Compelling Methods: A Research Methods Blog

2011-01-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

WRT 105--Spring 2010--Interrogating Status-Quo Stories

2010-08-21T12:59:00.000-07:00

WRT 105: Practices of Academic Writing
Fall 2009

T J Geiger Section: M206

Instructor Office: 005 HBC Room: HBC 209

Instructor Phone: 443-1091 Meeting Time: Tues/Thurs 8:00-9:20

tgeigeri@syr.edu--(preferred mode of contact) Office Hours: Tuesday 9:30-10:30am

Let’s start our conversation with others’ words:

[S]tatus-quo stories: worldviews and beliefs that normalize and naturalize the existing social system, values, and norms so entirely that they deny the possibility of change …. [S]tatus-quo stories seduce us into resisting change. Status-quo stories limit our imaginations and prevent us from envisioning alternate possibilities—different ways of living and arranging our lives. Status-quo stories train us to believe that the way things are is the way they always have been and the way they must be.

–AnaLouise Keating Teaching Transformation: Transcultural Classroom Dialogues

I believe that by changing ourselves we change the world, that traveling El Mundo Zurdo path is the path of a two-way movement — a going deep into the self and an expanding out into the world, a simultaneous recreation of the self and a reconstitution of society.

—Gloria E. Anzaldua “La Prieta”

Too often, we pour the energy needed for recognizing and exploring difference into pretending those differences are insurmountable barriers, or that they do not exist at all. This results in a voluntary isolation, or false and treacherous connections. Either way, we do not develop tools for using human difference as a springboard for creative change within our lives.

—Audre Lorde “Age, Race, Class and Sex”

I’m humble...because I don’t know what I’m wrong about today. I’ll speak with confidence, I’ll speak with passion, but I won’t speak with certainty.

—Tony Jones The New Christians: Dispatches from the Emergent Frontier

It requires intention, a revolutionary patience, courage, and, above all, humility. Once this work begins, the temptation to cross narrow boundaries becomes irresistible; connections, once invisible, come into full view.

—M. Jacqui Alexander “Remembering This Bridge Called My Back”

Opening Inquiries: Interrogating Status-Quo Stories

Who do you want to be? How will college help you become that person? What brought you to Syracuse University? What about “this place” have you found compelling? How has this place already challenged you? Demanded something significant of you? Affirmed you? Made you uncomfortable? Harnessed your passions? Invited you to see yourself and others differently than you’re accustomed to? How will you come to know yourself as part of this place—and to think about your work at SU as located in a very specific place and time, saturated with complex and competing interests and ambitions?

How will you choose to engage with the student living in the dorm room at the end of your hallway? With the LGBT activist who offers you a pamphlet? With those who speak in ways your ears are not accustomed to hearing? With a potential romantic interest? With those who understand the world in ways quite different from your own ways? What stories or scripts influence these and other encounters you have? What conversations are happening in campus gyms and Hendricks Chapel, in dining halls and classrooms? Which ones do you care about? And how do you join them? What desires are touched in student centers and laboratories, in tutoring centers and dorm rooms? What do you do with those desires? How do you, in turn, use them to touch and re-make the world—even as it urges you to change? And what exactly does all this business about desire and world-making have to do with writing class?

Together, we will start our writing work by reading several texts and asking a bunch of questions. For example, what exactly does AnaLouise Keating mean by “status-quo stories”? What are the stories that tell us what it means to be “a good student,” “men,” “women,” “straight,” “lesbian,” “transgender,” “American,” “religious,” “secular,” “middle-class,” “white,” “black,” “Korean,” “Native,” “a global citizen,” or however else we or others might choose to identify ourselves. How do such stories “seduce us,” and how might our lives and others’ lives be otherwise—kinder and freer, more generous and more just—if we were able to imagine different stories? On what assumptions does Gloria Anzaldua base her suggestion that our inner lives and social change are deeply connected? How might we take up Audre Lorde’s challenge to generatively, and not reductively, acknowledge and account for differences as well as commonalities within a context of tremendous diversity? Why do Tony Jones and M. Jacqui Alexander both highlight the need for humility in claim-making and in work to make the world a more humane place? Just what is Jones’s problem with certainty? What “narrow boundaries” will we experience the impulse to cross?

Course Description and Rationale
WRT 105 is an introduction to academic writing that focuses on the practices of analysis and argument, practices that carry across disciplinary lines and into professional and civic writing. These interdependent practices of critical inquiry are fundamental to the work you will do at Syracuse University and later in your careers and civic engagements.

Critical inquiry is not a stale and dull endeavor. It’s dynamic and contingent, shifting and imaginative. I’m not talking about the imagination of Walt Disney, or the imagination needed to create the world of Harry Potter; it is the ability to acknowledge and make meaning out of difference, to grasp the complexity of issues and experiences, and to avoid the impulse to reject the unfamiliar. We develop such an imagination by being willing to look closely and critically at the world around us, and to ask questions of what we see, experience, and assume. Such imagination is not the stuff of flip-floppers or those too hesitant to take a stand. It’s the stuff of real kindness and compassion, generous reading and engaged writing. It’s the stuff of scholars and citizens.

Analysis, as Rosenwasser and Stephen claim in Writing Analytically 5^th edition, “is a form of detective work that typically pursues something puzzling, something you are seeking to understand rather than something you are already sure you have the answers to. Analysis finds questions where there seem not to be any, and it makes connections that might not have been evident at first” (4). You analyze when you think carefully enough to recommend a course to a friend, or explore why a particular college sports team is so dominant, or decide who you will vote for in the local election, or come to understand better the geopolitical situation produced by the US presence in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Argument involves analysis – and moves into making claims to a specific audience about how the world is or should be. In other words, by engaging in argument, you become a maker of worlds. And careful analysis allows your world-making work to be much more thoughtful and ethical as well as more abundant. Argument here goes beyond pro/con debates on abortion or gun control and extends into situated social practices (and we might think of them as informed by status-quo stories) such as deciding who your sorority will invite as panelists for its diversity forum, or persuading your parents that, or taking a stand in an education class on the value of anti-racist pedagogy, or making the case that “don’t ask, don’t tell” is a suitable policy for the US military. Evidence for your arguments comes from analysis, from discussion with others, from your personal experience, and from research in the library and on the web.

Course Goals for WRT 105

• Students will compose a variety of texts as a process (inventing, drafting, revising, editing) that takes place over time, that requires thinking and rethinking ideas, and that addresses diverse audiences and rhetorical contexts.

• Students will develop a working knowledge of strategies and genres of critical analysis and argument.

• Students will learn critical techniques of reading through engagement with texts that raise issues of diversity and community and encourage students to make connections across difference.

• Students will include critical research in their composing processes.

Work of the Course

You will devote time, thought, and energy to a variety of informal and formal reading and writing practices. During the course you might be asked to annotate readings, keep a record of ideas and responses, jot down observations, take notes on class discussions, experiment with different styles and organizational choices, and engage in a variety of drafting and revision activities. All these activities are important and will have an impact on your development and success as academic writers (and your final grade). As you will see in the grade breakdown below, 30% of your final grade comes from invention work and reflection, work which I will collect on a regular basis and grade on a check scale: check (assignment was completed with some thoughtfulness and/or competence), check + (assignment demonstrates exceptional engagement and thought), check – (assignment shows minimal effort). You will get a zero for work you do not complete or that you don’t submit on time.

Writing well depends upon reading well. The course texts will provide you with ideas and arguments, facts and statistics. They will prompt thought as you agree or disagree or qualify those ideas. They enlarge the context for our class discussion. And they illustrate choices other writers have made as they composed. Writing and reading are interdependent practices, and you will move between the two regularly throughout the course.

Course Texts and Materials
(available at both the University Bookstore and Follett’s Orange Bookstore)

Blakesly, David & Jeffrey Hoogeveen. Writing: A Manual for the Digital Age

Rosenwasser, David and Jill Stephen. Writing Analytically, 5^th ed.

Readings from Blackboard (print these out or download them to your laptop)

You should also be prepared to provide copies of your work for everyone in the class (or in your peer response group) at various times during the semester. These can be xerox copies (CNY Printing and Copy Services in Marshall Square Mall, Alteracts, and the library offer low cost, self-service copying) or additional copies printed out from your computer. Plan on spending as much as $20 over the course of the semester.

Feedback
You will receive many different kinds of feedback during this course. Some will come from fellow students and some will come from me. Both are important; they tell you in various ways how your readers are responding to your writing. This feedback will also help you learn how to assess your own work.

Communications

I reserve 8:30-9 a.m. Mon-Thur, 9:30-10 a.m. Fri, and 1-2pm Saturday for responding to emails and phone calls. However, I’m not likely to get phone messages after 3pm on Friday until Monday morning. I don’t check email on Sunday.

Grading
The breakdown is as follows:

Unit 1: jumpstart essay	10%
Unit 2: analysis essay	30%
Unit 3: argument essay	30%
Course invention work and reflections	30%

Attendance and Participation
Writing studios are courses in language learning, and language is learned in communities; therefore, it is essential that you attend class and participate. Absences and lack of preparation for class will affect your classmates' work as well as your own. The work you do in class, the work you do to prepare for each class, is as important as any polished assignment you turn in for a grade. In addition, our syllabus is only a projection and may be subject to occasional changes and revisions as it seems appropriate, necessary, or just interesting. That is another reason why your attendance is vital.

If you must miss a class, you are responsible for work assigned. Please realize, however, that class time cannot be reconstructed or made up, and that your performance, your work, and your final course grade will be affected by absences. If you miss the equivalent of three weeks of classes or more without any official documented excuse it is unlikely you will pass the course. I don’t anticipate any of you will be in that position, however, so let’s all agree to do the work, come to class, learn a lot, and make the course a meaningful experience.

Blackboard

Our course is loaded on blackboard, a University on-line teaching support system. I will teach you how to access our section of WRT 105 on blackboard, and will then expect you to be able to locate, download, and link to a range of course materials with some regularity throughout the semester. I will also contact you regularly via the blackboard course listserv, which has already been created using each student’s “syr” email address. Please check your syr account at least once daily throughout the fall.

The url for blackboard is

http://blackboard.syr.edu

Once you access the main page you will be asked for your user ID and password. The following is from the student help page of blackboard:

Once a student registers for a course that is using Blackboard, a student account is set up for them and they are automatically enrolled in the appropriate course(s). Users login to Blackboard using their NetID and password. Your NetID is the portion of your SU email that appears before the @syr.edu. Your NetID password is also your Blackboard password. If you do not know what your NetID and password are, visit the ITS website at http://its.syr.edu/netid/to obtain this information. You can also obtain this information by calling 443-2677, or by going to the Student Computing Support Center in your dormitory.

Commenting on Student Writing

You will engage in great deal of formal and informal writing over the course of the semester. How I respond to this work will differ depending on whether it’s a freewrite or a report on a topic assigned for homework or a discussion lead handout or a brief synthesis paper or a unit essay. Sometimes I will return short assignments with a sentence or two at the end, asking a question or responding with a comment about the ideas in the piece and their development. Sometimes I may return them with no comments, but with a check on top and will use your writing to inform how we discuss something in the next class meeting (and I try to make the connections between your writing and how they shape our class agenda clear). In marginal comments (those items written next to specific sections of your text) and endnotes (comments written at the end of the paper with the whole piece in mind) to rough and final drafts of your essays, after identifying those elements of your work that are strong and praiseworthy or show promise, I will call your attention to areas where you could extend or complicate your thinking and development as well as issue you challenges to consider for future writing. Sentence level, usage, and grammar concerns do matter, and we will work on those issues. However, I’m not in the business of “fixing” papers because your writing is not broken.

Returning Graded Work

Given how little time we have in summer sessions and the intensity of doing fifteen weeks worth of material in six weeks, I will strive to get your graded assignments back to you as quickly as possible. If you wish to speak with me about my comments on any graded assignment or the grade itself, wait a minimum of 24 hours before contacting me. Getting papers back is often an emotional as well as intellectual experience—the heart beats faster, the pulse races a bit, the stomach moves. This lag time allows you a chance to process my assessment of your work and to clearly express any questions or concerns you might have.

Special Needs and Situations
Students who need special consideration because of any sort of disability or situation should make an appointment to see me right away.

Use of Student Writing
It is understood that registration for and continued enrollment in this course constitutes permission by the student for the instructor to use any student work constructed as a result of said enrollment in the course.

Computer Use
Most of the work you do for this class will be handed in word processed. Use an easily readable font, size 12 point. Include one inch margins and follow the page layout used by the MLA format described in your handbook.

We will also be using email for contact outside class. Use email to contact me about your coursework, to set up an appointment to meet with me outside class, or to ask a question.

Finally, we will be looking at a variety of sites on the Internet at times during the course. Please let me know if you have not had any experience using a browser such as Netscape or Explorer.

While computers save us great amounts of time over typewriters and make corrections much simpler, they are also susceptible to crashing and freezing. Save your work frequently, always make backup copies, and plan your projects with extra time allowed for those inevitable glitches.

The Writing Center

Experienced writing consultants at the Writing Center (101 HB Crouse Hall, on the Quad) can teach you how to succeed on individual assignments and ultimately become a better writer. They’re prepared to work one-on-one with you at any stage of your process and with any kind of writing you’re attempting while attending SU. Whether you need help understanding an assignment, brainstorming ideas, revising subsequent drafts, or developing editing strategies, face-to-face and online appointments are available for 25- or 50-minute sessions throughout the semester and can be reserved up to seven days in advance via their online scheduling program, WCOnline. In addition, drop-in appointments are welcome Monday through Thursday from 10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. and brief concerns or questions can be emailed to consultants via the eWC. For more information on hours, location and services, please visit http://wc.syr.edu. This is a free resource to all students and highly recommended for every assignment you work on in this class.

Academic Integrity

All writing submitted for this course is understood to be your original work. In cases where academic dishonesty is detected (the fraudulent submission of another's work, in whole or part, as your own), you may be subject to a failing grade for the project or the course, and in the worst case, to academic probation or expulsion. For a more detailed description of the guidelines for adhering to academic integrity in the College of Arts and Sciences, go to:

http://academicintegrity.syr.edu

Course: People of Faith and Social Activism

2010-07-22T11:17:00.000-07:00

—Spring 2009—

WRT 205

Critical Inquiry and Research: People of Faith and Social Activism

T J Geiger Section 202

005 HBC HBC 204

Phone: 443-1091 Tues/Thurs: 8:00-9:20

tgeigeri@syr.edu--(preferred mode of contact) Office Hours: Wed 2:30-3:30

If I could write I’d set all the words free to follow you/Tell you wonder, tell you secrets and solitude…

—Sam Phillips “If I Could Write”

Anyone writing honestly creates and solves new problems every time he sits down at his desk. Nobody can solve them for him in advance and no teacher had better try.

—Wallace Stegner

Text of pleasure: the text that contents, fills, grants euphoria; the text that comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading. Text of bliss: the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts (perhaps to the point of a certain boredom), unsettles the reader's historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of his tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis his relation with language.

—Roland Barthes The Pleasure of the Text

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

—Kenneth Burke The Philosophy of Literary Form

Course Description

Welcome to Writing 205, Syracuse University’s sophomore level writing course focusing on research as critical inquiry. At its best, research affords us an opportunity to experience the “bliss” of Barthes’ quote—to simultaneously acknowledge the limits of our understanding (maybe accompanied by shame or trauma or anxiety), and to seize the opportunity to complicate and enrich our understanding. And at the same moment that research brings us up against voices, discourses, ideas and worldviews that are strange and seemingly incomprehensible, it also provides us with the opportunity and inspiration to work with and within new discourses, ideas and worldviews.

This course recognizes that we all now compose in an informationally rich environment, so it’s extremely important that we grow comfortable with (and adept at) asking researchable questions and locating, evaluating and writing research. Good questions, rather than making us vulnerable or revealing our ignorance, trigger active engagement with ideas and issues and concepts. Our good questions will inspire us to gather more information, so we will learn to access information on the web, in databases, at the library, and through primary research such as interviews and surveys. We will evaluate our sources knowledgeably and critically. We will locate ourselves in the middle of complex and competing claims, and produce texts in various genres (white papers, proposals, reports, arguments, analyses, explanations, summaries, “samples,” etc.) that advance our collective understanding of these claims and arguments.

Course Goals

Goal #1: Students will compose texts that investigate a focused topic of inquiry that raises issues of diversity and community and that offers multiple points of entry based on their interest and expertise.

Goal #2: Students will develop a working knowledge of strategies and genres of critical research.

Goal #3: Students will learn critical techniques of reading through engagement with research-based texts.

Course Inquiry

Some of the voices participating actively in the contemporary Burkean conversation about what policies governments should adopt and what values a society should hold come from communities of faith. Regardless of what political or religious affiliations a person claims, if any at all, it seems unlikely that anyone would deny that religious traditions function as powerful social forces throughout history and in the contemporary moment.

Some questions we will consider include: How do religious motivations fuel or participate in social change movements and activism? What have been the contributions of religious communities and organizations to civic society and governmental policy? How have diverse faith communities answered the question, “What does it mean to work for justice from our religious perspective?” How does religious identity intersect with (and/or diverge from) race, class, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and ability to construct the grounds for social change movements? How does religion interact with other socially derived and historically situated motivations for activism? Who benefits from such activism? What does it mean to think of religion as a “disruptive” social force?

During the first four weeks, we will dive right into some of the messy, confusing, and always interesting intersections of faith and social change activism. Additionally, we will use a “spotlight approach” designed to let us see how scholars employ a variety of theoretical and methodological approaches. These first few weeks will also allow us to establish a common vocabulary for scholarly discussion about these important and sensitive intersections, identify research topics, and generate research questions for ourselves. From this intense and early work, you will write an inquiry essay in which you begin to carve out space for yourself in this discussion.

Here are some questions we can begin to explore during the first four weeks: What does it reveal about presidential politics that two major uproars of Barak Obama’s public life center around his association with pastors Jeremiah Wright (a black liberationist) and Rick Warren (a social justice-minded evangelical)? How is it that the Islamic injunctions prohibiting same-sex relations in Iran actually end up legitimizing and enabling transgender subcultures as well as sexual reassignment surgery? What does the desire of subjects in the documentary Trembling Before G-d to be both frum (Orthodox Jews) and gay and lesbian reveal about how culture, sexuality, and identity intersect? How does Soulforce (a gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Christian organization) participate in the legacies of the Civil Rights movement by conducting Equality Rides that entail civil disobedience at Christian colleges and universities that expel LGBT students who come out?

Later in the course each of you will write an individual sustained research essay analyzing a religiously motivated social change movement or a social change movement that draws significantly on religious frames to achieve its goals; you will choose the specific focus of this essay. In the final unit you will collaborate with several peers on a multi-media sampling and juxtaposing project. Throughout the semester we will practice and refine research strategies, analyze complex concepts, read information rhetorically, write informal and formal texts, work collaboratively, assess our writing, and keep a research portfolio.

None of you will be doing this work alone or in isolation. I will guide and prompt and assist you through every phase of the course, and your classmates will share their ideas and experiences and expertises as well.

Course Texts and Materials

(the handbook is available in the SUB and Follett’s Orange Bookstore)

Blakesley & Hoogeveen. The brief Thomson Handbook

Christian Smith. Disruptive Religion: The Force of Faith in Social Movement Activism

Various pdfs available on blackboard

approximately $20 for copy expenses over the course of the semester

I will mount course materials on blackboard—http://blackboard.syr.edu/—with great regularity. You will need your Mymail ID and password to access our course and I ask that you check your syr account at least once a day, since it is the only email address blackboard provides me to communicate with you.

Grading

Unit 1: Entering

(20%)

Portfolio

(10%)

An essay of 6 pages in which you enter the conversation initiated by course readings, and present a focused and critical analytical review of the texts.

Unit 2:

Sustained Research Essay

(30%)

Portfolio

(10%)

A 10-12 page research essay explaining and analyzing a particular subculture, making use of the texts and theories of unit 1, but building on that foundation through further primary and secondary research. Unit work includes an annotated bibliography.

Unit 3:

Collaborative Research

Project

(30%)

A multi-media group project in which group members create a sustained analysis or argument. Unit work includes collaborative written product as well as a group presentation.

Attendance & Participation

Attendance and active engagement in the course is critical. Your absences will affect your classmates’ work as well as your own. All the work is designed to develop your research skills and will feed directly into your writing.

Each unit calendar will outline the following weeks’ assignments, but we may shift assignments around or change direction occasionally as it seems appropriate, necessary, or interesting. If you must miss a class, you are responsible for making up the work and getting yourself back on track. Please realize that you cannot make up class time.

If you miss the equivalent of three weeks of classes or more without any official documented excuse you will not be able to pass the course. I don’t anticipate any of you will be in that position, however, so let’s all agree to do the work, come to class, learn a lot, and make the course a meaningful experience.

Communication with Instructor

I reserve 9-10am MWF, 2-3pm TTh, and 1-2pm Sat for responding to student emails and phone calls. However, I’m not likely to get phone messages late on Friday until Monday morning. While I may check email on Sunday, do not expect a response to emails sent at or after 2pm on Saturday until Monday between 9-10am.

Student Writing

All texts written in this course are generally public. You may be asked to share them with a peer, the class, or with me. It is understood that registration for and continued enrollment in this course constitutes permission by the student for the instructor to use any work resulting from the course.

But even more importantly, SAVE ALL YOUR WORK. It is all meaningful. Date and save every text—formal and informal—including notes, free writes, brainstorms, drafts, etc. You will have a difficult time properly citing research, assessing your work, and writing a final bibliographic essay you haven’t saved all of your writing.

Commenting on Student Work

You will engage in great deal of formal and informal writing over the course of the semester. How I respond to this work will differ depending on whether it’s a freewrite or an annotated bibliography or a brief synthesis paper or a unit essay. Sometimes I will return short assignments with a sentence or two at the end, asking a question or responding with a comment about the ideas in the piece and their development. Sometimes I may return them with no comments, but with a check on top and will use your writing to inform how we discuss something in the next class meeting (and I try to make the connections between your writing and how they shape our class agenda clear). In endnotes to rough and final drafts of your essays, after identifying those elements of your work that are strong and praiseworthy or show promise, I will call your attention to areas where you could extend or complicate your thinking and development as well as issue you challenges to consider for future writing. Sentence level, usage, and grammar concerns do matter, and we will work on those issues—but they are concerns for late in the writing process. I’m not in the business of “fixing” papers because your writing is not broken.

Statement on Plagiarism

The academic community requires ethical behavior from all of its participants. For writers, this means that the work we claim as ours must truly be ours. At the same time, we are not always expected to come up with new ideas; we often build our thinking on the ideas of others. We are expected, however, to credit others with their contributions and to clearly indicate the boundaries of our own thinking. In cases where academic dishonesty is detected (the fraudulent submission of another's work, in whole or part, as your own), you may be subject to a failing grade for the project or the course, and in the worst case, to academic probation or expulsion. For a more detailed description of the guidelines for adhering to academic honesty in the College of Arts and Sciences, go to http://www-hl.syr.edu/cas-pages/PromAcademicHonesty.htm

Special Needs

If you require consideration for a special need or circumstance of any kind, please see me. And I invite all of you to make use of the Writing Program’s Writing Center on the ground floor of HBC; it is staffed by consultants with experience in a range of learning situations.

Calendars

WRT 205: Unit 1 Calendar

HO=Handout (print ALL handouts and bring them to class with you for the day you are to have read them)

DR=Disruptive Religion

Note: If there is no instruction to post a writing activity in the Homework sections to Blackboard or to submit it via Digital Dropbox, print it out and bring it to class.

WEEK ONE:

Tues, 1/13 Introductions. Go over syllabus. Groups read and discuss Smith on the study of disruptive religion. Whole group discussion. Model active reading and asking good questions.

HOMEWORK:

o Read and Annotate “Correcting a Curious Neglect” (DR). This reading will help establish pressing and guiding issues for course inquiry. Read not for mastery or facts, but inventively for questions and ideas. To that end, choose a key quote or passage (two or three sentences) from “Correcting” that you would like our class to discuss. Choose one organization mentioned in the article that piqued your interest to do “quick-n-dirty” research on — go to the organization website or do an internet search or go to library database you’re familiar with. Write one page worth of material about what you find. Be prepared to present your findings at the next class. Skim the webpages about Soulforce and watch the clips linked to in announcements on Blackboard. These items will provide context and background for one form of gay Christian activism and will prepare you for additional reading before class next week. Identify four binaries you see at work in the Soulforce clips. Choose one of those binaries to freewrite about for ten minutes—post your identified binaries and freewrite to Blackboard by class time on Tuesday 1/15. Read and annotate “Beyond Complicity” (HO).

Thurs, 1/15 Examine some selected quotes. Continue establishing a vocabulary for our inquiry. Research reports. Discuss the importance of reader situatedness. Begin in-class the “analyzing the self” activity. Watch Jihad for Love clip. Begin a discussion of rhetorical analysis in terms of audience. Sign up for a “course expectations and paper brainstorming” conference for the next week.

HOMEWORK:

Read the Unit 1 Assignment Sheet and come to class with questions or confusions about it. Complete “analyzing the self” activity. Read and annotate “Radical Islamic Insurgency” (DR). This essay focuses on a specific, national religious movement for change and provides a history for some elements alluded to in Jihad for Love. Write a brief, one-page paper explaining why “Radical” fits in the section of DR it’s in, and then apply in 250 words one of the italicized “Religious Assets for Activism” (pages 9-22) (for example, Geographical dispersion) from Smith’s “Correcting” to “Radical.” Post these two short writing assignments to the Blackboard forum “Radical Responses” by 12pm Sunday 1/18. If you get stuck on how to approach these writing assignments, you might use the questions on the “Reading Rhetorically” handout as a guide. These assignments require that you understand the arguments/claims in “Radical” and the concept you choose from “Correcting” well enough to apply it—even if you’re not really sure, try something out! Watch Jihad for Love clip again—link in Announcements on Blackboard. The ideas in the clip bring us into global arena of gay and lesbian Islamic practice and activism. Read and annotate “Transing and Transpassing against Sex-Gender Walls in Iran” (HO). With this text, we make Iran the center of our attention once again, but this time to think about how the anti-gay policies of the Islamic Iranian state legitimize transsexuality as well as participate in a transnational traffic of terms and ideas. Fill out the “Reverse Engineering” handout. This will get us started thinking about how authors use sources to build arguments.

WEEK TWO:

Tues, 1/20 Discuss Unit 1 Assignment. Share and build on analyses of “Radical.” Start analysis of claims in “Transing.” Group discussions and extensions of “Reverse Engineering.”

HOMEWORK:

o Listen to or read the NPR story on feminist appropriations of the mikvah (ritual bathing) and watch the segment about liberation theology—links in Announcements. Then read and annotate “Women in the Menstruation Huts” and “Popular Religion, Protest, and Revolt” (DR). Fill out the “Initial Research” handout.

Thurs, 1/22 Share initial research. Working with the library databases and SUMMIT. Interrogating shared texts. Sign up for paired conferences to discuss drafts.

HOMEWORK:

Decide which three of our shared readings you will use for your paper. Generate (or choose from those we created or those on the syllabus) two possible questions for interrogating your texts. Post your choices of texts, your questions, and a short paragraph about why these questions and texts interest you to the Blackboard forum “Unit 1 Questions” by 5pm Friday 1/23. Read “Maner” (HO) to help you think more about your research for your first paper and extend the conversation we’ve begun in class. Write and post to the Blackboard forum “Interrogating Texts” by 5pm Sunday 1/25 a 250-word analysis of one of your chosen texts using one of your questions.

WEEK THREE:

Tues, 1/27 Revisit/clarify expectations for the essay. Group activity extending and complicating homework. Briefly discuss introducing sources. Sign up for individual conferences.

HOMEWORK:

o Identify three instances of sources being introduced in either “Beyond Complicity” or “Popular Religion” that you would like to try out in your essay. Extend and build upon what you’ve written toward your essay to a three-page draft. Bring three copies with you.

Thurs, 1/29 Practice introducing sources. Peer review.

HOMEWORK:

Compose a four-page draft and bring three copies to class.

WEEK FOUR:

Tues, 2/3 Peer review. Whole class discussion and group activities for introductions and conclusions.

HOMEWORK:

o Read Revise and bring the most recent version of your essay with you to class.

Thurs, 2/5 Titling essays. Charting sentence variety. Building portfolios.

HOMEWORK:

o Final draft and portfolio due. Submit your final essay via Digital Dropbox by 5pm Tuesday 2/10 and bring your portfolio ready to turn in at the beginning of class.

WEEK FIVE:

Tues, 2/10 Teaching feedback. Collect Unit 1 Portfolios. Discuss Unit 2 assignment. Begin watching Trembling Before G-d.

WRT 205: Unit 2 Calendar

HO=Handout of an long article on Blackboard (print ALL handouts and bring them to class with you for the day you are to have read them or otherwise worked with them)

DR=Disruptive Religion

BB=Blackboard

Note: If there is no instruction to post a writing activity in the Homework sections to Blackboard or to submit it via Digital Dropbox, print it out and bring it to class.

WEEK ONE:

Tues, 2/10 Collect Unit 1 Portfolios. Introduce the focus of Unit 2. Begin watching Trembling Before G-d. Randomly assigned topics.

HOMEWORK:

o Compose responses to prompts in “Trembling Responses” (HO). We will use the claims you generate here as the basis for a “circle of voices” activity and then focus in on a few claims you generate.

Thurs, 2/12 Circle of voices with “Trembling Responses.” Class focusing of claims. “Where do you stand?” activity. Whole class discussion of Trembling. Research reports. DR selections and discuss the AB Guidelines. Teaching feedback.

HOMEWORK:

Read and annotate “Operation Rescue.” So far, we’ve looked primary at texts that look at “progressive” movements at the intersections of sexuality, politics, and religion. With this article we examine a fairly “conservative” group and issues of intra-group identification. Read to understand the argument and to identify the kinds of research the author uses. Read your selected chapter from DR. Compose an annotate bibliography entry for that chapter handout using the guidelines we discussed in class and that you downloaded from BB—bring 6 copies to class (one for each group member and me).

WEEK TWO:

Tues, 2/17 Small group presentations of Talking Annotated Bibs. Identify claims and sources in “Operation Rescue.” Watch clip from Jesus Camp. Focused whole class discussion putting the clip and the article in conversation. Return Unit 1 portfolios; papers in Dropbox by 5pm.

HOMEWORK:

o Conduct quick-n-dirty research about the topic I assigned you in class. Download and read the Unit 2 assignment sheet. Write down any questions you have about it and bring them to the next class. Read Margaret Kantz’s “Teaching Students to Use Textual Sources Persuasively.” Reply to prompts in “Thinking Further with Kantz” (HO).

Thurs, 2/19 Research Reports. Generating possible research questions. Brainstorming possible avenues for primary research. Go over the research proposal assignment.

HOMEWORK:

Compose your research proposal (using the guidelines discussed in class). Post your proposal to BB by 1pm Sunday 2/22. Based on kinds of research you think you might do, I will structure some class time around how to do some kinds of primary research as well as why certain kinds of research work well to address particular questions. Locate two sources you think you might want to use for your paper. Fill out “Double-Entry Pages” for one of these sources so that you begin collecting material that you might use and figuring out what you might say back to it. Design some means of doing primary research around your topic. This might include going to discussion board, interview an interested person in-person or by email/phone, conducting a survey, etc.

WEEK THREE:

Tues, 2/24 Discussion of primary research. Continue to discuss how researchers can make claims. Practice making claims and writing thesis statements. Practice dialoguing with sources and reading rhetorically.

HOMEWORK:

Conduct (if at all possible) your primary research design. Re-read “Operation Rescue” with particular attention to the source work (introducing, responding, contextualizing, and citing). Read and annotate the selection on sources from Writing Analytically (HO). Write a 500 wd response applying the principles of “conversing with sources” from WA to two of your sources. Be very specific in your references to the texts: quote from them as you provide examples; make very clear your connections between sources. Please bring to class the sources you work with.

Thurs, 2/26 Share the results of your primary research. We will continue our work of dialoguing with scholarly sources.

HOMEWORK:

o Write four to five pages toward your essay expanding on the conservation you started having between and among your sources. In particular, take up one or two key ideas and work with them. The pages you write for this assignment should reflect your efforts to make claims and dialogue with your sources.

WEEK FOUR:

Tues, 3/3 Work with sample student essays. We will work toward more complex thesis statements.

HOMEWORK:

o Write a six- to seven-page draft of your essay taking up one or two key ideas and working with your sources. The pages you write for this assignment should reflect your efforts to make claims and dialogue with your sources.

Thurs, 3/5 Work with and extend your homework. Work toward making claims.

HOMEWORK:

o Over Spring Break, think and reflect. Revise and extend some if possible. Bring to class on 3/17 three copies of the two-page section you most want feedback on. Print and bring copies of the sample student essays from Blackboard.

WEEK FIVE: SPRING BREAK

WEEK SIX:

Tues, 3/17 Discussion of sample essays. Peer Review.

HOMEWORK:

o Revise your paper and bring three copies of the two-page section you most want feedback on.

Thurs, 3/19 Mini-peer review. Titling your essay. Questions about portfolios.

HOMEWORK:

Revise and finish essay 2 and your portfolio.

WEEK SEVEN:

Tues, 3/24 Submit Portfolios. Papers due to Digital Dropbox by 5pm.

Unit 3 Calendar

Tues, 3/24 I’ll introduce you to the unit 3 collaborative project. Based on several factors, I will assign you to groups and you will pick group research topics from the list I provide. You and your group mates will spend time on line and in library databases doing a quick scan of your topic for homework.

We’ll also take up Jeff Rice’s “The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop Pedagogy as Composition,” and I will share a sound clip and ask you to think deeply about the processes of sampling, pasting, and layering.

For homework: please read and annotate David Sibley’s “Introduction” to Geographies of Exclusion (pdf on blackboard). The reading, like Jeff Rice’s essay, is quite dense, though brief; please leave time to read closely and carefully. Come to class with an example of socio-spatial exclusion (that you have experienced, been witness to, or read or heard about). If your topic strikes you as illustrative of some form of socio-spatial exclusion, be prepared to explain how and why. As a group, locate at least three research artifacts specific to your topic (these could include websites, images, creative work—novels, poems, songs, artwork, etc., scholarly articles, articles from popular magazines, newspaper articles…). Be prepared to select a detail from one of your own research artifacts and “sample” it.

Thurs, 3/26 We will continue unpacking Jeff Rice and practice juxtaposing samples, and we will also take up the David Sibley essay. We will also interrogate the definition of “collaborative” writing.

For homework: read and annotate the chapter “Recognising Strangers” from Sara Ahmed’s book Strange Encounters: Embodied Others in Post-Coloniality. This is also a challenging reading, so take your time, don’t get frustrated, and do keep track of what confuses you; I will address confusions in class. Be prepared to make connections between Sibley and Ahmed, and to apply their ideas and claims to your topics.

Please bring to class any of the research materials you are finding specific to your topic.

Tues, 3/31 We will unpack the Sibley and Ahmed essays together. We will also practice sampling and interpreting specific passages from Sibley and Ahmed and juxtaposing them with research artifacts from each group.

For homework: individually write 500 words, putting Sibley and Ahmed and your source material in conversation with one another. I’m interested in seeing you make connections across key ideas and claims, and interpret and apply what you have read.

Thurs, 4/2 We will continue working with Sibley and Ahmed. We’ll also continue practicing sampling and juxtaposing in class. And finally, we’ll imagine the multi-media project: i-movies; power points; etc.

For homework: locate artifacts that are specific to the cultural moment of your topic—song lyrics, album covers, tv programs, movies, newspaper headlines, fashions, international events, domestic political agendas, fads and crazes, sports, etc. Collaboratively write a 500 wd proposal outlining your group’s project—the product you are working toward, the arguments/claims you are building toward, the theoretical material you are drawing on, the ideas you are brainstorming about your presentation, and the role each person intends to play as writer/researcher/presenter. Make time to send the proposal to each member so that you each have an opportunity to contribute to and revise the document.

Tues, 4/7 In class each group will work with their artifacts and create a collage that includes some interpreting of the juxtaposed samples. We will also practice working with sound bites and visuals: each group will either demonstrate (using the computer and projector at the front of the room) or talk us through a creative juxtaposing of a sound bite and a visual.

For homework: each group member should tackle one of the research/writing requirements in the assignment. Locate sources specific to your topic, and bring them to class on Thursday. Also each member of each group will compose two tentative claims based on your research so far. Bring the claims to class.

Thurs, 4/9 We will share all of our tentative claims, and put pressure on them—can they be supported? Are they analytical enough? Do they suggest the complexity of the topic?

For homework: Collaboratively compose a draft of your shared text.

Tues, 4/14 In class we will read and respond to each group’s draft.

For homework: Collaboratively revise your shared text based on the feedback in class.

Thurs, 4/16 I will briefly review the final reflection assignment. Meet with your groups in class to work on final projects and presentations. Please have your Thomson handbook with you.

For homework: Continue to work with group mates on all the required elements of the final projects.

Begin composing your final reflection (this is an individual writing project).

Tues, 4/21 Syracuse Showcase—no class.

For homework: Continue to work with group mates on all the required elements of the final projects.

Thurs, 4/23 First round of group presentations. Course Evals.

Tues, 4/28 Last day of class. Final group presentations.

Spinnuzi, Chapter 4

2009-11-18T05:48:00.000-08:00

I'll begin by saying it was nice to see Texas prominently featured in this week's reading--two weeks in a row! However, the reality of Texas being late to the game in terms of recognizing the need for regulation on services and pricing is not surprising, nor is it nearly as captivating as the story of Wiley College.

Methodologically, this chapter from Spinuzzi is interesting because he uses two theories that do not agree on the nature of history in order to illustrate the how defensible and sound claims might be made about the data of telecommunications history. Activity theory is grounded in a notion of dialectical contradictions developing a stabilized object. Alternatively, actor-network theory focuses not on dialectics and development toward a single, stable object. Rather, ANT looks to multiple and contingent translations discusive and material propostions by actants. In this way, history becomes an accounting of temporarily stable propositions--made stable by a layered accumulation (not unlike the Vicki Burton's notion of rhetorical accretion)--that are constantly open to problematization and renegotiation by actants.

Spinnuzi's appeal to Machiavelli serves well his goal to historicize the strategies of a network by making "success" one of his guiding analytics.

Spinnuzi provides me with a way to imagine tracking the accumulation of propositions that making an organization or network: writing departments, major curricula, liturgical practice, layered literacy events. He also challenges me not ascribe an intentionality and coherence on to a set of practices that may not have been intended. In other words, don't read the history of a group or practice in light of its present ideology. Rather, I should look for moments of accumulation and contestation that enable the present articulation of a group.

Burton, Chapter 3

2009-11-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

I might've gotten a little carried away. I've created topic headings so you might more easily find what you think's the most interesting section below to read:

--(Quantitative research on daily lives) This is such an interesting chapters to read for methods and claims about methods for variety of reasons. We can talk about Burton's methods or her presentation of Wesley's methods for "the care of our time" (72). Burton speaks to the connection of Wesley's time with the Holy Club when he was at college and their "methods" of accounting for one's use of time and and engagement with productive, reflective, or spiritual activity. Given the interest some of us have in more quantitative methods, Wesley's notation system for coding different activities throughout a day invites me to think about the ways we, as researchers, might collect such data today (quantified data about a person's daily life) and what activities our inquiry might be geared toward. The frequency and length of texts and tweets over a given day? Emails? What are the varieties of daily practices in which folks engage and what level of "care" do they bring to them?

--(Conforming/Transforming work of journals) When Burton notes the way life at Oxford is structured to generate a desire on the part of its students to maintain and normalize the sense of privilege they experience in that ivory tower (77), the spiritual and literate disciplines of journaling articulated by Wesley suggest a means of both social/personal control and transformation. While journaling might be read as a way for subjects to confess and make themselves into a Foucaultian docile subject, in the context of privilege it can be a way of calling into question the "natural," the given of life at Oxford. Inviting individuals and communities to write the details of their lives might enable them, through increased awareness, to intervene against their own complicity with oppressive structures or to enhance the exercises of agency Cushman so urges us to be cognizant of.

--(History-laden nature of literacy events) Burton's account of Wesley's "conversion" or "conviction" experience at Aldersgate situates his increase in spiritual life and power in a multi-layered literacy event connected to a long tradition of church history. While among the Moravians, Wesley's hearing of someone read aloud Luther's writings about the book of Romans leads him to write, "I felt my heart strangely warmed" (83). So, to break this literacy event down, we've got Wesley hearing a worship leader read aloud (a worship practice he got used to with his mother, Susanna) an exegesis from a 16th century Reformation instigator, composed in response to a 1st century letter written by St. Paul to an audience of Roman Christians. To recap, that's an oral rendering of a commentary on a letter, each centuries removed from the other. Such rich, historically laden literacy events (the trope of increased conviction upon hearing another's reading of Scripture) have a long tradition in western Christianity. For example, St. Augustine found himself led to a conversion experience during a sermon by St. Ambrose. Augustine was first taken in by the pleasantness of the rhetoric and then began to realize the truth that was being communicated. Having this sense of ecclesiastical (or church) history in mind I think realizes one fascinating dimension of the method Burton deploys for those interested in the history of sacred rhetoric in particular. The attentiveness to the specifics of the literacy event reveal the situational, contextual, and deeply rhetorical nature of communication about the divine. Often, speaking subjects (especially historical and orthodox figures) who voice their spiritual understandings are not thought to be engaged in what we in rhet/comp might see as 'good' rhetoric or rhetoric that is aware of its embeddedness in culture. They are often seen as adopting a kind of Boothian conquest rhetoric--win at all costs. However, Burton's rendering of Wesley's experience (and my supplementing of it here with Augustine's) indicate the necessarily shifting and radically specific nature of communication about the eternal and the divine.

--(History and ethics) One of the conversations that emerged post-colloquium in our class last week was a seeming difference between the kinds of ethical commitments owed by historical researchers to their subjects and those owed by ethnographers to their participants. There are a few ways in which Burton troubles this distinction. She sees her subjects as vivid and vibrant actors in social life and tries to give readers a sense of their rich lives, allowing us to see how diaries and journals worked to order the personal and spiritual lives of Wesley and early Methodists. At the beginning of the chapter, she turns to work of Ralph Cintron for a frame that allows her speak about the function of the journals in ordering the symbolic lives of their writers. What do we make of this link between an ethnographic frame and a historical inquiry?

Nancy Welch, Chapter 3

2009-10-21T05:35:00.000-07:00

One of the central claims that runs through chapter 3 and its "interlude" is that the practice of argument--informed by context and situation--and an awareness of history is important to mustering any potentially response to present conditions that might compel individuals and communities to activism. More specific to the chapter, Welch addresses two strands of thought important in feminist rhetorics and activism (the maternalist and the postmodern) to claim that if their more debilitating aspects (respectively, potential reinforcement of traditionalist gender roles and political indecision) can be worked through, then they can provide teachers with ways to imagine helping students move through inquiry (finding a place to stand in ongoing debates/struggles) to making arguments (making a case for the stance they have chosen).

This chapter finds its exigency and momentum in stories and anecdotes from Welch's own experiences and from one of her students. She turns to theories, for the most part, to highlight the inadequate responses they've enabled their proponents to articulate in the face of serious political realities.

What Welch advances is a pedagogical imperative that students be offered in writing classes opportunities to practice the full range of rhetorical strategies that mightenable them both to investigate questions/issues and to represent (and defend) their answers to a publics that might not agree with them.

This text challenges me to more fully engage students with the rhetorical possibilities of audience and argument to take up more thoughtfully and carefully with them issues of disagreement and clear opposition and how to respond to challenges they might encounter, especially when voicing minority views ( for example, opposition to war in the midst of "patriotic zeal").

Gwen Gorzelsky. "Rhetorical Ethnography: Shifting Figures"

2009-09-27T15:17:00.000-07:00

*Main claim(s) or research questions

-One of Gorzelsky's main claims is that attending to the figurative language used by ethnographic participants and researchers in the field as well as by researchers during the composing of an ethnographic text can aid the critical goal of just social change without promoting an agenda that overrides the goals and claims of research participants.

*Major assumptions about methods and methodologies.

-Ethnographic writing can be artistic (in the sense of inviting those who compose and read into experiences of greater wholeness and into revisions of their previous notions regarding research participants), drawing on metaphor both for constructing the research narrative and for conducting the analysis.

-Gorzelsky's methods for composing a rhetorical ethnography are described in a three step process: 1) identify the “embodied metaphors enacted by people in the field,” 2) examine the “language-based metaphors used in the field,” and 3) be aware of what figures arise in the process of writing the ethnographic account (88).

-Conducting ethnography involves an awareness of the cognition involved in communication. It also entails, more broadly, an awareness of the workings of communicative acts on the individuals who produce and hear them and within the systems they are a part. This involves special attention to metaphor.

-Identifying the metaphors at work in the field provides a glimpse into the workings of the social and thought systems of which those who deploy them are a part. Becoming aware of the metaphors used by researchers and participants enables researchers to revise the metaphors they use as researchers in order to change relational patterns with claims and metaphors of their participants, a personal change that can participate in social change.

*Key words/phrases/concepts

-metaphorics/figurative language--these are used interchangeably except when explicitly speaking about simile near the end of the chapter.

-gestalt

-relational patterns

-systemic

-conversion/change

*Key texts.

-Bateson, Gregory. Steps to an Ecology of Mind. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2000.

-Perls, Frederick, Ralph E. Hefferline, and Paul Goodman. Gestalt Therapy: Excitement and Growth in the Human Personality. New York: Dell, 1951.

*Major questions/challenges the text posed for me

-Gorzelsky's central claim about the political work performed by critical ethnography seems to be that it allows for the researcher to work on herself, on her personal metaphors, on her engagements with research subjects. Yet, she was also a participant in the community she studied, a group working toward "progressive" social change around literacy education for socially marginalized youth and their families. And her reflective work around metaphors enabled her to understand her disconnects with other activists in this social justice project. Implicitly, this work Gorzelsky does on herself is not simply for the scholarship she produced, but it will inform her future work in similar situations. In other words, by understanding the clash of metaphorics she encountered and working to revise her own metaphors, she enables herself to be in the world with others differently the next time such disconnects occur--specifically, when they occur again in activist contexts.

-Gorzelsky also takes up one of the very points regarding spirituality we took up in class last Thursday regarding an implicit or explicit teleology toward which its movements are or can be directed. In fact, this was the organizing tension of metaphorics (the invocation by another Struggle organizer of the progressive and “good” end toward which the Christian path is directed and Gorzelsky’s subscription to a set of [post-]Marxist redemptive and revolutionary metaphorics) she found herself responding to in the last part of her article. If, then, a telos of progressive good is a part of the organizing energia, or vivid story, that shapes and propels individuals and communities toward just action in the very specific instances and predicaments in which they and others find themselves, how can we as ethnographers account for that ground of reality, that play of metaphorics? Also, there seems something very rhetorical to me in the attention to symbols paid by the other Struggle organizer. His interest arose from a desire to communicate what he saw as an eternal truth to a particular audience experiencing very specific social and materials realities, necessitating a shaping of that message specific to that audience.

-It also seems implicit in Gorzelsky’s account that academics/researchers will more often, if not always, be the ones within an ethnographic project that have a tenuous or tortured relationship with religiosity (and not even the especially evangelical brands [Presbyterians are generally known as part of the American mainline rather than as part of the more evangelical traditions]. What does this say to those researchers who may well understand the dangers associated with power dynamics of sovereignty (Foucault’s beheaded king) and of a progressive telos (don’t worry about your working conditions today; everything we will be better in the sweet by and by), but who at the same time claim an identity that participates in both of those risky stances? In other words, I wonder about the usefulness of her positioning of researchers (which by necessity had to come out of her own experience and positionality) for ethnographers who subscribe to the notion of a sovereign God and who believe in Her/His ability to intervene in material and discursive reality.

Bazerman, Charles. “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts.” What Writing Does and How It Does It

2009-09-12T16:17:00.000-07:00

*Major claims and research questions:

-Attending to the ways texts draw on the discursive universe of which they are part enables a much clearer sense of how writing produces specific understandings, identities, communities, and pedagogical data (84).

-All textual products evince deliberate or unintentional influence from other texts and words that preceded them (83-84).

-As writers, identifying other texts to use is a part of intertextuality. However, it also involves the specific deployments of other texts, the purpose behind their invocation, and the writerly identity created through relationships to other texts (94).

*Assumptions about methods and methodologies:

-Analysis of a range of both explicit and implicit intertextuality is possible, but it is usually less difficult to account for the work performed by those more obvious and explicit intertextual moves than the implicit ones (89).

-Intertextual inquiries may open broadly, with a general research question, but they should move to specific focuses as quickly as possible to yield useful analysis (91).

-The selection of the text(s) for analysis is critical for intertextual projects (91).

-A thorough analysis of intertextuality may require a single, short text; whereas, if specific expressions of intertextuality or generic aspects of texts guide the analysis, a more voluminous body of texts may be subject to study (91).

-After texts have been chosen, data collection begins by noticing language use patterns and apparent anomalies. Then researchers can move to interpretation of that data (92-93).

*Key terms:

-Intertextuality—“The relation each text has to the texts surrounding it” (84)

-Intertextual reach—the amount and variety of a text’s circulation among other texts (89)

-Recontextualization—how words evoke different meanings and effects based on their use in a new discursive situation (91)

*Key citations:

Many sources seem to inform Bazerman’s work throughout the chapter, but explicit citations (aside from student work and a professional magazine used as examples for analysis and John Swales’ Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings) come only in the “further reading” section (95-96). However, of those listed, these appear to be most useful: Graham Allen’s Intertextuality and Amy Devitt’s “Intertextuality in Tax Accounting: Generic, Referential, and Functional”in Textual Dynamics of the Professions (Eds.) Bazerman and Paradis.

*Questions/Challenges the text raises for me:

-Bazerman makes issues of scope—the scope of questions and the size of the data pool—in research quite clear. The more features of intertextuality one wishes to highlight and explore, the more difficulty a large data set creates. This raises, for me, questions about moments in scholarship when researchers may have collected a large body material (hundreds of surveys, for example) and then choose especially "interesting" or perhaps “representative” responses to examine at length with the larger data set providing a background and context. How can the criteria for the selection of examples to be given more extensive treatments be articulated? Are they always?

-Bazerman also invites me to remain aware of the fact that whether certain meanings were intended in a given use of language or through a specific textual practice, discursive and material effects (what texts do) may not align with the writer’s intention. This produces an interesting question about how to treat texts offered up for analysis by research participants who are part of larger, mixed-methods research projects. How can researchers who come to know their participants through a variety of inquiry methods--individuals to whom they have some ethical responsibilities--take participants' claims into account while also attending the effects of their texts?

A Quote

2009-09-12T13:40:00.000-07:00

I wonder what the methodological implications of this stance are...

"What if, as researchers, we spiritually approached our research projects–-and our relationships with others in those projects-–knowing and confident that our words instead of our credentials were divine invitations to be in relationship with another, invitations that were able to both heal and serve?” ---Cynthia Dillard, On Spiritual Strivings: Transforming an African American Woman’s Academic Life

My Work is My Prayer: Speaking Socraticaly, Saying Shibboleth, and Spiritualizing Scholarship

2009-09-09T09:05:00.000-07:00

As I enter my last year of coursework, prepare for exam areas, and begin to imagine a dissertation project that I can sustain (and that can sustain me) and that will contribute something of value to the field, reflection on my research trajectory and on the questions I’ve found compelling over the years seems both appropriate and generative. If I were to identify two questions that run throughout my scholarly inquiries, one version of them might read: What are the conditions and resources that enable the fullest forms of human flourishing? How do communities either help or hinder the production of those conditions and the availability of those resources? I’ve used many methods to pursue these questions in a variety of projects, beginning with my work as a history and English major, which I made as often as possible serve my activist interests. My undergraduate career offered me opportunities to develop and explore interests in American ethnic literatures, religion, critical theory, and social history. Work in these diverse areas prepared me to pursue graduate studies, which introduced me to field of rhetoric and composition. That pursuit allowed me to see classrooms and pedagogies as sites for intellectual inquiry and to understand pedagogies as means for the care of the soul—both in the sense of an individuated self and an incarnation of the divine. And pedagogies, and rhetorical theory by extension, then become, for me, sets of technologies that enable individuals and communities (collections of souls) to inhabit and transform the world in particular ways. What follows is no linear trajectory, no account of a journey with a distinct teleology directing it; it is, however, a brief attempt to address Socrates’ opening questions about where I’ve been and where I’m going.

As an undergraduate, I had a vibrant activist life. Over time, I cultivated a personal sense of socially ethical action that grew organically from multidimensional involvements with diverse groups. These involvements included, for example, leading the student peace coalition at Lamar University, speaking at special meetings of the campus NAACP, and being on the boards of directors for local NOW and ACLU chapters as well as for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. As often as possible, I used my coursework as space to promote my politics. Though I tried to be self-reflexive at times, looking back now, a sense of my own self-righteousness was more often what I achieved. I was the missionary activist Ellen Cushman warns us not to be. However, the inquiries and methods I used at that time—shaped as they were by profoundly clear political commitments—were deemed successful by my professors and helped me develop an understanding of academic work as (from my perspective) necessarily political, an understanding that would later attract me to rhetoric and composition studies. Perhaps it would be useful to turn to an example of the kind of projects I undertook then that resonate with my ongoing questions about human flourishing. In my history research methods class, I wrote an oral history of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. That project was based on extensive interviews with three of the long-time leaders of that organization. And while I acknowledged my own role in the organization (I served on its Board of Directors at the time of the study and had just won an award from the group for my efforts to establish a state-wide network of student chapters), I did so clumsily and without adequately accounting for the affective commitments that drew me personally and academically to that inquiry.

With some greater degree of skill, I better accounted for my participant-observer location in my first sustained pedagogical project. During my second semester of English graduate work at Texas Woman’s University, my “Pedagogy of Electronic Texts” course offered me an opportunity to explore my own practice as a writing center consultant as well as to explore in a thoughtful way the community of practitioners of which I was a part. Given the focus of the class, I decided to center my questions around an area of consulting work I had avoided: the online writing lab, essentially a system that allowed students to email their papers with a submission form so that they could receive an email back with comments on their work. This was service plagued with technical problems throughout my time in the writing center, but even when it worked, the question of the effectiveness and soundness of the feedback students were getting remained an open one. As consultants, we received no training specific to the tutoring of writers (and the reasons for this were many and became an explicit part of my paper). So, my research questions circulated around how tutors with no explicit or ongoing training in the tutoring of writing created strategies specific to online environments. Of course, these questions also spoke to larger concerns about the predicament and conditions in which I and other consultants labored and the pedagogical value students might or might not have derived from our work.

To explore these concerns—concerns that emerged out of my own practice and interest in finding theoretical frames that aided electronically mediated communication—I used several methods. First, I asked willing graduate and undergraduate student writing consultants in the TWU writing center to fill out a survey with several open-ended questions. Second, I conducted follow up interviews with them. Third, I observed the kinds of comments two of them provided to OWL-submitted papers. After collecting this data, I turned to the scholarship in computers and writing for two purposes: to historicize themes in consultants’ survey and interview comments about the difficulty of foregrounding the human element in online writing spaces and to code the comments consultants provided. This paper ended up serving three related purposes: 1) it helped me develop my own philosophy of response to online texts, 2) it furthered my sense of having something to share with a scholarly community because the paper was accepted for a conference presentation and was later published in CCTE Studies, and 3) it became part of an ongoing conversation about professional development at TWU because the published version of that essay was used by the Director of FYC (not the same one there at the time of my study) to argue for a system of faculty teaching mentors for graduate student instructors. According to my evaluation at the end of that first year of MA work from the Interim Director of First-Year Composition and the writing center at the time of my study, I operated as a pedagogue, researcher, and colleague with “a kind of missionary zeal, with a combination of pragmatism and idealism.” I take that summative comment to mean that I was seen as someone who could use my research to help folks do good pedagogical work with increased efficacy, to further the social mission of a public women’s university, and to situate my work in theoretical frames that give it meaning beyond the strictly local.

Despite my commitment to social justice and pedagogy and the encouragement of those efforts that I saw modeled in rhetoric and composition and despite the modest success I’d experienced in my course research projects, I still felt inadequately able to articulate the life-affirming and powerful affective relationships I experienced in being part of inquiry communities with deep social missions. After I received my MA, my work toward a Women’s Studies Certificate gave me the space and opportunity to imagine and develop an understanding my research and scholarship as a site for what Gloria E. Anzaldúa refers to as “spiritual activism.” While I had felt able to pursue research projects with religious focuses in the past (to name a few: sociological observations of an evangelical megachurch, interpretive-critical work using a womanist hermeneutic to read Psalm 137, and biographical-historical investigations of the political and social achievements of American Unitarians prior to the Civil War), I had never encountered the notion that scholarship itself could be a spiritual act—it felt right. And it provided me with an opening to use the shibboleths of the academy while making them vital to my own efforts. It was not long after I encountered this idea that it became almost redemptive.

In early November 2007, while I was at a conference presenting a paper that defined Toni Morrison’s notion of “missing” (she writes in the dedication to Sula, “This book is for Ford and Slade, whom I miss although they have not left me”) as a spiritual technology grounded in lived experience that might aid in the construction of activist community, I got my chance to start missing someone after he was gone. The day after I presented, my daddy died. The next day I felt a desperate need to be with my kindred spirits, people with whom I share a common set of interests and affinities. In other words, I felt an urgent need to be in community with people who study how we organize our symbolic lives so that we might better understand the world as well as one another—also, I was already scheduled to return to Texas that day and it wasn’t possible to get an earlier flight. I fulfilled this need, in part, by engaging in a discussion with a panel dedicated to teaching composition and what ended up being a six-person workshop on tenure and promotion.

During the remainder of the 2007 — 2008 academic year, I turned conferencing into a form of mourning; I attended five more professional conferences and presented work at three of them. Of course, people kept dying, too: my granddad died the night I left for my first CCCC in New Orleans and my grandmother died two days after my acceptance into CCR. But, what I experienced the day after my daddy died was an embodied, spiritual yearning that was, perhaps, part of a need for comfort, but also a need for knowledge that denies a hard Cartesian split between the soul and the body. My ability to think in a purely “logical” manner did not provide me confirmation of my own existence or of my ability to make meaning in the wake of trauma.

I sought, and continue to seek, not only an intellectual knowledge but also a knowledge that confirms my existence and affirms my contributions to the world. In my experience, that kind of affirmation occurs only in community with other people. Only in community, not in isolation, can I find deliverance from the harmful fragmenting of body and mind, as well as the devaluation of spirit, perpetrated by western binaries. In my academic work, I attempt to bring my whole self into my knowledge generating endeavors; and yet, I also often use theoretical frames to simultaneously make sense of complexity and to hide my own personal stake or location in my work. I’m aided in my search for a more holistic experience as a researcher by the advice of Jacqueline Jones Royster when she suggests in the introduction to Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture “that individual and social experiences are necessary and vital dimensions of the wholeness of academic enterprises” (5). Bringing individual and social experience to bear in scholarship points toward the truth of Anzaldúa’s claim that “[b]eneath [one’s] desire for knowledge writhes the hunger to understand and love [oneself]” (“now” 543). To apply Anzaldúa’s idea about the origin of the “desire for knowledge” to my engagement with the academy, my longing for a deeper understanding of various areas of inquiry is inextricably tied to efforts to know myself, legitimate my existence, and call a new and more humane reality into being, which is the work of the border-crossing, life-affirming, justice-seeking nepantlera—one who straddles the borders of many worlds.

Since coming to Syracuse, I’ve made spirituality my primary site for inquiry. From trying to articulate a theoretical space that is generous enough to allow for both divine as well as discursive possession to adding to the conversation about the possibilities for explorations of religiosity in multicultural composition curricula, I’ve found compelling questions that circulate around how spiritual subjects organize their symbolic lives and how the concrete details of their daily struggles inform their sense of dignity and their connection to that which seems ineffable. For a long time, there was a tension in rhetoric and composition around students and other subjects who claimed spiritual identities as central to their conceptions of themselves. While the dismissive attitude that once prevailed has waned to a degree, there is still a need for more research at the intersections writing studies and students and communities of faith. Here comes my answer to the “where are you going?” part of Socrates’ question. Questions that now occupy me include the following: What literacies are cultivated and encouraged by various spiritual communities? What agents provide sponsorship for these literacies? What values do they evince? How do these literacies intersect with and diverge from the kinds of work practiced and privileged in the academy? How do subjects negotiate the multiple, competing, complementary sponsorships that attend their movements through various domains of public and private life?

Works Cited

Anzaldúa, Gloria. “now let us shift . . . the path of conocimiento . . . inner work, public acts.” this bridge we call home: radical visions for transformation. Ed. Gloria Anzaldúa and AnaLouise Keating. New York: Routledge, 2002. 540-78. Print.

Geiger, T J. "'I don't know what I'm doing'": The Struggles of Untrained OWL Tutors." CCTE Studies 7 (2008): 77-83. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Sula. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974.

Royster, Jacqueline J. “Introduction: Making Trails in Studies of Race, Gender, and Culture.” Calling Cards: Theory and Practice in the Study of Race, Gender, and Culture. Eds. Jacqueline J. Royster and Ann M. M. Simpkins. Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2005. Print.

Introducing the blog

2009-09-07T18:07:00.000-07:00

This is my blog for CCR 691: Comparative Processes and Premises of Research.