We here at Composition Forum have exciting news!

Liane Robertson, Kara Taczak, and Kathleen Blake Yancey’s article “Notes Toward A Theory of Prior Knowledge and Its Role in College Composers’ Transfer of Knowledge and Practice” from Composition Forum vol. 26 has been accepted for inclusion in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals 2013.

The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals series, published by Parlor Press, “represents the result of a nationwide conversation—beginning with journal editors, but expanding to teachers, scholars and workers across the discipline of Rhetoric and Composition—to select essays that showcase the innovative and transformative work now being published in the field’s independent journals.”

We could not be more pleased for the authors and their excellent achievement!

Below is the abstract for their article, and you can read the entire text at http://compositionforum.com/issue/26/prior-knowledge-transfer.php:

In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we  articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract from or contribute to efficacy in student writing.

Congratulations to Liane, Kara, and Kathleen on their accomplishment!

The newest volume of Composition Forum (Vol. 29, mind Spring 2014) is now available!

This volume features:

• An interview with Cheryl Glenn
• A retrospective article from Sondra Perl 
• Seven articles exploring the role that writing plays in our world as an agent of change
• Three program profiles
• Three reviews

More details from this volume are discussed in our “From the Editors” column.

We hope you visit the journal, and we welcome all suggestions and comments about the volume.

The editors of Composition Forum are excited to announce a call for papers for a special upcoming issue on Rhetorical Genre Studies. The deadline for proposals is November 15, view 2013 (see below for a more complete timeline).

This issue will be guest edited by Dylan Dryer (dylan.dryer@maine.edu).

30 Years of “Genre as Social Action”: The Past and Possible Futures of Rhetorical Genre Studies

Guest editor: dylan.dryer@maine.edu

2014 will mark the 30th anniversary of Carolyn R. Miller’s germinal essay “Genre as Social Action.” Long the Quarterly Journal of Speech’s most-cited article, Google Scholar finds another 2000 citations from journals around the globe. It is no overstatement to say that Canadian and US scholars’ efforts to think through the socio-cultural, cognitive, historical, and material implications of this essay are collectively what is now known as North American—or New Rhetorical—Genre Studies (RGS).

The typical exigency of significant anniversaries is the need to take stock; Composition Forum’s “fitting response” is a Special Issue devoted to examining the past and possible futures of RGS-based research on genre. To that end, the Special Issue’s Interview with Carolyn Miller will look back on the scholarly and cultural origins of—and three decades of subsequent uptake of—“Genre as Social Action.”

And this Special Issue will look forward. To that end, the guest editor seeks proposals for Articles that advance our understanding of genres as intersubjective phenomena. For, as Miller puts it, genres are “not just a pattern of forms” for “achieving our own ends” but ways of understanding “what ends we may have” (1984: 156, 165, emphasis added).

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

• novel applications of RGS’s construct of genre as a site of dynamic socio-cultural and cognitive activity
• the influence of technological innovations on current understandings of generic boundaries, functions, or lifespan
• useful insights from other conceptualizations of genre (e.g., systemic-functional linguistics, English for Specific Purposes, socio-discursive interactionism, and/or the Brazilian “synthesis”)
• pedagogical uses and limitations of RGS constructs of genre (inside or outside the postsecondary environment)
• inquiries into “lay” or “everyday” understandings of genre knowledge, emergence, utility, change, and dissolution
• explorations of institutionalized genre conventions and the affective domain
• discussions of data from empirical inquiries using an RGS theoretical framework. Ethnography and critical discourse-analysis, as well as emergent methodologies (corpus analysis, eye-tracking, bibliometrics, etc.), are welcome.

The editor also seeks Program Profiles of three first-year composition, WID, or postgraduate writing programs. Of particular interest will be these programs’ strategies for reliably and validly assessing “genre knowledge” (however conceptualized).

Timeline:

October 1, 2013: CFP released

November 15, 2013: Deadline for proposals

November 18, 2013: Notification of acceptances

April 15, 2014: Deadline for completed MSS

June 30, 2014: Review complete, revisions requested

August 31, 2014: Final versions of MSS due

September-October 2014: Editing, manuscript preparation, etc.

November 2014: Special issue released

We here at Composition Forum have some exciting news to share!

Noah R. Roderick’s article “Analogize This! The Politics of Scale and the Problem of Substance in Complexity-Based Composition,” originally published in Composition Forum 25, has been selected for inclusion in The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals 2012, to be published by Parlor Press.

We could not be more pleased for Noah, and we hope you’ll join us in celebrating his accomplishment!

Below is the abstract for Noah’s article (and you can read the piece in its entirety at http://compositionforum.com/issue/25/scale-substance-complexity.php):

In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions—was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

The Best of the Independent Rhetoric & Composition Journals 2012 will likely be available in time for the 2014 Conference on College Composition and Communication, so make sure to keep an eye out for it soon.

Congratulations to Noah on his well-deserved achievement!

– The Composition Forum team

The newest volume of Composition Forum (Spring 2013) is now available!

Volume 27 features an interview with Louise Wetherbee Phelps, a Retrospective article from Elizabeth Wardle and Doug Downs, and seven articles focusing on pedagogical theory in composition. This volume also includes three program profiles, a review essay, and two reviews.

We are especially pleased to welcome two new editors to Composition Forum with this volume: Elizabeth Wardle joins us as Retrospectives Editor, and Kevin Brock is our new Website Editor.  If you’d like to communicate with any of the CF editorial team, contact us at http://compositionforum.com/editorial-board.php

More details about Volume 27 and future plans for Composition Forum can be found in our “From the Editors” column: http://compositionforum.com/issue/27/from-the-editors.php

We hope you will visit the journal, and we welcome your suggestions and comments about this volume.