Composition Theory Visual Map
Our Journey Begins...
Trip: San Antonio, TX
to Hebron, OH.
- These are the places Alexis and Megan grew up. We feel that they have significance in how we have viewed the readings and how we have imagined them visually.
As time changes so will our license plate as we navigate our way through the readings. Berlin is our vanity plate because his history informs how we view the changes taking place within the field.
Our Trip is Not Yet Over.
We Have Not Reached Our Destination.
We Still Have More to Read!
Villanueva
"Victor's Village"
He challenges the dominant discourse of language by stating that having individuals choose to conform to the Standard English, especially during a time of multiculturalism and global influences are at our fingertips, issues such as post colonialism and racism are becoming more prominent and are being thrust into forefront.
“So here’s what I want to lay out—a problem for which I don’t have a solution. When we demand a certain language, a certain dialect, and a certain rhetorical manner in using that dialect and language, we seem to be working counter to the cultural multiplicity we seek. And I think that means that we will have to rethink the whole thing. The demand for linguistic and rhetorical compliance still smacks of colonialism, practices which reproduce, in effect, the colonial histories of America’s people of color. What we need, I’d say, is a greater consciousness of the pervasiveness of the ethnocentricity from which we wish to break away. What I’ll do, then, at least to open up the conversations, is to begin to lay out the problem through something of a historical and sociopolitical view of colonialism and racism.” (992)
Webb-Sunderhaus
"Museum"
Provides leverage against the elitist perspective of Standard English as an identity within the Composition field.
Tennessee as
"Exclusion/Marginalization/Forced Assimilation"
Students' Right to Their Own Language
"For a few students, their pursuit of academic literacy vis-a-vis a college degree put them at odds, in ways big and small, with some of the most important people in their lives" (1609).
"Border Crossing"
She discusses literacy sponsorship and literacy inhibitors in the lives of students
“Since dialect is not separate from culture, but an intrinsic part of it, accepting a new dialect means accepting a new culture; rejecting one’s native dialect is to some extent a rejection of one’s culture” (7).
Tennessee/Kentucky Border
The Arkansas Tennessee Border
Kentucky as "Identity"
Arkansas or"Community"
Faigley
Richie & Boardman
Border Rhetorics Crossing
Soliday
Mauk
"Theater"
"Realtor Office"
Feminism's involvement in the conversation.
Argues that economic class is largely ignored when discussing marginalized students in the academy.
"Boating Dock"
He discusses the importance of location, in terms of geography but also the body itself and the impact location has on learning to write
“They allow for the possibility that teachers and students can resist domination and think critically, thus leaving open the possibility for a historically aware theory and pedagogy of composing” (653).
"It is not enough to explore the relationship between language and consciousness--or language and identity. We must examin the multiple and competing systems that constitute human identity and interaction" (377).
"In our emphasis upon culture as a mode of meaning making, we have adequately recognized that material conflicts are central to the experience of many working-class students" (773).
The energy of feminists will be vital to the disruption of restrictive theory and practice. This energy will be important for sustaining coalitions for change; it is our best hope for inclusion and proliferation of difference, multiplicity, and uncontainable excess.
He critically analyzes the three most prominent rhet/comp theories ( expressionist, cognitive and social) and how they are used to promote critical thinking and activism through the classroom.
Tennessee or "Exclusion/Marginalization/Forced Assimiliation"
Hull
Brodkey
"Locksmith"
Discusses how class and gender cause exclusionary practices by teachers.
"Hull's Hedge: Tennessee
Largest Human Maze"
“Often, however, these new understandings come mixed with deeply held, unarticulated assumptions about remediation and remedial students, deficient assumptions that have been part of educational thought for a long time. Our unexamined cultural biases about difference, our national habits of mind for sorting and labeling individuals who perform poorly, our legacy of racism and class bias—these are the frames of mind which make it possible, even un remarkable, to assume that talk that is occasionally non-synchronous with the talk in the classroom indicates some fundamental problem in thought, to assume “thinking continuity problems” from a difference in conversational style. In examining June’s ways of assessing cognition, then, we hope to set the foundation for ongoing self-examination, for we are all enmeshed in culture, and, even as we resist them, we are shaped by its forces” (799).
Texas: Invention, Discovery, and Process
"Dialogue, that is to say, is the essential to the making of meaning and thus to learning to write. The chief use of chaos is that it creates the need for that dialogue" (650).
"Winds of Change Hair Shop"
What holds academia and students back is not necessarily the inappropriate training or education but a resistance to acceptance of cultural forces that shape our learning experiences.
Shift from current-traditional
to writing as a process and style.
Hairston
“Those who cling to the old paradigm lose their influence in the field because the leaders in the profession simply ignore their work” (440)
Tennessee or
"Exclusion/Marginalization/Forced Assimilation"
Flowers & Hayes "Space Museum"
"Blasts from the Past Diner"
Britton
Writing is a tool for communicating what we say. He believed our verbal expressions were the first signs of thought; the writing is what came next.
"Theme Park"
Sommers
Point of reference; Argues that a “good” writer spends time on the text, is involved in a relationship with the text and the reader and also creates meaning
“ The students list repetition as one of the elements they most worry about. This cue signals to them that they need to eliminate the repetition either by substituting or deleting words or phrases. Repetition occurs, in large part, because student writing imitates—transcribes—speech: attention to repetitious words is a manner of cleaning speech. Without a sense of the developmental possibilities of revision (and writing in general) students seek, on the authority of many textbooks, simply to clean up their language and prepare to type. What is curious, however, is that students are aware of lexical repetition, but not conceptual repetition. They only notice the repetition if they can “hear” it; they do not diagnose lexical repetition as symptomatic of problems on a deeper level. By rewarding their sentences to avoid the lexical repetition, but blind themselves to problems on a textual level although they are using different words, they are sometimes merely restating the same idea with different words.” (327)
“What does one do when a ready-made answer can’t be found in external sources? The myth says, “look to your own experience.” But what happens when a writer on this internal voyage of discovery still can’t “find” something to say because his or her “ideas” as such are not actually formed? What is here to “discover” if only confused experience and conflicting perceptions are stored in a writer’s memory? The mythology of discovery doesn’t warn the writer that he or she must often build or create new concepts out of raw material of experience; nor does it tell the writer how to do it. And yet, this act of creating ideas, not finding them, is at the heart of significant writing.” (467-468)
“Perl and Egendorf comment on that effort as they observe it in their students: “ When closely observed, students appear to write by shuttling back and forth from their sense of what they wanted to say to the words on the back page and back to address what is available to them inwardly (1979, p. 125).” This is in essence the process they call “retrospective structuring,” and its near inevitably might be suggested by comparing writing with carving: the sculptor with chisel in hand must both cut and observe the effect of his cut before going on. But retrospective structuring needs to be accompanied by what the authors call “projective structureing,” shaping the material in such a way that the writer’s meaning carries over to the intended reader. It is in this aspect of writin that ‘discovery’, or shaping at the point of utterance, tends to break down: a mistake sense of a reader’s expectations may obstruct or weaken the ‘sense of what they wanted to say—“ (464)
Listening to the spoken word and hearing the repetition versus writing a text and seeing the repetition is important to how educators can limit this problem.
Borders: Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana
"Alma Mater Statue"
Bizzell
She fuses language, experience and knowledge.
Louisiana or
"Discourse"
Arkansas or "Community"
“Beyond minor matter of spelling, diction, and so on, we do not have to worry about how many students are going to find out about the features of written language because these are already innate…Planning processes, therefore, have to be elaborated because they are all the writer has to guide her toward a solution to the particular writing problem. What’s missing here is the connection to the social context afforded by recognition of the dialectical relationship between thought and language.” (486)
: The field of Composition and Rhetoric has been so concerned with traditional language that individuals create texts that are highly specialized with discourse language and the writer ultimately leaves out their unique voice. However this text reminds them of their responsibility to use their many authentic voices.
He argues that an experienced writer is able to identify all communities they belong to in order to draw from their cultures and languages. However they also need to be aware that not all academic spaces encourage all border rhetoric’s thus causing the writer to balance and adapt their voice depending on their discourse.
Bartholomae
"Athletic Arena"
Harris' Marketplace
“Contemporary rhetorical theory has been concerned with the “codes” that constitute discourse (or specialized forms of discourse(. These codes determine not only what might be said but what also might be said but also who might be speaking or reading Barthes (1974), for example, has argues that the moment of writing, where private goals and plans become subject to a public language, is the moment when the writer becomes subject to a language he can neither command nor control…Alongside a text we have always the presence of “off-stage voices,” the oversound of all that has been said…”(611-612).
“On one hand, the university is pictured as a site of many discourses, and successful writers are seen as those who are able to work both within and against them, who can find a place for themselves on the margins or borders of a number of discourses. On the other, the university is also seen as a cluster of separate communities, disciplines in which writers must locate themselves through taking on “the commonplaces, set phrases, rituals and gestures, habits of mind, tricks of persuasion, obligatory conclusions and necessary connections that determine what might be said’ ‘”(146)”. (750)
Blamed error was a product of social language rather than lack of traditional education.
He promotes collaborative learning through cultural experiences and differential languages in turn build knowledge.