With the "counterhegemonic figured communities" of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy…

In this article, the author reflects on her personal experience, along with various historical accounts, in order to project a sense of "crisis" in 1963 film culture and argues that a similar disposition attempted to move 1963 Composition. Explored through the lens of the year 1963, the author focuses at the work of an iconic filmmaker--Jean Luc…

This article presents an interview with Dr. Muriel Harris who is considered as one of the most influential figures in writing center research and practice for over three decades. She is currently Professor Emerita of English at Purdue University. She founded The Purdue Writing Center which she directed from 1976 until 2003. She also founded…

Americans are obsessed with heroes, and they seemingly create them from anyone and everyone, anywhere and everywhere. This predilection is also clear in American histories. Their belief in heroes shows their connection to their society and culture, their willingness to follow someone in their social settings, and their belief that good people who…

One of the most important contributions of writer-teacher Wendy Bishop was to argue for the interconnectedness of creative writing and composition studies. By doing so, Bishop insisted on the importance of studying what writers do when they write. Because her pedagogy was driven by reports of individuals from a culture that had seldom been heard…

In January 2003, "College English" published a special issue that focused on the genre of creative nonfiction. Many of the articles centered specifically on the role of nonfiction in the composition classroom, and in her essay "Suddenly Sexy: Creative Nonfiction Rear-Ends Composition," Wendy Bishop claims that the genre of creative nonfiction has…

The forum contributors draw on their personal experiences and insights to put forth ideas about contingent faculty's relations with other faculty and with the academic institution as a whole.

There is some ambivalence over how the idea of the tool in rhetoric and composition should be viewed. During the last four Conferences on College Composition and Communication (2004-2008) the word "tool" appears, on average, more than 20 times a year in the titles of presentations, workshops, and sessions. Sometimes the word has positive…

Arguing against the emphasis of traditional U.S. composition classes on linguistically homogeneous situations, the authors contend that this focus is at odds with actual language use today. They call for a translingual approach, which they define as seeing difference in language not as a barrier to overcome or as a problem to manage, but as a…

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls "the democratic paradox"…

This article initiates scholarly discussions of "undergraduate research," an educational movement and comprehensive curricular innovation, in composition and rhetoric. I argue that by viewing undergraduate research production and authorship along a continuum of scholarly authority, student scholars obtain "authorship" and "authority" through…

In the sequel to their guidelines for reporting statistics in American Physiological Society journals, Curran-Everett and Benos highlighted that the initial guidelines of 2004 have had little effect on the statistical reporting practices of authors. In the present article, I suggest that the guidelines have also had little impact on both journal…

In this interview Susan Jarratt reviews the trajectory of her scholarship and revisits some of the lessons learned from a variety of her projects while simultaneously drawing out historical and narrative continuities of seemingly disparate time periods and contexts. In doing so, she elucidates the value of scholarship as a political and…

This article presents a written version of the address the author gave at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) meeting in San Francisco on March 12, 2009. In this address, the author talks about the wonder of writing and discusses how writing has been considered sacred. Reading and writing are associated with inwardness…

Educationese, the language often spoken, written and understood only by educators, is in grave danger. Anti-educationese radicals recently proposed national legislation outlawing the passive voice in all education communications, even school district newsletters. These revolutionaries purport that the use of shorter sentences, simple vocabulary…