Category: CFP

Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Composition Forum: “The Discourse-Based Interview: Forty Years of Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers”

Posted by – May 3, 2021

Guest editors: Neil Baird, Bowling Green State University, and Bradley Dilger, Purdue University

In 1983, Lee Odell, Dixie Goswami, and Anne Herrington published “The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings.” Since that time, over 250 published articles and 100 dissertations have cited this landmark essay, underscoring its enduring value for empirical research in writing. Researchers have extended the original scope of the discourse-based interview by developing new techniques for discovering the questions to ask participants and adapting the interview process to study multimedia-rich texts. In the forty years since Odell, Goswami, & Herrington wrote, writing has changed immeasurably, yet discovering writers’ tacit knowledge remains incredibly valuable—especially because, as Goswami and other scholars have pointed out, writing researchers and teachers have strong exigences to identify and explore the knowledge of all writers, not only those working from positions of privilege.

In this special issue, we invite scholars to explore how writing research and the discourse-based interview (DBI) have changed since the publication of Odell, Goswami, & Herrington’s landmark essay nearly 40 years ago. We invite proposals for feature articles that address relevant issues:

  • Ethical concerns related to any aspect of the DBI, but especially issues such as authorship, collaborative writing, and/or representation of participants in research;
  • New contexts or exigences for using DBIs, such as engaging the knowledges of indigenous and under-represented communities;
  • How changes in technologies for reading, writing, and publishing should be reflected in in the DBI to best capture the tacit knowledge of writers;
  • How emergent digital tools impact DBIs methodically: developing interview questions, identifying relevant alternative choices, analyzing data,  and representing tacit knowledge accurately;
  • Implications of changes in scholarly approaches to tacit knowledge, expertise, and disciplinary knowledge;
  • Implications for the DBI of the increase in collaborative writing in both academic and workplace contexts;
  • Methodological issues related to the use of stimulated elicitation or stimulated recall in qualitative research;
  • Meta-analysis or systematic review of studies that use DBIs.

We are especially interested in proposals for articles that would, in the tradition of Composition Forum’s “Retrospectives” section, reflect on and update prior methodological work by examining how thinking about tacit knowledge has changed since the publication of “The Discourse-Based Interview” in 1983.

Following the tradition of Composition Forum’s “Program Profiles,” we also plan an “Approaches, Practices, and Applications” section that includes articles focused on practical application, in contrast to the more theoretical or empirical pieces above. These articles would be written in a manner that facilitates engagement by those seeking to adapt the discourse-based interview in research, teaching, or other contexts, such as: 

  • The use of discourse-based interviews in teaching, mentoring, or other areas adjacent to writing research;
  • Mentoring novice researchers who want to integrate the DBI in their own work;
  • Innovative techniques for conducting discourse-based interviews;
  • The integration of discourse-based interviews into mixed-methods research designs.

We also seek contributors for book reviews that speak to the methodical and methodological universe of the discourse-based interview: subjects such as tacit knowledge, expertise, intersectionality in empirical research, and collaborative writing. Please see the list of titles on our web site (https://dtext.org/dbi), and contact the editors if you are interested in writing a review. We welcome suggestions for other relevant titles.

This special issue is part of a larger project exploring the discourse-based interview methodologically. For more background, see dtext.org/dbi/.

Calendar

Fri July 30, 2021                   Pre-submission deadline for review of draft proposals.

Wed September 1, 2021:       Deadline for submissions (11:59pm Hawai’i time).

Mon October 4, 2021:           Notification of submission decisions.

Fri January 14, 2022:            Deadline for manuscript drafts.

Fri March 25, 2022:              Feedback shared with authors.

Fri June 17, 2022:                 Final manuscripts due.

Mon August 15, 2022:          Publication.

Submission Guidelines

Please download our proposal template, fill it out, and email your proposal to dbi@dtext.org. Proposals should be no more than 500 words, excluding Works Cited. Indicate the type of contribution you’re proposing: an article, retrospective, or approaches & practices. We are especially interested in proposals from emergent scholars, scholar-teachers from teaching-intensive institutions, and scholars who study under-represented communities.

Following Composition Forum guidelines, expect the following length for contributions if accepted:

  • Articles: 6,000 to 8,000 words
  • Retrospectives: 3,000 to 5,000 words
  • Approaches, practices, and applications: 5,000 to 7,000 words
  • Book reviews: 1,500 words
  • Review essays: 2,500 words

All accepted articles will be peer-reviewed by the guest editors and members of the CF editorial review team, following the Anti-Racist Scholarly Reviewing Practices developed by a coalition of technical communication journal editors. Our style reference will be the MLA Handbook, ninth edition.

We welcome your questions. The editors are happy to read and comment on draft proposals shared before July 30. Please contact the special issue editors: dbi@dtext.org.

  • Category: CFP
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Call for Proposals for a Special Issue of Composition Forum: “Promoting Social Justice for Multilingual Writers on College Campuses”

Posted by – July 8, 2019

Guest editors: Brooke Schreiber, Baruch College, CUNY; Eunjeong Lee, Queens College, CUNY; Jennifer Johnson, Stanford University; Norah Fahim, Stanford University

cfspecialissue2020@gmail.com

Deadline for proposals: September 15, 2019

The fight for linguistic equity in writing education in the U.S. has a long and complex history. From the statement on “Students’ Rights to Their Own Language” (SRTOL) in 1974, to Asao Inoue’s recent CCCC Chair’s address calling out White language supremacy, the efforts to achieve justice for language minoritized students have been fraught with tension and conflict. At the core of this conflict is a fundamental question: in a world where English-only ideology and a deficit perspective towards language minoritized students still dominate (e.g., Lee, 2017), how we best serve our linguistically diverse students and promote pluralism in the writing classroom? In the current sociopolitical climate, where we see racist attitudes and acts linked with monolingual and monocultural bias in the daily news cycle, discussion and enactment of anti-racist praxis are more important than ever. And in order to bring about social justice for multilingual students, we must shift the conversations to ones that recognize multilinguals’ unique competencies in moving across languages and cultures (Canagarajah, 2013; You 2016).

In this special issue, we focus on how we as educators can work towards social justice for multilingual students through classroom practices, campus-wide advocacy, and administrative choices. We invite proposals for articles (print-based or multimedia) that address issues such as:

  • Initiating discussions of linguistic racism and promoting language plurality in dominant monolingual and/or white institutional spaces
  • Understanding the range of multilingual student backgrounds (i.e., international visa holders, immigrant/gen 1.5 students, refugees) and their experiences at our institutions
  • Developing pedagogical practices (rhetorical grammar, cross-cultural communication activities) that create spaces for multilingual students to negotiate language standards
  • Supporting writing faculty across the disciplines to enact anti-racist and translingual pedagogies
  • Implementing writing center policies and practices to support multilingual students
  • Using course options and placement practices to advocate for students

We also seek proposals for two Program Profiles, which might address various aspects of writing programs, including first-­‐year composition, WAC/WID, student support programs, teacher training, professional writing, and/or writing centers. We are particularly interested in profiles of programs which have developed innovative structures or curriculum for reaching out to, placing, assessing, or otherwise supporting multilingual student populations.

Proposal Submission Guidelines

Due date: September 15th, 2019

Length of proposals: an abstract of no more than 500 words and a tentative title

Proposals should be submitted to: cfspecialissue2020@gmail.com

For any questions, please contact:Eunjeong Lee at eunjeong.lee@qc.cuny.edu

Notification of acceptance: October 7th

  • Category: CFP
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Call for Managing Editor for Composition Forum!

Posted by – May 16, 2018

Composition Forum: A journal of pedagogical theory in rhetoric and composition compositionforum.com

Composition Forum is pleased to invite applications for the position of Managing Editor. The Managing Editor will work closely with Editor Christian Weisser in all aspects of the journal. The primary responsibility of this position is to facilitate the peer-review process of scholarly articles. This includes the following activities:

  • Review and screen new articles submitted for publication to determine if they fit the scope and focus of the journal
  • Solicit and assign reviewers to write written evaluations of screened articles
  • Evaluate reviewer feedback and decide upon accept, reject, or revise and submit status for each peer-reviewed article
  • Communicate with authors regarding the status of their articles and facilitate revisions (where applicable)
  • Guide accepted articles through editing and proofing to final publication, working closely with Web Editor Kevin Brock

Candidates should have an established record of scholarship in rhetoric and composition. Some editorial experience is preferred. Composition Forum welcomes individuals or teams of two editors to manage the workload—the current Managing Editors (Anis Bawarshi and Mary Jo Reiff) have worked as a team for several years. The incoming Managing Editor(s) are also encouraged to bring on Editorial Assistants (such as advanced graduate students). All positions within Composition Forum are on a volunteer basis with no monetary compensation, though editors are encouraged to secure compensation and/or release time from their universities to offset the time invested in this scholarly work.

Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis beginning on June 1st. Applicants should send an email to editors@compositionforum.com containing the following:

  • A brief (2-3 paragraph) statement of interest, describing the applicant’s background and experience relevant to the position, as well as an overview of your “vision” or goals for the articles section of Composition Forum in the future.
  • A current curriculum vita or resume

Applications will be promptly acknowledged, and finalists will interview through Skype or by phone. We hope to conclude the search in early summer 2018, allowing the new Managing Editor(s) to shadow and interact with the current editors before the Fall 2018 academic year begins.

Please direct questions or comments about the position (but not applications) to Christian Weisser at crw17@psu.edu

Composition Forum Call for Applications: Review Editor

Posted by – April 17, 2017

Composition Forum: A Journal of Pedagogical Theory in Rhetoric and Composition seeks a Review Editor to replace the outgoing editor. The Review Editor solicits book reviews and review essays, offers editorial feedback to review authors, and helps to format reviews for two regular issues and one “special themed” issue per year. Duties also include maintaining contact with publishers to obtain new titles, ensuring that review authors receive copies of texts, and participating in online editorial meetings. The incoming editor will shadow the current Review Editor for one production cycle.

Please submit a CV and an email describing your qualifications and vision/goals for the Reviews section of Composition Forum to Christian Weisser (weisser@psu.edu). Review of applicants will begin on May 15, 2017.

Call For Papers: Composition Forum Special Issue: Public Writing in Composition

Posted by – August 10, 2016

The editors of Composition Forum are pleased to announce a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Public Writing in Composition guest edited by Christopher Minnix. Please send 300 to 500 word proposals for articles and Program Profiles by September 15, 2016 to Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu). See below for a complete timeline.

Special Issue CFP: Public Writing in Composition
Guest editor: Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu)

Twenty years ago Susan Wells introduced us to the story of Arthur Colbert—a Temple University student who crafted a powerful and effective public response to being falsely accused, detained, and beaten by two Philadelphia policemen—in the introduction to her seminal article “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?” Writing six years after Wells, Christian Weisser predicted that public writing could become “the next dominant focal point around which the teaching of college writing is theorized and imagined” (42) in Moving Beyond Academic Discourse: Composition Studies and the Public Sphere. Over the past twenty years, public writing has indeed become a major focus in composition and a major initiative in many composition programs. At the same time, rereading Arthur Colbert’s story in our contemporary moment, a moment marked by significant police brutality but also by powerful and savvy rhetorical responses, such as we see from movements like #BlackLivesMatter and Dreamers Adrift, underlines the continued importance of teaching public writing, while returning us to the perennial question articulated by Wells: “what do we want from public writing?”

This special issue of Composition Forum calls on public writing teachers to respond to this question in our current disciplinary and political moment. The editor invites work that examines and explores critical issues in the theory and teaching of public writing within the discipline of composition studies, but also invites studies that examine how contemporary public discourse, such as the rhetoric of social movements, collective activism, or advocacy, might shed new light on enduring controversies in public writing research and provide new theoretical and pedagogical approaches to teaching public writing.

Research on public writing has theorized and critiqued understandings of the classroom as public space, debated the authenticity of public writing assignments and genres, theorized and outlined multimodal public writing pedagogies, developed the use of rhetorical case studies of public rhetoric in teaching public writing, argued for the role of community literacy and community publishing work in fostering students’ public knowledge and agency, and theorized composition studies as a public. The past 20 years have also witnessed the development and increasing accessibility of new media genres, multimodal composing platforms, and digital networks that have expanded our students’ opportunities for composing and circulating public arguments. These developments have challenged scholars in public writing to explore the relationship between access and opportunity for public writing and the potential influence or public efficacy of students’ public writing. Both the expansion of opportunities for public writing and the development of public writing theory and pedagogy have served as catalysts for numerous writing programs across the country to “go public” by crafting public writing curricula and defining public writing as part of their outcomes.

To revisit the question “what do we want from public writing?” in our contemporary moment, authors are encouraged to engage and revisit the tensions and problems that have defined public writing pedagogy in composition, while also exploring and defining new areas of inquiry. Authors might pursue issues such as the following, though they should not feel limited by them:

  • emerging genres and mediums of public writing and their pedagogical applications.

  • materiality and public writing pedagogy, including investigations of material rhetoric in the public writing classroom and explorations of the relationship between materiality and the composition and circulation of public writing.

  • students’ prior knowledge of genres and mediums of public writing and the potentials and constraints of this knowledge for the public writing classroom.

  • case studies or analyses of public writing—social movement rhetoric, activist rhetoric, advocacy rhetoric, etc.—with pedagogical implications for the public writing classroom.

  • spatial or place-based perspectives on public writing, including work that examines rhetorical ecologies of public writing

  • new approaches to service learning and community-based projects that foster students’ public writing and agency.

  • interdisciplinary approaches and perspectives applicable to public writing in composition, such as work in civic media, youth political participation, civic gaming, etc.

  • approaches to the problem of authenticity in public writing classrooms, including work that examines authentic public writing assignments.

  • work that expands our understanding of what counts as public participation in the public writing classroom, including explorations of participatory acts that often fall outside of the category of persuasion, such as sharing information across social networks.

  • approaches to assessing public writing and public writing programs.

  • public writing pedagogy that engages global contexts and exigencies.

  • theoretical and pedagogical approaches to multimodal public rhetoric.

  • approaches that revisit or explore public writing and theories of the public or publicity—public spheres, counter-publics, etc.

  • work that explores the intersections and divergences of public writing and civic education, particularly contemporary pedagogies such as “the new civics.”

  • analyses of initiatives to integrate public writing into community college and university writing programs.

  • approaches and possibilities for teaching public writing across the curriculum or in the disciplines.

  • teaching public writing in Basic Writing classrooms.

  • discussions of resistances—institutional, faculty, departmental, student—to public writing in composition.

Topics other than those listed above are enthusiastically encouraged, and articles on a broad range of issues and topics that fall within the broad project of public writing theory and pedagogy will be considered.

The guest editor also seeks two Program Profiles that focus on several important aspects of public writing programs, including, but not limited to, the following: the development and implementation of public writing courses and curricula, the role of community partnerships in public writing programs, the institutional perception and politics of public writing in specific universities or community colleges, and the role of writing program administration in advocating for public writing programs. Of particular interest are profiles that focus on the benefits and risks of integrating public writing into the curriculum at the level of writing programs. Interested contributors are invited to submit 300-500 word proposals to the guest editor, Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu), by September 15, 2016.

For more information on submitting articles or Program Profiles, visit http://compositionforum.com/submissions.php.

Timeline

August 1, 2016 – CFP released

September 15, 2016 – Deadline for proposals (300500 words)

September 25, 2016 – Notification of acceptances

January 25, 2017 – Deadline for completed MSS

March 15, 2017 – Review complete, revisions requested

May 30, 2017 – Final versions of MSS due

June 2017 – Editing, manuscript preparation, etc.

July 2017 – Special issue published

Please contact Christopher Minnix (cminnix@uab.edu) with inquiries.

Call For Papers: First Conference on Rhetoric and Writing Studies Undergraduate Programs (Oct. 13-14, 2016)

Posted by – February 28, 2016

Call for Proposals: First Conference on Rhetoric and Writing Studies Undergraduate Programs

October 13-14, 2016
Camino Real Hotel
El Paso, Texas

Sixteen years into a new century, we can say that undergraduate programs in Rhetoric and Writing Studies (RWS) are a diverse and exciting landscape in which, to borrow Sandra Jamieson’s words, we can discern “a snapshot of where the field of writing studies is today” and “where it is going and what it might become” (vii).

Sponsored by the Association for Rhetoric and Writing Studies Undergraduate Programs, this conference will provide a space for scholarship, conversation, and collaboration related to all facets of undergraduate programs in RWS. As such, we invite proposals on any issue related to RWS undergraduate programs, whether existing, planned, or aspirational.

Proposed topics may include, but are not limited to:

  • Defining Undergraduate Programs: Rhetoric? Writing Studies? Rhetoric &/or Writing Studies?
  • Curriculum of Undergraduate Programs in RWS
  • Teaching, Learning, and Pedagogy in Undergraduate RWS Programs
  • Institutional Locations of Undergraduate RWS Programs
  • Institutional Politics and Undergraduate RWS Programs
  • Undergraduate RWS Program Administration
  • Histories of Undergraduate RWS Programs
  • Student Recruitment, Mentoring, and Retention
  • Undergraduate Research: Mentoring, Presentation, and Publication
  • Education, Hiring, and Mentoring of Undergraduate RWS Faculty
  • Funding, Grants, and Resources for Undergraduate RWS Programs
  • Partnerships between RWS Programs and Publics, Government, Workplace, Nonprofits, etc.
  • Technology and Digital Studies in Undergraduate RWS Programs

Proposals

The conference welcomes individual proposals as well as proposals for panels, roundtables, and posters.

Conference sessions will be concurrent, lasting 90 minutes per session. Individual proposals will be grouped into conference sessions by topic. Presenters may propose panels of 3 to 4 presenters, roundtables of 5 or more presenters, and poster presentations.

Faculty, graduate students, and undergraduate students may submit proposals.

Deadlines

Presenters should submit an abstract (500 words or less) of the proposed presentation no later than May 15, 2016.
Presenters will be notified of the status of their proposal by July 30, 2016.

To Submit A Proposal

Proposals may be submitted by email to rhetwriting@gmail.com. Please identify status as faculty, graduate student, or undergraduate student.

For More Information

Information about conference registration, hotel accommodations, and El Paso attractions will be posted to the Association website at www.rhetoricandwriting.org

Questions can be sent to Helen Foster at hfoster@utep.edu or Angela Petit at apetit.online@gmail.com

Work Cited

Jamieson, Sandra. Foreword. Writing Majors: Eighteen Program Profiles. Ed. Greg Giberson, Jim Nugent, and Lori Ostergaard. Logan, Utah State UP, 2015. vii-ix. Print.

Association for Rhetoric and Writing Studies Undergraduate Programs
www.rhetoricandwriting.org
www.facebook.com/RhetWritingUP
rhetwriting@gmail.com

  • Category: CFP
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Call For Papers: Emotion in Composition

Posted by – July 11, 2015

The editors of Composition Forum are pleased to announce a call for papers for an upcoming special issue on Emotion in Composition. Please send proposals of 300 to 500 words by September 5, 2015 to Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu). See below for a complete timeline.

Special Issue CFP: Emotion in Composition
Guest editor: Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu)

By 2016, it will have been nearly twenty years since the publication of Lynn Worsham’s “Going Postal,” which traced student anger to its institutional sources, and almost a decade since Laura Micciche’s Doing Emotion, which urged emotional performance as a cognitive endeavor. It is the ambition of this special issue to reorient our field’s conversation regarding emotions once again, finding pathways through two decades’ worth of emotional investigation, charting new directions, and coming to grips with the action of emotions today—whether on campus, in local communities, or online; in program administration or in the teaching and learning of writing.

In the last twenty years the field of Composition has examined how emotion influences writers’ cognition and revision, constitutes classrooms as communities, and saturates program administration. We have asserted the centrality of emotion to critical thinking and critical literacy, to student interest and retention, and to the construction of student writers, WPAs, and instructors as gendered, raced, and classed subjects. We have valued the emotional labor of these same subjects, the work that gets done through emotional performance. And we have interrogated empathy and compassion in diverse classrooms and communities and in evolving publics.

Yet as the last decade’s blossoming of scholarship regarding affect has matured, what signs are there of a second spring? It might be argued that inquiry into emotion has spent itself and can provide no further insight, that we have hit a methodological wall in our reading of classroom interactions as symptomatic of cultural trends and in our investigation of moments of explosion. We have plumbed what positive emotions can do for student writers in opening to the world and established a framework around that stance. We have detailed and formed action plans through which to handle uncomfortable discussions of white privilege and able-­‐ism, of racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia.

Yet work remains to be done in each of the above areas. We’ve yet to account for the ebbs and flows of interest and disinterest, annoyance and curiosity, that carry the daily teaching and learning language. We’ve insufficiently explored what frustration, mania and depression contribute to writing lives. We might even more fully attend to love’s labor to produce an equitable world.

These topics, coupled with those below, by no means exhaust what a fuller grappling with emotion contributes to the teaching and learning of writing. This issue calls upon researchers, teachers, and administrators to sift through the last twenty years of emotional inquiry in imagining what we’ll need to know and do in the next twenty—complicating, reframing, and extending previous engagements with emotion. It also solicits those opening up entirely new avenues of inquiry through theories previously unexplored in composition, topics unaddressed, and methodologies yet to be applied.

Prospective authors might propose to discuss (but should not feel limited to):

  • Classroom implications of terminological distinctions (e.g. emotion/pathos/passion/feeling/affect, empathy/sympathy/compassion)
  • Boredom and engagement in FYC
  • Theories of affect in conversation with composition
  • Motivation and writing
  • Grit and retention
  • Emotional communication in tutorials and/or conferences
  • Use and abuse of “emotional literacy” and “emotional intelligence”
  • Institutional emotions (e.g. WPA disappointment, TA or job market anxiety)
  • Emotional labor of students, WPAs and writing instructors
  • Habits of Mind in the Framework for Success
  • Pedagogy concerning pathos in public rhetoric (e.g. politics of resentment, hope)
  • Affect and metacognition
  • Instructors’ proper or ideal emotions
  • Performance and embodiment as reading and writing methods
  • Emotional construction of gender, sexual orientation, class, and racial identity
  • Feminist pedagogy
  • Emotion and second-­‐language writing
  • Applications or contestation of neuroscience in composition
  • Multimodal emotional communication (e.g. emoji)
  • Ethics and rhetorics of empathy, in classrooms or in classroom-­‐community contexts

The editor also seeks up to three Program Profiles, which address various aspects of writing programs, including first-­‐year composition, WAC/WID, student support programs, teacher training, the undergraduate major, professional writing, writing centers, or postgraduate writing. The emotional labor of writing program administration is of particular interest, as is emotional communication within an institution’s budgetary and historical constraints. However, the section will field a wide range of approaches to the action of emotion within writing programs.

For more information on submitting articles or Program Profiles, visit http://compositionforum.com/submissions.php.

Timeline
July 5, 2015 – CFP released
September 5, 2015 – Deadline for proposals (300-­‐500 words)
September 15, 2015 – Notification of acceptances
January 15, 2016 – Deadline for completed MSS
March 15, 2016 – Review complete, revisions requested
May 30, 2016 – Final versions of MSS due
June-­‐July 2016 – Editing, manuscript preparation, etc.
August 2016 – Special issue released

Please contact Lance Langdon (llangdon@uci.edu) with inquiries.

  • Category: CFP
  • Comments Closed

Announcing The Research Exchange Index (REx)

Posted by – October 31, 2012

The following announcement is posted on behalf of Joan MullinJenn Fishman, and Mike Palmquist, the editors of The Research Exchange Index:

The Research Exchange Index, or REx, is designed to collect information about local, national, and international writing research conducted in unpublished and published studies. REx is also designed to solve a longstanding problem in writing studies: access to a wealth of information difficult to research across publications and difficult to find because it remains in institutional reports, programs, classrooms, or departments.

As a database about the processes of a research study, entries are different than articles about the studies that might be published in journals or books; therefore, entering data in REx not only doesn’t infringe on any copyright, but, once made public, actually serves to promote work by authors/editors.

Your contribution will become part of a peer-reviewed digital publication. After the collection deadline (May 1st, 2013), REx editors will review all entries for clarity and completeness of information, contacting researchers for further information as needed. Once the review process is complete, the edited entries will be included in the searchable REx database. REx editors will introduce the database with a scholarly essay that contextualizes contemporary writing research, offers an overview of database contents, and points to current and emerging research trends indicated by your studies.

From the first edition onward, REx will provide a historical snapshot of writing research, and it will offer a resource for planning future studies. For example, REx might be used to:

  • generate aggregatable data about one or more types of contemporary writing
  • research;
  • demonstrate gaps in our knowledge of contemporary writing;
  • provide models for research studies at new sites;
  • indicate areas of future study;
  • locate archives for historical studies of twenty-first-century writing; and
  • discover potential collaborators or sites for collaborative studies.

With individual teacher-scholars’ participation, REx will provide a rich and comprehensive profile of what research in “writing studies” is and is becoming. Start your entry by going to http://researchexchange.colostate.edu/index.cfm

CFP: Undergraduate Writing Majors: Fourteen Program Profiles

Posted by – March 5, 2011

Composition Forum readers who appreciated Lori Ostergaard and Greg A. Giberson’s “Unifying Program Goals: Developing and Implementing a Writing and Rhetoric Major at Oakland University” will be pleased to learn they are editing a collection which continues their research.

Call for Proposals: Undergraduate Writing Majors: Fourteen Program Profiles

Editors: Greg Giberson, Ph.D., Oakland University
Jim Nugent, Ph.D., Oakland University
Lori Ostergaard, Ph.D., Oakland University

During the 2010 CCCC convention, fifteen contributors to What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors (Utah State University Press, 2010) participated in a roundtable discussion about the growing interest in the writing major. At least sixty people attended the standing-room only session and almost every question posed to the panel was practical in nature, representing some variation of the question “How do we do this?” The proposed collection is conceived as a follow up to What We are Becoming and attempts to answer this very question.

The proposed collection will provide a snapshot of the major through fourteen profiles from various types of institutions (liberal arts, MA, doctoral, etc.), different programs (having varied departmental configurations, sizes, and disciplinary homes), and curricular orientations (such as writing studies, professional/technical writing, new media, creative writing, etc.). The program profiles will:

  • overview the history of the program, institution, department, etc.; describe the program and the rationale for its structure;
  • provide a narrative explaining the local contingencies that helped/hindered the program’s implementation;
  • provide insight into the deliberations, arguments, and comprises that were made in developing the program;
  • include a “Connections” section explaining where the program fits in the university and how it relates to other programs such as first-year composition, WAC, writing centers, etc.;
  • include a “Reflection” section explaining what the author(s) learned about developing, implementing, running, and revising such a program;
  • include a “Looking Forward” section discussing the future of the program; and
  • offer brief supplementary materials as necessary (such as checklists, course descriptions, etc.).

While not an exhaustive list, each chapter should address these aspects of the program thoroughly. While all institutions have their own histories, cultures, and contexts, we believe the knowledge and experiences gathered in this collection will be an indispensable resource for those who find themselves asking “How do we do this?”–whether now or in the years of growth ahead.

The editors seek 500-word proposals for chapters of 5,000 to 7,000 words in length. The deadline for proposals is May 10, 2011. Please email questions and proposals in Microsoft Word or RTF format to: giberso2@oakland.edu.

Consider Submitting a Program Profile

Posted by – April 28, 2009

Those of us who direct writing programs recognize how difficult it can be to balance administrative and scholarly work. While we produce a number of in-house publications or internal program documents, we don’t have as many opportunities to frame and present these to our colleagues in the field. The Program Profiles section of Composition Forum provides an opportunity for those of us who engage in various kinds of program administration and curriculum development work to share that work with others in our field at the same time as it provides an opportunity to have that work recognized as scholarship.

As co-editors of the Program Profiles section of the journal, we invite you to submit profiles of your FYC, WAC, undergraduate, or graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition. Profiles are generally 2,000 to 4,000 words and should include a general description of the program, the theory informing the program, a structural description of the program, institutional constraints, and a section that explains what you’ve learned from your directorship of the program or what you might do differently based on your experience.

To send queries or manuscripts, please contact our Program Profile Editors, Mary Jo Reiff and Anis Bawarshi.