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Congratulations
Andrew McQuaide, a double-major in Writing and Rhetoric and African-American Studies, was recently honored with a 2008 Diversity Award for Undergraduate Student Excellence (Academic/Service). He was noted for his "academic excellence and campus leadership on behalf of Kingian nonviolence."
Publication
We are pleased to announce the publication of "Thinking Vertically." Appearing in the "Interchanges" section of the most recent issue of CCC, this piece responds to Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle's "Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions." It represents a collaboratively-authored response by many members of the CWP, including Libby Miles, Michael Pennell, Kim Hensley Owens, Jeremiah Dyehouse, Helen O'Grady, Nedra Reynolds, Robert Schwegler, and Linda Shamoon. As the editor, Deborah Holdstein, notes, the piece shows that "good thinking can...be a many-authored thing" (367).
Spring 2008 Graduate Courses
WRT 645: Beyond First-Year Writing
Professor Libby Miles
Thursday, 4:00 – 6:45
Beyond the first-year writing course, there are vast and fascinating fields of study within Rhetoric & Composition – this seminar invites you to experience some of them. We are most readily identified as the folks who brought you first-year composition, but the intellectual discipline of Rhetoric & Composition has burgeoned in the past 40 years, particularly at Land Grant institutions like URI. On the other hand, there are still pockets of the country, particularly in small colleges, where the field has had little impact at all. This course grew from a study conducted in one such college: a setting in which there is no first-year writing per se, yet an environment utterly infused with writing nonetheless. In 2005-6, Professor Miles conducted naturalistic research of undergraduate students in a writing-saturated, maritime-focused, living-learning community. Her basic research question, “what happens to student writing in this educational environment?” yielded more questions than answers … questions that will be examined – and perhaps answered by you – during this seminar.
Themes explored will be:
- self-sponsored, extra-curricular, and underlife student writing
- genre theory, particularly appropriated and subversive genres
- “embodied rhetorics” and the physicality of writing practices
- the materiality of writing
- place studies in rhetoric and eco-composition
- research on skills transfer
- histories of the function of disciplines in the university
- economies of writing instruction
- institutional conditions and critique
- histories and theories of WAC and WID (writing across the curriculum and writing in the disciplines)
- histories and theories of functions for rhetorical education
This will be a course making connections: historical, interdisciplinary, geographic, extracurricular, environmental, physical. At the same time, it will be an opportunity to pursue connections not yet made, paths not yet explored.
Highly recommended pre-requisite: WRT 512
WRT 647: Seminar in Research Methods: Rhetoric and Composition Studies
Professor Mike Pennell
Wednesday, 4-6:45
This course serves as an introduction to reading and practicing research in the field of rhetoric and composition. By reviewing a variety of research methodologies, we will investigate the ways in which knowledge is created, reported, and validated in the field. The course positions research questions and design, as well as the theories that drive them, as fundamental to understanding a field of knowledge.
The course is intended for doctoral students in rhetoric and composition, considering a large-scale research project. Therefore, we will focus on issues pertinent to novice researchers: the development of research questions, the variety of research methodologies and methods available to researchers, institutional regulations on research, and the design of a research study.
We will not cover every possible research method; rather, we will focus on research methods appropriate to novice researchers and central to the field, such as case studies, archival research, true and quasi-experiments, and meta-analyses. By reading a variety of research, we will become more comfortable recognizing and analyzing types of scholarship, as well as designing research projects. Ultimately, students will use the course as a site to design a research proposal.
Welcome to New Faculty
We are pleased to welcome two new faculty to the College Writing Program.
Kim Hensley Owens (Assistant Professor of Writing & Rhetoric) earned her Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and will be teaching WRT 104 and WRT 490. WRT 490: Writing and Rhetoric is a new course emphasizing audience, composing processes, and rhetorical theories, including issues relevant to writing professionally.
Karen Carlo Ruhren (Lecturer) will be teaching WRT 104 and WRT 227.
New B.A. in Writing and Rhetoric
URI students can now major in writing and rhetoric! Beginning in Fall 06, students who are strong writers, who enjoy writing, and who are considering a career in writing can choose the new B.A. in Writing and Rhetoric in the College of Arts and Sciences. This major focuses on professional, academic, and technical writing and is the only writing major offered by a New England land-grant institution.
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