All USU Press Publications

Landscape of Desire: Identity and Nature in Utah's Canyon Country

Greg Gordon — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:20 PDT

Landscape of Desire powerfully documents and celebrates a place and the evolutions that occur when human beings are intimately connected to their surroundings. Greg Gordon accomplishes this with a tapestry of writing that interweaves land use history, natural history, experiential education, and personal reflection. He tracks the geomorphology of southern Utah as well as the creatures and plants his student group encounters, the history lessons (planned and unplanned), the trials and joys of gathering so many individuals into a cohesive will, and his own personal epiphanies, restraints, insights, and disillusionments.

What We Really Value: Beyond Rubrics in Teaching and Assessing Writing

Bob Broad — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:19 PDT

The result of a long-term study of one university's introductory composition program, Broad's approach to mapping the values that inform writing evaluation is empirically grounded, painstakingly analyzed, yet flexible, human, and pedagogically wise. Not simple, but surely practical, his method yields a more satisfactory process of exploration and a more useful representation of the values by which compositionists actually evaluate their students. With this important study, Broad moves the field far beyond rubrics in teaching and assessing writing. What We Really Value traces the origins of traditional rubrics within the theoretical and historical circumstances out of which they emerged, then holds rubrics up for critical scrutiny in the context of contemporary developments in the field. As an alternative to the generic character and decontextualized function of scoring guides, he offers dynamic criteria mapping, a form of qualitative inquiry by which writing programs (as well as individual instructors) can portray their rhetorical values with more ethical integrity and more pedagogical utility than rubrics allow.

Genre and the Invention of the Writer: Reconsidering the Place of Invention in Composition

Anis S. Bawarshi — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:19 PDT

In a focused and compelling discussion, Anis Bawarshi looks to genre theory for what it can contribute to a refined understanding of invention. In describing what he calls "the genre function," he explores what is at stake for the study and teaching of writing to imagine invention as a way that writers locate themselves, via genres, within various positions and activities. He argues, in fact, that invention is a process in which writers are acted upon by genres as much as they act themselves. Such an approach naturally requires the composition scholar to re-place invention from the writer to the sites of action, the genres, in which the writer participates. This move calls for a thoroughly rhetorical view of invention, roughly in the tradition of Richard Young, Janice Lauer, and those who have followed them. Bawarshi is also keenly interested in the writing classroom. Instead of mastering notions of "good" writing, Bawarshi feels that students gain more from learning how to adapt socially and rhetorically as they move from one "genred" site of action to the next. He explores the major genres of the classroom (the syllabus, the writing prompt) as a way to introduce such an approach. He argues strongly and concretely for making the rhetorical art of adaptation central to first-year writing instruction, empowering students to navigate disciplinary and professional boundaries that await them beyond the writing classroom.

Machine Scoring of Student Essays: Truth and Consequences

Patricia Freitag Ericsson et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:18 PDT

The current trend toward machine-scoring of student work, Ericsson and Haswell argue, has created an emerging issue with implications for higher education across the disciplines, but with particular importance for those in English departments and in administration. The academic community has been silent on the issue—some would say excluded from it—while the commercial entities who develop essay-scoring software have been very active. Machine Scoring of Student Essays is the first volume to seriously consider the educational mechanisms and consequences of this trend, and it offers important discussions from some of the leading scholars in writing assessment.

Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations?: Learning to Teach Underprepared Writers across the Curriculum

Stephen M. Fishman et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:17 PDT

Ever since Horace Mann promoted state supported schooling in the 1850s, the aims of U.S. public education have been the subject of heated national debate. Whose Goals? Whose Aspirations? joins this debate by exploring clashing educational aims in a discipline-based university classroom and the consequences of these clashes for "underprepared" writers. In this close-up look at a White middle-class teacher and his ethnically diverse students, Fishman and McCarthy examine not only the role of Standard English in college writing instruction but also the underlying and highly charged issues of multiculturalism, race cognizance, and social class.

(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment for Teaching and Learning

Brian Huot — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:16 PDT

Brian Huot's aim for this book is both ambitious and provocative. He wants to reorient composition studies' view of writing assessment. To accomplish this, he not only has to inspire the field to perceive assessment—generally not the most appreciated area of study—as deeply significant to theory and pedagogy, he also has to counter some common misconceptions about the history of assessment in writing. In(Re)Articulating Writing Assessment, Huot advocates a new understanding, a more optimistic and productive one than we have seen in composition for a very long time. Assessment, as Huot points out, defines what is valued by a teacher or a society. What isn't valued isn't assessed; it tends to disappear from the curriculum. The dark side of this truth is what many teachers find troubling about large scale assessments, as standardized tests don't grant attention or merit to all they should. Instead, assessment has been used as an interested social mechanism for reinscribing current power relations and class systems.

(First Person)2: A Study of Co-authoring in the Academy

Kami Day et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:16 PDT

In (First Person)2, Day and Eodice offer one of the few book-length studies of co-authoring in academic fields since Lunsford and Ede published theirs over a decade ago. The central research here involves in-depth interviews with ten successful academic collaborators from a range of disciplines and settings. The interviews explore the narratives of these informants' experience—what brought them to collaborate, what cognitive and logistical processes were involved as they worked together, what is the status of collaborated work in their field, and so on—and situate these informants within the broader discussion of collaboration theory and research as it has been articulated over the last ten years.

A Field of Dreams: Independent Writing Programs and the Future of Composition Studies

Peggy O'Neill et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:15 PDT

One of the first collections to focus on independent writing programs, A Field of Dreams offers a complex picture of the experience of the stand-alone. Included here are narratives of individual programs from a wide range of institutions, exploring such issues as what institutional issues led to their independence, how independence solved or created administrative problems, how it changed the culture of the writing program and faculty sense of purpose, success, or failure.

English Composition as a Happening

Geoffrey Sirc — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:14 PDT

From the Introduction: "Contemporary Composition is still inflected by the epistemic turn taken in the 1980s, convincing me that we need to remember what we've forgotten—namely, how impassioned resolves and thrilling discoveries were abandoned and why. I'd like to retrace the road not taken in Composition Studies, to salvage what can still be recovered... I want to inspect the wreckage, in order to show what was the promise of the Happenings for Composition, as well as the huge gray longueur of its pale replacement, Eighties Composition. In so doing, I hope to begin a reconfiguration of our field's pre- and after history." What happened to the bold, kicky promise of writing instruction in the 1960s? The current conservative trend in composition is analyzed allegorically by Geoffrey Sirc in this book-length homage to Charles Deemer's 1967 article, in which the theories and practices of Happenings artists (multi-disciplinary performance pioneers) were used to invigorate college writing. Sirc takes up Deemer's inquiry, moving through the material and theoretical concerns of such pre- and post-Happenings influences as Duchamp and Pollock, situationists and punks, as well as many of the Happenings artists proper.

Writing with Elbow

Pat Belanoff et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:13 PDT

Peter Elbow is one of those scholars who had such an impact on his field that by mid-career he had already attained icon status. As an early proponent of what became known as process theory, Elbow, with others working along similar lines, developed a powerful body of theory that gradually reoriented instruction in writing toward an emphasis on invention and revision-toward the process of writing as a mode of thinking-and consequently toward a focus on the interaction between writer and audience, instead of on the traditionally conceived product of writing, the text. It is not too much to claim that Peter Elbow, like few others, changed the way writing is taught in America. Writing with Elbow is a volume written by leading scholars now working in the field of composition who trace their own scholarship to foundational work done by Peter Elbow over the last thirty years. The book is in that sense a celebration. But it is more than that, too. Elbow and process writing are not without their critics, and the essays collected in Writing with Elbow also test him, extend his work, explore his intellectual forebears, address his critics and contexts, and complicate his legacy across a wide range of issues in current composition research and practice. A thoughtful, comprehensive retrospective on Peter Elbow's legacy, Writing with Elbow is a must-read collection for composition scholars, teachers, English educationists, and graduate students.

Personal Effects: The Social Character of Scholarly Writing

Deborah H. Holdstein et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:12 PDT

In Personal Effects, Holdstein and Bleich compile a volume that cuts across the grain of current orthodoxy. These editors and contributors argue that it is fundamental in humanistic scholarship to take account of the personal and collective experiences of scholars, researchers, critics, and teachers. They contend that humanistic inquiry cannot develop successfully at this time without reference to the varieties of subjective, intersubjective, and collective experience of teachers and researchers. In composition studies, they point out, an important strand of theory has continuously mined the personal experience of individual writers ("where they stand" even in a destabilized sense of that idea). "[S]uch substantive accounts of the 'inner' academic life provide appropriate and rich contexts for further study and analysis." With this volume, then, these scholars move us to explore the intersections of the social with subjectivity, with voice, ideology, and culture, and to consider the roles of these in the work of academics who study writing and literature. Taken together, the essays in this collection carry forward the idea that the personal, the candidly subjective and intersubjective, must be part of the subject of study in humanities scholarship. They propose an understanding of the personal in scholarship that is more helpful because more clearly anchored in human experience.

Creatures of Habitat: The Changing Nature of Wildlife and Wild Places in Utah and the Intermountain West

Mark Gerard Hengesbaugh — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:11 PDT

From flying squirrels on high wooded plateaus to hanging gardens in redrock canyons, the Intermountain West is home to some of the world's rarest and most fascinating animals and plants. Creatures of Habitat details many unique but little-known talents of this region's strange and wonderful wild inhabitants and descibes their connections with native environments. For example, readers will learn about the pronghorn antelope's supercharged cardiovascular system, a brine shrimp-powered shorebird that each year flies nonstop from the Great Salt Lake to Central Argentina, and a rare mustard plant recently discovered on Mount Ogden. Emphasizing how increasing loss and degradation of habitat hinders native species' survival, Mark Gerard Hengesbaugh discusses what is happening to wildlife and wild places and what is being done about it.

Saying and Silence: Listening to Composition with Bakhtin

Frank Farmer — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:09 PDT

Farmer explores the relationship between the meaningful word and the meaningful pause, between saying and silence, especially as the relationship emerges in our classrooms, our disciplinary conversations, and encounters with publics beyond the academy. Each of his chapters here addresses some aspect of how we and our students, colleagues, and critics have our say and speak our piece, often under conditions where silence is the institutionally sanctioned and preferred alternative. He has enlisted a number of Bakhtinian ideas (the superaddressee, outsideness, voice in dialogue) to help in the project of interpreting the silences we hear, naming the silences we do not hear, and of encouraging all silences to speak in ways that are freely chosen, not enforced.

ReInventing The University: Literacies and Legitimacy in the Postmodern Academy

Christopher L. Schroeder — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:08 PDT

Schroeder argues that, for students, postmodern instability in literacy and meaning has become a question of the legitimacy of current discourse of education. Schroeder is committed, then, to constructing literacies jointly with students and by so doing to bringing students to engage more deeply with education and society. To accomplish this, of course, he must advocate rebalancing instruction to a more radically student-centered curriculum. This does not mean he abandons traditional discourse or traditional practice in the classroom; rather, tradition becomes only one voice among many in the classroom, instead of being the dominating one. ReInventing the University is an extended discussion of why Schroeder feels this is necessary, how he tries to construct literacies that have legitimacy with students, and what his experiences could mean for classrooms, departments, and disciplines.

River Flowing from the Sunrise: An Environmental History of the Lower San Juan

James M. Aton et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:07 PDT

The authors recount twelve millennia of history along the lower San Juan River, much of it the story of mostly unsuccessful human attempts to make a living from the river's arid and fickle environment. From the Anasazi to government dam builders, from Navajo to Mormon herders and farmers, from scientific explorers to busted miners, the San Juan has attracted more attention and fueled more hopes than such a remote, unpromising, and muddy stream would seem to merit.

Teaching Composition as a Social Process

Bruce McComiskey — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:06 PDT

Bruce McComiskey is a strong advocate of social approaches to teaching writing. However, he opposes composition teaching that relies on cultural theory for content, because it too often prejudges the ethical character of institutions and reverts unnecessarily to product-centered practices in the classroom. He opposes what he calls the "read-this-essay-and-do-what-the-author-did method of writing instruction: read Roland Barthes's essay 'Toys' and write a similar essay; read John Fiske's essay on TV and critique a show." McComiskey argues for teaching writing as situated in discourse itself, in the constant flow of texts produced within social relationships and institutions. He urges writing teachers not to neglect the linguistic and rhetorical levels of composing, but rather to strengthen them with attention to the social contexts and ideological investments that pervade both the processes and products of writing.

Composing Research: A Contextualist Paradigm for Rhetoric and Composition

Cindy Johanek — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:05 PDT

In Composing Research, Cindy Johanek offers a new perspective on the ideological conflict between qualitative and quantitative research approaches, and the theories of knowledge that inform them. With a paradigm that is sensitive to the context of one's research questions, she argues, scholars can develop less dichotomous forms that invoke the strengths of both research traditions. Context-oriented approaches can lift the narrative from beneath the numbers in an experimental study, for example, or bring the useful clarity of numbers to an ethnographic study.

Rainbow Bridge: An Illustrated History

Hank Hassell — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:05 PDT

On the morning of August 14, 1909, a small, diverse group including Professor Byron Cummings of the University of Utah, Government Land Office surveyor William Douglass, pioneer archaeologist and trader John Weatherill, and Paiute guide Nasja Begay gazed at the largest structure of its kind in the world-Rainbow Bridge. Their presence marked the official discovery of the magnificent natural bridge, which spans 275 feet and towers 291 feet above the stream bed below it. Of the discovery party, only Nasja Begay had seen the stone arch before; he was one of a probably small number of Paiutes and Navajos, the true modern discoverers, who had visited it. In 1910, an executive order issued under the still fresh Antiquities Act created Rainbow Bridge National Monument, one of the first. Hank Hassell, a librarian and writer at Northern Arizona University, tells all this and much more in the first book to provide the complete story of Rainbow Bridge. Spectacular photos and informative drawings illustrate his text.

Under Construction: Working at the Intersections of Composition Theory, Research, and Practice

Christine Farris et al. — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:04 PDT

Few composition scholars two decades ago would have imagined the rate at which their field is now developing, expanding beyond its boundaries, creating new alliances, and locating new sites for research and generation of knowledge. In their introduction to this volume, Farris and Anson argue that, faced with a welter of competing models, compositionists too quickly dichotomize and dismiss.

Wiring the Writing Center

Eric H. Hobson — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 07:57:03 PDT

As computers have brought important developments to composition studies, writing centers have found themselves creating and improvising applications for their own work and often for the writing programs and institutions in which they live. Online tutorials, websites with an array of downloadable resources for students, scheduling and email possibilities--all of these are becoming common-place among writing centers across the country. However, in spite of impressive work by individual centers, exchange on these topics between and among writing centers has been sporadic. As more writing centers approach getting "wired" and others continue to upgrade, the need for communication and collaboration becomes ever more obvious, and so does the need to understand theoretical implications of choices made.