College Composition and Communication, Vol. 63, No. 3, February 2012

Table of Contents

• From the Editor: A Blueprint for the Future: Lessons from the Past [FREE ACCESS]

  Kathleen Blake Yancey

• Inspecting Shadows of Past Classroom Practices: A Search for Students’ Voices

  Patricia Sullivan

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  Abstract: Our pedagogical histories lean on textbooks, institutional records, and the words of famous teachers. Students rarely appear in situ. Here, the voices of two very different Progressive Era students cast spotlights on the shadows of long-ago classroom practices—offering a liveliness that is difficult to recover, but worth seeking.

• “Ladies Who Don’t Know Us Correct Our Papers”: Postwar Lay Reader Programs and Twenty-First Century Contingent Labor in First-Year Writing

  Kelly Ritter

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  Abstract: I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.

• At a Mirror, Darkly: The Imagined Undergraduate Writers of Ten Novice Composition Instructors [FREE ACCESS]

  Dylan B. Dryer

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  Abstract: While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.

• Rhetorical Scarcity: Spatial and Economic Inflections on Genre Change

  Risa Applegarth

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  Abstract: This study examines how changes in a key scientific genre supported anthropology’s early twentieth-century bid for scientific status. Combining spatial theories of genre with inflections from the register of economics, I develop the concept of rhetorical scarcity to characterize this genre change not as evolution but as manipulation that produces a manufactured situation of intense rhetorical constraint.

• 2011 CCCC Exemplar Award Acceptance Speech

  Edward M. White

• Reviews of Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses [FREE ACCESS]

  by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa

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  Abstract: The Reviews (and reviewers) are:
  
  Methodologically Adrift
  Richard H. Haswell
  
  Everything That Rises . . .
  Jeanne Gunner
  
  Important Focus, Limited Perspective
  Carolyn Calhoon-Dillahunt
  
  An HBCU Perspective on Academically Adrift
  Teresa Redd

• Review Essay: Resisting Entropy [FREE ACCESS]

  Geoffrey Sirc

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  Abstract: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns
  Thomas Miller
  
  A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity
  Byron Hawk
  
  Toward A Composition Made Whole
  Jody Shipka
  
  Teaching with Student Texts: Essays toward an Informed Practice
  Joseph Harris, John D. Miles, Charles Paine, editors

• Interchanges

  Clyde Moneyhun

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  Abstract: Response to Doug Hesse’s “The Place of Creative Writing in Composition Studies”
  Clyde Moneyhun
  
  Response to Clyde Moneyhun
  Doug Hesse

• CCC Poster Page 9: Writing Assessment [FREE ACCESS]

• CCCC News

• Announcements and Calls [FREE ACCESS]

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