up to 2003

I'm running out of reading time and, by the looks of things on this blog, you are too! That's ok. It's summer skidding into fall. I wish it were otherwise, but there's no ignoring the steady march toward beginnings...

So, I skimmed the next set of readings (many of which I heard while in the audience, so I have the advantage of memory to lean on). Thematics that rise to the top in this set: diverse community of practitioners that make up the field (i.e., includes 2-year college teachers), the role of race in understandings and practices of rhetoric and the connection to writing and identity, and the hybridity of scholarship in the field (Bishop's piece is part memoir, part institutional history, part call-to-action, and part poem; Lovas's includes multi-media). With this last bit, it's become increasingly the case that people are trying to do scholarship differently, to practice what they preach in the classroom by mixing genres and mediums in scholarly writing too.

What also stands out to me, and what gave me a sense of belonging when I first went down this road, is the sense of community that pervades our work as scholars and teachers--understanding community as plural, as that which encompasses (and does not resolve or fully integrate) multiple differences. There is an ethos of caring and commitment that I find very welcoming and...unique in the context of academic culture.

Selfe's essay has functioned as a kind of siren. The important relationship between technology & literacy has only gained steam since she wrote in 1998. What counts as "writing" has changed dramatically...she got that long ago, and we're living with the reality of that right now in our classrooms.

90-96

These addresses illustrate the central place of literacy practices in the life of the field. Evident in these pieces is the growing importance of African-American literacy practices to the politics of writing instruction (whose language gets acknowledged? whose doesn't? why? what's to be gained by studying how minority and/or under-privileged language-users have employed writing, reading, and speaking practices?). And Gere and Bridwell-Bowles focus on the "extra-curriculum" of composition--all of the writing that goes on outside of school. This writing, as they both attest, is often a site of personal and social transformation. B-B advocates that we find ways to allow the outside world into the classroom more often in order to make them "vital places" where students might feel passionate about their work and come to see language as tranformative. She also calls for recognizing more mediums and forms as legitimate in the context of writing and composing. Her address in particular feels very forward-thinking to me. She seems to anticipate the recent emphasis on public writing, community writing projects, and digital/multi-modal writing practices. It seems to me that the field has really made good on her calls to action...all of which were "in the air" at the time, rather than invented by her alone. The convergence of critical pedagogy, politicized pedagogy, and enlarged studies of rhetoric and literacy, as well as the rise of technology seem to be part of the brew.