Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

A month ago I practiced using video for guest engagement discussions between other scholars and my student-colleagues. With the practice under my belt, I asked Professor Vershawn Ashanti Young, author of Your Average Nigga (2007), currently at University of Waterloo, Ontario. I had reached out to him over the summer and asked him to work with my class, coming next week. In exchange, he asked if I would explain my ethnographic studies to his own class, titled "Love, Language, and Leadership." Specifically, he asked me to address themes from Pelias's book of personal relationships, especially his autoethnography of his family. Thinking that his students would appreciate learning from my student-colleagues more than me, hearing voices from racial and class backgrounds unfamiliar to most Waterloo students, I arranged for a Latina student working on a family project and an African-American student working on a black barbershop project to speak briefly about their work and...

Creative Commons Peckham, Irvin. "Arguing." Going North, Thinking West: The Intersections of Social Class, Critical Thinking, and Politicized Writing Instruction . Logan UT: USUP, 2010: 67-85. Print. FYW's distinction is to see one's writing from the other's eyes. This goes back to Flower and Hayes and earlier -- the need for the author to write beyond himself, expecting a reader to experience and interpret.  As cognitive psychology progressed in the late 1970s, more specific applications of the social science were proposed for the composition course. In 1977, Carnegie-Mellon English professor Linda Flower directly proposed the use of problem-solving strategies in composition (Flower and Hayes, “Problem-Solving Strategies” 450-452). [Flower and her psychologist colleague John Hayes believed that heuristics open complex communication processes to the possibility of rational choice. These problem-solving strategies could help the struggling writer put idea...

Referencing the Egyptian Revolution, by artist Graphic Resistance, 2011 <http://graphic-resistance.deviantart.com/> Plenty of research has been published on resistance of/by students within the classroom, especially within the writing classroom. A brief, incomplete, bibliography: Carter, Christopher. Rhetoric and resistance in the corporate academy. Hampton Pr, 2008.  Corkery, Caleb. "Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy without Resistance." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.3 (2009): 244-256.  Flowerdew, John. "13 Critical discourse analysis and strategies of resistance." Advances in discourse studies (2008): 195.  Gorzelsky, Gwen. "Working boundaries: From student resistance to student agency." College Composition and Communication (2009): 64-84.  Palmerino, Gregory. "Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write--Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom." College English 73.3 (2011): 283-302...

This has a bit to relate to my other (super secret) blog post this week, " Writing in the Disciplines ," where I admittedly ranted for a while about the ignorance of some professors about what the hell writing is anyway. But I've gotten past that (for the week. A new week looms). The hub-bub here is a middle school principal (-pal: "the principal is your pal") who allegedly told students not to speak Spanish on campus. That's the line that hit the headlines  with community reaction expected: Outside the board meeting, Kloecker said that the problem was Flores-Smith, not issues of culture or race. "We've been a predominantly Hispanic district for several years now," she said. "But we never had a problem until she came." Flores-Smith started the job in August. After the vote, Flores-Smith expressed satisfaction. "I'm hoping everything will die down now," she said. "We need to get back to peaceful living. And edu...