Studies in Composition and Rhetoric – serie

Who Speaks for Writing confronts a range of current debates about stewardship in writing studies in the 21st century.In recent years, writing studies has become more and more institutionalized in departments, programs, and majors. Specializations within the discipline have proliferated as have moments of collaboration. These circumstances make an exploration and understanding of the stakes in this burgeoning field important.The authors represent a broad range of expertise and specialization in the field, and they seek to answer questions not only about the current ownership of writing studies but also about the theoretical and practical applications of this ownership. Their chapters offer new directions for composition theorists, teachers, and administrators for the 21st century.

This book explores the ethical implications of using digital media tools in the writing classroom, particularly first-year composition, but applied more broadly as well. The author argues that in addition to Stuart Selber’s three multiliteracies, teachers of writing must include ethical literacy when teaching students to compose using digital tools. This book explores the need for this ethical literacy – drawing on interviews with writing program administrators and instructors – and offers implications, heuristics, outcomes, and sample assignments for teaching digital media ethics in writing.

Afrocentric Teacher-Research: Rethinking Appropriateness and Inclusion reports on a qualitative teacher-research study that examines the ways in which African American and other students perform expository writing tasks using an Afrocentric Ebonics-focused first-year writing curriculum. Foundational to the book is a study of twenty-one student-writers and one writing classroom employing an Afrocentric Ebonics-based curriculum. Further, this book conceptualizes a theory of Afrocentric teacher-research that includes all students in addition to African Americans, and positions teacher-research as a methodology that not only transforms classroom practices, but also transforms disciplinary practices by urging rhetoric and composition teachers and scholars to revise the way that we study Afrocentric pedagogies and Ebonics-based linguistic practices.

This book won the 2014 CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) Outstanding Book Award – Edited CollectionRace and Writing Assessment brings together established and up-and-coming scholars in composition studies to explore how writing assessments needs to change in order to account for the increasing diversity of students in college classrooms today. Contributors identify where we have ignored race in our writing assessment approaches and explore issues related to assessment technologies, faculty and student responses to assessment, institutional responses to writing assessment, and context for assessing writing beyond composition programs.Balancing practical advice and theoretical discussions, Race and Writing Assessment provides a variety of models, frameworks, and research methods to consider writing assessment approaches that are sensitive to the linguistic and cultural identities that diverse students bring to writing classrooms. This book illustrates that this is no one-size-fits-all model for addressing diversity in assessment practice but that assessment practices attuned to racial diversity must be rooted in the contexts in which they are found. In doing so, Race and Writing Assessment enriches contemporary research on contextualized approaches to writing assessment.

This book won the 2014 CCCC (Conference on College Composition and Communication) Outstanding Book Award – Edited CollectionRace and Writing Assessment brings together established and up-and-coming scholars in composition studies to explore how writing assessments needs to change in order to account for the increasing diversity of students in college classrooms today. Contributors identify where we have ignored race in our writing assessment approaches and explore issues related to assessment technologies, faculty and student responses to assessment, institutional responses to writing assessment, and context for assessing writing beyond composition programs.Balancing practical advice and theoretical discussions, Race and Writing Assessment provides a variety of models, frameworks, and research methods to consider writing assessment approaches that are sensitive to the linguistic and cultural identities that diverse students bring to writing classrooms. This book illustrates that this is no one-size-fits-all model for addressing diversity in assessment practice but that assessment practices attuned to racial diversity must be rooted in the contexts in which they are found. In doing so, Race and Writing Assessment enriches contemporary research on contextualized approaches to writing assessment.

This book argues that the psycholinguistic nature of literacy is universal and seeks to recouperate late nineteenth and early twentieth century techniques for addressing it. After defining the key terms of this study, the book goes onto survey various types of literacy education in the United States. First, it examples various religious organization and their methods for supporting literacy, focusing on the main religious groups in the United States in the Modern period: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. The book then discusses contributions made by NGOs, demonstrating the importance and limitations of reading groups, literary societies, settlement houses, unions, and corporations. Finally, the book examines government managed educational programs in K-12 schools as well as colleges and universities.Ultimately, this book argues, the psycholinguistic character of reading remains consistent over time, place and delivery syste. While sponsors play a key role, self-motivation is a driving force in literacy development. Although literacy education is in an on-going state of transition, the need for critical literacy continues to be an urgent, widespread and essential goal.

As individual institutions of education at all levels respond to the call for greater accountability and assessment, those who teach literacy face the challenging task of choosing what to measure and how to measure it. Both defining literacy clearly and tying that definition to strategies for assessment are two of many challenges faced by educators, theorists, and members of the public who assume responsibility for assessing literacy as well as developing and improving literacy programs. In a pluralistic and democratic society sensitive to multicultural variation, we need to find our way between the competing needs for inclusiveness and for clear and useful standards. Multiple definitions of literacy raise the issue of whether there can be a standard or set of standards and if so, what they are in an environment of multiple literacies. Indeed, the downside of the defeat of older monolithic notions of literacy is the undermining or at least the questioning of well-established methods of literacy assessment. To some extent, the older methods of assessment have been revised in the light of more expansive definitions of literacy. But will this kind of revision be enough? How are the criteria for judgment to be known and applied? Thus, this volume addresses the problems of assessing literacy development in the context of multiple and inclusive definitions. Each section consists of chapters that deal with the issue of definitions per se, with standards in postsecondary settings, with the K-12 situation, and with alternative, non-school environments where literacy is critical to human functioning in a democratic society.

Literacy Heroines is about twelve amazing women who lived and worked in the period 1880-1930 who used their literacy abilities to address major issues in the country in those years, including some we still face today: racism, sexism, voting rights, educational and economic inequality, health disparities and others. They used their exemplary literacy skills to teach, to bring issues to light, to right wrongs, to publish books, articles, pamphlets and other materials to reach their goals. They benefited from focused help in the form of sponsorship from others and provided sponsorship in many forms to others to foster literacy in people young and old. They stand as Literacy Heroines, working in a variety of roles, using their literacy abilities in heroic efforts to serve as respected exemplars and sponsors of literacy for others. They used their grit and willingness to stand up for their principles, took small steps, worked collaboratively, hospitably inviting people to literacy. Ultimately, it should be clear that in one way or another, the Heroines were addressing the many forms of inequality in American society; their lives and work show that literacy is thus a key tool in the struggle for social justice, then and now. Suitable for courses in the history of literacy or writing studies, history of feminism, history of education and related areas.

Teaching and Race: How To Survive, Manage, and Even Encourage Race Talk provides an in-depth interdisciplinary analysis of some common student talk about race, its flavor, character, rhetorical, sociological, psychological and educational development sources, and manageable tools for responding to students. The book recommends an accessible two-step, compassionate listening followed by critical challenges, to make the transformative connection between emotion and evidence. The book helps teachers embrace the moments of difficult conversation, confront student denial (as well as their own), and take advantage of the unique opportunity the classroom provides to advance the students’ anti-racist identity development. Teaching and Race narrates common, sometimes offensive, language in four student interviews that are tied to strong feelings of confusion, denial, guilt, resistance and more. The student interviews help college teachers name and analyze loaded racial discussion so that they can thoughtfully address it in the classroom, rather than feel their only choices are explosive confrontation, gloss-overs or redirection. The book empowers teachers to shift potentially confrontational race talk to open-minded race dialogues that ultimately defuse the shock, sting, alarm and confusion of race talk by well-intentioned but unpracticed voices. The book creates a compassionate but informed moment for teachers, preparing them to confidently raise a critical challenge to misinformation at the moment it arises, and providing a beginning response for the teacher.

This collection offers support for instructors who are concerned about students’ critical literacy abilities. Attending to critical reading to help students navigate fake news, as well as other forms of disinformation and misinformation, is the job of instructors across all disciplines, but is especially important for college English instructors because students’ reading problems play out in many and varied ways in students’ writing. The volume includes chapters that analyze the current information landscape by examining assorted approaches to the wide-ranging types of materials available on and offline and offers strategies for teaching critical reading and writing in first-year composition and beyond. The chapters herein bring fresh perspectives on a range of issues, including ways to teach critical digital reading, ecological models that help students understand fake news, and the ethical questions that inform teaching in such a climate. With each chapter offering practical, research-based advice this collection underscores not just the importance of attending to reading, particularly in the era of fake news, but precisely how to do so.

This edited collection arrives at a crucial moment in the evolution of Writing Studies research. It brings together well-known and emerging scholars in the field of Writing Studies, broadly defined, to explore the range of research methods and methodologies, the types of research questions asked, and the types of data in play in research about higher education writing in the 21st century. Its contribution is unique in the current landscape—a collection of carefully detailed descriptions of the research methods that constitute the field today, after fifty years of development—as marked by the 50th anniversary of the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar. The chapters focus on writing and writers in higher education, foregrounding research questions, methods, and data, while defining the areas of research that constitute this interdisciplinary field and offering examples of studies that employ the methods in these areas. Initial chapters address broad questions: the state of the field today, with a special focus on the field’s methods and their (inter)disciplinary history. Contributions then cover domains such as sociological ethnography, cultural-historical activity theory, linguistics, decolonial translation, cognitive science, corpus linguistics in the study of writing in university first year and upper-level contexts, recurring features in writing across academic contexts, work from psychologists studying college writers’ neuroplasticity, and many other domains of writing research. The final chapter argues for the value of lifespan writing research as an emerging domain, while the conclusion presents a synthesis of the major themes of the collection from leading scholars in the field.

In 2015, Professor Emerita Lucille M. Schultz donated to the University of Cincinnati her set of composition materials gathered from fifteen libraries and collections around the country. With 350 entries ranging from 1785 to 1916, the collection includes picture books for early primary schools, grammar textbooks, student writing, and advanced rhetoric textbooks for undergraduates. The documents afford a thrilling glimpse into nineteenth-century ways of thinking and teaching, highlighting practices we would today identify as prewriting, collaborative invention, freewriting, and object-oriented pedagogy. Composing Legacies relates these pedagogies to expressions of social class, nationalism, and public engagement that run throughout the Victorian era and the Gilded Age. Early chapters show how writing and grammar handbooks aimed to reproduce social hierarchies; later ones show how textbook authors aimed to mitigate lecture-style pedagogy with attention to student backgrounds, personal interests, economic aspirations, and presumed audiences. Often, those authors demonstrated a pronounced interest in national unity, but not without exception. Little-known Confederate textbooks took the ideology of unity to be a form of Northern aggression, promoting the maintenance of state and local traditions through their classroom exercises and sample passages. Composition scholars who see the nineteenth-century as a period of skills-and-drills teaching, devoid of explicit political concern, will find surprises in the archival texts’ testimonies about national crises and civic participation. Those scholars will also find that the “social turn” in writing and rhetoric, however recent as a historical framework, has been underway for more than two hundred years.

Invisible Effects directly engages systems and complexity theory to reveal how the effects of writing and writing instruction work in deferred, disguised, and unexpected ways. The book explains how writing and language that exist in "writing systems" can indirectly (though powerfully) affect people and environments in sometimes distant contexts. In so doing, the book takes on a question central to rhetoric and writing throughout its long history but perhaps even more pressing today: how do we recognize and measure the effects of writing when those effects are so tangled up with our complex material and discursive environments? The surprisingly powerful effects explored here suggest new ways of thinking about and teaching writing and the applications, lessons, and examples in the text precisely model what this thinking and teaching might look like.This book is primed to serve as an important addition to reading lists of scholars and graduate students in Writing Studies and Rhetoric and should appear on many syllabi in courses on writing and writing instruction and on rhetoric, both introductory and advanced. As well, the book’s advocacy for the unrecognized potential impact of writing instruction makes it appealing for writing program directors and any potential university faculty, administrators, and non-academics interested in the importance and the efficacy of writing instruction. This book is also a useful resource for scholars and graduate students specializing in Writing Across the Curriculum, as the text provides a useful way to shift the conversation and communicate about writing across disciplines.

This collection offers support for instructors who are concerned about students’ critical literacy abilities. Attending to critical reading to help students navigate fake news, as well as other forms of disinformation and misinformation, is the job of instructors across all disciplines, but is especially important for college English instructors because students’ reading problems play out in many and varied ways in students’ writing. The volume includes chapters that analyze the current information landscape by examining assorted approaches to the wide-ranging types of materials available on and offline and offers strategies for teaching critical reading and writing in first-year composition and beyond. The chapters herein bring fresh perspectives on a range of issues, including ways to teach critical digital reading, ecological models that help students understand fake news, and the ethical questions that inform teaching in such a climate. With each chapter offering practical, research-based advice this collection underscores not just the importance of attending to reading, particularly in the era of fake news, but precisely how to do so.

Working with and against Shared Curricula: Perspectives from College Writing Teachers and Administrators explores the complexities surrounding the expanding use of shared curricula—syllabi and assignments intended to work universally, for all teachers and all students within a given writing program. Chapters in this collection offer the experiential accounts and research-based arguments needed to prepare teachers and administrators to respond to calls to scale up writing programs for delivery by contingent instructors, in online courses, or at distant sites. Speaking from a variety of perspectives and institutional locations, these authors grapple with questions increasingly common in writing programs: In what ways do shared curricula forward noble goals, such as reducing workload for teachers or ensuring an equitable educational experience for all?; In what ways do shared curricula undermine teacher efficacy and student learning?; When syllabi and assignments are exported from one location to another, what contexts are gained, lost, or changed in the process? In the end, what emerges from this collection is not a clear or simplified argument either for or against shared curricula and pre-designed courses. Instead, readers gain a nuanced picture of both the affordances and limitations of these instructional models for writing programs, and their potential impacts for teachers and students. By exploring the lived experiences, material conditions, political economies, and ideological conflicts of shared curricula environments for multiple stakeholders, this collection serves as a thoughtful interrogation of scalability in writing instruction.

In this collection, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, the contributors offer insights from theoretical, historical, and pedagogical lenses and these critical insights emerge out of their academic, scholarly, and personal experiences of teaching during crises. In some cases, authors have taught while battling COVID, and others have done so while addressing and acknowledging school-based violence. While some teach the analysis of the discourse of crisis, others critique the missteps of policy-making during calamity. More so, some authors examine the finesse of micro-teaching at emotional levels; others find the means to develop macro-structures of programmatic curriculum. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights the educational decision making that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students have faced at the turn of the millennium. Specifically, contributors to this collection offer a broad range of experiences, expertise, and engagement with pedagogy during emergencies that we currently face but also frame issues of emergencies that will inevitably challenge educators in the future.

We have developed this volume, Deep Reading, Deep Learning, as a companion to our 2017 NCTE book, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, which received the CCCC Outstanding Book Award in 2019 for Best Edited Collection. In this volume we address a range of social, ethical, and pedagogical issues that have emerged as essential concerns for teachers of reading and writing, especially those related to identity, culture, and positionality. This new volume emphasizes the broad question of equity and social justice in the acquisition and practice of literacy, and the multifaceted lived reality of positionality related to race, class, gender, disability, and language as experienced by students in the classroom.

In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the discipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book begins to fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims and character of antisemitism. Drawing upon rhetorical analysis, personal narrative, and original phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book illuminates the experiential, rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, exposes the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism, and gestures toward a future in which, through more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and students and better engage Jewish members of the discipline as accomplices in antiracism. "I take this book personally. Grayson’s theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes, and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imaginary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book—recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark reflection—and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It’s a powerful and vibrant contribution to our field."—Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities "In this timely and important monograph, Dr. Grayson adroitly explains the impact of antisemitism not only for rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars and students but also our contemporary moment. In lucid and engaging prose, she unpacks thousands of years of history and tropes, making this book a must-read for anyone engaged in antiracist work."—Janice W. Fernheimer, Zantker Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, University of Kentucky

In Antisemitism and the White Supremacist Imaginary: Conflations and Contradictions in Composition and Rhetoric, Mara Lee Grayson calls attention to the complicity of academic institutions and the discipline(s) of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies in the simultaneous perpetuation and denial of anti-Jewish racism. Despite the persistence of antisemitism and Christian hegemony in the United States and its academic institutions, and despite a growing body of antiracist and anti-oppressive scholarship, antisemitism remains largely unaddressed in disciplinary scholarship, curricula, and pedagogy. This book begins to fill that gap by exploring how the rhetoric through which Jewish identity is conceptualized and weaponized by the white supremacist imaginary essentializes Jewish identities and obscures the racist aims and character of antisemitism. Drawing upon rhetorical analysis, personal narrative, and original phenomenological research, Grayson highlights how deeply embedded antisemitic ideologies impact the lived experiences of Jewish teachers, students, and scholars, and perpetuate white supremacy. This book illuminates the experiential, rhetorical, historical, political, and racial dynamics of antisemitism, exposes the limitations of existing discourses of whiteness and (anti)racism, and gestures toward a future in which, through more nuanced and productive discourse, we can better support Jewish educators and students and better engage Jewish members of the discipline as accomplices in antiracism. "I take this book personally. Grayson’s theoretical framework, historical overview, personal anecdotes, and phenomenological research locate antisemitism nestled in the heart of the white supremacist imaginary. I felt such sadness, anger, and pain reading this book—recognizing myself as a Jew in its stark reflection—and yet her words also charge me, explicitly in my Jewishness, with the urgent need to join others in imagining a more just world through cooperative action and frank dialogue. It’s a powerful and vibrant contribution to our field."—Eli Goldblatt, Co-Author, with David Jolliffe, of Literacy as Conversation: Learning Networks in Urban and Rural Communities "In this timely and important monograph, Dr. Grayson adroitly explains the impact of antisemitism not only for rhetoric, composition, and writing scholars and students but also our contemporary moment. In lucid and engaging prose, she unpacks thousands of years of history and tropes, making this book a must-read for anyone engaged in antiracist work."—Janice W. Fernheimer, Zantker Professor of Jewish Studies, Professor of Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies, University of Kentucky

Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal examines WPA journeys and journeying.Designed for WPA graduate seminars and professional development workshops, this book addresses two questions:• How do people develop readiness to serve as WPAs?• How do experienced WPAs find or create renewal opportunities that help them move forward throughout their lives and careers?Authors address these questions from their sometimes-intersecting identities as BIPOC scholars, LGBTQ+ people, graduate students, and adjunct faculty, as well as early, mid-, and later-career WPAs.Authors draw on their experience teaching at a range of two- and four-year institutions to analyse the complexities, contingencies, and rewards of short and long-term WPA work. These scholars contend that understanding WPA "readiness" and "renewal" involves questioning inherited definitions of those terms and engaging in theorized, self-aware conversations that reflect, and reflect on, understudied fears and desires about WPA work from graduate preparation to preparing for leadership rotation and retirement.

We have developed this volume, Deep Reading, Deep Learning, as a companion to our 2017 NCTE book, Deep Reading: Teaching Reading in the Writing Classroom, which received the CCCC Outstanding Book Award in 2019 for Best Edited Collection. In this volume we address a range of social, ethical, and pedagogical issues that have emerged as essential concerns for teachers of reading and writing, especially those related to identity, culture, and positionality. This new volume emphasizes the broad question of equity and social justice in the acquisition and practice of literacy, and the multifaceted lived reality of positionality related to race, class, gender, disability, and language as experienced by students in the classroom.

Understanding WPA Readiness and Renewal examines WPA journeys and journeying.Designed for WPA graduate seminars and professional development workshops, this book addresses two questions:• How do people develop readiness to serve as WPAs?• How do experienced WPAs find or create renewal opportunities that help them move forward throughout their lives and careers?Authors address these questions from their sometimes-intersecting identities as BIPOC scholars, LGBTQ+ people, graduate students, and adjunct faculty, as well as early, mid-, and later-career WPAs.Authors draw on their experience teaching at a range of two- and four-year institutions to analyse the complexities, contingencies, and rewards of short and long-term WPA work. These scholars contend that understanding WPA "readiness" and "renewal" involves questioning inherited definitions of those terms and engaging in theorized, self-aware conversations that reflect, and reflect on, understudied fears and desires about WPA work from graduate preparation to preparing for leadership rotation and retirement.

In this collection, Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis: Emergent Teaching Through Emergencies, the contributors offer insights from theoretical, historical, and pedagogical lenses and these critical insights emerge out of their academic, scholarly, and personal experiences of teaching during crises. In some cases, authors have taught while battling COVID, and others have done so while addressing and acknowledging school-based violence. While some teach the analysis of the discourse of crisis, others critique the missteps of policy-making during calamity. More so, some authors examine the finesse of micro-teaching at emotional levels; others find the means to develop macro-structures of programmatic curriculum. Literacy and Learning in Times of Crisis highlights the educational decision making that educators have used to cope with the dilemmas that they and their students have faced at the turn of the millennium. Specifically, contributors to this collection offer a broad range of experiences, expertise, and engagement with pedagogy during emergencies that we currently face but also frame issues of emergencies that will inevitably challenge educators in the future.

Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett's Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy is an edited collection comprised of thirteen original chapters and two vital reprints of Moffett’s work that have been out of print for more than thirty years. All of the contributions in this volume are dedicated to pushing forward Moffett’s prescient ideas into the contemporary contexts of teaching, learning, and the language arts which inform current discussions of holistic education. The volume offers scholars, educational professionals, teachers, and graduate students of writing studies, rhetoric, composition, and English education a practical guide to understanding the theory, methodology, and praxis of James Moffett. This text is perfect for scholars at all levels who are focused on language learning, writing and composition, and mindfulness and spirituality in teaching and learning or teacher educators seeking inventive approaches to literacy learning which account for holistic conceptions of development and the theory and history of composition.The volume begins with an in-depth introduction to Moffett’s work for those new to Moffett studies and offers readers the tools to deepen or begin the study of Moffett’s ideas as well as resources for continuing that work beyond this volume. "No history of the National Writing Project, or of English Language Arts teaching more generally, would be complete without a rich engagement with the work and ideas of James Moffett. Written during the tumultuous 1960’s, Moffett’s central books, Teaching the Universe of Discourse and A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum, sparked a paradigm shift in how the profession came to understand the purpose and substance of teaching language and literacy. As current teachers grapple with another tumultuous time, Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett’s Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy is a book that will help them (re)discover the nurturing and humanistic underpinnings of their calling."—Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Executive Director, National Writing Project "This collection re-introduces a profoundly influential but largely forgotten voice in English education—especially writing instruction—to a generation that feels his influence in the very intellectual air we breathe, too often without knowing his name. James Moffett was at the molten center of political controversies over language, schooling, and censorship a generation ago that still inflame school board meetings and legislative battles today. Yet he was also a pioneer and prophet of the mindfulness turn in education and the broader culture that is powerfully alive in ways that he advanced from mid-career until his untimely death in 1996. The essays here (including his own, ‘Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation’) reintroduce and reinterpret him for us at a time when his voice of courage, comfort, and composure are urgently needed."—David R. Russell, Professor Emeritus, Iowa State University

Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett's Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy is an edited collection comprised of thirteen original chapters and two vital reprints of Moffett’s work that have been out of print for more than thirty years. All of the contributions in this volume are dedicated to pushing forward Moffett’s prescient ideas into the contemporary contexts of teaching, learning, and the language arts which inform current discussions of holistic education. The volume offers scholars, educational professionals, teachers, and graduate students of writing studies, rhetoric, composition, and English education a practical guide to understanding the theory, methodology, and praxis of James Moffett. This text is perfect for scholars at all levels who are focused on language learning, writing and composition, and mindfulness and spirituality in teaching and learning or teacher educators seeking inventive approaches to literacy learning which account for holistic conceptions of development and the theory and history of composition.The volume begins with an in-depth introduction to Moffett’s work for those new to Moffett studies and offers readers the tools to deepen or begin the study of Moffett’s ideas as well as resources for continuing that work beyond this volume. "No history of the National Writing Project, or of English Language Arts teaching more generally, would be complete without a rich engagement with the work and ideas of James Moffett. Written during the tumultuous 1960’s, Moffett’s central books, Teaching the Universe of Discourse and A Student-Centered Language Arts Curriculum, sparked a paradigm shift in how the profession came to understand the purpose and substance of teaching language and literacy. As current teachers grapple with another tumultuous time, Toward a Re-Emergence of James Moffett’s Mindful, Spiritual, and Student-Centered Pedagogy is a book that will help them (re)discover the nurturing and humanistic underpinnings of their calling."—Elyse Eidman-Aadahl, Executive Director, National Writing Project "This collection re-introduces a profoundly influential but largely forgotten voice in English education—especially writing instruction—to a generation that feels his influence in the very intellectual air we breathe, too often without knowing his name. James Moffett was at the molten center of political controversies over language, schooling, and censorship a generation ago that still inflame school board meetings and legislative battles today. Yet he was also a pioneer and prophet of the mindfulness turn in education and the broader culture that is powerfully alive in ways that he advanced from mid-career until his untimely death in 1996. The essays here (including his own, ‘Writing, Inner Speech, and Meditation’) reintroduce and reinterpret him for us at a time when his voice of courage, comfort, and composure are urgently needed."—David R. Russell, Professor Emeritus, Iowa State University

Basic Writing in the 21st Century offers a cutting-edge survey of basic writing practices, issues, and scholarship as well as a much-needed resource for all writing instructors and scholars. The book’s thirty-three original essays—written by emerging scholars, mid-career professionals, and established and award-winning scholars—offer rich, varied discussions of concerns that typically receive far too little attention in basic writing as well as writing studies altogether. Topics include ableism and accessibility, queer perspectives on teaching and learning, translingualism, teaching multilingual writers, and the impact of institutional landscapes on teaching and learning. Bookended by intriguing overviews of legacy scholars’ contributions and compelling, experience-based teaching/learning narratives, this truly significant book represents contemporary practices and current perspectives while also being certain to stand the test of time. Timely and thought-provoking. This collection reframes the formative era of basic writing scholarship within a context of critique, revision, and expansion. It shows why basic writing inquiry—and the committed scholars it attracts—will always be the lifeblood of our field. And it serves as a guidebook for a new generation of teachers and scholars who want to understand how to make a difference. — Deborah Brandt, Professor Emerita of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison The breadth of Basic Writing in the 21st Century is breathtaking. The authors span the history and currency of basic writing, oldtimers to relative newcomers, their scholarship, research, pedagogy, and personal stories: history, theory, philosophy, politics (from the politics we carry in ourselves, from the world to the small, rural college, university to community college), the pedagogies that have stood the tests of time to pedagogies that tell of these times, tools for the classroom (physical and digital). Fifty years of basic writing in one collection, fifty years of continuous struggle to keep the foot in the institutional door. This is a critically important collection. — Victor Villanueva, Regents Professor & Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts, Washington State University

Basic Writing in the 21st Century offers a cutting-edge survey of basic writing practices, issues, and scholarship as well as a much-needed resource for all writing instructors and scholars. The book’s thirty-three original essays—written by emerging scholars, mid-career professionals, and established and award-winning scholars—offer rich, varied discussions of concerns that typically receive far too little attention in basic writing as well as writing studies altogether. Topics include ableism and accessibility, queer perspectives on teaching and learning, translingualism, teaching multilingual writers, and the impact of institutional landscapes on teaching and learning. Bookended by intriguing overviews of legacy scholars’ contributions and compelling, experience-based teaching/learning narratives, this truly significant book represents contemporary practices and current perspectives while also being certain to stand the test of time. Timely and thought-provoking. This collection reframes the formative era of basic writing scholarship within a context of critique, revision, and expansion. It shows why basic writing inquiry—and the committed scholars it attracts—will always be the lifeblood of our field. And it serves as a guidebook for a new generation of teachers and scholars who want to understand how to make a difference. — Deborah Brandt, Professor Emerita of English, University of Wisconsin-Madison The breadth of Basic Writing in the 21st Century is breathtaking. The authors span the history and currency of basic writing, oldtimers to relative newcomers, their scholarship, research, pedagogy, and personal stories: history, theory, philosophy, politics (from the politics we carry in ourselves, from the world to the small, rural college, university to community college), the pedagogies that have stood the tests of time to pedagogies that tell of these times, tools for the classroom (physical and digital). Fifty years of basic writing in one collection, fifty years of continuous struggle to keep the foot in the institutional door. This is a critically important collection. — Victor Villanueva, Regents Professor & Edward R. Meyer Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts, Washington State University

Seeking Our Places: Innovations in Creative Writing Studies Research, Methodologies, and Practices contends that as the field of Creative Writing Studies continues to shape its disciplinary identity within the larger discipline of Writing Studies, so too must we continue to theorize new methods and methodologies for examining creative writing as action, artifact, and socio-material phenomenon. In moving toward more Writing Studies based methodologies, Seeking Our Places argues that it is in theorizing, practicing, and reflecting on these methodologies inflected through the act of creative writing that we may discover new ways of regarding creative writing and producing new insights into the field of Creative Writing Studies.

This collection of essays by an award winning scholar and poet will appeal to readers from many areas of English, with particular appeal to grad students preparing to teach writing courses."As an admirer of Eli Goldblatt’s original, groundbreaking, and beautifully crafted written work in composition, I think this focused book of his collected essays will be extremely compelling reading for people in this field."—Russel Durst, Professor, University of Cincinnati"Goldblatt’s perspective, his embeddedness in his place, community, and culture, and his range of topical interests is truly unique. He is a teacher, poet, essayist, activist, literacy scholar, and publisher of great importance. I don’t know anyone else whose work can simultaneously occupy so many vantage points so deeply and well."—Paula Mathieu, Associate Professor, Boston College