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Thursday, Oct. 25
Special Event 4:00pm-6:00pm MU 202 Alumni Lounge

Rhetorically Incorrect: A Roundtable on Controversial Issues in Writing

Keynote Address
Should Writing Be Studied?: The Problem of the Pedagogical Imperative and Curriculum Design
John Trimbur (Worcester Polytechnic Institute)

Session I  10:30-noon
Ia. Panel: A Writing Major: Re-Unifying the Study of Language and Textual Production MU 209 Yavapai
Maureen A. Mathison (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT) "Unifying the Disparate Curriculum"
Doug Downs (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT) "Whither the First-Year Composition Course in a Writing Major?"
Laura Card (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT) "Redressing the Fragmentation of Writing: The Undergraduate Major"

Ib. Reforming Writing: Institution, Curriculum, and Classroom MU 213 Santa Cruz
Philip Gaines (Montana State University, Bozeman MT) "No-Contact Zone: Developing Multicultural Awareness in the Culturally Homogeneous Composition Classroom
David Overbey (Kent State University, Kent OH) "Potential Incompatabilities Between the Value of Revision and the Value of Circulation in the Teaching of Writing
Scott Stevens (California State University, Fresno CA) & Kim Donehower (California State University, Fresno CA) "Getting Out of the Remediation Business"
Chair: Ebru Erdem (Arizona State University)

Ic. Making and Breaking Laws and Literacies MU 215 Pinal
Melissa J. Fiesta (California State University, Long Beach CA) "A Rhetoric for an Emergent Critical Literacy: Lydia Maria Child's Pedagogy for Freed Slaves"
Barbara Little Liu (Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic CT) "Civil Disobedience: How Studying Genre Rebels Can Make Students Better Writers"
Carol Smith (Fort Lewis College, Durango CO) Reflections on the Colorado Legislature’s Definition of Academic Literacy"
Chair: Maire Simington (Arizona State University)

Id. Panel: Hegemania, or, the Pedagogical Opportunities and Obstacles of Public Issues in the Composition Classroom MU 211 Yuma
Diane Gruber (Arizona State University West, Phoenix AZ)
Alisa Messer (City College of San Francisco CA)
Michael Stancliff (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)

Ie. Missionary Myopia: What We Don't See is What We Get MU 206 Chrysocolla
Richard Bullock (Wright State University, Dayton OH) "Avoiding the Missionary Position: Composition Studies and Its Relation to Secondary Education"
William Degenaro (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ) "What Rhet-Comp Historians Could Learn in the Junior College Archives"
Toby Widdicombe (University of Alaska, Anchorage AK) "Who Put the Ass in Assessment? Or, Is There Value in Evaluation?"
Chair: Lauren Yena (Arizona State University)

Lunch Break  noon-1:30

Session II  1:30-3:00
IIa. Panel: Grappling with Status: Defining the Discipline of Professional/Technical Communication MU 209 Yavapai
Susan Thomas (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) "A Family Tree: Prof/Tech Comm. and Social Epistemic Rhetoric"
Michelle Eble (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) "Straddling Institutional Walls: Service Classes? Service Learning? Redirecting Disciplines?"
Robin Breault (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) "Beyond the Tower: The Discipline of Professional/Technical Communication and Community Action Projects"

IIb. What do Students have to do with Writing Instruction? MU 215 Pinal
Laurie Bower (University of Nevada, Reno NV) "Reciprocal Reflection in the Basic Writing Classroom"
Melody L. Kilcrease (San Diego State University, San Diego CA) "Literacy as Rhetorical Flexibility: Writing Our Way Into Communities of Practice"
Madeleine Picciotto (University of California, San Diego) "Writing and Re-Entry: Composition and Community College Transfer Students"
Chair: Laura Nutten (Arizona State University)

IIc. Literacy Beyond the Pale: Redefining Text and Significance MU 211 Yuma
Kirk Branch (University of Kansas, Lawrence KS) "Suspect Subject: Teaching Writing in Jail"
Maureen Daly Goggin (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) "'As I Cannot Write': (Re)Writing the Feminine with Needle and Thread"
Elenore Long (Bay Path College, Longmeadow MA) "Scaffolding Rhetorical Instruction in Upper-Division Experiential Learning Projects: The Case of The French Show with Pierrot"
Chair: Lisa Rodrigue (Arizona State University)

IId. Workplace Discourses and Writing Technologies MU 213 Santa Cruz
Allene Cooper (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) "Writing for Non-Profit Organizations: How Is It Different?"
Loel Kim (University of Memphis, Memphis TN) "Hyperlinked Frameworks for Learning to Write Technical Documentation"
Chair: Lynette Austin (Arizona State University)

Session III  3:15-4:45
IIIa. Roundtable: Feminist Theories, Feminist Practices: Possibilities, Problems, and Future Directions MU 209 Yavapai
Sibylle Gruber (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Jean Boreen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Laura Gray-Rosendale (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Colleen Carscallen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)

IIIb. What Does Rhetoric Have to do With Writing? Three Perspectives MU 213 Santa Cruz
Joanne Munroe (Whatcom Community College, Bellingham WA) "Mathematical Means, Rhetorical Modes and the Vanishing 'Snow' man: How the Act of Writing Improves Mathematical Reasoning"
James Procaccini (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) "Imaginative Invention: Vico's Potential For Rhetoric and Writing"
Mark T. Williams (California State University, Long Beach CA) "ReOrdering Rhetorical Contexts with Burke's Terms for Order"
Chair: Lisa A. Makros (Arizona State University)

IIIc. Writing Instruction and Computer Technologies: What's at Stake? MU 215 Pinal
Timothy D. Ray (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) "Plugged into Pedagogy: An Exploration of Teaching Practices in 'Hybrid' Writing Courses"
Barbara Sitko (Washington State University, Pullman, WA) and Cindy Wambeam (Washington State University, Pullman, WA) "Why Teach Writing With Computers"
Chair: Susan K. Miller (Arizona State University)

IIId. If We Build it, Will They Come? Challenging the Status Quo of Writing Program Curricula MU 211 Yuma
Richard C. Gebhardt (Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green OH) "Argument’s Role in Causing (and Healing?) Splits between Composition and Literature"
Stacia Dunn Neeley (TCU, Forth Worth TX) "Writing a Rhetorical Revision of the Composition Course"
Peter Vandenberg (DePaul University, Chicago IL) and Roger Graves (DePaul University, Chicago IL) "What Time Is It? Critical Mass, Technology, and the Coming Age of the Writing Major"
Chair: Jennifer Mattix (Arizona State University)

Session IV  9:00-10:30
IVa. Panel: Responding to Authority's Challenges: Teaching and Learning Masterful Gestures MU 209 Yavapai
Thomas P. Miller (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ) "Teaching Deportment"
Michael Robinson (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ) "From Formal Parody to Romantic Comedy"
Jane E. Hindman (San Diego State University, San Diego CA) "The Proper Place of Parody in the Classroom"

IVb. Panel: Why Hasn’t the “Savior” Come? Or How a Failed Job Search Led to the Reorganization of UNLV’s Composition Program MU 213 Santa Cruz
Ed Nagelhout (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)
Jeff Jablonski (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)
Leon Coburn (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)

IVc. Roundtable: Re-Inventing the University: The Multiple Literacies of TA Training and Development MU 215 Pinal
Morgan Gresham (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Sandi Reynolds (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Becky Adams (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Angela Petit (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Robert Burton (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)

IVd. What is Professional/Technical Writing? Old Challenges and New Directions MU 211 Yuma
Michael S. Knievel (Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX) "The Humanistic and the Technical: Considering the Role of Professional Writing in English Studies and the Humanities"
George Pullman (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) "Gone the way of the Oldsmobile?"
Patti Wojahn (New Mexico State University, Las Cruces NM) "The Rhetoric of Interaction: The Value of Movin’ On Out of Discourse Communities"
Chair: Loise Rodriguez-Connal (Arizona State University)

Session V  10:45-12:15
Va. Roundtable: The Rhetoric of Writing Programs: Definitions of Writing and their Implications for Writing Instruction and Administration MU 209 Yavapai
Sonia Apgar Begert (Olympic College, Bremerton WA)
Anis Bawarshi (University of Washington, Seattle WA)
Kirk Branch (University of Kansas, Lawrence KS)
Ann Dobyns (University of Denver, Denver CO)
Kim Emmons (University of Washington, Seattle WA)
Susan Miller (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT)

Vb. Panel: Examining Cultural Studies’ Pedagogy Through its Own Critical Lens MU 213 Santa Cruz
Julia Courtney (Purdue University, Lafayette IN) "'What’s this have to do with Writing?': Re-thinking Inquiry, Ideology, and the University in First Year Composition Classes"
Julia Romberger (Purdue University, Lafayette IN) "Negotiating the Spectrum: A Critical Examination of the Constructed Subjectivities in Cultural Studies Pedagogies"
Jessie Kapper (Purdue University, Lafayette IN) "Cultural Studies Impairing Success?: A Call for Cross-Cultural References"

Vc. Panel: "Wild Strategery": New Diagrams of Control and Assessment in Postmodern Writing Classrooms MU 215 Pinal
Byron Hawk (George Mason University) "The 3Cs--Creed, Code, and Cult: Generational Difference in the Teaching Scene"
Lorie J. Goodman (Pepperdine University, Malibu CA) "Literacy Unleashed"
Thomas J. Rickert (Western Oregon University, Salem OR) "'Can't You Read the Signs?': Post-Process Grading in the Society of Control"

Vd. What do TAs Need to Know About Teaching Writing, and Why do They Need to Know it? MU 211 Yuma
Kimberly Bell (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) and Lynee Lewis Gaillet (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA) "Literacy and TA Training, or, What Do Literature-Trained TAs Really Need to Know About Rhet/Comp to Teach First-Year Writing?"
Jeanne Dugan (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) and Sarah Duerden (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ) "Seeking a Philosopher’s Stone and Finding a Goblet of Fire: How Can New TA Training Be More Effective?"
Chair: Amy D. Ruzycki-Shinabarger (Arizona State University)

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Should Writing Be Studied?: The Problem of the Pedagogical Imperative and Curriculum Design--John Trimbur (Worcester Polytechnic University)

This talk seeks to recast the old problem "can writing be taught?" by asking not just whether writing is an art or a craft or whether students learn to write best by immersion or direct instruction but by asking more broadly whether writing is, or should be, an academic subject with legitimate claims to intellectual inquiry. At present, rhetoric and composition seems to be divided on the question of whether writing should be studied, torn between a deeply felt commitment to serving student needs and a desire to constitute and disseminate its own authoritative bodies of knowledge. I want to explore the tensions between the pedagogical imperative that has historically defined our work and more recent initiatives to imagine writing as a distinct undergraduate field of study. How our writing programs and pedagogical practices negotiate these tensions will depend, I think, on how we answer the question posed by this conference, namely "what is writing?"

Ia. Panel: A Writing Major: Re-Unifying the Study of Language and Textual Production

Maureen A. Mathison (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT)
Doug Downs (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT)
Laura Card (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT)

This panel explores what it would mean to bring together prior subjects relating to language with contemporary ones to design a writing major that would stand on its own. In conjunction, we examine the historical background that led to the division of the study of language, of which writing was a component. We argue that the past configuration of education, while imperfect, was in many ways conceptually better than the current configuration of writing-- housed primarily in English Departments. The first paper details the relevant history and its implications for today's configuration and offers a foundation for a more contemporary and useful major in writing. The second paper examines the relevance of the first-year writing course as it generally stands in the general education curriculum today, and offers a course more rhetorically powerful that can serve as an introductory course. Finally, the third paper takes up after the second and completes a curriculum of writing instruction that is based on particular classical principles with contemporary leanings.

Unifying the Disparate Curriculum - Maureen Mathison
In her bibliographic essay, Maureen Daly Goggin (1999) reminds us of the common roots of literature, speech communication, linguistics, rhetoric/composition, and creative writing. While they were at one time housed in the same department, English Studies, they are generally considered independent of each other today, and generally taught as if one had no or very little relationship to the other (with the exception of rhetoric /composition with literature). They are, however, conceptually compatible in the sense that each represents some aspect of language in use. Drawing from David Fleming's notion of rhetorical education (1998), this panelist argues that a major in writing could once again bring together what are currently disparate subject areas to create a major that would emphasize the teaching and learning of writing as part of a larger rhetorical education.

Whither the First-Year Composition Course in a Writing Major? - Douglas Downs
In a curriculum dedicated to re-unifying the fragmented fields that study language use in society, the first-year writing course need not be the standard exercise in futility of teaching all writing to all students (or, teaching no writing to all students). The course becomes instead an introduction to language use and textual production. Leaving genre instruction to dedicated classes (described by the third panelist), the first-year composition course serves as a doorway to theoretical topics in the writing major. The course will be intensive in rhetorical theory, and also give students glimpses into theories, questions, and implications of epistemology and constructivism, intertextuality, critical reading and reception theory, linguistics, literacy (including information literacy), and author-ity. While students will still gain exposure to concepts of academic argument and writing that so often drive FYC courses, this focus will no longer be the primary purpose of the course.

Redressing the Fragmentation of Writing: The Undergraduate Major - Laura Card
The third panelist explores the aims and curriculum of an undergraduate writing major. Beyond the first year course, the writing major will educate students to write in appropriate ways and forms to specific audiences. This education will develop in students both habits of mind and skills that will not only inform their writing, but also open possibilities for future employment (teachers, technical writers, creative writers, etc.) and graduate studies (English, writing, law, history, social sciences, etc.). Skills will be developed by classes in grammar, linguistics, and genre-based writing, i.e., academic composition, creative writing, writing in various disciplines, electronic publishing and journalism. Theory-based classes, such as rhetoric, argument and literary criticism, will create dispositions toward disciplined thought processes necessary to communicate well in a written medium. Such a major would most likely fill 40-50 hours out of the normal 120 hours required for graduation with an undergraduate degree. After the general education requirements are met, most writing majors will then have room for one and possibly two minors that would broaden their experience and further enhance their writing abilities. An added bonus will be that because the classes for the major come from so many of the areas that have fragmented from language study, faculty and students will be re-united under the umbrella of a common discipline.
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Ib. Reforming Writing: Institution, Curriculum, and Classroom

No-Contact Zone: Developing Multicultural Awareness in the Culturally Homogeneous Composition Classroom--Philip Gaines (Montana State University, Bozeman MT)
Within the field of composition studies, the implications of multiculturality for the dynamics of the writing classroom have received considerable attention. A classic exemplar of research in this area is Mary Louise Pratt’s Arts of the Contact Zone, which sees the classroom as a space for the strategic interplay of cultures--enacted by the students themselves--providing the context for composition. Following Pratt’s lead, teacher-scholars have explored the implications of such cultural "contact zones" for composition theory and pedagogy.

Implementing a multicultural component in the classroom has generally assumed and exploited the ethnic diversity represented by the student population. Crucially, however, many colleges and universities in the U.S. are not characterized by this degree of diversity, having instead student populations of which over 90% are white. This demographic of homogeneity virtually assures substantial ethnic uniformity in such university classrooms. How is multicultural awareness developed in these contexts? The proposed presentation addresses this question.

In order to explore a pedagogical strategy for developing multicultural awareness in culturally homogeneous classrooms, an intermediate composition course entitled "Writing about Gangs" was developed. The course exemplifies a pedagogical approach which seeks to a create a discourse for composition that emerges not from actual cross-cultural contact but rather from students’ mediation of an interaction between texts focusing on one aspect of cross-cultural exploration--an approach that has not been adequately treated in the literature of composition theory and pedagogy.

Reading, discussion, presentations, and writing assignments focus on the theme of inner-city ethnic gangs. The course provides students an intertextual encounter with a social and cultural setting foreign to virtually all of them. The semester’s readings include 1) an overview of the gang situation in the U.S., 2) summaries of prevailing sociological theories of deviance which seek to account for gangs, 3) sociological field research on inner-city youth gangs, 4) published interviews with gang members, 5) an autobiographical account of gang life, and 6) articles from a daily newspaper about a city’s gang situation. Writing assignments call upon students to critique theory through the application of field research findings; argue, on the basis of theory and research, how a variety of inner-city conditions might lead to a youth’s gang involvement; and contribute to a community’s newspaper "conversation" about the gang issue. The final paper asks students to discuss how the course readings, discussion, and writing assignments influenced their perspective on youths who become involved in gangs. Research questions dealt with in the presentation include:

1. Is there evidence that suggests a development in the sophistication of students’ understanding of the some of the complex issues involving inner-city ethnic youth gangs?

2. Has there been an observable shift in students’ perspectives on inner-city youth gang members and, if so, how has this shift constituted an increase in multicultural awareness?

3. Does the presentation of a difficult and unfamiliar cross-cultural context through reading, discussion, and writing appear to have been an effective mode of learning?

The presentation concludes with a discussion of the generally positive findings of this experiment and the suggestion of implications for curricular reform in similar institutional contexts.

Potential incompatibilities between the value of revision and the value of circulation in the teaching of writing--David Overbey (Kent State University, Kent OH)
"I like the gun to the head thing."--Interview with a scholar after presenting a conference paper, Fall 98

This paper will pose the problem that the portfolio method of teaching writing--allowing students to write multiple drafts of essays--may be incompatible with teaching students that writing is valuable because of its circulation and distribution (Trimbur 2000).

Trimbur's argument that "the circulation of writing should figure much more prominently in writing instruction" asks teachers and scholars to understand that the value of importance of writing correspond to its capacity to promote or challenge social values, which it can do only through its distribution and circulation. The delivery of writing in contemporary society, Trimbur explains, is not just "a technical aspect of discourse" but also "ethical and political." Delivery depends on the circulation of writing, and the circulation of writing acts as a crucial agent of modern "democratic revolutions."

I argue that to teach students about the importance of the circulation of writing, and more specifically to represent writing as something that gains its value through its distribution, is potentially incompatible with revisionist pedagogy, because writing must be produced before it can be distributed, and the portfolio approach to teaching writing may have the tendency to misrepresent writing to students as something that can be worked on indefinitely.

As the quotation from the interview with a scholar at the top illustrates, writers in the real world not only work under but also learn to thrive on deadlines. An attorney must have a mistake-free document written by a certain court date in order to file a motion or a lawsuit. A successful sports journalist has to write a satisfactory story about a game within hours after its completion, not over the course of a semester.

So the question becomes, to what extent does giving students opportunities to re-write papers become incompatible with the pedagogical recommendations Trimbur makes about the teaching of the circulation of writing? Are teachers undermining the importance of producing written texts for distribution and circulation when they promote the idea that writing can be revised again and again? Do students suffer unknowingly by not having a finish line in front of them when they write? And to what extent does the portfolio approach misrepresent writing--and thereby mislead students about writing--by ignoring that much real-world writing must be done the best it can be without the benefit of prolonged reflection and revision? This paper will invite the scholarly community to ponder these questions, and offer possible solutions.

Getting Out of the Remediation Business--Scott Stevens (California State University, Fresno CA), Kim Donehower (California State University, Fresno CA)
Some time ago David Bartholomae proposed that basic writing programs create basic writers as much as they help underprepared students become more accomplished. It was a radical claim, but one that had little impact on the ingrained institutional treatment of beginning writers. Later experiments such as Mary Soliday's at CUNY and Rhonda Grego and Jenny Thompson's at South Carolina challenged the curricular space reserved for the underprepared, arguing instead that new models for helping students deemed "unready" needed to be found.

The announcement by the California State University trustees that remediation would be reduced to ten percent by 2007 has created uncharacteristic liberty in the curricular response to the "problem" of underprepared students. We decided to take advantage of this moment to study what it might mean to get out of the remediation business altogether.

This ninety-minute roundtable discussion presents the results of an experiment at California State University, Fresno, to streamline the remedial writing sequence by placing students requiring remediation directly into the freshman composition course with a mandatory supplemental workshop. The results of this study raise intriguing questions about the inadequacy of institutional responses to the perceived remediation "crisis."

As part of a tri-campus research project with CSU, Chico, and CSU, Sacramento, conducted during the 2000-2001 academic year, 200 CSUF students who would normally have to take a two-semester composition sequence (the first course of which bears no credit) were instead enrolled directly into the freshman composition course with a mandatory, one-credit, two-hour-per-week supplemental workshop. The workshop curriculum was designed to address the perceived needs of these "remedial" writers.

Preliminary results from the first semester of the study show these "remedial" students able to pass the freshman composition course with supplemental help at only a slightly lower percentage than the English 1 pass rate for non-remedial students (81.3% passing vs. 85.1%). In addition, the retention rate for these "remedial" students was significantly higher than that of students enrolled in the two-course remediation sequence, and slightly higher than that of non-remedial students enrolled in the freshman composition course.

These results, as well as data on students' relationships with reading and writing collected via surveys and interviews, raises provocative questions for discussion:

· Can placement mechanisms ever precisely determine what students need and why?
· To what extent do placement mechanisms measure issues of affect and attitude rather than literacy abilities?
· If students aren't marked as remedial and non-remedial, would teachers recognize a difference?
· How long does remediation need to take?
· What issues most need to be addressed in remediation?
· What is the link between approaches to remediation and retention?
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Ic. Making and Breaking Laws and Literacies

A Rhetoric for an Emergent Critical Literacy: Lydia Maria Child's Pedagogy for Freed Slaves--Melissa J. Fiesta (California State University, Long Beach CA)
The recently published The Literacy Connection (1999) offers several important articulations of literacy that we as both rhetoricians and compositionists may effectively apply to our praxis. In his chapter "Emergent Critical Literacy: A Historical Perspective on Western Literate Practices," Jay L. Gordon defines critical literacy "as the ability to apply both reading and writing skills to important tasks, decisions, and processes, both public and private" (2). "Emergent" critical literacy refers "to a moment or interval during which a society finds more and more of its members acquiring critical literacy" (2). Gordon identifies the 19th century American South as one such historical moment. He uses this historical moment to further question whether and when critical literacy results in emancipation: "Nevertheless, it would be misleading to suggest that literacy has not been at all emancipatory for African Americans. Some slaves profited from their literacy by acquiring positions as artisans and mechanics, which could substantially improve their social standing and well-being" (15). He suggests "the overall benefits of critical literacy" outweigh the frustration of individuals who may not be able to immediately benefit from critical literacy (17). While individuals may not experience a more just society in their lifetimes, critical literacy may help individuals to revision their society and may then ultimately result in a collective realization of a more just society for future generations. Gordon admits, however, that his historical survey of critical literacy is "derivative" (2).

The most radical of the rhetorics widely disseminated to the common schools for freed slaves in the Southern United States after the Civil War, Lydia Maria Child's The Freedman's Book, supports Gordon's conclusions. This twenty-minute presentation considers how such significant archival material can inform our praxis in rhetoric and composition and help us to better understand the literacies we teach. I will use Child's pedagogy to offer provisional answers to the questions: What is literacy? What has literacy been in particular historical moments? What kind(s) of literacy do we in the field of rhetoric and composition seek to teach in this historical moment? What historical moments can we use to establish important connections between the histories of rhetoric and the histories of literacy? Why might we want to establish these connections?

Civil Disobedience: How Studying Genre Rebels Can Make Students Better Writers--Barbara Little Liu (Eastern Connecticut State University, Willimantic CT)
Is literacy just about knowing the rules? Or is it also about knowing when to break them? Is genre merely a construct of previously established rhetorical conventions? Or is it also the opportunities each situation affords for innovation? This presentation will argue that being prepared to self-consciously and purposefully break the rules is as important to writers as knowing the rules in the first place.

In redefining genre as "social action," Carolyn Miller argued that rhetors examine the nature of a rhetorical situation--both those elements that reoccur from one generic instance to another and those that are unique to each instance--in order to understand the constraints that limit an individual writer's rhetorical response and the opportunities for innovation that may empower that same writer. Thus, writing becomes an act of recognizing and adhering to elements of a prescribed form, while also making key decisions about the shaping of a unique, individual text that fully and persuasively addresses the writer's own view of the situation and his own call to write (to borrow Trimbur's term).

Such an understanding of genre suggests that writers should learn not only how to divine the rules and constraints within an established genre but also the choices available to them for change and innovation. While much writing instruction certainly focuses on the first half of the generic equation--the development, understanding, and appropriateness of constraints--much less time seems to be spent on the second half--the flexibility of genres and the need to bend and sometimes break generic rules.

In this presentation, I propose exposing student writers to the work of "experimental" writers who purposely resist, bend, and juggle generic conventions. I will show how the work of such writers as sociologist Laurel Richardson and literary critic Marianna Torgovnick is especially useful for writing instruction since most of these writers not only publish work that bends and subverts generic conventions but also publish explanations and justifications of their writing choices.

Students can read the work of such writers and read what they have written about their lives as writers. This exposure to the work of experimental writers can provide deep insights into the ways in which writers can import practices from one genre to serve specific purposes in another. It can also help students understand that writing is always a matter of making purposeful choices and that a writer's choice to resist generic expectations involves an assessment of both safety and risk. These understandings can then better prepare students to make their own critical writing choices.

Reflections on the Colorado Legislature’s Definition of Academic Literacy--Carol Smith (Fort Lewis College, Durango CO)
A law passed last year by the Colorado Legislature requires colleges and universities to assess all freshmen upon matriculation to determine if they are “Ready and Able” for college reading, writing and mathematics. If students are not “ready and able” they are “required” to remediate themselves by the end of their freshman year (although the penalties for not doing so are not clear). The “ready and able” terminology comes from a pamphlet of that name developed by staff at the Colorado Commission of Higher Education to help high school students envision the expectations of college professors. According to the pamphlet, the expectation statements were developed from an analysis of syllabi and assignments used at Colorado colleges and universities. While each college and university was invited to develop a plan to operationalize the “ready and able” standards, it seems increasingly apparent that the Colorado Commission of Higher Education will be identifying a statewide cutoff score, most likely based on ACT scores.

Our Writing Program faculty are outraged by this legislation, but should we be? The excerpt from Peter Vandenberg included in the call for papers is directly on point. Through placement, we have “routinely hierarchized” our freshmen. Should we be outraged that the legislature has decided that’s a good idea? Through placement, we have enforced our “conception of textual literacy.” Is the legislature’s conception really all that different than our own? In this paper, I reflect on these disturbing insights and other issues raised by considering the relationship between the legislature’s definitions of literacy and those embedded in our placement and instructional practices.
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Id. Panel: Hegemania, or, the Pedagogical Opportunities and Obstacles of Public Issues in the Composition Classroom

Panel: Hegemania, or, the Pedagogical Opportunities and Obstacles of Public Issues in the Composition Classroom--Diane Gruber (Arizona State University West, Phoenix AZ), Alisa Messer (City College of San Francisco CA), Michael Stancliff (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)
We define "hegemania" as the zealous consensuses that quickly arise in many classroom discussions of public issues.  We explore this phenomenon and argue that it is at once the greatest barrier and best opportunity for instructors who teach writing in the context of public cultures. Our panel offers as an opportunity to discuss strategies of negotiating this productive contradiction.
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Ie. Missionary Myopia: What We Don't See is What We Get

Avoiding the Missionary Position: Composition Studies and Its Relation to Secondary Education--Richard Bullock (Wright State University, Dayton OH)
When the term “composition studies” comes up, the usual implication is that it refers to college-level writing, writers, and scholars. Indeed, the preeminent journal in the field is College Composition and Communication, and the history of the discipline shows that it developed primarily in college English departments and specifically in first-year writing programs. This situatedness, however, leads us to think, speak, and teach in ways that too often enact a discipline-specific “island mentality”: students, fresh, new, and more or less blank, drift up on our shores, and we do things to them before loading them on boats and sending them off to their next destination. Where they came from, what they bring with them, how their pasts influence their present is too often left unexamined: as Tom Lehrer sang of Werner von Braun, “That’s not my department.”

In this paper, I want to argue that our disciplinary myopia not only hurts the discipline but hurts our students in concrete, curricular ways. Many placement procedures effectively deny students’ histories as writers and denigrate their previous educations, as do the “developmental,” “remedial,” or “basic” writing courses into which they are placed. Textbooks regularly assume that students are blank slates, compressing—as do most Guides to Writing—James Moffett’s developmental scheme, meant to be worked out over an entire school career, into a single term. And curriculums often follow that same scheme, beginning with the personal narrative as if students never before encountered stories.

Professionally, we too often write for one another—and “one another” is defined as “college professors and graduate students.” Aside from summer forays into National Writing Projects or similar programs, we teach first-year students, majors, and graduate students, too often leaving future teachers in the hands of English Education specialists who are somehow not fully “us.” If we do venture into schools to do in-service projects, our role is too often that of the Visiting Eminence, delivering sermons and handing out T shirts to the bare-breasted natives as we bring civilization by declaiming the sins of the five-paragraph theme (which is still very much with us). In the world of education, we like to think of ourselves as the sophisticated cosmopolites, but statistically, we’re hicks.

Ultimately, I see this paper as both an analysis of this relationship between college composition and primary/middle/secondary English/Language Arts education and as a call to change that relationship. Drawing on my experience as a writing program director, a coordinator of two summer programs for teachers, editor of two books of essays by primary and secondary English teachers, and most recently a member of my village’s school board, I plan to explore the ways in which college writing instruction needs to enrich and be enriched by interactions with other teachers of writing, acknowledging along the way activities such as Directed Self-Placement, various Stretch programs, and certain college writing assignments that honor the lives students have led before coming to us.

What Rhet-Comp Historians Could Learn in the Junior College Archives--William Degenaro (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ)
Historians of rhetoric and composition have documented the role that writing instruction has played in "gatekeeping" less prepared students. Sharon Crowley, Thomas P. Miller, and James Berlin have narrated the birth of composition at Harvard as a form of assessment which served the ideological function of identifying "remedial students" on one hand and "real Harvard men" on the other. These critical histories have helped the field to historicize first-year composition, college remediation, and writing assessment and by extension make arguments for more ethical administration of writing programs. For those scholars and teachers with liberatory and democratic agendas, the critical history of composition has proven valuable in narrating where compositionists came from and where compositionists hope to go as a force within higher education.

The history of the two-year college (called "junior college" in its early years) follows a remarkably similar trajectory as the history of composition. Both are institutions which at once serve egalitarian and gatekeeping goals. Historians of rhetoric and composition interested in how higher education has treated less-prepared students ought to listen to what the "junior college archives" tell us about higher education in the twentieth century. Just as the birth of composition involved the attempt to protect higher education from encroachment by those unworthy of elite institutions, so too did the two-year college. William Rainey Harper, the founding president of the University of Chicago, started the first two-year college in Joliet, Illinois, in 1901 as part of a larger scheme to eradicate all lower-division coursework from research universities. The new "junior college" was intended to be a proving ground for students who desired a baccalaureate degree. The best and brightest (often defined as those who spoke and wrote dominant dialect and adhered to the various linguistic and cultural niceties of the middle-class) could continue while the less-prepared had their ambition managed and "cooled out" by guidance councilors and curriculum builders.

Historians in the field of rhetoric and composition have ignored the archives of data that two-year colleges provide and have by extension neglected a crucial aspect of how American higher education changed at the dawn of the twentieth century. As stated, those historians who see their historical narratives as liberatory praxis should take note of this historical moment. So, too, should those interested in the implications of universities as centers of research as well as those interested in historicizing remediation and working-class education. In my presentation, I will sketch the connections between these two educational movements and outline what my historical project in the two-year college archives can teach historians in our field.

Who Put the Ass in Assessment? Or, Is There Value in Evaluation?--Toby Widdicombe (University of Alaska, Anchorage AK)
None would deny the ubiquity of assessment in American education. In this age of student as consumer, it has become increasingly vital that the customers get value for money. Few would dispute assessment’s theoretical value. Isn’t it essential that outcomes be demonstrated as effective?
What I would dispute, however, is assessment’s value as it is frequently carried on today in the two settings with which I am familiar: high schools and colleges. I will illustrate my argument with reference to four examples from my teaching and administrative experience over more than 20 years.

Example 1: The Subject A Exam (UCSB in the mid 1980’s)
Here my focus will be on the dangers of inadequate testing instruments and insufficient grader preparation.

Example 2: The ENFI Project (NYIT in the early 1990’s)
Here my focus will be on the dangers of unrealistic project timelines and subjective assessment mechanisms.

Example 3: Accreditation (UAA in 2000)
Here my focus will be on the dangers of top-down initiatives and ends-oriented thinking.

Example 4: The High School Exit Exam (Anchorage in 2002)
Here my focus will be on the dangers of mixing politics with assessment.

Conclusion
I’ll sketch out what I see as the considerable value of assessment and the minimum requirements for its success.
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IIa. Panel: Grappling with Status: Defining the Discipline of Professional/Technical Communication

Susan Thomas (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA)
Michelle Eble (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA)
Robin Breault (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA)

In her article “Composition Studies: a Dappled Discipline,” arguing for the disciplinary status of Composition Studies, Janice Lauer outlines 5 criteria linked to disciplinary status:
· An evolving body of knowledge
· An ancestry of theoretical assumptions and theories
· A history of the discipline
· Epistemic Courts in which knowledge is produced
· Accepted methods of inquiry.
Professional/Technical Communication arguably meets these criteria; nevertheless, it still occupies an odd position within the academy where it is sometimes recognized as its own discipline, sometimes recognized as a subset of rhetoric and composition, and sometimes only as a set of service courses. This hazy disciplinary status of Professional/Technical Communication is further blurred by recent scholarship, research and practices, which increasingly move toward community service applications. Viewed within the shifting power dynamics of the corporatization of universities, Professional/Technical Communication’s definition as a discipline becomes perhaps even more important.

As university budgets are increasingly supplemented by funding from the private sector, which prioritizes academic interests that relate to corporate interests, the community service aspect of Professional/Technical Communications serves two critical functions:
1. It appeals to corporate sponsors who value the fiscal benefits of philanthropy, as well as practical applications over strictly intellectual ones.
2. It assists in resisting the complete corporate take over of the discipline by combining the resources of the private sector with the ideas and resources of the academic world for the benefit of local communities.
Thus, recognizing Professional/Technical Communication as a discipline is crucial but problematic, considering traditional disciplinary models, since it moves beyond traditional criteria adding the beneficial requirement of community action.

Our panel will address these issues by arguing that Professional/Technical Communication has redefined disciplinary criteria and status. We will approach this argument from three distinct angles:
· Historical—Focusing on the scholarship and practices of Fred Newton Scott, the first presentation will explore how social epistemic rhetoric has shaped and defined the discipline of Professional/Technical Communication, arguing that socially concerned rhetoric has prompted the redefinition of disciplinary status over the last several decades.
· Classroom Pedagogy and Theory— This presentation will examine the complex nature of Professional/Technical Communication courses, which engage students in service learning projects. By critically questioning the practice of specific web-based service learning projects at one institution, the presenter will argue that through service work Professional/Technical Communication has helped radically redefine the direction of academic disciplines.
· Community-Based Service Projects— Drawing on the examples of two local community action projects, this presentation will argue that Professional/Technical Communication has done more than establish itself as a discipline within the academy. Through community-based work, Professional/Technical Communication has moved beyond academic borders, reconfiguring service as a disciplinary criterion.
These presentations will engage conference participants in discussions concerning how Professional/Technical Communication’s disciplinary status has and will affect writing research, scholarship and pedagogy, which we hope will lead to further questioning of what writing is, why we study it, and why and how we teach it.

A Family Tree: Prof/Tech Comm. and Social Epistemic Rhetoric - Susan Thomas
Focusing on the scholarship and practices of Fred Newton Scott, this presentation explores how social epistemic rhetoric has shaped and defined the discipline of Professional/Technical Communication, arguing that socially concerned rhetoric has prompted the redefinition of disciplinary status over the last several decades.

Straddling Institutional Walls: Service Classes? Service Learning? Redirecting Disciplines? - Michelle Eble
This presentation examines the complex nature of Professional/Technical Communication courses, which engage students in service learning projects. By critically questioning the practice of specific web-based service learning projects at one institution, this presentation will argue that through service work Professional/Technical Communication has helped radically redefine the direction of academic disciplines.

Beyond the Tower: The Discipline of Professional/Technical Communication and Community Action Projects - Robin Breault
Drawing on the examples of two local community action projects, this presentation argues that Professional/Technical Communication has done more than establish itself as a discipline within the academy. Through community-based work, Professional/Technical Communication has moved beyond academic borders, reconfiguring service as a disciplinary criterion.
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IIb. What do Students have to do with Writing Instruction?

Reciprocal Reflection in the Basic Writing Classroom--Laurie Bower (University of Nevada, Reno NV)
I propose to show how I conduct an informal curricular assessment in my basic writing classes using 3 by 5 cards and end-of-the-semester evaluation forms (that I design). On one side of the cards, students write their "successes," and on the other side of a card, they write their "struggles." Using the 3-by-5-card approach, I find a few negative student comments, such as "reading responses are hard for me;" "my notebook sucks," or "I have to use vocabulary words right in a sentence" which can be converted to topics for discussion in a subsequent class. The end-of-the-semester evaluations I administer give students a chance to talk back and tell me honestly what they liked about the class or how they might redesign certain assignments. I reassure students that I do not read these comments until after grades are in.

Marcia Dickson (1995: 30) cautions in It's Not Like That Here that teachers too often make misinformed assumptions about basic writers, and consequently, judge them unfairly as "just lazy." It has been my personal experience that most basic writers aren't lazy, but they are often apathetic. If a writing teacher can blend encouragement with high expectations, I believe students will, in some cases, begin to exert "force" in class, going from "objects" to subjects. I interpret an expression of mild frustration on the 3 by 5 cards as an indicator that students may be leaving their comfort zones and receiving challenge and stimulation, conditions conducive to growth and change.

Some examples of growth and change expressed on those cards include statements like "I can't believe how excited Ms. Bower got when I finally understood revision," or "This class is my hardest, but it's also my favorite." Responding to intellectual awareness, students might comment, "Before this class, I never realized how ads display men and women. It's scary." When I've compiled all the comments, I make up an overhead that summarizes the information and let students look at it and comment on it. They see that, while they might not like a particular assignment, other students are finding it useful, and this can diffuse their negativity.

Of course not all frustration is mild or productive. In response to students' expressions of more than moderate frustration, I reflect seriously upon my teaching practices. In Reflection, Kathleen Blake Yancey (1998: 11) states that such a mechanism can serve the purpose of "checking against, a confirming, and a balancing of self with others" [emphasis hers]. As a result, if several students indicate identical concerns - that they can't complete other coursework due to English 1 requirements, for example - then I talk about these issues in class and/or consider eliminating or at least revising assignments. In this case, the mid-semester assessment becomes a means for re-envisioning my curriculum before it is too late and the semester is over.

After reflecting on the positive and negative comments expressed on the 3 by 5 cards, I write a mid-semester letter to the class acknowledging student efforts, expressing pride in their accomplishments, and highlighting my desire to push their limits. I try to make the letter as upbeat as possible, but I remind students that this class is tough for a reason, and any less would do them a disservice. I will be sharing copies of a sample letter with
attendees.

Finally, these mid-semester 3 by 5 cards and end-of-the-semester evaluations are invaluable insights into my teaching. In fact, in semesters when I have not asked for such feedback, negative end-of-the-semester departmental evaluations were sometimes accompanied by more than mild frustration. To avoid this, a mid-semester reflection of this sort (honest, relatively objective) allows students to vent, offers teachers a second look at their curricular choices, and keeps them focused on the center of their classes - their students.

Literacy as Rhetorical Flexibility: Writing Our Way Into Communities of Practice--Melody L. Kilcrease (San Diego State University, San Diego CA)
This 20 minute paper will outline a lower division second semester writing course designed from socioliterate linguistic theories. In contrast to Traditional and Learner-Centered literacy theories, socioliterate theorists propose that "learners acquire literacy in particular social contexts, developing what might be termed socioliterate competence through exposure to the genres specific to those contexts."

The course focuses attention on the ways texts and their features are authorized by the practices within a given community. The course should enable our students to
· validate their own perceptions about the differing requirements for text production across the university and among their instructors, and in other communities of practice to which they may belong;
· discriminate among the rhetorical shifts required of them as they move through the university and other communities;
· anticipate the cultural "orientation" process they will undergo as readers and writers entering their chosen profession or career;
· and recognize their abilities to adapt to changing rhetorical situations as a key to lifelong learning.

The course will ask students to locate, analyze and report on the types and functions of texts in a variety of settings across the campus and the community, and practice writing about their research using typical academic genres. Of special interest will be how and where arguments appear in differing communities of practice. The course will also include presentations by invited guests that address the genres authorized in their disciplinary, professional, or other community practices.

The presentation will be supplemented with a handout, and a response form, upon which participants will be asked to comment. In addition, at the end of the presentation participants will be asked to discuss what we understand our "practices" or common genres to be as members of the community of college writing instructors.

Writing and Re-Entry: Composition and Community College Transfer Students--Madeleine Picciotto (University of California, San Diego)
Students at community colleges who hope to transfer to four-year institutions have often spent many years away from formal education; even those who are closer to traditional college age may have little exposure to or understanding of the university system, and may be anxious about their level of preparation for further academic work. They may sense that although they have achieved a high level of “literacy” in a community college context, university-based definitions of “literacy” can differ, sometimes going beyond a facility with mechanical conventions to a more critical understanding of the word and the world.

So-called “transfer-level” English composition courses -- community college classes that are considered to be the equivalent of first-year university composition -- often serve as an introduction, for such students, to the expectations of the university regarding analytical writing and critical thinking. They can also be used as a means for demystifying the university experience and providing community college transfer students with a critical awareness of their own positions. In my talk, I will discuss my own work teaching transfer-level composition classes at the San Diego Community College District’s Miramar campus, describing the problems and possibilities I have enountered in my attempt to simultaneously enhance students’ analytical writing skills and give them a greater sense of control over their educational futures by inviting them to problematize their current educational experiences in the community college, as well as to explore significant issues and problems they may face as they enter the four-year system.
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IIc. Literacy Beyond the Pale: Redefining Text and Significance

Suspect Subject: Teaching Writing in Jail--Kirk Branch (University of Kansas, Lawrence KS)
This paper examines the dynamics of a literacy program in a county jail, focusing especially on the competing rhetorics of literacy within a prison. To teach writing in such a setting means to constantly ask the question of its social value, especially in light of the competing identities projected onto student/inmates.

“As I Cannot Write”: (Re)Writing the Feminine with Needle and Thread--Maureen Daly Goggin (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)
This proposed paper tackles the general, but elusive, question: What is writing? Diverse scholars focusing on the acts of reading/writing have clearly demonstrated that literate practices are multiple, competing ideological activities that not only shift over time, but co-exist in time, to serve different kinds of functions, contexts and people (Bazerman; Graff; Gee; Heath; Scribner and Cole; Street). Other scholars in visual rhetoric are theorizing a range of artifacts and practices beyond those immediately connected to alphabetic script by they turning their attention to the semiotic and performative aspects of architecture, photography, museums, and war memorials (Mitchell; Zelizer). These two bodies of work permit us to recognize a wider range of cultural practices that may be understood as writing. For those interested in recouping women’s rhetoric, this expanded gaze is particularly crucial, especially if we are to move beyond mere “female tokenism,”(i.e., simply adding to the store of already canonized criteria that limits what counts in the production and distribution of knowledge) (Biesecker; Jarratt). This paper contributes to widening the scholarly gaze by examining cultural activities and objects not typically associated with reading/writing, namely, needlework, and in particular, sampler making.

Sampler making, one of many practices in the complex world of needlework, dates back thousands of years, and has been found in every region of the world. Early on, needlework samplers served as invention tools (places in which to practice various techniques and find inspiration for new creations). (On the history of samplers, see, for example, Clabburn; Humphrey; Parker; Toller.) If, as Kaufer and Butler so cogently theorize, rhetoric is an art of design, then the rhetor needs to know the available means for generating a design. In the case of needlework, a stitcher needs to know the available means of representing her message via choices of stitches, threads, materials, colors, motifs, and so on. Early samplers offered one place for developing that knowledge. However, by the beginning of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteen century, samplers became transformed into decorative products whose sole purpose in most instances was to demonstrate skill and mastery of needlework. Its purpose and focus thus shifted from sampler-as-praxis to sampler-as-artifact. Yet even under the guise of sampler-as-artifact, one glimpses the traces of praxis where “society’s ‘workings’ become visible in the purposes, imagined audiences, content, and outcomes” (Miller 4) of these text/iles.

This paper focuses on a sampler stitched in circa 1830 by Elizabeth Parker of Ashburnham, Sussex, England. At first glance, this text/ile appears to be an ordinary marking sampler, a domestic and domesticating, plain-stitch exercise undertaken by young women (especially between the 18th-19th centuries) to equip them with skills for positions that would enable them to avoid potentially horrific circumstances, an escape well captured by Geraldine Clifford’s title “Marry, Stitch, Die or Do Worse.” On closer inspection, Parker’s sampler is anything but ordinary, plain, or an escape. On a large piece of tightly-woven linen, measuring some 30” wide by 34” inches long, Parker cross-stitched in red silk 46 lines in excruciatingly small letters her story of physical and psychological harm at the hands of a supposed protector, experiences that left unnamed physical, emotional, and spiritual scars that paralyzed her. Her paralysis is compounded by persistent dark thoughts of suicide, thoughts weighed down by potentially severe legal and religious consequences (Anderson; MacDonald and Murphy).

As an artifact, this most uncommon of common textiles both fits and resists the parameters of canonical genres, namely, commonplace notebooks (Miller; Moss), autobiographies (Bergland; Gilmore “Mark;” Lionnet), and religious and juridical confessions (Gilmore “Policing;” Swaim). The grapholectic marks render it a familiar text(ile), and yet in material terms it resists canonical generic placement precisely because it is cross-stitched in red silk on white linen. As a praxis, it perhaps fits more readily the parameters of writing. That is, stitching transformed a material surface into a multiple levels of meanings, addressing conflicting purposes and audiences, woven in intersecting, multiple discourses of a particular historical moment and place.

As a practice, it seems undeniably writing, and yet the needleworker herself begins her piece with the words “As I cannot write . . . .” This enigmatic phrase invites myriad possible readings. Is it, for example, a humble topos, a commonplace in autobiographical writing of the time (Gilmore 63)? Does it signal that the writer fears public retribution and thus selects (what we now would see as ironic) a more private medium? Does it mean that paper and pen were not readily available but ubiquitous linen and thread were? Does writing here mean something more akin to the powerlessness and inability to inscribe one’s life? As important as these semiotic musings are, for the purposes of this paper, this puzzling opening draws attention to the central issue of what is writing. Parker’s text/ile itself challenges both its opening phrase as well as conservative notions about what counts as a literate practice and what counts as textual artifact. Perhaps the general, but elusive, question that begins this proposal ought to be rephrased as: What are writing(s), for writing both as artifact and praxis is always multiple, provisional, and contested. Extending our gaze to other artifacts and practices can only enrich our theories, studies, and pedagogies of literate practices, and open up critical spaces for recognizing feminine contributions to knowledge production and dissemination--contributions that have been hidden in plain view.

Scaffolding Rhetorical Instruction in Upper-Division Experiential Learning Projects: The Case of The French Show with Pierrot--Elenore Long (Bay Path College, Longmeadow MA)
The questions Writing: What is it? Why study it? and Why teach it? Serve as topoi for this paper as it investigates a pressing concern at our and other institutions: With more multi-media technology available not only to ourselves but to our students, more professors of rhetoric are exploring ways in which technologies--and the performative forums they engender--widen the range of rhetorical choices available to students as well as the literate practices demanded of them (Condon & Butler). Using an upper-division capstone course as a case in point, this paper asks the questions: How can we design instruction so that the rhetorical significance of experiential learning projects are not lost on students in light of pressing temporal demands? And how can we build arguments to convince skeptical colleagues that such projects contribute not only to students' professional preparation but to their rhetorical education in ways that are significantly different from--and in some important ways comparatively better than--traditional writing classes (Body, Lund)? In responding to both questions, the above topoi--Writing: What is it? Why study it? and Why teach it?--are instrumental. The proposed paper argues that in moving between the boundaries of available technology and more traditional arguments about rhetoric's relationship to writing, we are best able to address the above questions.

This paper reports on an extended dialogue between a teacher of the capstone course and a researcher trained in observation-based research methods--both of whom work at a small, private women's college in western New England. Recently, the college has overhauled the entire curriculum to better support its "commit[ment] to the development of leadership, communication, and technological skills for all students, [. . . by] integrat[ing] these skills throughout the curriculum." Experiential senior-year capstone courses in all academic majors are part of the reform effort. Even as the institution struggles to make good on its intentions, the college's commitment to use technology in the service of rhetorical education makes the site an interesting "laboratory for change" with applications to other institutions (Dewey 32).

The backdrop for this paper is a two-semester pilot course in which senior communications majors work with early childhood education majors (all of whom are fulfilling a foreign language requirement) to design and to produce episodes of a French show for children, ages 4 to 8. Given a partnership with a local cable television station, the completed episodes are aired in the area's homes and schools. Granted, for years internships have made somewhat similar experiences available to students: television-production majors, for example, have long worked in media centers to film events or to shadow experts (Weaver and Siegel). While we recognize the parallel, the capstone experience is aimed at a different goal: to enhance students' strategic knowledge and literate repertoires even as they learn the tools of their trades. Research and experience tell us that this goal may be the toughest nut to crack (Flower, Long and Higgins; Long).

The paper analyzes sites of conflict within two kinds of data (Flower). First, it reports on the planning sessions among the entire group of students, drawing on their disciplinary training to reach provisional consensus concerning the design of the sets, the sequence of the instructional modules, the script itself. Next, it reports insights from the think-aloud protocols of five communication majors as they each put in their share of long hours required to edit available footage into opening & closing sequences and the show's first episodes. The paper uses this data to explore the adequacy of composing as a metaphor for the kinds of rhetorical thinking and know-how required of students learning to produce high quality programming.

The paper banks the above analysis within an evaluation of the instructional tools the teacher of the capstone course used to frame the course for his students, particularly his work to frame the most daunting aspects of the project as problems of intense rhetorical interest. Students read rhetorical theories and looked for their applications in the studio. For instance, they used semiotics to decode the set's design (Scholes). They read classical rhetorical theory to explore the appeals behind their rather extensive efforts to plant children in the audience to achieve multicultural representation. They read descriptions of literate practices to study how schemas for call-and-response and signing-while-singing served as cultural capital for both college-students puppeteers and the children in the studio (Gee; Heath; Scribner and Coles; Street). They read literature on rhetorical planning to map their opportunism against a whole host of other goals and constraints (Flower; Flower, Wallace, Norris and Burnett). (A faculty member volunteered to write and perform music for the show, for instance, and a native Frenchman volunteered to perform the role of a central puppet, but his schedule as a flight attendant meant fancy footwork for the film crew.) For this part of the course, students kept journals and presented a final paper to their peers and faculty members. These projects serve as preliminary evidence in our arguments to skeptical colleagues ? arguments making the case not just for experiential learning but for the kind of scaffolding necessary to make it work toward the goal of rigorous rhetorical education.
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IId. Workplace Discourses and Writing Technologies

Writing for Non-Profit Organizations: How Is It Different?--Allene Cooper (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)
The nonprofit sector is a large employer where nearly 11 million people work in the US alone. In 1996, US revenues for the nonprofit sector were over $670 billion, about 9% of the gross domestic product. And the American nonprofit sector continues to grow steadily by about 4-6% each year (NCNB). Since the nonprofit world is actually big business, this ought to be an important area of research and pedagogy to those of us who teach workplace writing. Although communication in nonprofit organizations shares characteristics with other business/technical writing and speaking, it also has unique audiences, aims, vocabularies, and genres.

The National Center for Nonprofit Boards (NCNB) indicates the scope of the nonprofit sector in the American workforce. NCNB notes that over 1,270,000 nonprofit organizations were listed by the IRS in 1998, and of this number over 730,000 were public charities. These numbers are more indicative of the opportunities our students may have when we realize that they neither include churches nor the great number of small nonprofits that do not have to file with the IRS.

Although it is probably impossible to count the number of such organizations worldwide, Action Without Borders in its comprehensive Web directory called “Idealist” has information on over 150,000 nonprofit and volunteering resources in 140 countries. Thus writing opportunities for our students are global. Our students, prepared accordingly, may have an entire world where they can effect lasting changes in our society.

These organizations have a broad range of activities, including: health, human services, arts and culture, education, research, and advocacy. Heading almost countess subcategories, major groups include
· Arts, Culture, and Humanities
· Education
· Environment and Animals
· Health
· Human Services
· International, Foreign Affairs
· Public, Societal Benefit
· Religion Related
· Mutual/Membership Benefit

Although this sector of the American workplace employs as much as 7 percent of our population, and although much of the work these employees perform involves writing, little notice has been taken of them in business and technical courses.

The Presentation:
This presentation will report a study I conducted in 2000 to determine what skills and genre should be taught in a course to prepare students to write in non-profit organizations. Specifically, I will discuss the importance of the pathetic appeal in the letters and proposals frequently written in “charitable” organizations.

Those charitable organizations that completed my survey include the following. (An asterisk indicates those I visited and where I interviewed writing staff.) American Cancer Society, American Heart Association*, American Red Cross*, Arizona Humanities Council*, Arizona State University Commission on the Status of Women, Boys and Girls Club of the East Valley-Tempe, Brother to Brother International, National Multiple Sclerosis Society*, Phoenix Memorial Hospital*, PREHAB of Arizona*, Valley of the Sun YMCA Writer’s Voice.

Hyperlinked Frameworks for Learning to Write Technical Documentation--Loel Kim (University of Memphis, Memphis TN)
Perhaps because students encounter technical communications in their everyday worlds, they are often dismissive about technical writing projects—and the skills it takes to produce them. Being asked to write instructions to assemble a piece of furniture, for example, is deceptively straightforward. However, students usually find once they are in the midst of the project, that it requires a mastery of and the complex orchestration of many skills to accomplish it. Thus technical writing assignments must blend lessons in writing, design, rhetorical analysis, and instructional design in ways that convince students they are complex enough to merit their attention while at the same time delivering the lessons in accessible and meaningful ways—arrangements which may vary from student to student.

How could this process be supported in an online environment? Some research in hypertextual environments (Beeman, Anderson, Bader, Larkin, McClard, McQuillan, and Shields, 1988; Bruce and Peyton, 1992; Jacobson and Levin, 1993) posits a knowledge-based, problem-solving approach as a fruitful direction for developing effective writing pedagogy; however, technological limitations have constrained the responsiveness of the learning environment to the learner. This paper explores the potential for and current problems and limitations in providing a dynamic conceptual framework to support the kind of project-based pedagogy which is useful for technical writing. XML programming, for example, may offer online settings in which students may chart the paths of their lessons from a dynamic exercise-based framework.
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IIIa. Roundtable: Feminist Theories, Feminist Practices: Possibilities, Problems, and Future Directions

Sibylle Gruber (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Jean Boreen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Laura Gray-Rosendale (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)
Colleen Carscallen (Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff AZ)

New work on feminist theory and pedagogy has encouraged teachers and researchers to look at the broader implications of the multiple positionalities we inhabit. In this presentation, we draw on the important work of feminist scholars within Rhetoric and Composition (Emig; Jarratt; Miller; Phelps; Royster; Schell; Worsham) as well as those in Philosophy and Sociology (Ahmed; Chancer; Curtoys; Dixon; Hicks; Johnson; McNay; Minks; Peck ). Such research has begun to ask critical questions about the rhetorical investments of various feminist theories and practices. Specifically, we will address the possibilities, problems, and future directions of feminist theory and pedagogy for Rhetoric and Composition Studies by looking closely at the following questions in light of our own teaching experiences:

· How can we contextualize feminist theory to fit our specific practices?
· How can we re-conceive “difference” beyond static, binary dichotomies?
· How can we challenge marginalizing constructions of “otherness”?
· What will this mean for problematizing the work of feminist teachers and scholars in today’s colleges and universities?

This presentation offers new insights for feminist scholarship in Rhetoric and Composition Studies by looking at how feminist theory and practice are applied to and emerge out of the local contexts within which we work. The roundtable will also encourage audience participation, asking where and how feminist theories have worked for all of us in particular pedagogical situations. Drawing from our experiences and those of audience members, we hope to generate new insights and ideas about feminist theory in action in our field. These local contexts will perhaps reveal new, more effective, feminist theories that emerge from practices themselves.
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IIIb. What Does Rhetoric Have to do With Writing? Three Perspectives

Mathematical Means, Rhetorical Modes and the Vanishing “Snow” man: How the Act of Writing Improves Mathematical Reasoning--Joanne Munroe (Whatcom Community College, Bellingham WA)
This is a 20 minute presentation about teaching rhetorical modes in mathematical reasoning courses. In my investigation of the works of “literate” mathematicians such as John Paulos, Keith Devlin and Reuben Hersh, I discovered a group of like minds who recognize the power of a “good story” in the organization of one’s thoughts. I have been influenced by their writings and by their integration of the Humanities in their collective approach. My teaching reflects these influences.

In my presentation I will :

Begin with a review of literature that connects mathematics with narrative

Discuss the results of having my classes read mathematical novels (reading to write) and keep journal notes for use in their thematic essays

Introduce the incorporation of comprehension questions, questions identifying purpose and audience which are combined in thematic essays that treat the influence of the history and philosophy of mathematics on current theoretical and pedagogical assumptions

Describe the use of “process” essays as ways of reconstructing metacognitive processes to highlight the value of the algorithm and the ways in which it compares to other forms of reasoning

Bring in an in-class (mathematics problem) exercise and an accompanying “focused” write assignment and “teach” the process that I am using through teaching a problem solution

Distribute a few examples of the thematic essays (written by students) which incorporate mathematical solutions and applications, and which also demonstrate the student’s flexibility in combining rhetorical modes

Imaginative Invention: Vico's Potential For Rhetoric and Writing--James Procaccini (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)
I am proposing that rhetoric and composition teachers and scholars would benefit from knowing more about the work of Giambattista Vico, the eighteenth-century rhetorician. His theories of imagination, metaphor and invention are worthy of our attention because I believe they contribute to a richer understanding of current literate practices and pedagogies. I will use Richard Young's essay, "Concepts of Art and the Teaching of Writing" as a heuristic: I propose to show just how fully a Vichian approach to rhetoric and the teaching of writing fulfills Young's call for a "more adequate conception of rhetorical art" (202). In the past decade there has been an intermittent flurry of activity over the relative merits of what is typically referred to as a debate between expressivist and constructivist theory and practice, first in the discussion initiated by Erika Lindemann and Gary Tate in College English, followed by the exchange between Peter Elbow and David Bartholomae in College Composition and Communication, among others. Vico's notion of rhetoric is important because it overcomes the polarities of Young's neo-classical/neo-romantic lens and the more recent expressivist/constructivist one by reinterpreting topical invention in the context of metaphoric discourse. This prospect may lead to a more unified theory of composition and literature, a goal that Patricia Bizzell and others have embraced, but also to the shifting of writing and its pedagogy from the disciplinary instability of composition to the more cohesive and appropriate discipline of rhetoric (Maureen Daly Goggin). I want to propose that Vico's integration of imaginative and topical-epistemic factors through his theory of metaphoric discourse may approximate the role of a rhetorical paradigm, offering a shift in thinking about literacy and pedagogy that in fact minimizes traditional curricular barriers without nullifying differences between rhetoric and poetic. I will use Vico scholarship such as Ernesto Grassi's Rhetoric as Philosophy, John Schaeffer's Sensus Communis: Vico, Rhetoric, and the Limits of Relativism, and Donald Verene's Vico's Science of Imagination to support my contentions about Vichian invention. The next step is to demonstrate his direct relevance to rhetoric and literacy, and to writing and pedagogy. What does my proposal try to accomplish? I think an appreciation of what I am calling Vico's imaginative invention will act to minimize excessive theoretical and pedagogical conflicts among factions in writing programs (and English Departments). A Vichian approach may allow for highly diverse pedagogical practices while presenting a shared justification, an overarching yet flexible theory of writing and writing pedagogy, a narrowing of the gap between theory and practice, and between rhetoric and composition. It attempts to respond to questions such as "What does rhetoric have to do with writing?" by emphasizing its relationship to the question, "What is literacy?" These questions have implications for assessment, collaboration, and Writing majors, although I do not discuss these topics of interest.

ReOrdering Rhetorical Contexts with Burke's Terms for Order--Mark T. Williams (California State University, Long Beach CA)
The material situations or contexts that surround communicative events provide an unresolved tension for researchers and teachers of writing. Some argue that writing and literacy are context-bound (Rose; Bizzell), while others claim we can transcend contexts (Goody & Watt). I provide an alternative to these admittedly polar notions by examining how context appears in ancient and contemporary discussions of writing. I offer a theory of context that treats the word as thing, idea, and purpose--what Burke would call the positive, dialectical, and ultimate terms for order.

Although Cicero first uses the Latin contexo to weave ideas and things in discourse, recent deployments of the term are perhaps more influenced by the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowksi. He describes the "context of situation" in 1923, and rhetoricians refer to the anthropologist when discussing contexts for writing (Berthoff; Bitzer; Kinneavy; Richards). While Burke praises Malinowski's "context of situation," Burke also labels it a "scientific anecdote," a treatment of meaning at the "positive order" of terms (Rhetoric 205-206). Scientific anecdotes and positive terms are helpful, but they also reduce action to motion, ideas to things.

In this presentation I rely on Burke's terms for order--the positive order of things, the dialectical order of ideas, and the ultimate order of design and purpose--to provide more representative anecdotes for context, to provide rhetorical agency for the potentially overpowering influences of material situations. I theorize context to counter some criticism of the notion that arises from work in speech, history, and anthropology (Jasinski; White; Taussig). Rhetoricians must account for such critiques because context remains fundamental for our description of things, our ordering of ideas, and our elaboration of purpose.
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IIIc. Writing Instruction and Computer Technologies: What's at Stake?

Plugged into Pedagogy: An Exploration of Teaching Practices in 'Hybrid' Writing Courses--Timothy D. Ray (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)

Why Teach Writing With Computers--Barbara Sitko (Washington State University, Pullman WA), Cindy Wambeam (Washington State University, Pullman WA)
Computers and related technologies are having a profound impact on the ways in which teachers and students view rhetoric, writing, composing processes, academic and professional writing, and communication. Decisions about the relationship of technology to a writing program involve a wide spectrum of considerations, including student and faculty access, teacher education and training, critical inquiry, and attention to students' professional development. Thus, the intersection of technology and writing programs includes many and varied stakeholders.

This round-table will provide an opportunity for conference participants who are stakeholders in technology decisions to discuss writing and technology from their perspectives as researchers, teachers, TA educators, and students.

After a brief introduction to an annotated bibliography of topics currently discussed in the literature, participants will have an opportunity to discuss such broad areas such as "critical computer literacy," "integration of technology and course curriculum," "best practices," "online resources," and "professional development," as locations of the intersections of technology and writing.

The leaders hope that discussion will address both the problems and the possibilities of technology across the broad spectrum of writing programs, locating technology within the larger conference goals of bringing scholars and teachers in the Western region together to share experiences and ideas.

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IIId. If We Build it, Will They Come? Challenging the Status Quo of Writing Program Curricula

Argument’s Role in Causing (and Healing?) Splits between Composition and Literature--Richard C. Gebhardt (Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green OH)
When Gerald Graff writes that “there is always a background of agreement that makes disagreement possible, and through debate that area of agreement can be widened,” he implies a view of argument as cooperative inquiry widely held in composition studies. For instance, Richard Fulkerson describes argument as “a cooperative, dialectical exchange and a search for mutually acceptable (and contingent) answers”--a process “in which the goal is not victory but a good decision, one in which all arguers are at risk of needing to alter their views, one in which a participant takes seriously and fairly the views different from his or her own.” Such cooperative ideas of argument, however, contrast sharply (a) with habits faculty members develop while building their CVs and (b) with habits future faculty members begin to form in undergraduate writing-about-literature courses.

After sketching the first of those two points (and how it complicates cooperative efforts within English studies), I will turn to the second point, using textbooks and syllabi for introductory “Writing about Literature” classes as well as course descriptions (e.g., CEA Critic’s “Teaching Theory to Undergraduates” issue). Then I will suggest (and invite audience discussion about) two strategies for addressing the combative model of argument in English studies: (a) interdisciplinary efforts to provide models of argument-literature interaction and synergy, and (b) intradepartmental WAC-like efforts to broaden the perspectives on argument English majors experience--and use--as undergraduates.

Writing a Rhetorical Revision of the Composition Course--Stacia Dunn Neeley (TCU, Forth Worth TX)
Commenting over a decade ago on the future of composition studies, Stephen North writes,
"If Composition is working its way toward becoming a discipline in any usual sense of that word, it is taking the long way around. It might not be too much to claim, in fact, that for all the rhetoric about unity in pursuit of one or another goal, Composition as a knowledge-making society is gradually pulling itself apart. Not branching out or expanding, although these might be politically more palatable descriptions, but fragmenting: gathering into communities or clusters of communities among which relations are becoming increasingly tenuous." (The Making of Knowledge in Composition 364)
We are still taking “the long way around,” when the answer beckons from the very center of our daily work. North’s use of the term “rhetoric” in the pejorative offers another incentive for defining the relationship between rhetoric and writing. This interactive presentation addresses the WSCC question “What does rhetoric have to do with writing?” Arguing that rhetoric and composition are inseparable, I will propose that we can strengthen ties among all of our composition communities—technical writing experts, rhetoricians, expressivists, post-process theorists, feminists alike—by writing a rhetorical revision of the composition course. After presenting a brief outline of the possibilities for envisioning the composition course as a forum for rhetorical inquiry and cultural studies, I will invite my audience to 1) consider “schooling” and higher education as a culture; 2) analyze ways in which that culture—along with its liberal to conservative, socioacademic to corporate leanings—influences the ways in which writing is taught; 3) read and discuss a sample assignment sequence from a second-year writing course; and 4) theorize ways in which rhetorical theory can provide working solutions to larger disciplinary problems such as poor graduate instructor training, lack of student investment in writing, and unappealing degree programs in English. This inductive method of redefining the composition course can lead to productive revisions of writing program administration and curriculum that will strengthen the potential of writing as knowledge-making in the academy and in our students’ futures.

What Time Is It? Critical Mass, Technology, and the Coming Age of the Writing Major--Peter Vandenberg (DePaul University, Chicago IL), Roger Graves (DePaul University, Chicago IL)
Drawing on movements in rhetoric and composition, academia at large, and in the wider culture, this pair of speakers will argue that conditions are right for the formation and growth of undergraduate major programs centered on the production of text. Drawing in part on their own experience with curricular renovation in an English department at a large, urban university, they will go on to elaborate these exigencies and provide a theoretical model flexible enough to account for national trends and adjust to local conditions.

The disciplinary success of rhetoric and composition seems certain to lead to curricular growth in writing and text-based rhetoric. Rooted as it is not in disciplinary inquiry but in pedagogy, it is inevitable that growth in rhetoric and composition will mean increased attention to undergraduate curricula. Quite simply, those trained to teach writing will create opportunities for that activity. Now that the growth of graduate programs in the field has leveled, faculty in rhetoric and composition are demonstrating a desire to expand the various interests of first-year writing into major programs of study. Those who rode the wave of tenure-track hires in the field during the late 80s and early 90s are now rising into positions of prominence and authority; a review of undergraduate English curricula available on the Internet (which we will summarize) reflects the impact of their expertise on the traditional, literature-based English major.

This movement in rhetoric and composition, of course, is not at all out of step with the importance the wider public continues to place on text-based literacy. Authors such as Robert Reich, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and scores of others continue to popularize the notion of a future in which abstract sociolinguistic skills become more and more necessary. Academic authors, too, see adequate social participation increasingly contingent upon synthetic, critical, and analytical “skills” whose development is interdependent with text and technology (for example, Miles Myers, Kalantzis and Cope). Writing teachers, of course, are well positioned to deliver the twenty-first century’s new “knowledge workers”; however, through major curricula actively designed to construct perceptions of human value, we can also help students gain awareness of the consequences of high literacy training—the loss of cultural diversity and social, economic, and participatory stratification.

The speakers will suggest that any major program in writing ought to strive for theoretical coherence through a unified epistemology, a meaningful progression toward a defined end, a balance of reflection and practical activity, and a strong attention to local conditions. They will try to demonstrate a model of such coherence through a program of study designed for their home institution that:
· Grounds the study of writing in the study of discourse—the relationships among power, community, language use, genre, culture, and values
· Makes the term literacy an ongoing point of interrogation—its relationship to print, critical inquiry, social stratification, cultural boundary maintenance, technology
· Investigates the relationship between text, voice, and image through an analysis of the aesthetics, rhetoric, and ethics of “new media”; the influence of new media on attention, expectation, identity, and the perception of a “public sphere”
· Situates writing in contexts outside the classroom by engaging students in “extra-academic” projects with workplace and experiential- or service-learning goals.
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IVa. Panel: Responding to Authority's Challenges: Teaching and Learning Masterful Gestures

Thomas P. Miller (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ)
Michael Robinson (University of Arizona, Tucson AZ)
Jane E. Hindman (San Diego State University, San Diego CA)

Teaching Deportment--Thomas P. Miller
Rhetoric has traditionally considered explicitly teaching students to gesture properly as part of the art of delivery. However, gestures also figure as a pervasive aspect of an embodied mode of symbolic action. Cultural understandings of gesture have evolved historically from natural deportment through conventional modes of placing the body to the purposeful employment of physical movements. Contemporary usage tends to configure gestures as expressions of personal feelings or intentions rather than as a representation of natural character or modes of decorum. This historical evolution in cultural understandings of how meaning is embodied in action will be reviewed. Such review helps us to reflect upon how instruction in academic discourse is related to broader trends in rhetorical studies, particularly the molding of character through the teaching of gestures toward the personal.

From Formal Parody to Romantic Comedy--Michael Robinson
This presentation explores both intentional and unintentional parody in student writing as the product of an overemphasis on predetermined and universalizing academic forms. Drawing on Kenneth Burke's "Attitudes Toward History," I advocate an attitude that grounds rhetoric in attention to the interplay of difference and truth. This attitude of "romantic comedy" calls on us to attend to our responses to others as a way to rediscover previously suppressed aspects of our own stories. Employing romantic comedy, I offer
a rhetoric in which form grows from a consideration of two key principles: relation and incarnation. In considering relation, we seek to define the kind of relationship we wish to create with readers. In terms of incarnation, we ask, "What textual choices will help us create that relationship?" This more flexible and specific approach to form aims for a rhetoric that improves students' opportunity for more engaged and engaging texts.

The Proper Place of Parody in the Classroom--Jane E. Hindman
Many writing instructors concur with Bartholomae's claim that successful academic readers and writers seek out the margins of the language and methods of the university; likewise, many of us support Mary Louis Pratt's contention that the contact zone of university classrooms can and should include a place for unsolicited oppositional discourse. Nonetheless, most writing instruction either persistently refuses or misrecognizes students' parodies of academic gestures. Thus, just how and when to teach students methods for mediating and resisting academic language and methods remains a mystery. Relying on students' (and audience's) responses to materials and methods used in the composition classroom, this presentation will suggest methods for responding to students' unsolicited parody and for teaching student how to make effective gestures that simultaneously comply with and subvert academic discourse.
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IVb. Panel: Why Hasn’t the “Savior” Come? Or How a Failed Job Search Led to the Reorganization of UNLV’s Composition Program

Ed Nagelhout (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)
Jeff Jablonski (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)
Leon Coburn (University of Nevada, Las Vegas NV)

This panel addresses the question: What should Program Administration be about? It aims to reflect on the case of UNLV to engage the audience in a discussion of traditional and alternative models of program administration.

A key issue for scholarship on writing program administration is defining the role and power of the writing director. Many have argued that the traditional, hierarchical “WPA-centric” (Gunner) formation of the lone, tenured WPA contributes in many ways to the low status of the position, the field, and the non-tenure-track faculty who mostly staff these programs. Several collaborative models of program administration have been theorized as alternatives, and the literature includes several case studies reflecting on efforts to implement such “de-centered” or “flattened” administrative structures (Cambridge and McClelland; Dickson; Harrington, Fox, and Hogue; Howard; Gunner; Keller et al.; Schell).

This panel adds to these critical narratives by reflecting on the ways that the English department at UNLV was forced to reassess the structure and administration of their composition program as a result of a history of unsuccessful searches to find a “savior,” a director expected to single-handedly revitalize the program. After establishing the institutional context and history of the composition program, we will analyze the failed job search, articulate alternative models for administering writing programs, and theorize the changing face of writing program administration—especially on an urban, commuter campus. We will also discus the status of the department’s efforts at program reorganization.

Speaker One will set the context for the panel by briefly describing the institutional and departmental setting and the history and current structure of the composition program. Speaker One will also recount the series of failed efforts to find a suitable director. The speaker will analyze why the search for a “savior” was destined to fail, including how the most recent MLA job advertisement embodied many of the WPA-centric assumptions critiqued in the literature.

Speaker Two will reflect on how the failed job search provoked a useful period of programmatic and departmental self-reflection, leading to the decision to formulate an ad hoc committee to 1) examine the failed search and 2) consider alternatives, including reorganizing the composition program. Speaker Two will describe several models of “collaborative” program administration drawn from published case studies and a survey of programs with alternative structures.

Speaker Three will theorize the changing face of writing program administration at an urban, commuter campus by examining the UNLV composition program as a complex system. This brief analysis will situate the composition program within the larger university structure and examine its relationship to other existing (and future) writing programs within the department. Speaker Three will conclude by reporting on the current status of UNLV’s efforts to reorganize its writing program.
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IVc. Roundtable: Re-Inventing the University: The Multiple Literacies of TA Training and Development

Morgan Gresham (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Sandi Reynolds (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Becky Adams (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Angela Petit (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)
Robert Burton (Texas Women’s University, Denton TX)

The multiplicity of literacy and discourse communities has been well defined. Bartholomae (1985) reminds us of the importance of learning to speak the language of the university, and Smith (1988) invites us to think about joining particular literacy clubs. Selfe (1989) brings the literacies of computers into the mix and, Brandt (1996) shows us how our multiple literacies are piling up and competing. Compositionists now recognize that as we become more fully initiated into our literacy clubs we are negotiating an ever-increasing number of literacy lenses. Becoming a Graduate Teaching Assistant (GTA) in the discipline of composition means acquiring additional literacy lenses. This roundtable addresses the number of literacies GTAs must assume and the ways the discipline can best help those negotiations.

The speakers in our roundtable represent the spectrum of literacies in our department; we have three presenters who are just beginning their graduate endeavors, one who has almost completed her graduate work, and one assistant professor who is responsible for the training and development of TAs. In our discussion, we want to highlight the number of literacies GTA will encounter: English literacy, rhetoric and composition literacy, technological literacies, administrative literacies, and multiple student literacies. Speaker One will open our discussion by setting the scene at our university, explaining both what the present TA training encompasses and what remains to be accomplished. She will present the basic feminist theories and pedagogy that provide the backdrop against which we shape our training. Speaker Two will address the literacy of computers and examine her own hit-or-miss experiences given the initial lack of training in Computer-Mediated Composition. She will then argue that training for TAs must include the pragmatic elements of technological literacy as well as the theoretical reason for utilizing technology. Speakers Three, Four, and Five will present their wish lists of things necessary to meet the demands of teaching first-year composition. From these lists, we hope to engage the audience in creating similar lists that we can share as we attempt to negotiate what it means to be a literate member of the composition-teaching club.

It is imperative that TA training encompass both theory and practice of multiple literacies. For it is only through effectual TA training that we can meet our goals as composition teachers and aid in the search for literacy.
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IVd. What is Professional/Technical Writing? Old Challenges and New Directions

The Humanistic and the Technical: Considering the Role of Professional Writing in English Studies and the Humanities--Michael S. Knievel (Texas Tech University, Lubbock TX)
In the past twenty-five years, a significant thread of scholarship in the field of professional communication has grappled with the question of whether or not professional communication could be seen as/read/considered a “humanistic endeavor” (Miller, 1979), as well as whether or not we “. . . can. . .keep ourselves alive as humanists. . .”(Skaggs, 1979), while wrangling with professional writing instruction. Since the late 1970s, theoretical currents in the field of professional communication seem to parallel, in many ways, those in composition in that scholars have cultivated a greater disciplinary scope and sophistication in reconfiguring process and product while recognizing more fully professional communication’s relationship to rhetoric, ideology, and epistemology.

In his 1994 anthology, Humanistic Aspects of Technical Communication, Paul Dombrowski frames and compiles articles on social construction, ethics, the rhetoric of science, and gender in an effort to map those ideas he identifies as central to a notion of technical communication as “humanistic.” Dombrowski’s effort raises the question of what significance, if any, is all of this to technical communication teachers and to other teachers of writing? What might be at stake for technical communication and, at the same time, other sub-disciplines sharing/fighting for space under the “English Studies” umbrella if we hail technical communication as “humanistic?” How important to technical communication pedagogy, not to mention disciplinary status and future is identifying or not identifying with this humanistic current of practice and ideology?

One of the concerns raised in this year’s WSCC call for papers is “What is professional/technical writing?” In this paper, I address this question, emphasizing what kind of relationship technical communication has with humanism (which I argue is central to its disciplinary definition), what this relationship might be, and what this relationship says about our study of writing and writing pedagogy in general. In responding to these questions, I situate technical communication within the humanist paradigm and within English Studies. I argue that past attempts to limit technical communication’s relationship to humanism on postmodern and rhetorical grounds are important moves in mapping an association between technical communication and humanism but that a fuller articulation of this association must be made to mutually benefit technical communication and English Studies broadly defined.
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Va. Roundtable: The Rhetoric of Writing Programs: Definitions of Writing and their Implications for Writing Instruction and Administration

Sonia Apgar Begert (Olympic College, Bremerton WA)
Anis Bawarshi (University of Washington, Seattle WA)
Kirk Branch (University of Kansas, Lawrence KS)
Ann Dobyns (University of Denver, Denver CO)
Kim Emmons (University of Washington, Seattle WA)
Susan Miller (University of Utah, Salt Lake City UT)

At the Western States Composition Conference last October, a group of us involved in some way or another with writing program administration met informally to discuss our programs, especially the various philosophical and institutional forces that shape them, and to describe the challenges we face and how we might meet these challenges programmatically. For example, we discussed the issue of TA training, and, not surprisingly, found that differences in the ways we approach such training reflected some differences in our assumptions regarding the field of rhetoric and composition. For this year’s Western States Composition Conference, we propose a round-table discussion in which participants examine more formally and in more detail some of the assumptions that guide their various writing programs. Specifically, we will address the question “what is writing?” and explore how the various ways we answer it are implicated in the ways we teach and administer writing. In this way, we will attempt to uncover how the rhetoric of our writing programs shapes the practice of our writing programs.

The round-table, comprised of representatives from five western states colleges and universities, will articulate and examine the assumptions about writing that underscore the writing programs at our various institutions and how these assumptions get rhetorically articulated in our administrative choices and practices, including the role of WPA (or the lack of one); design of the First-Year Writing course; textbook choices; assessment; TA training; relationships between writing and literature; relations between FY Writing and Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, and secondary school writing; issues of professionalization and working conditions; and so on. We will also address how our assumptions about what writing is might be contradicted in our practices, especially when enacted under disparate conditions and with disparate agendas.

Speakers one through five will first speak for about seven minutes each, describing the definitions of writing that drive writing instruction and administration at their institutions. These speakers will discuss writing instruction at Olympic College, the University of Denver, the University of Kansas, the University of Utah, and the University of Washington. Speaker number six will then follow with a genre-based definition of writing which challenges our writing program assumptions and practices. For the remainder of the roundtable, participants will discuss how their assumptions are reflected in their practices, from course design to TA training to competing pedagogies. During this time, we will encourage audience interaction.

In doing this, we hope to examine the question, “what is writing?” while also examining the rhetorical and institutional and even contradictory ways we make our answers visible to students, teachers, the university, and the public.
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Vb. Panel: Examining Cultural Studies’ Pedagogy Through its Own Critical Lens

Julia Courtney (Purdue University, Lafayette IN)
Julia Romberger (Purdue University, Lafayette IN)
Jessie Kapper (Purdue University, Lafayette IN)

“What’s this have to do with Writing?”: Re-thinking Inquiry, Ideology, and the University in First Year Composition Classes--Julia Courtney
Cultural studies composition theory posits that critical or liberatory pedagogy can enhance students’ analytical abilities, expose oppressive ideologies, and effect social change if it is implemented enthusiastically enough, critically enough, or responsibly enough; however, most composition instructors are charged not with cultivating intra-institutional dissension but introducing first year students to the discourse of the academy and promoting writing practices that will allow students to integrate successfully into the university. The role of critical composition pedagogy is growing increasingly unclear as the lack of evidence attesting to its efficiency, both socially and disciplinarily, becomes the context for its inclusion in professional literature (see for example, Harris and Fish).Making the functions and ideologies of the university-as-institution explicit in composition theory and critical practice is crucial if Compositionists are to think well about the possibilities for cultural studies pedagogy in academic writing classes.

This presentation will outline a specific composition course that aims to not only permit students to become acclimated to academic discourse, but to move and act reflectively in it; students create a context for the academic writing they are asked to do by examining both academic and mainstream media responses to education issues such as assessment and testing practices, gender inequality, and technology access. While the presentation will emphasize practice, a disciplinary theoretical context will be provided to situate the discussion regarding the goals and outcomes of cultural studies pedagogy using the work of scholars such as James Berlin and Henry Giroux. The presentation will create a brief composite of problems some students have when entering the academic discourse community as articulated in the work of David Bartholome, Susan Jarratt, and Mike Rose; taking up the idea of institutional critique forwarded by Porter et. al, the presentation will emphasize that critiquing educational institutions is crucial if ideological change is to occur at the classroom level. The presentation will suggest that a composition class that analyzes the ideologies of the university as represented by various writers to different audiences can be an effective way of both teaching discourse conventions and facilitating students’ reflective participation in them or resistance to them.

Negotiating the Spectrum: A Critical Examination of the Constructed Subjectivities in Cultural Studies Pedagogies--Julia Romberger
Cultural Studies pedagogies within the composition classroom are frequently met with resistance. In part this resistance may stem from the ways in which ideology is enacted in the pedagogical practices. Ideology and its role in discourse and writing have been examined in the theories of Louis Althusser, Stuart Hall, and James Berlin. Through the lens of these theories, the speaker will show how ideologies of Cultural Studies articulate a subjectivity for the students and then request that the students write as rhetors from this subject position.

The request for a rhetor to articulate and act from a subjectivity that has been constructed in part for them occurs successfully in online Environmental Activist web sites. Activist web sites such as that of the Sierra Club, the Native Forest Council, Greenpeace, and E.L.F. construct an ideological stance through their web sites’ rhetoric and request that the rhetor articulate an activist stance from this position through specific genres of writing. The reason for their success is two-fold. First, the potential rhetor approaches the site already inclined toward the ideological position. Second, despite the fact that their fundamental ideologies have much in common, the stance of each of these sites allows for differing levels of activism and action in conjunction with their agendas. The rhetoric of sites like the Sierra Club and the Native Forest council calls for their subjects to act within the dominant system to critique and advocate change. Greenpeace and E.L.F. promote a more disruptive activist stance.

The speaker will discuss ways in which Cultural Studies pedagogies can draw from the success of such advocacy sites in several ways and address the issue of student resistance. By determining the students’ current ideological stances and interests, instructors can negotiate between the values students hold and the desired pedagogical outcomes. In doing this, an instructor can increase the likelihood of student inclination toward the Cultural Studies ideologies and allow for a range of active involvement within the ideology.

Cultural Studies Impairing Success?: A Call for Cross-Cultural References--Jessie Kapper
Cultural studies pedagogy is gaining momentum in first-year writing classrooms. Despite the diverse populations in these classrooms, however, textbook examples predominantly are American culture referenced, meaning the topics or prompts incorporate values, attitudes, and information relevant specifically to American culture. For instance, approximately 70 percent of the culture referenced examples in The Call to Write, a cultural studies based first-year composition textbook written by John Trimbur, are American culture referenced. This predominance of American culture references likely places international writers at a disadvantage, since they might need to learn more about the culture references before they can examine how the culture references serve as examples of ideas discussed in class or in the text.

Drawing on research about other minority populations in writing classrooms and the speaker’s own recent research on culture references in first-year writing classrooms, the speaker will examine the potential impact culture reference has on second language writers in the mainstream classroom. Her examination will include an analysis of several popular, first-year writing textbooks that employ a cultural studies pedagogy. In addition, the speaker will discuss her observations of classes using these texts and interviews with the classroom instructors.

After presenting this data about the potential impact of culture reference, the speaker will offer suggestions for incorporating more cross-cultural and multicultural references and writing assignments into the classroom, examining how such pedagogical choices benefit both native English speakers and second language writers. These suggestions will encourage the audience to consider how we respond to diversity and how we envision multiculturalism. Finally, the speaker will conclude by discussing why we should continue to study culture references in mainstream classrooms, and she will offer suggestions for future avenues of research.
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Vc. Panel: "Wild Strategery": New Diagrams of Control and Assessment in Postmodern Writing Classrooms

Byron Hawk (George Mason University)
Lorie J. Goodman (Pepperdine University, Malibu CA)
Thomas J. Rickert (Western Oregon University, Salem OR)

It is the grounding assumption of this panel that we are currently at a generational crossroads that has specific consequences for writing classrooms. Each new generation entering our classrooms to be taught writing brings with it new perspectives, knowledges, attitudes, and orientations. Whether or not these characteristics can be grouped together to define an entire generation accurately, such exercises in definition can serve as a useful heuristic for initiating inquiry. Our panel considers the possibility that the current generation entering academia can be seen to indicate a sea-change in attitudes toward education--what it is and what it is for. In terms of writing, we suggest that there is a waning of investment in traditional forms of writing, especially those that adhere to the standardized precepts of print literacy, except insofar as they are congruent with students' vocational interests. Critical pedagogies that attempt to instill critical distance in students towards ideological aspects of culture seem to particularly suffer in such a climate, fostering attitudes of cynical accommodation and acquiescence at odds with the goals of empowerment these pedagogies seek. At the same time, universities and colleges have responded to cultural and economic transformations with new strategies of control that bear marked differences from those characteristic of Foucault's disciplinary regime. Our panel understands phenomena like Duke University's recent drive toward even stricter assessment procedures (and Duke is hardly uncharacteristic) to be intimately connected with students' disengagement with education and writing and the development of an ever more elevated consumer mentality. In order to make sense of these and related problems, our panel interrogates generational conflicts as they pertain to control strategies and resistance, forms of electronic post-literacy as they conflict with institutionally mandated forms of literacy, and problems concerning assessment in an era when its goals and usefulness are less clear than it has been in the past.

The 3Cs--Creed, Code, and Cult: Generational Difference in the Teaching Scene--Byron Hawk

Literacy Unleashed--Lorie J. Goodman
The desires of post-modern, post-literate students clash with the literate mandates of our institutions and their impulse to hold the line on grading and modern notions of literacy. These issues of control over language and literacy accelerate in electronic environments that create potential for literate activity beyond institutional norms of composition and argument.

'Can't You Read the Signs?': Post-Process Grading in the Society of Control--Thomas J. Rickert
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Vd. What do TAs Need to Know About Teaching Writing, and Why do They Need to Know it?

Literacy and TA Training, or, What Do Literature-Trained TAs Really Need to Know About Rhet/Comp to Teach First-Year Writing?

Kimberly Bell (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA)
Lynee Lewis Gaillet (Georgia State University, Atlanta GA)

As a WPA trained in composition/rhetoric and an Associate WPA trained in medieval literature, we have attempted to devise a comprehensive TA mentoring program focusing on literacy in comp/rhet studies for our lit-trained TAs. Our institution is located in a large urban area. We offer 200 sections of composition a semester, and most of these classes are taught by TAs who have no or limited knowledge of composition studies. They view their classes as opportunities to introduce and discuss "great literature," despite the fact that the only sanctioned books for the first-semester writing class are a handbook and a rhetoric/reader. Our dual task of introducing TAs to rhet/comp studies and reforming the curriculum in our first-year writing courses is complicated by the demographics of our TAs, who because of urban exigencies often stay in graduate programs much longer than traditional graduate students.

In this presentation, we will outline our TA training program, discussing the challenges of instituting a comprehensive mentoring plan in a large university where no TA training formerly existed. We will address the following issues and encourage the audience to explore possible solutions to these questions:

· Should teachers trained only in literature or creative writing (and who are illiterate in composition theory and pedagogy) be responsible for teaching first-year writing?
· How do WPAs not only educate but interest lit-trained TAs assigned to teach first-year composition?
· How much formal knowledge of comp/rhet scholarship and pedagogy do TAs actually need?
· How does the WPA deal with TAs from creative writing and literature who are openly hostile toward and uninterested in composition instruction?

Seeking a Philosopher’s Stone and Finding a Goblet of Fire: How Can New TA Training Be More Effective?

Jeanne Dugan (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)
Sarah Duerden (Arizona State University, Tempe AZ)

New Teaching Assistants experience a 3- week intensive course prior to the start of the year and a one-semester class that follows, a sort of “new TA boot camp” that, at times, resembles playing Quidditch without enough broomsticks. In three short weeks, the faculty attempts to ready a diverse group of new teachers for first-year writing. The challenges for all involved are enormous. Within this group of TAs are experienced teachers and first time teachers, all of whom rightly expect training that meets their individual needs. Many of the new TAs have not only never taught before, many have never taken first-year writing, the course they are going to teach. Most are literature MA or MFA candidates, and most have never taken a course in rhetoric. Their bias is towards literature, and some cannot understand why literature is not at the heart of first-year writing. Some TAs want literally to know what to do in class next week; others want to explore why they are teaching what they are teaching, and what other professionals have said. The challenges of teaching such a course revolve around the varying needs of the individuals. Both speakers have taught the new Teaching Assistant Training Orientation and Seminar. Based on this experience, we would like to reflect on the challenges and successes we have encountered.

Specifically, we will discuss effective strategies useful for the opening intensive three-week orientation as well as useful but differing approaches to the semester-long seminar. Topics will include active learning techniques, theories, and modeling; and building community among the new TAs. We will further explore the issue of texts: what new TAs should read and what they should not read, a topic which relates to the delicate balance between pedagogical and theoretical concerns that must be addressed throughout the seminar. In turn, texts and pedagogical/theoretical issues tie into the types of individual mentoring that should occur throughout the semester and beyond. Of course, no TA Seminar exists without controversy: we will explore problems of and solutions to issues of resistance. Finally, based on our experience, we would like to propose a vision of an “ideal” TA Training.
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updated Sept. 15, 2001

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