Courses, Ph.D. in Composition and Rhetoric

Core courses:Composition Theory, Introduction to Research. For the Ph.D. in English, one theory course is required. Composition Theory fulfills that requirement.

Optional Courses:

Gender and Writing, Writing and Emerging Technologies, Writing and Difference, Academic Discourses, Critical/Cultural Pedagogies, Writing and the Teaching of Writing, Literacy Studies. In addition, other relevant courses are offfered by the English Department, by the Department of Communication Studies, and by the School of Education's program in Language and Literacy Studies.

Course Descriptions:

Writing and the Teaching of Writing

Explores the ground defined by these questions: "What do we do when we do this thing we call 'writing'? What is its nature, or what are its several natures? And, should we set up to teach writing, what models do we carry of the processes by which something is learned and taught?"

Offered as an introduction to the field to entering MA/PhD students, area K-12 teachers, and offered to (not required of) graduate students teaching the undergraduate first-year writing course for the first time. Readings from such anthologies as Tate-Myers' Writing Teacher's Sourcebook and Lee Odell's Theory and Practice in the Teaching of Writing. Includes readings, a writing project, a collaboratively written book review, and an inquiry (research) project. As part of the curriculum, experience in all aspects of the writing process-drafting, giving and receiving feedback, copy-editing, publishing-and in reflecting on the experience.

Composition Theory

We will read a sampling of theoretical perspectives being advanced in contemporary composition and rhetoric. We'll consider such questions as these: What's the ground for each? How does each construct the enterprise of teaching writing, of "composition"? What issues are perceived and approaches advocated? One aim for the course will be to develop a partial map of the field and get a sense of one's own orientation--as a teacher and scholar--within that landscape. We will read the work of such scholars as Bartholomae, Bizzell, Britton, Brodkey, Elbow, Flower, Harris, Malinowitz, Spellmeyer, and Villanueva.

Major projects: one "applications" paper critically examining a connection between a particular theory and teaching practice, one book review, and one longer essay on an issue of choice. We will also use e-mail for informal discussions of readings, both before as a follow up to in person discussions during seminar.

Introduction to Research on Writing

This seminar has two aims: to provide a framework for reading and evaluating empirical research and to help prepare participants to conduct their own research. We focus primarily on qualitative, context based methodologies although we will consider the aims, methods and assumptions of a variety of approaches, including experimental, descriptive, and interpretive, and a variety of methodologies including ethnographic and case study research as informed by cultural anthropology and education research. We will read about and experiment with such specific methods as using compose-aloud protocols, interviewing, and text analysis through various means. As we consider research approaches, we will look as well as at the theoretical perspectives that inform them, including rhetorical theory, structural and critical linguistics, feminist theory, cognitive and developmental theory, and other composition theories.

Throughout the seminar, we will keep returning to two key questions: How do our-and other researchers' -personal situations, theoretical assumptions, and methods shape the "reality" we find in our investigations? What can we learn from a given study that would influence our teaching or our view of different theoretical claims? Requirements include two, short written critiques of published research studies; occasional experiment with particular research techniques; a critical review of research on a topic of choice; and a short research project, also on a question of choice.

Writing and Difference

Writing and Difference takes a cultural studies approach to investigating the interaction of cultural and academic discourses, looking at the textual practices of marginalized groups and individuals' interactions with discourses of power. Specifically, the seminar will investigate the ways in which difference--defined broadly as race, class, gender, and sexuality--affects writing practices, and how such difference is negotiated within the site of schooling, and more locally, within writing classrooms. We'll begin by looking at research into the diverse literate behaviors in the U.S, examining how cultural contexts embody a variety of epistemologies and ideologies.

From this foundation, we'll turn our attention to questions of power and identity politics; that is, the ways in which individuals form subjectivities and identities from the discourses they encounter and express such subjectivities in their writing. The course's primary focus will be on what happens when identities formed in marginalized discourses encounter and possibly conflict with the more "valued" discourses of our society, particularly academic discourse. We will examine these questions of power, textuality, and identity through readings in cultural and composition theory. However, the goal of such theorizing will remain grounded in practice; thus, we will also examine such questions materially through published literacy histories and qualitative research into classroom practice.

Finally, the course will turn to questions of pedagogy, looking at various teaching strategies designed to mediate these issues of power in the writing classroom. Assignments will include periodic reading responses, a short autobiographical project into diverse literacy practices, and a major final project. The final project will be geared toward the personal interests of class member.

Gender and Writing

Gender and writing will examine how gender affects writing practices, including the types of literacy practiced, the contexts of its use, writing processes, and how writing interacts with/potentially alters conceptions of gender and gendered ideologies. In particular, we will examine how looking at writing through the lens of gender challenges traditional notions of authorial voice, genre, and definitions of academic writing as well as the role language plays in constructing, performing, and refashioning gendered identity.

In order to examine these effects, the course will take a survey approach, beginning with feminist recovery of women's rhetorics and early work in composition on gender and writing taking an essentialist stance. The rest of the course will be organized by definitions of gender (i.e., psychological, sociological, textual, postmodern, cultural, and performative) and how each perspective has impacted composition research and theory on gender and writing. The main focus of the course, then, is on research into gendered writing practices in various contexts rather than the gender theory itself. The theory will serve as a context for studies of gendered writing practices in academic discourse, the pubic sphere, and technological writing spaces.

Critical/Cultural Composition Pedagogies

This course will focus on how a variety of critical and cultural theories from diverse disciplines-i.e., critical pedagogy, cultural studies, feminist theory, queer theory, etc.-- have been applied to the composition classroom. In particular, the course will examine pedagogical works and discussions of pedagogy in composition scholarship that attempt to apply such theories to first-year and advanced composition courses (e.g. Berlin, Shor, France, Jarratt, Fleckenstein).

Writing and Emerging Technologies

In what ways has technology affected writing? reading? texts? books? the teaching of writing? educational institutions? Once upon a time we wrote on tablets, parchment, papyrus, yellow legal pads, on the telegraph, the typewriter. Now our writing is largely computer-mediated. Increasingly our students writing and read in new situations: email, IM, chatrooms, MOOs, MUDs. And increasingly we are asked to teach on line. For us writing teachers, what has changed? And what is the same? How does technology connect with our pedagogy?

These questions will be at the center of our own reading and writing. We'll read such books (yes, books!) as Duguid and Brown's The Social Life of Information, Geoffrey Nunberg's The Future of the Book, Shoshana Zuboff's In The Age of the New Machine, and essays from Cynthia Selfe's and Gail Hawisher's anthology, Passions, Pedagogies, and Twenty-First Century Technologies. No technical expertise required; some modest technical help provided.

Literacy Studies

What is literacy? What makes literacy effective, compelling, and valued? This course begins by addressing the mainstream American myth that suggests literacy leads to economic progress (social and individual). To challenge this myth, we will read ethnographic and other qualitative studies that inspire us to redefine literacy. These readings will take us from text-based to ideology-based definitions of literacy, from literacy acts to literacy events and practices, and from historical to ethnographic perspectives. Based on readings and class discussions, we will interrogate dominant cultural perceptions of literacy and ultimately consider the ways that readers and writers use literacy to upset these same cultural perceptions.

Course readings may include such books as Shirley Brice Heath's Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms, Harvey Graff's The Legacies of Literacy: Continuities and Contradictions in Western Culture and Society, Deborah Brandt's Literacy in American Lives, Morris Young's Minor Re/Visions: Asian American Literacy Narratives as a Rhetoric of Citizenship, and Beverly J. Moss' Literacy Across Communities as well as selections from Ellen Cushman et al's Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook.

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