Volume 33 Number 2 | Composition Studies

Volume 33 Number 2 Fall 2005

Articles
Ilene Crawford	Playing in Traffic: A Timely Metaphor for PostmodernEthnography and Composition Pedagogy

Jennifer DiGrazia Michel Boucher	Writing InQueeries: Bodies, Queer Theory, and an Experimental Writing Class

Peter Goggin Zach Waggoner	Sustainable Development: Thinking Globally and Acting Locally in the Writing Classroom

Erin Herberg	Can a Metamorphosis be Quantified?: Reflecting on Portfolio Assessment

Course Design
Kelly Ritter	English 200: Intermediate Composition

Online Exclusive Book Reviews
Dana Zaskoda	The Center Will Hold: Critical Perspectives on Writing Center Scholarship , edited by Michael A. Pemberton and Joyce Kinkead

Pavel Zemliansky	Electronic Collaboration in the Humanities: Issues and Options, edited by James A. Inman, Cheryl Reed, and Peter Sands

Andrea Deacon Muldoon	Historical Studies of Writing Program Administration: Individuals, Communities, and the Formation of a Discipline, edited by Barbara L’Eplattenier and Lisa Mastrangelo

Kim Donehower	Multiliteracies for a Digital Age, by Stuart A. Selber

Jami L. Carlacio	Response to Reform: Composition and the Professionalization of Teaching by Margaret J. Marshall

Allison Brimmer	Rhetoric and Ethnicity, edited by Keith Gilyard and Vorris Nunley

Carol Lea Clark	Rhetorical Education in America, edited by Cheryl Glenn, Margaret M. Lyday, and Wendy B. Sharer

Amy Dayton	Teaching Academic ESL Writing: Practical Techniques in Vocabulary and Grammar, by Eli Hinkel

Mary Buchinger Bodwell	*Writing Genres*, by Amy J. Devitt

Wendy Warren Austin	Writing New Media: Theory and Applications for Expanding the Teaching of Composition, by Anne Frances Wysocki, Johndan Johnson-Eilola, Cynthia L. Selfe, and Geoffrey Sirc

Book Reviews
Susan V. Wall	Ethnography Unbound: From Theory Shock to Critical Praxis, edited by Stephen Gilbert Brown and Sidney I. Dobrin

Amanda Espinosa-Aguilar	ESL Writers: A Guide for Writing Center Tutors , edited by Shanti Bruce and Ben Rafoth

Shane Borrowman	Defining Visual Rhetorics, by Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers

Maureen Daly Goggin	Invention in Rhetoric and Composition , by Janice M. Lauer

Teresa Grettano	Rhetoric Before and Beyond the Greeks, edited by Carol S. Lipson and Roberta A. Binkley

James Guignard	City Comp: Identities, Spaces, Practices, edited by Bruce McComiskey and Cynthia Ryan

Kurt Schick	Writing Groups Inside and Outside the Classroom, edited by Beverly J. Moss, Nels P. Highberg, and Melissa Nicholas

R. Mark Hall	Demythologizing Language Difference in the Academy: Establishing Discipline-Based Writing Programs, by Mark Waldo

Announcements	(Download PDF)

Abstracts for Composition Studies 33.2

Crawford, Ilene. "Playing in Traffic: A Timely Metaphor for Postmodern Ethnography and Composition Pedagogy." Composition Studies (33.2): 11-23.

This article argues that traveling and working as a writer in Vietnam yielded metaphors that changed the author’s pedagogy as well. The article first describes how the experience of crossing the street taught her to move on the terms dictated by local conditions. The metaphor of “moving in traffic” that grew out of this experience denotes a series of related, timely practices the author developed for her work as a writer. The article then draws on examples from recent composition courses to shows how the author has taken on similar timely teaching practices to develop a pedagogy of moving in traffic that relies on related metaphors of the street. The article concludes by offering a final metaphor of playing in traffic, which shows that teaching and writing is necessarily both fearful and hopeful work.

DiGrazia, Jennifer and Michel Boucher. "Writing InQueeries:
Bodies, Queer Theory, and an Experimental Writing Class." Composition Studies (33.2): 25-44.

In an experimental writing course we taught at a northeastern state university, we explored queer and writing, hoping to discover what students could create by merging these terms. How might queer theory help students use writing to reimagine and rearticulate various identity categories in ways that allowed them to reconfigure the mental map with which they navigate the world and understand themselves? How might writing help them understand queer theory and apply it to their lived realities? We use student interviews and reference students' projects to illustrate that, given the writing opportunity and theoretical background, students and teachers can use the writing classroom as a place to recreate identity categories and reimagine possibilities for self–representation. Yet, our course reaffirmed for us that even in a space within which we purportedly challenge identity categories, possibilities for representation remain limited. In a classroom, as in everyday interactions, we read bodies and rely upon these readings to categorize people and guide our interactions with them.

Goggin, Peter, and Zach Waggoner. "Sustainable Development: Thinking Globally and Acting Locally in the Writing Classroom." Composition Studies (33.2): 45-67.

This essay argues for sustainability-- a course of action and a mindset that meets the needs of the present while being conscious of, and not compromising the needs of, the future--as a robust focus teaching first-year composition. The essay describes a course designed to respond to calls by composition scholars to reimagine pedagogical designs for writing instruction based on the concept of sustainability. This revisioning is addressed through the pedagogical design of the New London Group’s four tenets of multiliteracy. Included in the essay are an account of the authors’ experiences in implementing and teaching the course along with excerpts from students’ discussions and observations on sustainability and writing.

Herberg, Erin. "Can a Metamorphosis be Quantified?: Reflecting on Portfolio Assessment." Composition Studies (33.2): 69-87.

This article outlines the experiences of a first-year writing program’s adoption of large-scale portfolio assessment as part of its move from student-focused assessment to programmatic assessment. This research is an attempt to provide evidence to support the claims benefits associated with portfolio assessment and to chronicle the changes that resulted in one writing program’s shift to portfolio assessment. It recounts the development, implementation, and evolution of a portfolio assessment program and reflects on its successes and the challenges the program continues to face.

Ritter, Kelly. "English 200: Intermediate Composition." Composition Studies (33.2): 89-112.

"English 200: Intermediate Composition" is a program elective for English majors and a writing-intensive elective for nonmajors at Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU), a comprehensive institution of 11,000 undergraduate and graduate (master’s level) students. English 200 is described in the departmental course catalog as a course “in expository writing, focusing on rhetorical analysis of a variety of texts in our culture.” Instructor approaches vary within a special topics format; the topic for this section was “Rhetoric, Argument, and the Law in Popular Culture.” The course is capped at 20 students and has a pre-requisite of English 112 (Composition II: Research Writing).

View this Course Design Online.