Research and Scholarship in Composition
There are 6 products in Research and Scholarship in Composition
Assessment of Writing
Twenty-two essays focus on how policies shape practices in writing assessment and how practices are intertwined with politics.
Feminism and Composition Studies
The fifteen essays and six responses in this volume of the MLA’s Research and Scholarship in Composition series “push the boundaries of knowledge in both feminism and composition,” as the coeditor Susan C. Jarratt writes, “by exploring the productive intersections and tensions of the two.” She goes on to say, “Composition at its best works against the grain of conventional institutional practices. . . . Both feminist inquiry and post-current-traditional composition studies/styles challenge assumptions and seek to transform ways of thinking, teaching, and learning.” Both are complex, containing different agendas and different voices.
Feminism and Composition Studies: In Other Words is a feminist project that boldly places at its center differences among women. Topics discussed include American history, politics, language, racism, pedagogy, contingent labor in the teaching of writing, e-mail behavior, and the need for educational and institutional reform. Teachers, graduate students, program administrators, and feminists will find valuable the critiques, theoretical as well as personal, contained in this unusually honest and thought-provoking volume.
Literacy and Computers
Computers, this collection of essays suggests, are transforming texts, language, and literacy itself. In easy-to-understand language, Literacy and Computers discusses computer-related issues within several larger contexts: the politics, social implications, and economics of literacy education; the roles of authors and readers; the nature of interpretation and subjectivity; and the ways in which human beings construct meaning. The first three parts of the volume examine
- how computers have become part of the classroom
- how electronic networks function as tools for reading, writing, and interpreting texts
- how hypertext, a specialized genre of computer programs, relates to traditional notions of text
The fourth part pulls together the multiple voices of the previous contributions and urges readers to venture beyond early studies of computers in composition classrooms. Addressed to novice and expert computer users alike, Literacy and Computers describes the possibilities—and the difficulties—posed by the new technologies.
Writing in Multicultural Settings
The twenty essays and four responses (“cross-talks”) in this volume, the fifth in the Research and Scholarship in Composition series, confront the challenges presented by the racial, ethnic, class, gender, religious, age, and physical-ability differences among today’s writing students. The contributors, who teach in classrooms and writing centers at a variety of private and public institutions, discuss their immersion in students’ discourses and cultures and balance descriptions of their teaching experiences with careful and critical reflection.
The volume begins and ends with sections examining the tensions and conflicts in the classroom; the two sections in between focus more specifically on texts and curricula and on teaching English as a second language. The cross-talk that concludes each section synthesizes and critiques the essays.
Writing in Multicultural Settings is essential, thought-provoking reading for college administrators, writing teachers, and scholars and students in composition studies.
Writing Theory and Critical Theory
Writing Theory and Critical Theory discusses the growing body of work linking composition studies and literary studies. Enlisting the strategies of deconstruction, hermeneutics, postmodernism, feminism, neo-Marxism, neopragmatism, psychoanalysis, reader-response criticism, and cultural studies, the twenty-seven contributors investigate the resources that critical theory can bring to an examination of discourse. Composition teachers, critical theorists, and writing program administrators will find this collection a provocative and insightful overview of the field of composition studies.
Writing, Teaching, and Learning in the Disciplines
Recent surveys indicate that writing-in-the-disciplines programs have been established or projected by more than one-third of the colleges and universities in the United States. The fourteen essays in this volume chart the history of this interdisciplinary development in both the United States and Great Britain and examine the wide range of forms that writing-in-the-disciplines programs have taken in American higher education. The collection outlines the social, intellectual, and political forces that have shaped the movement; presents perspectives on the programs from disciplines outside English studies; describes the relations among writing, teaching, and learning; and considers the future of the movement.
