Economies of Writing: Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition - Softcover

HORNER, BRUCE

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1607325225 ISBN 13: 9781607325222

Verlag: Utah State University Press, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

Economies of Writing advances scholarship on political economies of writing and writing instruction, considering them in terms of course subject, pedagogy, technology, and social practice. Taking the "economic" as a necessary point of departure and contention for the field, the collection insists that writing concerns are inevitably participants in political markets in their consideration of forms of valuation, production, and circulation of knowledge with labor and with capital.

Approaching the economic as plural, contingent, and political, chapters explore complex forces shaping the production and valuation of literacies, languages, identities, and institutions and consider their implications for composition scholarship, teaching, administration, and public rhetorics. Chapters engage a range of issues, including knowledge transfer, cyberpublics, graduate writing courses, and internationalized web domains.

Economies of Writing challenges dominant ideologies of writing, writing skills, writing assessment, language, writing technology, and public rhetoric by revealing the complex and shifting valuations of writing practices as they circulate within and across different economies. The volume is a significant contribution to rhetoric and composition’s understanding of and ways to address its seemingly perennial unease about its own work.

Contributors: Anis Bawarshi, Deborah Brandt, Jenn Fishman, T. R. Johnson, Jay Jordan, Kacie Kiser, Steve Lamos, Donna LeCourt, Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, Samantha Looker, Katie Malcolm, Paul Kei Matsuda, Joan Mullin, Jason Peters, Christian J. Pulver, Kelly Ritter, Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, Tony Scott, Scott Wible, Yuching Jill Yang, James T. Zebroski

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Bruce Horner is Endowed Chair in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Louisville. His books include Cross-Language Relations in Composition, winner of the 2012 CCCC Outstanding Book Award; Reworking English in Rhetoric and Composition; and Rewriting Composition.

Brice Nordquist is assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Syracuse University. He is the chair of the CCCC’s Transnational Composition Group and assistant editor of Working Papers on Negotiating Differences in Language and Literacy.

Susan M. Ryan is associate professor of English at the University of Louisville, where she specializes in American literature and culture. She is the author of The Grammar of Good Intentions and The Moral Economies of American Authorship.

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Economies of Writing

Revaluations in Rhetoric and Composition

By Bruce Horner, Brice Nordquist, Susan M. Ryan

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2017 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-522-2

Contents

Acknowledgments, 
Introduction Bruce Horner, Brice Nordquist, and Susan M. Ryan, 
I Institutional/Disciplinary Economies, 
1. The Politics of Valuation in Writing Assessment Tony Scott, 
2. (Re)writing Economies in a Community College: Funding, Labor, and Basic Writing Katie Malcolm, 
3. Dwelling Work and the Teaching of Writing: Responding to the Pressures of For-Profit Instruction Steve Lamos, 
4. Occupying Research — Again/Still Joan Mullin and Jenn Fishman, 
5. The Political Economy of English: The "Capital" of Literature, Creative Writing, and Composition James T. Zebroski, 
II Economies of Writing Pedagogy and Curriculum, 
6. Economies of Knowledge Transfer and the Use-Value of First-Year Composition Anis Bawarshi, 
7. Symbolic Capital in the First-Year Composition Classroom Yuching Jill Yang, Kacie Kiser, and Paul Kei Matsuda, 
8. A Question of Mimetics: Graduate-Student Writing Courses and the New "Basic" Kelly Ritter, 
9. Commodifying Writing: Handbook Simplicity versus Scholarly Complexity Samantha Looker, 
10. Psychoanalysis, Writing Pedagogy, and the Public: Toward a New Economy of Desire in the Classroom and in Composition Studies T. R. Johnson, 
III Economies of Language and Medium, 
11. Literate Resources and the Contingent Value of Language Rebecca Lorimer Leonard, 
12. The Rhetoric of Economic Costs and Social Benefits in US Healthcare Language Policy Scott Wible, 
13. Web 2.0 Writing as Engine of Information Capital Christian J. Pulver, 
14. www.engl.ish: Internationalized World Wide Web Domains and Translingual Complexities Jay Jordan, 
IV Public Writing Economies, 
15. Habermasochism: The Promise of Cyberpublics in an Information Economy Donna Lecourt, 
16. Tierra Contaminada: Economies of Writing and Contaminated Ground Jason Peters, 
17. Democratic Rhetoric in the Era of Neoliberalism Phyllis Mentzell Ryder, 
Afterword: Lessons Learned Deborah Brandt, 
References, 
About the Authors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

THE POLITICS OF VALUATION IN WRITING ASSESSMENT

Tony Scott

Two contrasting situations have become familiar tropes of writing program administration and writing assessment scholarship in our field. Chris Gallagher (2009, 29–30) opens an article about assessment in Writing Program Administration with the description of one scenario in which university administrators are seeking to impose standardized assessments on a first-year writing program. The administrators are tying assessment to efficiency, centralized quality control, and accountability. Looming ominously within the scene is the Spellings Commission Report, which uses crisis rhetoric to call for an overhaul of higher education that has efficiency and accountability (typically code for mandated large-scale assessment) as central elements; also looming is the testing/textbook/curriculum industry, which has become an important, politically active driver of state-imposed assessment mandates on higher education across the country. After presenting this daunting scenario, Gallagher offers a contrasting scenario in which the writing program administrator (WPA) is respected and placed in a position of agency. The empowered WPA in the more positive scenario is recognized by interdisciplinary colleagues and higher-level administrators for expertise in writing, and she is initiating informed, democratic assessment practices with teachers that have positive effects in classes across campus (30).

Cindy Moore, Peggy O'Neill, and Brian Huot open an influential article in College Composition and Communication with similarly contrasting situations. In the first, a dean initiates contact with a WPA to seek advice about assessment in a writing-across-the-curriculum initiative. Moore, O'Neill, and Huot (2009) see this as an important development for its "implied message about the potential role of the composition director in the broad-based assessment this dean is beginning to imagine" (108). As with Gallagher's more positive scenario, here the WPA is in a position of power that comes from institutionally recognized expertise in both assessment and writing. She is not only able to shape how writing is conceived and assessed in the writing program, she is also able to shape assessment policy across campus. The article then describes contrasting, negative scenarios, which, the authors acknowledge, are common enough to have become established lore in the field. Here, assessments are imposed from outside, and WPAs are forced to work within narrow parameters that offer little autonomy for the writing program and little control over how scores will be used (108–9).

The problem posed in both articles is, How we might do assessment constructively, responsibly, and in a way consistent with current scholarly understandings of writers and writing, under circumstances not yet of our making? The responses to the problem are nearly always individualistic and focus primarily on the actions, rhetorical acumen, and agentive scope of the WPA, who represents the seemingly unified interests of an entire writing program. A minimum requirement is that the WPA learn about assessment. Moore, O'Neill, and Huot (2009) advocate a fairly deep and rigorous knowledge that includes understanding of complex conversations in psychometrics and educational measurement. Gallagher (2009) advocates a perhaps more familiarly composition-situated expertise that combines a current understanding of writing pedagogy with a general understanding of technical concepts in assessment. Both envision responses to assessment challenges that involve a rhetorically adept WPA who, lacking institutionally conferred agency and expertise in writing education, must create the conditions for it through the power of persuasion.

The trope of the can-do, rhetorically savvy, resourceful WPA holds its own place in the WPA scholarship. In her award-winning monograph, The Activist WPA, Linda Adler-Kassner (2008) offers frameworks WPAs might use to build relationships and coalitions across campuses and beyond to secure resources. While the techniques are drawn from activism, the purposes to which they are put are hardly radical — to create the conditions for a responsible and effective writing program. Kelly Ritter (2006, 61) similarly advocates that WPAs go public, outside of institutional structures, to gain a "hard-fought" authority not conferred institutionally and to secure seemingly basic operational resources. She advocates negotiating and building consensus with a broad swath of people — upper-level university administrators, regional WPAs, trustees on the school board, feeder institutions, high schools, and state boards of higher education. All of this work is to happen, one imagines, in addition to the demanding day-to-day work of actually administering a writing program.

What are the conditions that have led WPAs to envision this superbly skilled, tireless, and self-sacrificing professional paragon whose primary goal is to overcome considerable institutional friction — only to responsibly do what the institution mandates? How does the function of WPAs as skilled negotiators and assessment experts relate to the agency and conditions of the TAs and...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Utah State University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1607325225
• ISBN 13: 9781607325222
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 317
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar