Words Verb Movements

Joseph Harris wrote A TEACHING SUBJECT (2012), and it's pretty good. However, we have some ideas that can make it better. What follows is a visual representation of chapter proposals we'd like to see Harris include in a new edition. This visual also shows what new scholars (us) in this field consider important - what direction we hope to be headed in, and what important stops have already happened along the way.

[brilliantcomphumans]

This is a visual representation of how FYC connects to other alphabetic artifacts (terms) present in chapter proposals for Joe Harris’ A Teaching Subject.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Methodology

Sample selection:

To create a visual that represents the field, we selected a corpus that encapsulated the trends of the field based on readings we completed for ENGL 7530/6530 in July 2016 in the form of book chapter proposals. The 500-word chapter proposal was based on a fictive call for a revised edition of Joseph Harris’s A Teaching Subject. Harris’s book, organized by words that represented at major trends in the field of composition since the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966, provided an exigence aligned to our goals of mapping the current field. The ten MA and PhD candidates in our class proposed the following words for the new edition: access, affect, bodies, communication, genre, literacy, metacognition, multimodal, response, and transfer. One of the students collected the proposals and created a single text file. We selected this corpus due to the expansive view that each word represents in the field of composition and rhetoric in 2016. We recognize the limitations of this corpus as it does not come from refereed journals or other published work; this corpus might better represent where we hope the field will go rather than where it is. Creation of visual:

Based on previous exposure to software tools that create word clouds and other visual representations of text, we elected to use the “links” (also called the “collocates graph”) feature of Voyant Tools. This feature generates a web of words that are used most frequently in the corpus. The software color-coded the words based on their frequency with green words appearing more frequently and red words appearing less frequently. The software also connects words based on their relative proximity with lines of varying width. Wider lines connecting two words identifies not only a more frequent connection but a closer connection. For example, the thickest line in our graph connects “composition” and “studies” because those words appear adjacent to one another more frequently than another other combination with “composition” or “studies”).  

The “links” feature is both interactive and adjustable. When we initially loaded the corpus into the software, only 15 words appeared with only students, writing, and composition as green words. By expanding the context to “7”, those 15 words became green and more than 40 red words appeared. We removed any word that was used only once in the entire corpus.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Selected Presentation Medium

To best reach our intended audience of graduate students new to the field and to connect with other public scholars, we selected Tumblr, a social media site featuring “microblogging” that is popular among teens and young adults, as our delivery method. Along with the efficiency of this medium and the portability of the information in this venue, we intend this choice as a nod to the emergence and centrality of digital literacy in the 21st century. While we recognize the temporality of cloud-based media, we also hope that this site endures as an archive of our learning.

[brilliantcomphumans]

The act of writing, then, is not so much about using a particular set of skills as it is about becoming a particular kind of person

Kevin Roozen in Naming What We Know

[brilliantcomphumans]

This is a visual representation of the ways in which writing connects with specific words in the chapter proposals.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Writing

1. “Writing,” “language,” and “students” are connected in the shape of a triangle. If we look at the words through the lens “language-writing-students,” it points to Threshold Concept 3.1, “Writing is linked to identity,” in which Kevin Roozen writes, “The act of writing, then, is not so much about using a particular set of skills as it is about becoming a particular kind of person” (qtd. in Adler-Kassner and Wardle 51). Writing enables the development of the self, and it also allows students to perform different identities within different communities and situations. If we adjust the view, through the lens “writing-students(’)-language,” another trend comes into focus: students and their individual voices. Since CCC’s Students’ Right to Their Own Language statement, the field has advocated for a more multilingual and individualized attention to voice. However, in Joseph Harris’s A Teaching Subject, he notes the pedagogical tension that “stem[s] from deep and conflicting institutions about how language and the self are related” (56).

2. “Writing” and “genres” are only connected through the terms “FYC” and “classroom.” This appears to situate genre only inside the composition class. The location is important to note, as this distance between the genres in the classroom and their relevance to the outside world reveals another debate in the field. Elizabeth Wardle criticizes in “Mutt Genres” the artificiality of genre assignments: “Simply teaching students institutionalized features of various genres limits and simplifies the varied exigencies to which those genres have responded in their rhetorical situations outside of the FYC classroom” (678). Still, as Fulkerson describes in “Composition at the Turn of the 21st Century,” teaching genres remains one of the three most prevalent approaches to FYC.

3. It is interesting that the word “grammar” does not appear at all in our word web. However, “writing” does connect to “current” in the form of current-traditional (three out of the five times it was used in the document), signifying the shift from focus on form to focus on meaning and effective communication. This absence of grammar also brings attention to the general misconception outside the field that teaching writing denotes teaching grammar. Student writers in Nancy Sommers’s study understood revision—better writing—to be mostly a matter of word choice and word rearrangement. Similarly, the pressures other disciplines put on FYC to reform students’ grammar illustrate the skewed expectations of those outside the field who see FYC as a service course. This misconception is a result of the field’s continual struggle to define itself and its goals in FYC to other stakeholders.

4. Although “composition” and “studies” is the strongest link, “writing” and “studies” comes in at a close second. This reveals the recent shift toward conceptualizing composition and rhetoric under writing studies. Karen Kopelson identifies in “Sp(l)itting Images” a need to broaden the field’s research outside the limiting framework of the pedagogical imperative. Other scholars have advocated for FYC to embrace writing—and writing about writing—as their content (Hairston; Downs and Wardle; Adler-Kassner and Wardle).

[brilliantcomphumans]

One conditions that serves as a strong current invitation to composition studies is the growing consensus among most disciplines that our realities and systems of knowing are not reflections or givens that are discovered ready-made but rather are themselves composed (or constructed, to use the term of choice), that it is only by actively composing our worlds that we can know them. This view of reality as a series of composed texts and of composing or constructing as the acts of bringing those realities to consciousness is, quite simply, the heart of composition studies.

Andrea Lunsford

[brilliantcomphumans]

A visual representation of the term “composition” and its interconnectivity to other terminology used in chapter proposals.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Composition

“Composition” is a prominent term that figures into the visual representation of our proposals for good reason; Harris’ subtitle states that A Teaching Subject focuses on “composition since 1966,” and the alphabetic artifacts that are prominently linked to “composition” recall an interesting journey and an exciting perspective of the future. In the visual created for this project, some interesting connections occurred between the term “composition” and the words “access,” “disability,” and “studies.”

Access - It is no surprise that “access” is linked to “composition” in the visual – this seems to speak to concerns in the field that originated during the social turn, and persist today in the midst of the public intellectual movement. Mina P. Shaughanessy and Paulo Freire speak to the concept of access relating to class in their work, and Lynn Z. Bloom furthers this idea of widening access through breaking down hierarchies of class and race in her 1996 piece entitled “Freshman English as a Middle Class Enterprise.” She postulates that “as teachers we, like our students, are citizens of the world; all of us have an ethical as well as cultural obligation to respect the world’s multiple ways of living and of speaking” (671). This idea of living and speaking in more accessible spaces continues to shape our discipline.

In a piece entitled “Where We Are: Disability & Accessibility,” scholars Tara Wood, Jay Dolmage, Margaret Price, and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson speak to a future where we move beyond a mindset of disability towards one of inclusion in composition studies. They point out that “[i]ronically, the most common objection we hear to anticipating disabled students invokes the infinite diversity of human minds and bodies; or, ‘How can I accommodate everyone?’ This is a good question, but a misdirected one. A better question might be, ‘How can a classroom community be productively and continually transformed by an orientation of inclusion?’ Understanding access and accommodation as recursive projects that exist before, throughout, and even after a course allows for deliberate and proactive course design while also inviting and drawing on the diversity that each roster provides” (148).

Additional Source – “Where We Are: Disability & Accessibility”(2014):

https://www.uc.edu/content/dam/uc/journals/composition-studies/docs/WWA/Wood%20Dolmage%20Price%20Lewiecki-Wilson%2042.2.pdf

Disability - This terminology ties directly to the intersectional quality of “access” and what it means to composition studies. While it would not be appropriate to conflate the two differentiating issues, there is some similarity between the ways in which Catherine Prendergast speaks to the hidden issues of racism (i.e. “Race: The Absent Presence in Composition Studies”) and the way current scholarship speaks to disability within the cultural landscape of composition and rhetoric – both students and scholars feel the current impact of silenced spaces. Victor del Hierro, Daisy Levy, and Margaret Price speak to disability and its intersectional relationship with other individual characteristics in their piece entitled “We Are Here: Negotiating Differences and Alliance in Spaces of Cultural Rhetorics.” Through this article, we see that composition studies can thrive progressively by acknowledging silenced voices.  

Additional Source – A Conversation with Margaret Price (SWCA 2016): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ab2o1Z4xpoU

Studies - This is a logical connection to the term “composition” because it is a signal of the beginning as well as the present and future. The discipline (& Harris’ text) has been defining what the “studies” portion of comp as a discipline should look like for a long time. Harris opens his text with the Dartmouth meeting of 1966, and then expands into his chapter on growth while keeping an eye on the underpinnings of our current-traditional roots. This quest for “definition” is reflected by scholar and sass-master Virginia Burke who, in 1965 penned the following about composition studies:

“There is chaos today in the teaching of composition because since the turn of the century, composition has lacked an informing discipline, without which no field can maintain its proper dimensions, the balance and proportion of its various parts or its very integrity.” -- V. Burke “The Composition-Rhetoric Pyramid”

While there is evidence that we as a discipline have become more developed and defined over the decades, I postulate that composition as a study is continually attempting to redefine itself. We must shift with the turns and movements that continue to shape our own cultural situation. This is showcased effectively by Andrea Lunsford’s introduction to her book entitled The Nature of Composition Studies where she states that “[o]ne conditions that serves as a strong current invitation to composition studies is the growing consensus among most disciplines that our realities and systems of knowing are not reflections or givens that are discovered ready-made but rather are themselves composed (or constructed, to use the term of choice), that it is only by actively composing our worlds that we can know them. This view of reality as a series of composed texts and of composing or constructing as the acts of bringing those realities to consciousness is, quite simply, the heart of composition studies” (8-9).

[brilliantcomphumans]

As always, the ultimate point of rhetoric is to help writers/speakers/designers do a better job of helping people live their lives—or, even, save lives.

James Porter

[brilliantcomphumans]

A visual representing “rhetoric” and its connectivity to terms in the chapter proposals.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Rhetoric

In our visual, rhetoric is connected to studies, writing, and composition, but not to students or classrooms.  This suggests that although we are discussing rhetoric as we debate its place in the field of composition, (we also see rhetoric connected to field), we aren’t discussing it in terms of how it directly applies to what our students are doing.  In other words, we are most frequently discussing rhetoric as a part of our theoretical work, not our teaching work, perhaps only perpetuating the “theory-practice split” that Karen Kopelson points out in “Sp(l)itting Images; or, Back to the Future of (Rhetoric and?) Composition.”  While the discipline seems to acknowledge that rhetoric and writing are intertwined, it would appear that rhetoric only reaches our students (and effects our classroom practices) through composition pedagogy.  

Rhetoric is frequently mentioned in connection with Porter – referring us to James Porter’s essay “Recovering Delivery for Digital Composition.” This is a bit puzzling, as so many others refer to rhetoric – Burke, Crowley, Detweiler, Ratcliffe, Spigelman).  Even then, 3 of the 4 mentions of Porter refer to his views on digital technologies for composing.  Only 1 reference to Porter mentions his rhetorical focus – how he “put[s] rhetoric first.”  This is puzzling because Porter’s focus is not necessarily on defending or highlighting the value of digital composition, but specifically on arguing for the rhetorical concept of delivery in a discipline that is already using digital media for composing.  

[brilliantcomphumans]

“Compositionists must learn to resist thinking of identifying students and our teaching in terms of fixed categories of language, language ability, and social identity, however natural and inevitable such categories can seem to be in our day-to-day work and in the arguments we make to the public in defense of our work.

Canagarajah, A. Suresh. "The Place of World Englishes in Composition: Pluralization Continued."​

[brilliantcomphumans]

Image displaying “student” interconnectivity to other terms.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Student

1- In “The War Between Reading and Writing---and How to End It,” Peter Elbow differentiates between reader and writer where the former believes that all knowledge comes from linguistic, from language, the latter, however, believes that there is a prior knowledge, nonverbal part of knowledge. These two fractions represent what students are. The links connect Students to language, writing, knowledge, response, fyc, understanding, and teachers. There is a need in the field to change students roles to whether we want them to be mere recipients, readers, or writers, generators of their own ideas based on their own set of knowledge before they can expand on it as they progress.

2- Students in this image are not linked to composition studies neither to rhetoric. This shows how composition studies have shaped a new role for students, more individualized, where they have the right to use their own style and persona in writing. This is not a new turn in the field. Bartholomae in “Writing with Teachers: A Conversation with Peter Elbow” defines students to be this subjective and self-independent entity. Composition studies has created available space for students’ independence and how teachers should work on creating that space. Patricia Sullivan in “Composing Culture: A Place for the Personal” (2003). Jeff Smith also focuses on Students’ goals and outcomes in academia making it a student-oriented pedagogy. Issues of race and gender most definitely fit in this concentration on students. Lynn Bloom emphasizes how we shouldn’t enforce middle class ethics on students to homogenize them and to punish the misfit. Candace Spigelman takes the discussion into another level of how we have no right to shape ideologies for students since they are in the process of acquiring their own beliefs and experiences in life.

3- There is also a link between language and rights emphasized in the image referring to student’s language invoking Geneva Smitherman’s “CCCC’s Role in the Struggle for Language Rights” and most certainly implying Horner’s, Trimbur’s, and Canagarajah’s appeals to respect and endorse student’s choice of language and differences. The word English has disappeared in this image finalizing steps in composition studies to focus less on Academic English highlighting the importance of students’ right of choice instead.

4- In this image, the proposals seem to have a correlation between students and fyc only. Students as a category should be broadened to include all levels, of course not forgetting Kopelson’s article on graduate students in “Splitting Images.” Again, however, fyc also represents the intro stage where students are introduced to different ways of writing and expression, not limited to five-paragraph essay.

5- There is also a link between students and teachers representing how to create the new student model where teachers should be cognizant of why we approach our students differently.  Bartholomae hinted at that too that teachers are responsible for creating space for students’ individuality. Kopelson’s article on cunning performance highlights how students anticipate certain reactions or attitudes from their teachers. “Many students will not feel the pleasure or power of authorship unless we make that role available” (Bartholomae : Writing with Teachers, 69).

Trends: students’ prior knowledge and understanding. Students as individuals. Missing: English, grammar, and process theory.

Significance: the field has definitely become more student-oriented. Although composition studies have ignored providing practical strategies in classrooms, students have been given agency to enhance their writing experience that is not specifically tied to writing courses. There is a developing sense of writing appreciation where students have approached it as a medium to realize their own purposes in writing.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Absence/Presence

As we reveal in our individual studies, our visual shows us that four terms have taken on particular importance in our corpus:  composition, rhetoric, student, and writing.  We noticed a conspicuous absence of several terms we consider important: literacy, communication, linguistics, grammar, English, pedagogy, process, digital, voice, and academia, among others. We have each explored these presences and absences in our individual analyses, keeping in mind that our corpus is only our own ideas, and not representative of the entire field of composition, past, present, and future.

[brilliantcomphumans]

Why This Matters

Why This Matters

Voyant tools, word clouds, and other textual analysis tools can help us do what Derek Mueller refers to as “distant reading,” which Mueller says is useful “to reduce and intensify patterns.”  Although this practice cannot be claimed to reveal all of the ideas in the field, the study of trends in word frequency can help to at least suggest trends in the scholarship in the field.  Awareness of these trends is crucial as we have to acknowledge our individual roles; each paper we write or tweet we send out influences what are perceived as the priorities of composition studies.  Through showing us what ideas or approaches are currently being privileged, cited, or overlooked, distant reading empowers us to take an active role in the direction our field takes.