of composition, rhetoric, and literacy. Partly in dialogue with the philosophy of John Dewey, it reveals the tensions and conflicts inherent in progressive education, emphasizing how these were viewed through the lens of the immigrant student. Yezierska shows that pedagogical progressivism has had tremendous potential to tap into students’ lived experiences and transform them into more fully realized, engaged citizens, even as she also shows that such power has been constrained by institutional structures.
Outside the Text: Retheorizing Empiricism and Identity
Authors: Sánchez Raúl
Published: March 2024

Recent theoretical and technological developments, including concepts of networking elaborated by Bruno Latour, enable composition studies to take an empiricist turn toward issues of identity. More specifically, these developments help the field more strongly connect the figure of the writing-subject to the experiences of actual writers.
Rhetorics of Displacement: Constructing Identities in Forced Relocations
Authors: Powell Katrina M.
Published: March 2024

Forced displacement has often involved the use of rhetoric, both by government institutions and by people who struggle not only to survive displacement, but also to resist it. The author analyzes such discourses through three case studies: Spike Lee’s film When the Levees Broke, Dave Eggers’s novel What Is the What, and a documentaryshe helped produce on families displaced by eminent domain when the Shenandoah National Park was created.
Review: Literacy, Rhetoric, Identity, and Agency
Authors: Daniell Beth
Published: March 2024

Reviewed are Writing from These Roots: Literacy in a Hmong-American Community by John M. Duffy, and Spiritual Literacy in John Wesley’s Methodism: Reading, Writing, and Speaking to Believe by Vicki Tolar Burton.
Beyond Repair: Literacy, Technology, and a Curriculum of Aging
Authors: Bowen Lauren Marshall
Published: March 2024

The magazine of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) often relies on problematic rhetorics that privilege youth-centered ideals and create limited representations of older adults’ literacy in digital times. These rhetorics rest on a metaphor of repair, which labels aging adults as primarily bodies in need of fixing or protection.
Emerging Voices: The Shifting Rhetorics of Style: Writing in Action in Modern Rhetoric
Authors: Lockhart Tara
Published: March 2024

This article excavates how style in writing was represented and taught in the under-investigated mid-twentieth century. I trace four editions of the textbook Modern Rhetoric (1949–1979), authored by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren; I detail how the book was surprisingly innovative for the time, despite its eventual re-entrenchment to a more conservative approach. I argue that the teaching of style serves as a marker of the tensions between disciplines and pedagogical approaches, changing views of students, and competing cultural demands.
The Trouble with Outcomes: Pragmatic Inquiry and Educational Aims
Authors: Gallagher Chris W.
Published: March 2024

Although outcomes assessment (OA) has become “common sense” in higher education, this article shows that the concept of outcomes tends to limit and compromise teaching and learning while serving the interests of institutional management. By contrast, the pragmatic concept of consequences tends to expand our view of teaching and learning, and contests the technical rationality of the managerial university. Though I challenge outcomes assessment, I recognize that OA is the coin of the educational realm. Therefore, this article outlines ways to frame and use educational aims to minimize the negative tendencies of outcomes assessment and to maximize the positive tendencies of “consequential assessment.”
Emerging Voices: Resituating Expertise: An Activity Theory Perspective on Representation in Critical Ethnography
Authors: Stinnett Jerry
Published: March 2024

Ethnography has consistently faced ethical questions since the earliest postmodern critiques of the ethnographer’s claims to objectivity in descriptive research. Concerns of how to represent ethically the ethnographic Other, to engage in activist research, and to foster collaboration among researchers and participants persist even in the age of critical ethnography and its strict attention to these issues. This article offers activity theory as a useful tool with which to address the ethical and practical difficulties that continue to plague critical ethnographers. I argue that by seeing the project of ethnographic research as an activity system as described by A. N. Leontiev and expanded upon in the work of David Russell and Yrjo Engeström, researchers can recognize the shifting locus of expertise between researcher and participant and thus design a research project that is more ethical and, ultimately, more useful for all involved. Ultimately, activity theory serves as a means of helping ethnographers recognize the actual nature of what they are doing when they conduct research so that they may confront ethical challenges in a more fully theorized fashion.
Time, Lives, and Videotape: Operationalizing Discovery in Scenes of Literacy Sponsorship
Authors: Halbritter Bump , Lindquist Julie
Published: March 2024

We present an approach to operationalizing discovery in literacy research by describing a diagnostic, abductive methodology. This methodology treats products of videotaped interviews and participant-authored footage as narrative data produced in scenes of literacy sponsorship. In describing the operations of our diagnostic approach, we foreground our process of discovery via LiteracyCorps Michigan, our ongoing, long-term research project. We offer this methodology as a research practice that can bring new understandings of how literacy sponsorship operates.
“Standard” Issue: Public Discourse, Ayers v. Fordice, and the Dilemma of the Basic Writer
Authors: Inman Joyce
Published: March 2024

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.
The Consequences of Integrating Faith into Academic Writing: Casuistic Stretching and Biblical Citation
Authors: Ringer Jeffrey M.
Published: March 2024

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how “Austin” casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience’s pluralistic perspective. Austin’s writing thus provides a discursive window into how writing academically for an FYW course might nudge students from dualism toward pluralism. It thus prompts compositionists not only to interrogate how writing academically may implicate students’ most deeply held beliefs, but also to make such identity consequences explicit to students.
Introduction to the Special Issue on Western Cultures of Intellectual Property
Authors: Kennedy Krista , Howard Rebecca Moore
Published: March 2024

This special issue of College English brings together well-established scholars of intellectual property as they present fresh work to the field. Their essays offer wide-ranging, provocative explorations of intellectual property as a cultural artifact over the past three centuries.
1967: The Birth of “The Death of the Author”
Authors: Logie John
Published: March 2024

Roland Barthes’s “The Death of the Author” is a foundational text for scholars who are addressing questions of authorship and textual ownership in English studies and its neighboring disciplines. Barthes’s essay is typically presented without significant attention to the circumstances and context surrounding its initial English publication in 1967 (not in 1968, as is often stated). This project works to better understand that context, and thereby to better understand Barthes’s argument. Although it has often been claimed that Barthes’s essay has a “revolutionary spirit,” this spirit is not directly political in nature. Rather, it is grounded in an artistic revolution that was producing sophisticated multimedia well before digital tools made multimedia commonplace.
User Data on the Social Web: Authorship, Agency, and Appropriation
Authors: Reyman Jessica
Published: March 2024

Social web services catalog users’ activities across the Internet, aggregating, analyzing, and selling a vast array of user data to be used largely for consumer profiling and target marketing. This article interrogates the tacit agreements and terms-of-use policies that govern who owns user data, how it circulates, and how it can be used. Relying on problematic assumptions about the authorship of social data, data-mining practices and technology policies unquestioningly place ownership in the hands of technology companies and compel users to surrender control over their own contributions on the social web. This article explores the implications of the practices and policies surrounding data management for composition and participation on the social web and argues for a more balanced distribution of rights to user data.
Emerging Voices : “Speak White”: Language Policy, Immigration Discourse, and Tactical Authenticity in a French Enclave in New England
Authors: Peters Jason
Published: March 2024

This article provides a historical case study of the Sentinelle Affair, a conflict between French language rights and the English Only educational policies of the Catholic Church in New England in the 1920s. An analysis of this conflict reveals a correspondence between programs of language centralization and the production of language differences in the United States. The article explores the possibility that such language histories of white ethnic groups might provide grounds for creating what Malea Powell calls “a rhetoric and composition alliance.”
Our Brilliant Career: Women in English, 1973–2010
Authors: Gubar Susan
Published: March 2024

Susan Gubar reflects on her career as a woman scholar and queries in what ways women’s roles in English departments, and in academia, have evolved over the last few decades.
Wampum, Sequoyan, and Story: Decolonizing the Digital Archive
Authors: Cushman Ellen
Published: March 2024

Archives have a long and troubled history as imperialist endeavors. Scholars of digital archives can begin to decolonize the archive by asking, how is knowledge imparted, in what media, by whom, and for what ends? Drawing on a six-year-long ethnohistorical study of Cherokee language and writing, I explore these questions and analyze the epistemological work of wampum, Sequoyan, and digital storytelling. I argue that decolonial digital archives have built into them the instrumental, historical, and cultural meanings of whatever media they include. To be understood in and on their terms, these media need to be contextualized within the notions of time, social practices, stories, and languages that lend them meaning.
Delivering Textual Diaspora: Building Digital Cultural Repositories as Rhetoric Research
Authors: Ridolfo Jim
Published: March 2024

This essay considers the dispersed Samaritan manuscripts as a challenge for digital and rhetorical scholars. Although the entire Samaritan population of 760 lives in Israel and the Palestinian Authority, most of their manuscripts are housed in libraries, collections, and museums across the world. Drawing on interviews and archival research, I introduce the term textual diaspora to describe how some Samaritan Elders are strategically thinking about the future digital delivery of manuscripts in diaspora, and I suggest the importance of engaging with stakeholders when building digital repositories in the humanities.
East Texas Activism (1966–68): Locating the Literacy Scene through the Digital Humanities
Authors: Carter Shannon , Dent Kelly L.
Published: March 2024

This article suggests ways digital tools and platforms can help researchers capture the local and global forces that interanimate local literacy scenes. As a concrete example, we offer Remixing Rural Texas (RRT), describing the way this digital tool works to capture a targeted literacy scene: the civil rights efforts of two African American students on a recently desegregated campus in 1967–68. RRT features an eighteen-minute documentary about these efforts, remixed almost entirely from existing archival materials, and a data-source annotation tool that connects the local literacy scene to global events. We conclude with an extended treatment of local stakeholders and the way RRT enables more sustainable, reciprocal, and participatory partnerships with the local community.
Emerging Voices: The “Hands of God” at Work: Negotiating between Western and Religious Sponsorship in Indonesia
Authors: Engelson Amber
Published: March 2024

This article draws from ethnographic research to explore the interplay between Western capital (both monetary and cultural), the English language, and Indonesian religious identity at the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies, an “inter-religious, international Ph.D. program” in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. After discussing research methodology and positioning the program’s local-global religious identity within the larger Indonesian geopolitical context—which highlights English’s complicated role as both the language of Western imperialism and the language of global academic connection—this article explores how two Muslim PhD students negotiate this contact zone as they write. These student portraits, in turn, highlight the importance of acknowledging (1) religious identities as resources in our increasingly global US classrooms; (2) that identity negotiation occurs both textually and extratextually as multilingual writers reformulate and circulate information they draw from English publications to foment social change in their local communities; and (3) the contributions that non-Western voices can make in academic conversations long dominated by the West.
Closing Deals with Hamlet’s Help: Assessing the Instrumental Value of an English Degree
Authors: Fontaine Sheryl I. , Mexal Stephen J.
Published: March 2024

Critics of contemporary higher education frequently overlook an important dimension of assessment of student learning: namely, the social and economic consequences used to justify the assessment measures in the first place. This essay argues that meaningful student assessment must take into account the unintended, transferable utility of liberal higher education. The authors, from a large master’s-comprehensive state university, use a recent survey of alumni of their English degree program from as far back as the 1960s to assess the importance that the degree has had in the lives of former students. Believing that disciplinary differences may help us to understand the navigational courses that emerge as seemingly nonlinear and unpredictable paths from the college degree to the life after college, the authors use students’ responses to identify how, where, and what students have used from their English courses in their most recent professions and, in turn, the limitations of current value-added assessments such as the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA).
Emerging Voices: Talking over the Fence: Writing in Turn-of-the-Century Farm Journals
Authors: Brazeau Alicia
Published: March 2024

This article investigates turn-of-the-century agricultural journals as mediums of composition education that taught readers the discoursal goals and values of the agricultural press. Editors of Maine Farmer and Ohio Farmer, in particular, argued that advanced composition skills needed to be connected to rural contexts and practices. They also ultimately offered readers an identity to assume as writers: teachers in a community of farming professionals. That these publications were critical of the pedagogies that did not empower rural voices, and were simultaneously so intent on sponsoring new rural writers, demonstrates that more current concerns with rural literacy have a long history.
Collaboration (in) Theory: Reworking the Social Turn’s Conversational Imperative
Authors: Duffy William
Published: March 2024

This article examines the limitations of social constructionist theory that conflates collaboration with “conversation,” an idea that not only informs how many writing scholars understand the concept of collaboration itself, but one that also allows writing theorists to argue that all writing is inherently collaborative. After briefly tracing the history of this social turn collaboration theory, the article offers an object-oriented definition of collaboration to initiate a rhetorical framework for understanding what collaborators actually do with their discourse, especially when they compose texts. Following a discussion of Donald Davidson’s concept of triangulation and its relevance for understanding the discursive work of collaboration, the article concludes with a consideration of how this revised approach to collaborative composition reflects the goals of postprocess theory, including the habits of mind discussed in the Framework for Success in Post-Secondary Writing.
Unwelcome Stories, Identity Matters, and Strategies for Engaging in Cross-Boundary Discourses
Authors: Wallace David
Published: March 2024

Our fields need stories that are unwelcome—stories that bother us because we have not fully embraced the notions that our identities matter in our scholarship, our teaching, and our lives. We also need to embrace the multifaceted, intersectional nature of identity, and we need new strategies for engaging in cross-boundary discourses. I offer a queer reading of the work of three African American rhetoricians to explicate three concepts that are critical for engaging in responsible cross-boundary discourse as well as three trajectories for moving forward.
What Is the Value of the GED?
Authors: Bowen Betsy , Nantz Kathryn
Published: March 2024

Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and census and economic data, this article examines the value of the GED for students at a community-based urban literacy center. After exploring assumptions about literacy implicit in the GED writing test, the article assesses the economic and noneconomic impacts of the GED, a test taken by over 700,000 adults in 2012. Because the students at this literacy center differ significantly from the national pool of GED test takers—being all women, older, and largely immigrants—the study provides information about the value of the GED for those who are particularly disadvantaged in seeking this credential.
Symposium: Off Track and On: Valuing the Intellectual Work of Non-Tenure-Track Faculty
Authors: Cucciarre Christine , McCamley Michael , Harris Joseph
Published: March 2024

This symposium offers three perspectives on how permanent non-tenure track faculty are positioned to effect change in English departments and writing programs, as well as some of the obstacles they face in doing so.
Review: “English Only” and Multilingualism in Composition Studies: Policy, Philosophy, and Practice
Authors: Ferris Dana R.
Published: March 2024

Ferris looks at three books—Cross-Language Relations in Composition; Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies; and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China—as they address the question of adherence to a monolingual or “standard” set of language and writing norms in composition, and consider how the answer to this question impacts our teaching.
Toward a Twenty-First-Century Federal Writers’ Project
Authors: Mutnick Deborah
Published: March 2024

This article draws parallels between the Great Depression and the great recession that began in 2007 in light of the history, methods, themes, and relevance of the New Deal Federal Writers’ Project (FWP) to contemporary community writing projects. Through a critical analysis of the FWP’s legacy as both a twentieth-century American epic and a lesson in powerful, sometimes flawed methodologies, this article suggests that a twenty-first-century reprise of the FWP would unify and inform already existing university-community partnerships to enact the “public turn” called for in composition and other disciplines at a critical juncture in American—and world—history.
The Vulnerable Population of Teacher-Researchers; Or, “Why I Can’t Name My Coauthors”
Authors: White Brian
Published: March 2024

Educational researchers are accustomed to institutional review board (IRB) requirements (e.g., protecting participants) with students often identified as the only “vulnerable population” for IRB purposes. However, as practitioner research has gained more prominence, the vulnerability of teacher-researchers themselves has begun to surface. In this article I tell the stories of teachers who felt ostracized as a result of engaging in research and publication. Drawing on research from Scandinavia and Australia, I present some reasons why teachers might seek to “cut down” colleagues who conduct and publish research. Finally, I present suggestions for university-based researchers and teacher educators who wish to help practitioner researchers prepare for any potential backlash as well as some questions for future research.
Editorial: Opening the Conversation: Thoughts on English Teacher Preparation and Renewal with Patricia Lambert Stock, Ruth Vinz, and David Schaafsma, Past EE Editors
Authors: Rush Leslie S. , Scherff Lisa
Published: March 2024

For the final installment of our co-written editorials with former English Education editors, and in honor of the centennial anniversary of the National Council of Teachers of English, we offer responses by Patricia Lambert Stock, Ruth Vinz, and David Schaafsma to the question, “How can the profession improve the preparation and renewal of all English educators?”
Extending the Conversation: In Search of the Authentic English Classroom: Facing the Schoolishness of School
Authors: Whitney Anne Elrod
Published: March 2024

Anne Elrod Whitney’s first-person narrative about her experiences as a student, teacher, and teacher educator gives us a sense of what authenticity in classrooms might look like and what it might mean for students.
“A Rainforest in Front of a Bulldozer”: The Literacy Practices of Teacher Candidates Committed to Social Justice
Authors: Johnson Janet D.
Published: March 2024

This critical ethnographic study explores how two teacher candidates in English education used specific and varied literacy practices to enact their social justice priorities at a troubled high school in a high-need district. Data include interviews before and after the student teaching experience; observations of teaching, blogs, journals, and emails; and coursework required of candidates. Critical discourse analysis was used to analyze the data. The New Literacy Studies and teaching for social justice frameworks were foundational to this research. In addition, the theory of testimonial reading, as outlined by Felman (1992) and Boler (1999), was used to demonstrate how the two candidates worked within and against the system to resist deficit models of their students and ultimately bear witness to their students’ experiences.
Extending the Conversation: The State of English Education: Considering Possibilities in Troubled Times
Authors: Hawthorne Shaun , Goodwyn Andy , George Marshall , Reid Louann , Shoffner Melanie
Published: March 2024

For the “Extending the Conversation” section in this issue, we invited English educators from the United States and abroad to reflect on the state of English education in their countries. All five contributors have interacted through their participation in the NCTE Annual Convention, the CEE summer summits, the International Federation for the Teaching of English (IFTE) convention, and the NATE conference. We begin with initial thoughts by Shaun Hawthorne, the Deputy Principal at Western Springs College in Auckland, New Zealand; and Andy Goodwyn, a faculty member at the University of Reading in England. Then, Marshall George (Fordham University), Louann Reid (Colorado State University), and Melanie Shoffner (Purdue University) offer a “trialogue” in response. We hope these perspectives give readers insight into international contexts and advance dialogue in English education.