Selected Recent Projects and Publications
“Practicing (Antiracist and Anti-ableist) Multimodality: TA Training and Student Responses to Implementing a Multimodal Curriculum in First-Year Writing.” (with Jennifer Lanatti Shen) Professionalizing Multimodal Composition, Eds. Shyam Pandey and Santosh Khadka. University Press of Colorado, 2023. 61-77.
There are many reasons that faculty choose to assign multimodal projects in writing classes: they give students opportunities to use composing skills they already have; they echo the ways that students create and communicate outside of class; they reflect, as Christina Cedillo (2018) reminds us, an embodied approach to writing. For many, though, we suspect that this decision also boils down to this: these projects are more creative, more engaging, and just more fun for teachers and for student-composers. In this chapter, we outline the literature, particularly in antiracist and anti-ableist pedagogy, that informs our ways of thinking about multimodal writing pedagogy, review the process that led to Jennifer’s multimodal first-year writing course as a graduate teaching associate, and discuss the results of a brief survey of Jennifer’s students. We conclude by offering a few takeaways for teachers considering a similar critical, antiracist/anti-ableist, multimodal approach.
“Networked Intervention and the Emergence of #BostonHelp.” Hashtag Activism. Eds. Melissa Ames and Kristi McDuffie. University Press of Colorado, 2023. 21-37.
On April 15, 2013, the US was stunned when a pair of bombs detonated near the finish line of the Boston Marathon. Within seconds of the blasts, word of the incident began spreading across social media. Most early tweeters used #BostonMarathon, the official race hashtag, or simply #Boston, to share news, search for loved ones, and generally express their grief over the attack. As it became clear, however, that runners stranded in various parts of the city weren’t likely to be allowed back to their hotels and belongs, a new hashtag emerged: #BostonHelp. The earliest users of the tag – including @mollfrey, who appears to first have suggested it -- used it specifically to offer shelter for displaced runners, who likewise used the tag to find someone willing to help.
An analysis of the 1,177 #BostonHelp tweets sent in the three hours following the blasts offers insight into how Twitter users use the platform to perform material acts of service and how some such hashtags are born, policed, and promoted. The coded tweets fall into four main categories: emotional support, information and resources, material support, and boundary work. The network begins with an offer of material support (@fellinline’s initial offer of his guest room, tweeted at 4:18 pm). This first offer is followed by a bit of boundary work: users – exemplified by @mollfrey – reached out to others on Twitter who were offering food, shelter, transportation, etc. and suggested they use the tag. Users within the #BostonHelp network also tweeted to popular, Boston-based accounts encouraging them to let their followers know about the hashtag. The vast majority of the nearly 1,200 tweets sent in the three hours after the birth of the hashtag served just two purposes: “Material Support” (tweets including offers of tangible goods and spaces) and “Boundary Work” (tweets that reinforce the material purpose of the tag and/or encourage others to use the tag to mark these kinds of offers) account for 79.2% of the tweets.
The balance of tweets, weighted as it is toward boundary work and offers of material support, makes one thing particularly clear: acts that might be considered wholly (or at least largely) rhetorical are a vital part of the network that enabled material interventions. Boundary work, in particular, represents an important rhetorical intervention: if we examine the network created by the #BostonHelp hashtag over time, we see that the incidences of tweets meant to offer emotional support – a purpose not supported by the promotional and policing work of some members of the network – tapers off quickly as users begin to understand the purpose of the group as material and not emotional. Still, this seemingly non-material boundary work is vital to the efficacy of the offers for material support. That is, the rhetorical work of policing and promoting the hashtag allows the network to expand and reach additional displaced runners and material supporters.
Teachers, Activists, and Advocates in the History of Composition (under review)
Too many histories of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies ignore or elide the contributions of Black teachers, writers, scholars, activists, and advocates. They also too often ignore the disciplinary silences on matters of importance. As I’ll argue in the chapter on the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, for example, though it was held in the midst of arguably the most important decade of Civil Rights work in American history, the participants at Dartmouth entirely avoided questions of race. Race and racism are also largely absent from the National Council of Teachers of English’s (NCTE) curricular publications in the 1950s and 1960s, despite the monumental changes happening in education in response to the Civil Rights Movement and Brown v. Board of Education. The goal of this project, then, is to call attention to key figures, particularly activists, whose work helps expand our sense of the history of English education and rhetoric, composition, and writing studies during this period; my goal is also to call specific attention to how disciplinary silences acted to reinforce whiteness as a cornerstone of the development of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies as a discipline. The central question at the heart of this project is: if the fledgling discipline of rhetoric, composition, and writing studies was not talking about the intersections of race/racism and literacy education, who was? And how would engaging with those who were change the way we understand our own disciplinary histories? To do this work, I’ve looked at three kinds of archival or archival-adjacent materials: documents held in the official archives of key organizations, including the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), NCTE, and the Carnegie Corporation (who funded the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar), conference proceedings and published materials that purport to represent the official conversations happening within the related disciplines of English education and rhetoric, composition, and writing studies, and reports and documents from organizations outside or adjacent to formal academic institutions whose contents might expand our understanding of the historical period over which the discipline initially developed as a distinct discipline (especially the 1960s).
Following (and inspired by) Kynard, Ruiz, Smitherman, Royster, and others’ historiographical work, the chapters that follow examine (or, in some cases like the 1966 Dartmouth Seminar, reexamine) events or scholars/teachers/activists whose work helps expand existing histories of the discipline and whose work offers us a firmer foundation for a more equitable future for composition.
Chapter 2 takes us to the years before rhetoric, composition, and writing studies fully emerged as a discipline in its own right by looking at the state of literacy education at the midcentury mark. It discusses the rise of Project English and the influence of Cold War nationalism on the push for a standardized English literacy curriculum. Chapter 3 then discusses a fairly canonical moment in disciplinary history: the 1966 Anglo American Seminar at Dartmouth. For many, this marks an official beginning for Composition/Rhetoric and Writing Studies as a distinct subfield within English studies. Rather than position this as another in the line of Ivy-associated disciplinary moments, however, this chapter instead connects the 1966 Seminar to larger Anglophone conversations about the role of student-centered education in English education. It also, building on the discussion in chapter 2, connects the federally-funded Project English, the Cold War, and linguistic imperialism as important forces in the organizing of the ‘66 Seminar. And finally, the chapter considers the silences at Dartmouth: who was missing and how and why were questions of race/racism and English teaching ignored by the assembled scholars?
Chapter 4 reviews the history of legal, social, and educational racism in the US from emancipation through the mid-20th century, how organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) responded, and how education (particularly, especially in the 1930s and 1940s, higher education) fit into the struggle for civil rights and equal education following the Civil War. Chapter 5 connects the broader educational changes wrought by the Civil Rights Movement to organizational and disciplinary moments from 1968, namely that year’s CCCC Convention, which began in Minneapolis the same day Dr. Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis, and the publication of the December 1968 issue of College Composition and Communication, which featured multiple Black scholars for the first time in the journal’s history. Chapter 5 discusses the context in which the convention and the resulting issue of College Composition and Communication were produced and then reviews and engages with the articles from that issue, connecting them to our contemporary conversations about antiracist and equitable writing programs and writing instruction.
Chapter 6 focuses on the same period but a different geographical and institutional context: the development of Ethnic Studies as distinct disciplines in the Bay Area of California and the establishment of Freedom Schools in the South, particularly Mississippi. Chapter 6 discusses the 1968-69 Ethnic Studies strikes, the Mississippi Freedom schools’ curricula, and their relationship to composition. The birth of Ethnic Studies via sustained activism by students of color, particularly Black and AAPI students, at San Francisco State and UC Berkeley in 1968-69 represents a particularly important shift in higher education, one that is bound up with the teaching of writing. Chapter 7 then connects the activism of the Ethnic Studies strikes and the larger Black Power and Civil Rights movements (as well as the scholarship by Black scholars from the December 1968 CCC issue) to the creation of Students Right to their Own Language resolution in 1974 and reviews the resolution’s immediate and continuing impact on the field. Chapter 8 is a conclusion that ponders how we might create an antiracist future for writing studies. It also offers some practical advice for writing program administrators and faculty in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies.