In PWR classes, students closely consider their audience and purpose as they pursue research and compose arguments in situations that we try to make as real-life as possible. In my classes, for instance, I ask students to look to self-selected “models of greatness” to show them what success looks like in a particular rhetorical situation, whether specialist academic journal or generalist essay. Simultaneously, PWR pedagogy moves students from writer-centered prose to reader-centered prose, to use Linda Flower’s terms, by requiring they carefully consider feedback from instructors, tutors, and peers alike. This emphasis on process draws not only from writing studies but also from philosophy. As Hannah Arendt puts it in The Human Condition, “for excellence, by definition, the presence of others is required" (Professor Andrea Lunsford points to this idea from Arendt in her seminal 1991 article on the writing center “Collaboration, Control, and the Idea of a Writing Center”).
In the Western philosophical tradition, the strength of our thinking and communication cannot develop in isolation; going public is a way of testing and developing our excellence. PWR pedagogy gently but insistently encourages students to go public with their thinking. The end result is not only many outstanding RBAs [research based arguments], but for more and more students, publication beyond the circle of their class to the wider campus, nation, and world.
Quite a few students publish their RBAs in journals at Stanford dedicated to undergraduate writing. For instance, Liz Hille’s student Amanda Campos, has had her PWR1 RBA published in Intersect: Stanford's Journal on Science, Technology, & Society. Coming out of Liz's class on the Rhetoric of Resistance, Amanda's essay analyzed the dominant and resistant narratives about the Doerr school accepting big money from fossil fuel companies. Amanda says “I was inspired by the hard work of the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability and wanted to increase awareness about the impacts of fossil fuel funding. I seek to increase accessibility to the facts behind fossil fuel companies' misleading clean energy efforts and climate disinformation, as well as how they are using this funding to greenwash their public images.” As we would hope, Amanda says, “The peer-review process of my PWR class gave me more confidence in my writing.” She also noted that Dr. Hille was the first to suggest the topic of fossil fuel funding which not only led to publication but also to Amanda’s activism in the Coalition for a True School of Sustainability.
One of Katherine Rothschild’s students, Vignesh Kumar, also published his RBA, "Charging Forward: Creating a Productive Framework for Promoting Electric Vehicle Adoption Among U.S. Cities Based on Development Stage" in Intersect in spring 2022. Like Amanda, Vignesh developed a stronger voice through his PWR class. As he explains, “Initially, I was hesitant about submitting my RBA for publication since I was not confident that my work would contribute substantially to my target discourse communities. However, after going back home for winter break and finding that the process of writing my RBA had profoundly changed the way I viewed electrical vehicles and climate policy, I realized that perhaps my article could have a similar impact on readers in the general public.” Moreover, he found that the steps emphasized by Dr. Rothschild in her class made publication relatively easy. Vignesh highlighted the required IMRD structure [Introduction-Methods-Results-Discussion] and the naming of a target peer-reviewed journal in the abstract they also had to write as two features of the class that were especially helpful pre-publication steps. More conceptually, Vigness observes that “[Dr. Rothschild] was deeply committed to the concept of ‘transfer,’ and encouraged our class to write the RBA in a way that transcends the demands of PWR 1 and meets the needs of real discourse communities.”
When asked how she moves students to publication, Dr. Rothschild says her classes cultivate a “writerly identity.” This can be particularly important for students who identify with STEM fields and may believe they are not writers. “This positionality, which is encouraged by mass media, can harm STEM writers' ability to succeed,” Dr. Rothschild explains. But “when they see that exceptional writing is something that's not innate, but that's learned and revised, it can free them from the perception of a ‘natural writer.’” Indeed, Dr. Rothschild’s research shows (coming Fall 2023) that “when we begin to cross-contextualize our writing, and see ourselves as strong and resilient writers in many contexts, we become stronger writers who will take chances on things like publication.”
Another student published in the Stanford Journal of Public Health. Hannah Jeoung credits both her PWR1 and PWR2 instructors with inspiring her journey to publication. Though it was her PWR2 paper, “Mass Media and Menstruation,” written for John Peterson’s class, that was ultimately accepted, Hannah learned about the Stanford Journal of Public Health from her PWR1 instructor Dr. Selby Schwartz. Hannah reflects, “As someone who loves writing but rarely finds the time to do so, I feel that being in a PWR class allowed me to devote dedicated efforts towards finding my voice. Furthermore, both of my wonderful PWR professors always pushed us to find a topic that we were both passionate about and addressed real-world issues. This made it easy to create papers that were unique, relevant to the vision of different publication journals, and about topics that I was eager to share with the world.”
Students may also transform their RBAs into new genres. Dr. Nissa Cannon’s student Alondra Martinez turned her RBA into an Op Ed for the Stanford Daily, “Stanford needs a course on Taylor Swift’s social media marketing.” Dr. Sangeeta Mediratta’s student, Alexandra Blum, made the same move, publishing “The dark history of the ‘Playboy Bunny’ and its Halloween costume implications” this past October. The OpEd was Alexandra’s first for the Daily. Encouraged by Dr. Mediratta to rework her RBA to share with a broader audience, Alexandra pitched the idea to the desk editors, who then helped her learn journalism conventions. Alexandra found the process of converting her RBA “difficult” as she had to distill her argument from 15 pages to a tight 750 words or so and recast an argument about American fantasylands on women’s psyches into a commentary on student life. As she says, “it was a fun adaptation because it made my cultural studies relevant to my community and our everyday lives. Because of my professor’s eagerness to support [our interests] and the liveliness of student discussion, PWR was one of the first courses where I felt truly proud of my research.”
RBAs have made their way into the national news. Sophie Callcott published an opinion essay in The New York Times based on her research and writing in Lisa Swan’s PWR 1 class, Writing about Education. Dr. Swan shared that Sophie’s writing in The Stanford Daily was noticed by The Times, and credits PWR 1 with “giving [her] the platform to write about a subject [she] didn't know [she] was this passionate about” and then “pushing” her “to deepen my thinking.”
Based on work she completed with Kevin Moore, Annie Ostojic published an op-ed in the SF Chronicle: “Medical Deepfake Disinformation is Coming. We Aren’t Ready.”Her piece is on the implications of the potential loss of the “epistemic backstop” in biomedicine. Annie developed her research on biomedical deepfakes in both of Dr. Moore’s PWR courses (PWR 1: Trust, Rhetoric, and Writing and PWR 2: Propaganda and Rhetoric). Again with Dr. Moore, she then conducted an independent study in Winter 2022, where she examined op-ed writing genres and reshaped her RBAs into a focused op-ed submission. The day after her piece came out in the Chronicle, Annie also went on ABC 7 news to speak about her work!
Stanford students find yet other ways to take their RBA’s public. For example, another student of Dr. Mediratta’s found a home for his RBA as a webtext on the site of a global pacifist organization, World Beyond War. Published anonymously and in English as well as Russian, the prescient, eye-opening “The Deadly Things We Do Not See” addresses the crisis in Donetsk, Ukraine that he argues began in 2014. To take another example, a student of mine, Isaac Applebaum, shared his final PWR2 presentation "Reducing socioeconomic disparities in patient outcomes by addressing the financial toxicity of cancer" with the Stanford Cancer Institute's Frontiers in Cancer Clinical Translation seminar series. Isaac did some additional interviews and reading, but was able to reuse many of his PWR2 slides to outline a proposal to study Stanford cancer patients’ social needs. PWR2, in Isaac’s words, “deepened [his] passion for this area of research” and developed “the rhetorical skills required to present [his] analysis.”
Yet another Stanford Medicine publication – also a webtext – is Alina Wilson’s “Spirituality in Care: The Real Emergency?” first written for my PWR91: Doctors’ Stories. Alina submitted her story to Stanford Medicine’s online newsletter Panacea because “for the first time” she felt she had created a “piece worth publishing,” and finally considered herself a writer. In a recurring theme in this newsletter article, Alina reports that while taking my course, she “produced and edited work that [she] felt proud of.” In particular, she credits the feedback in class as well as a Stanford Storytelling Project workshop that helped her “switch into ‘storytelling mode’” and out of academese. Finally, Ajay Ravi published a story in a local digital news site, InMenlo, “How community leaders are putting the oaks in North Fair Oaks” based on work he completed for Dr. Emily Polk’s PWR91: Environmental Justice Storytelling. It’s a wonderful example of the way writing can emerge in close collaboration not just with classmates but also with community organizations, in this case Canopy, an urban forest advocacy group.
These are just some of the carefully reasoned arguments that made their way into the public sphere after germinating in PWR classes. In PWR classes, students develop the self concept, confidence, and skills needed to take excellent writing public. Future newsletter articles will describe the journals PWR lecturers run that also support student publication.
