Readings for the 2016 PWR September Sessions

This issue's Rhetoric of the Field is devoted to the different readings that our Septembrist Committee has chosen to inform our work together during our professional development meetings in the week of September 12th. From issues of transfer, to multimodality, space and pedagogy, and empathy, this selection of texts touch on many of the issues and questions of importance to writing and rhetoric studies today.

Banks, Adam. "Ain’t No Walls behind the Sky, Baby! Funk, Flight, Freedom." College Composition and Communication 67.2 (2015): 267-79. NCTE. Web. 31 Aug. 2016. 

“Editor’s note: This is a written version of the address that Adam Banks gave at the CCCC Convention in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday, March 19, 2015.” This keynote comments on the histories of the teaching of writing, on how visionary perceptions of forms (such as musical forms, including funk) shape the future, and how embracing expansive multimodal applications of “writing” will nurture our teachers, our students,  and our profession.

Burke, Rachael. "Empathy: Rethinking ‘Student-Centeredness’ in the Writing Classroom." The Writing Campus. George Mason University, 27 Jan. 2016. 

This short article describes a metacognitive empathic writing assignment that asks students to consider the impacts their writing will have on others.

Disciplinary Dialogues section of JSLW. Journal of Second Language Writing 22.4 (2013): 426-27. Web.

“For this edition of Disciplinary Dialogues, 10 SLW scholars were asked to describe what SLW means to them in 1000 words. Paul Matsuda was also invited to write a 2,000-word response to these papers.” Each pop-up participant chooses 1-2 essays (they are short!) from the Dialogues.

Gierdowski, Dana and Susan Miller-Cochran. “A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Understanding Expectations and Mapping Preferences for Writing Classroom Design.” In Jim Purdy & Dánielle Nicole DeVoss (Eds.), Making space: Writing instruction, infrastructure, and multiliteracies. Sweetland Digital Rhetoric Collaborative/University of Michigan Press. Retrieved September 1, 2016.

This article analyzes different learning spaces in writing classes and analyze their own students’ responses to a prompt to design their ideal writing classroom space.  It is best read online through the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative.

Moore, Jessie et al. Revisualizing Composition: How First-Year Writers Use Composing Technologies, Computers and Composition 39 (March 2016): 1-13.

This article shares and analyzes survey results from 1,366 students across seven different colleges and universities about how first-year students use composing technologies. The findings show that students use both analog and digital technologies to compose, generating conversation about how to build critical and rhetorical awareness of composing technologies in first-year composition classrooms.

Nowacek, Rebecca. Chapter 1 From Agents of Integration: Understanding Transfer as a Rhetorical Act. SIU Press, 2011.

Although the word "genre" is nowhere in any of the titles, this chapter is about genre as a site of opportunity for transferring writing knowledge from one domain to another.