Jeff Ludwig's Panel Summaries

Chairs Address from Charles Bazerman, The Wonder of Writing
Bazermans address to the field was interesting and provocative for a couple of important reasons, some of which resonated very closely with my conference experience this year. Bazerman made it clear from the start that the realm of our discipline is the very nature and connectedness of reading and writing and how these are interconnected in how we have a stake in literacy, with all roads leading to and connected with social action, participatory democracy, and the establishment of common knowledge for our field. While, as Bazerman points out, rhet-comp has had its ambivalences about asserting its place as a discipline, he urged his listeners to move beyond models for the field provided by English departments and to push for practical, student-focused, collaborative, activist, pedagogic, and (what I feel is most important) interdisciplinary models. Further, he argues that the field needs research into itself to know itself with greater specificity and confidence and to be persuasive publicly; we have a responsibility to know ourselves and our discipline because we study and use the very medium in which knowledge is made and distributed.

Session B1: We Have Been Here Forever: Towards a History of Composition(ist)s of Color Rewriting Rhetoric within and beyond NCTE/CCCC
This session featured four speakers Joyce Rain Anderson (Bridgewater State), Samantha Blackman (Purdue), Cristina Kirklighter (Texas A&M), and Victor Villanueva (WSU Pullman) and one discussant LuMing Mao (Miami of Ohio). All four speakers took on the state of CCCC as an institution as it relates to the perceptions of and practices toward scholars of color at the conference, in caucuses, or in its history. Anderson focused on ways of infusing Native American rhetoric into the field and argued that the inclusion of native rhetorics must go beyond special issues of CCC or College English. Blackman analyzed the intersectionality of race, gender, and sexual identities from critical race theory to address the pragmatic concern that CCCC special interest caucuses demarcated by identity are scheduled at the same time during the conference and therefore do not address any kind of multiple identities of its participants. Kirklighter then discussed a particular moment of CCCC history where the contributions of Chicano/Chicana scholars has gone overlooked. Clearly, however, many people were there to hear Villanuevas talk he modestly nicknamed Strawman Argument: A Case Study of CCCC. Essentially his talk was a critique of Stephen Norths The Making of Knowledge in Composition, where he not only identified how Norths book does not recognize the contributions of scholars of color in its description especially of social constructionism but also argued that the continuation by the field in ignoring and rewriting this history is emblematic of structural racism and that we have not realized the bias and white gaze with which the field sees itself.

Session H12: New Media and Writing Program Administration: Reconfiguring Administrative Discourses and Practices Around New Media
This session featured four speakers Melinda Turnley (DePaul), Amy Kimme Hea and Anne-Marie Hall (Arizona) who spoke together as a pair, and Marvin Diogenes (Stanford) who discussed the various ways they have programmatically included the composing of new media in their first-year and advanced writing classes. Since theirs is an administrative perspective, their talk focused also on instructor training. Turnley discussed how the department of Writing, Rhetoric, and Discourse a newly formed program that split from English has had to find ways of collaborating with other programs on campus (namely Communication, Art History and Architecture, and Digital Media) to lay claim to forms of new media and negotiate the turf of writing in the schools new configuration. She argues that writing should lay claim to technology in many ways and that the investments of programs into digital literacies converges with and helps to expand our field.

Hea and Hall spoke together as two representatives of how Arizona is working to incorporate discussions of new media in the professionalization of the programs instructors. After spending time defining new media and identifying the fact that incorporating new media from the top down in programs simply isnt effective, Hea and Hall discussed how training instructors to see new media as literacy development in itself (versus text-based literacy existing as primary and new media literacy as secondary) is critical in its incorporation into programs. They then moved on to showcase projects that have been underway in their program at both graduate and undergraduate levels, showcasing in particular students translation of their work into new media forms. Essentially Arizona holds installations every year, where faculty and students present their work in various forms and invite faculty and administrators from across campus to participate. Hea in particular discussed a graduate course where her students used formations of new media to analyze how to train program instructors in the use of new media forms.

Finally, Diogenes discussed his revised program for Writing and Rhetoric at Stanford, particularly focusing on the second-level (sophomore year) course students are required to take. Interestingly, Stanford offers similar courses as DU does, but one course during the first-year and a research-writing and oral presentation course during the second year. Diogenes identified how the oral presentation requirement was lumped into the course that focuses on research and the translation of research and writing into other formats. He discussed how instructors were especially anxious about their ability to teach the technology, and identified a danger in courses that leave behind writing and speaking to focus on the media. The lesson, he explained, is that with the incorporation of new media must also be an analysis of its rhetorical functions.

Session J1: Riding a New Wave: Towards the Writing/Composition/Rhetoric Major and Minor
This session featured three speakers Sandra Jamieson (Drew University), Kathy Yancey (Florida State), and Irwin Bud Weiser (Purdue) whose focus was on various ways of looking at the formation and implementation of a major or minor of writing, which led naturally to discussions of the fields identity based from the variety of ways writing is packaged in the university. All three speakers seemed clear that a writing major/minor, or some combination thereof, is the future of rhetoric and composition but to what extent and how best to situate this identity is where differences lie. Sandra Jamieson discussed MLAs recent report on the status of the Undergraduate Major in Writing and Literature, trying to get a picture of what it means to major in writing, only finding that while majors and programs are increasing, there is little commonality and little to no patterns of prototypical development. Most majors have first-year courses, a methods course, advanced courses, capstones, and a sequence to build and develop skills encountered in the introductory course.

Yancey discussed Florida States newly developed major with three tracks within the major: 1) writing (which stems from creative writing and its partnerships with English but also has to do with rhetoric), 2) editing (which includes publishing and the history of texts), and 3) new media (both the rhetorical study of and composing in new media). Yancey discussed how Florida States program takes a kind of cultural studies approach to the major, in the sense that students study the rhetoric of writing but also the ways writing is done and in the sense that this approach maps the content of the major itself as what she called foundational, modular, and programmatic. In essence, students follow tracks as they choose their way through the program, and Yancey pointed out that these tracks stemmed from creating with faculty iterations of what a writing major would look like and then developed curriculum from there.

Finally, Weiser argued that a writing minor is a better way to begin the development of rhetoric and composition for administrative and curricular reasons. Essentially Wesier raises a lot of questions: Can a first-year course be an intro to the Writing Major? What is the balance between writing courses and courses that study written discourse? How do we blend this to move beyond using writing as an assessment of the content? Do we have the faculty to teach courses in the major? Is there a demand for the major? Without good answers to many of these questions, Weiser argues that a minor instead of a major is the best option for many programs.

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