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Roger Thompson

D. Alexis Hart

D. Alexis Hart and Roger Thompson offer rich academic inquiry into the idea of “the veteran” as well as into ways that veteran culture has been fostered or challenged in writing classrooms, in writing centers, and in college communities more generally.

For good reasons, the rise of veterans studies has occurred within the discipline of writing studies, with its interdisciplinary approach to scholarship, pedagogy, and community outreach. Writing faculty are often a point of first contact with veteran students, and writing classrooms are by their nature the site of disclosures, providing opportunities to make connections and hear narratives that debunk the myth of the stereotypical combat veteran of popular culture. 

Presenting a more nuanced approach to understanding “the veteran” leads not only to more useful research, but also to more wide-ranging and significant scholarship and community engagement. Such an approach recognizes veterans as assets to the college campus, encourages institutions to customize their veterans programs and courses, and leads to more thoughtful engagement with veterans in the writing classroom.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE)

Studies in Writing and Rhetoric

Writing Programs, Veterans Studies, and the Post-9/11 University: A Field Guide

Anna Plemons

Through a mix of history, theory, and story, Anna Plemons explores the fate of the Arts in Corrections (AIC) program at New Folsom Prison in California in order to study prison education in general as well as the disciplinary goals of rhetoric and composition classrooms.

When viewed as a microcosm of the broader enterprise, the prison classroom highlights the way that composition and rhetoric as a discipline continues to make use of colonial ways of knowing and being that work against the decolonial intentions of the field. Plemons suggests that a truly decolonial turn in composition cannot be achieved as long as economic logics and rhetorics of individual transformation continue to be the default currency for ascribing value in prison writing programs specifically and in out-of-school writing communities more generally. Indigenous scholarship provides the theoretical basis for Plemons’s proposed intervention in the ways it both pushes back against individualized, economic assessments of value and describes design principles for research and pedagogy that are respectful, reciprocal, and relational. 

Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom includes narrative selections from the author and current and former AIC participants, inviting readers into the lives of incarcerated authors and demonstrating the effects of relationality on prison-scholars, ultimately upending the misconception that these writers and their teachers exist apart from the web of relations beyond the prison walls. With contributions from incarcerated prison-scholars Ken Blackburn, Bryson L. Cole, Harry B. Grant Jr., Adam Hinds, Hung-Linh "Ronnie" Hoang, Andrew Molino, Michael L. Owens, Wayne Vaka, and Martin Williams.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Beyond Progress in the Prison Classroom: Options and Opportunities

Mara Holt

Collaborative learning is not only a standard part of writing pedagogy, but it is also a part of contemporary culture. Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice: A History examines the rich historical and political contexts of collaborative learning, starting with John Dewey’s impact on progressive education in the early twentieth century. 

In the 1930s, for instance, collaborative practices flourished. In the 1950s, they operated in stealth, within an ideology suspicious of collaboration. Collaborative pedagogies blossomed in the protests of the 1960s and continued into the 1980s with the social turn in composition theory. Twenty-first-century collaborative practices influenced by pragmatism are found in writing centers, feminist pedagogies, and computer-mediated instruction. Mara Holt argues that as composition changes with the influence of ecological and posthuman theories, there is evidence of a significant pragmatist commitment to evaluating theory by its consequences.

Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice: A History

Sandra L. Tarabochia

Reframing the Relational examines how writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines communicate with each other in face-to-face conversations about teaching writing. 

Sandra L. Tarabochia argues that a pedagogical approach to faculty interactions in Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) and Writing in the Disciplines (WID) contexts can enhance cross-disciplinary communication and collaboration and ultimately lead to more productive, sustainable initiatives. Theorizing pedagogy as an epistemic, reflexive, relational activity among teacher-learners, she uses a pedagogical framework to analyze conversations between writing specialists and faculty in other disciplines, drawing on transcripts from interviews and recorded conversations. 

The author identifies the discursive moves faculty used to navigate three communicative challenges or opportunities: negotiating expertise, orienting to change, and embracing play. Based on this analysis, she constructs a pedagogical ethic for WAC/WID work and shows how it can help faculty embrace the potential of cross-disciplinary communication.

Reframing the Relational: A Pedagogical Ethic for Cross-Curricular Literacy Work

Staci M. Perryman-Clark

Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building.

This collection centers writing program administration (WPA) discourse as intersectional race work. In this historical moment in public discourse when race and racist logics are no longer sanitized in coded language or veiled political rhetoric, contributors provide examples of how WPA scholars can push back against the ways in which larger, cultural rhetorical projects inform our institutional practices, are coded into administrative agendas, and are reflected in programmatic objectives and interpersonal relations. Editors Staci M. Perryman-Clark and Collin Lamont Craig have made a space for WPAs of color to cultivate antiracist responses within an Afrocentric framework and to enact socially responsible approaches to program building. This framework also positions WPAs of color to build relationships with allies and create contexts for students and faculty to imagine rhetorics that speak truth to oppressive and divisive ideologies within and beyond the academy, but especially within writing programs. Contributors share not just experiences of racist microaggressions, but also the successes of black WPAs and WPAs whose work represents a strong commitment to students of color. Together they work to foster stronger alliance building among white allies in the discipline, and, most importantly, to develop concrete, specific models for taking action to confront and resist racist microaggressions. As a whole, this collection works to shift the focus from race more broadly toward perspectives on blackness in writing program administration.

Black Perspectives in Writing Program Administration: From the Margins to the Center

This collection explores decolonial shifts in composition and rhetoric informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods.

The discipline of composition and rhetoric stands at a crossroad in its pedagogical, research, and public commitments. Decolonial ruptures in writing and rhetoric studies work to build new horizons, new histories, of local knowledges and meaning-making practices that break from Western hegemonic models of knowledge production. This collection functions as one access point within a constellation of such work, forming an ecology of decolonial shifts informed by strategies for potentially decolonizing language and literacy practices, writing and rhetorical instruction, and research practices and methods. Rhetorics elsewhere and otherwise emerge across a spectrum, from geo- and body politics of knowledge and understanding to local histories emerging from colonial peripheries. Romeo García and Damián Baca offer the expressions elsewhere and otherwise as invitations to join existing networks and envision pluriversal ways of thinking, writing, and teaching that surpass the field’s Eurocentric geographies, cartographies, and chronologies.

Rhetorics Elsewhere and Otherwise: Contested Modernities, Decolonial Visions

Aja Y. Martinez

Named one of the 20 Best New Rhetoric Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority

Winner of the 2021 Vision Award from the Coalition for Community Writing 

Humanities scholar Aja Y. Martinez makes a compelling case for counterstory as methodology in rhetoric and writing studies through the well-established framework of critical race theory (CRT), reviewing first the counterstory work of Richard Delgado, Derrick Bell, and Patricia J. Williams, whom she terms counterstory exemplars. Delgado, Bell, and Williams, foundational critical race theorists working in the respective counterstory genres of narrated dialogue, fantasy/allegory, and autobiography, have set precedent for others who would research and compose with this method.

Arguing that counterstory provides opportunities for marginalized voices to contribute to conversations about dominant ideology, Martinez applies racial and feminist rhetorical criticism to the rich histories and theories established through counterstory genres, all the while demonstrating how CRT theories and methods can inform teaching, research, and writing/publishing of counterstory.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series
In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition—including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse—ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.