Writing

By Pottery Fan: photo of greek art created about 500 BC by Douris - Kalugaringon nga buhat, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6451040

Research Profile

Rhetoric and composition, with a focus on rhetorics of inquiry, curricular design, writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines, critical information literacy, technical and professional writing, design thinking, civic engagement, and writing program administration. 

Five Interrelated Areas of Publication

Each entry below represents a refereed publication:

Book/textbook (B), Article (A), Book chapter (C). 

Full citations can be found in my CV.

Writing across the curriculum:

  • The dynamics of negotiating expertise in disciplinary contact zones (A)

  • The prospect of rhetoric in WAC initiatives (C)

  • The “curricular physics” of rhetoric education, as various curricular models (first-year, WAC/WID) affect in different ways such core concepts as expertise, authority, and community (C)

  • How STEAM highlights new conceptions of expertise, and a new humanities (C)

Institutional settings of writing instruction:

  • The rhetoric implicit in writing requirements (C)

  • An archeology of the writing classroom, revealing the complex ways in which we forget and remember classrooms, as sites for both genred activity and opportune change (C)

  • The effective use of student texts as instructional materials in classroom “workshops” (C)

The Rhetorics of academic inquiry:

  • Ideas in Action offers a flexible guide to tools of analysis and argument essential to college writing (B)

  • Composing Knowledge invites students to join conversations in the academic community by unmasking its conventions and by having them reflect on their own situated learning environment (B)

Critical information literacy and writing:

  • What rhetoric can bring to the definition of information literacy as a concept (A)

  • What writing pedagogy can offer to information literacy initiatives as sites for interdisciplinary collaboration.  (A)

  • An assessment of the critical information literacy movement 12 years after publication of the two above-referenced articles (C)

University instruction and civic engagement:

  • Managing the Partnership between Higher Education and Industry addresses opportunities for collaboration between campus and corporations (B)

  • The rhetoric of civility and the fate of argument (C)

  • The complex laminations of academic and civic discourse that are both possible and problematic in university writing instruction.  (C)

Current Projects

  • “Classroom Kairos.” Bakhtin’s chronotope invites us to explore the classroom as a defined and defining space/time configuration, and to locate the institutional and curricular place of the writing classroom within the activity system of the university.  Classical treatments of kairos and Bakhtin’s notion of unfinalizability suggest how the chronotope of the classroom, far from being inimical to opportune change, provides the necessary ground for pedagogical experiment.   Classroom kairos is thus necessarily implicated in an ongoing tension between tradition and change--between a pedagogy of propriety and a pedagogy of transgressive desire for the opportune.  40 pp. manuscript.

  • "Writing by Design.”  In an early stage of formulation, this project seeks to explore writing as a design art.