At the forefront of the fast-evolving social justice turn in Technical Communication is a powerful group of scholars impacting how we think about the practice of workplace writing and its role in shaping social conditions. Three of these scholars–Rebecca Walton, Kristen Moore and Natasha Jones– collaborated on the influential TPC monograph: Technical Communication After The […]
Asou Inoue’s first and second responses to Paul A.J.Beehler’s article “Cracking the Code (Meshing and Switching): Standard English as a Required Ticket to Influence,” lay out a compassionately framed discussion of Beehler’s very problematic argument that Standardized English is necessary in schools for its unifying function in educational settings and in larger society. Beehler, like […]
These thoughts are taken from a talk I gave at the 2018 Watson Conference at the University of Louisville, a truly special academic conference that has been wonderfully intimate in size and feel whenever I have been involved, and is inspiringly imprinted by the translingualists and critical literacy scholars of the university’s famous Composition Department. […]
I keep veering into Walter Benjamin’s writing, though my current work is more grounded in student realities than in Benjamin’s corner vestibule wedged in among metaphysics, philology and history. This side-trip feels something like eating out of a (large–not that little one) container of Haagen Dazs Butter Pecan while everyone around me chats civilly over […]
Origins by the Chesapeake Bay I have a picture of my father. I guess it was probably taken around 1938, the year he graduated from high school in Calvert County Maryland. He grew up in North Beach, a sleepy Chesapeake Bay-side town that once was a mecca for entertainment and gambling sought out by comfortable […]
Three concepts have helped me think about a pedagogy for democratically engaged digital literacy. The first entails a disposition toward authorized, rule-bound discourse and comes from the field of computer science. As Peter Krapp writes in Noise Channels: Glitch and Error In Digital Culture, glitch is a deformance of a computing system (Krapp 75) that […]
My lesson on Instagram Essays for younger students is live on the new 826 Digital website. I created this lesson for 826, a national literacy program with branches all over. But I have gone on to do more work with college students and Instagram as a format for multimodal academic writing. Using Instagram as an […]
Creating space for freshman writers to make language their own–really, deeply their own, true to their overlapping discourses and cultural knowledges– is a challenge in academic spaces. Students don’t always trust the act of transgressing standard English language. And why should they? They still need to perform it in many places as they make their […]
The Pluriverse of Style 