There’s so much to read out there, but sometimes I’ve found myself not reading enough. Jeff Rice writes that
Other advice I give (and it is always unsolicited advice; I can read the faces of students who probably want me to keep the advice to myself) to graduate students is read. Read two articles a week; one book a month.
Which sounds like pretty good advice. I probably average more than two journal articles a week (though I’m not fully certain), but certainly not a Composition book a month. So, I’m making it my new goal: two journal articles a week and a book a month. This month’s goal is Joseph Harris’s A Teaching Subject. I have some notes that I need to post from some journal articles I read while in Pittsburgh (or on the bus to or from Pittsburgh) last week.
Notes from the December 2006 CCC under the cut.
Kill, Melanie. “Acknowledging the Rough Edges of Resistance: Negotiation of Identities for First-Year Composition.“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 213-235.
Kill argues “that the work of renegotiating classroom identity cannot fall to students alone, and if we are to join in, we must not allow the weight of our authority to secure us in comfortably familiar positions“ (215). While we might theorize and try to enact progressive pedagogies, Kill does not “believe that we are likely to bring productive change out of these struggles [over change and stability within student-teacher interactions] until we acknowledge and examine the challenges we face in disrupting our own complicity in, and reasons for, maintaining the status quo at the level of everyday interaction“ (216). Using genre theory and the idea of uptake, especially uptake’s memory, wherein students will use their expectations and memories of writing teachers to determine how to react to us and how to evoke who we are, Kill writes that “This is a risk all of us face as we are represented in uptake: if we can’t secure the subject position we want to occupy, it matters little, if at all, who we presume to be in actuality“ (222).
Wootten, Judith A. (Jay). “2006 CCCC Chair’s Address: Riding a One-Eyed Horse: Reining In and Fencing Out.“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 236-245.
Wootten discusses what we in rhetoric/writing/composition turn our focus to (using the metaphor of the horse whose head must turn to see and refocus), noting that “’the new’ is a renaming, a re-focusing“ whenever we talk about something new (239). She turns to computers and multimodality, announcing that “we’d better be creating empowered users,“ those users who “are those who can control the computer,“ rather than “[c]omputer-mediated users [who] feel isolated and are overwhelmed by the amount of information“ (243, citing Stuart Selber). She ends her talk with a call for professional development and to not become unquestioning about our focus to the point that we loose our reason and discretion (244).
Sommers, Nancy. “Across the Drafts.“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 248-257.
Looking back on her 1982 essay “Responding to Student Writing,“ Sommers reflects that she didn’t actually have student voices in her essay and that she was too quick to judge other teachers, setting herself up as an outsider teacher who knew better about feedback. She explains a longitudinal study held at Harvard that found that students wanted more specific comments from faculty, to write about what mattered to themselves, and engagement with teachers through feedback (251).
Rutz, Carol. “Recovering the Conversation: A Response to ‘Responding to Student Writing’ via ‘Across the Drafts.’“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 257-262.
Tinberg, Howard. “From ‘Self-Righteous Researcher’ to ‘Fellow Teacher.’“ CCC 58.2 (December 2006): 262-266.
Tinberg writes that he believes “composition is a field wholly committed to revisiting, even as it honors, cherished positions and foundational scholarship and research“ (265).
