Main Claims

Schroeder begins his chapter with a lit review that draws the connections between new literacy studies, ethnography, and composition studies necessary to his project. Using his experience as an ethnographer in a graduate level course on cultural linguistics, Schroeder enacts a theory of new ethnography and literacy models, both of which feature the central characteristic of being dynamic. Whereas old ethnography required rigor, cold hard facts and distant, objective observation, new ethnography provides "access to culture," and pomoethno (my wordplay, not his) represents "the formation of a critical cultural politics centered on the role of the body in meaning-making, the fluidity and permeability of boundaries, and the need for self-consciousness about textual productions" (66). "The question of communities is central to the study of literacies," but the community he speaks of is one rooted in the material and cross-cultural, rather than an imagined space of shared investment and returns (61). Schroeder concentrates on new literacies as "sites of competing discourses and cultures, and literacy acts are efforts to navigate among these within specific social, material, and political contexts" (66), and the contexts offer constraints and possibilities for the range of choices a subject is able to negotiate within. Schroeder's chapter embodies his theory, as he "found [him]self trying to negotiate among discourses and cultures" (66), as teacher and ethnographer whose very presence is deeply affected by his position as white, middle class, male. He begins the very important and often overlooked step in which the researcher recognizes him or herself as inherently part of the subject of study. To drop the curtain and reveal the wizard takes little away from his gifts, but rather builds trust and a space for understanding for the audience.

Assumptions about Method/ologies
Schroeder does not give in to the traditional linear structure of the academic argument, which is pretty appropriate in this case. Rather, his structure reflects the recursiveness that he describes of his multiple positionalities as classroom ethnographer. Additionally, his parenthetical style citation (dropping a list of names connected to the development of an idea or concept), his personal and theoretical stance, and the inclusion of emails and evaluations as primary texts demonstrate Schroeder's commitment to the productive discomfort inherent in the composing of a postmodern text. As he puts it:

In drafting early versions of this text, I experimented with a range of discursive practices, from academic exposition to mosaic and academic argument to scrapping, and yet in trying to keep within the constraints of this collection, I was confined in the ways that I could connect and elaborate on these pieces, which I eliminated in the final version. These negotiations are significant contribtions, as the epigraphs to this text suggest, cooperatively evolved texts that are, at the same time, emeshed within the cultural practices of the academy. (67)

Key Words
Intersubjectivity, postmodern ethnography, new literacy studies, current vs. dynamic literacy models

Key Texts
Dwight Conquergood, Ellen Barton, Cope and Kalantzis, Ralph Cintron

Questions/Challenges

I should likely come up with more, but for now, my major challenge has to do with the negotiating process. In each of the author's sample texts from his course, either Schroeder himself, or the very traditional literacies his positionality represents tend to be the point of orientation that the students are negotiating toward. I believe that more work needs to be done in this area about just who is doing the negotiating, such as in Bizzell's "Rationality as Rhetorical Sovereignty at the Barcelona Disputation."

In this piece from What Writing Does and How It Does It Barton introduces the audience to linguistics that focuses on the social in general and to rich feature discourse analysis in particular. As she explains it, discourse analysis looks at "how specific features of language contribute to the interpretation of texts in their various contexts" (57). Rich feature analysis take a specific feature, chosen for its "interestingness" or likelyhood of proving significant to understanding the structure and function of that feature in a particular context, and codes a representative sample of texts in order to analyze and draw conclusions from the data. Discourse analysis tends to be qualitative with quantitative "verification" (usually through coding).

Though Barton does tip her hat to the complicated nature of academic discourse (65), still she seems to privilege the "epistemic stance" of those she identifies as experienced writers (which in the case of her study refers to experienced academics writing for a general academic audience). While she criticizes the work of her students as overly general, which motivates her 1993 study, she does not comment on the stance of experienced writers, whose stance toward the making of knowledge she identifies as "oppositional, the product of contrast and competition" (74). My belief [look, an evidential!] that she (possibly unknowingly) privileges this perspective is furthered when she fails to recognize a complication in her frustration with the work or writers who place the privy of knowledge in "general society" (74). Meanwhile, she terms experienced writers as part of an "academic community" without commenting on how the notion of community founded on opposition and conflict is a sort of complex situation. In many ways I realize this quarrel is not quite fair; for one thing, I'm charging Barton with not paying attention to something that is one of my declared projects, not hers. Second, she claims that her study is a way of helping educators understand the foundational difference between positions of what she names experienced and inexperienced writers, and I think this is clearly an important project for composition as well as any field that struggles with student writing (likely all of them).

Though she may do so in the extended articles on the topic, I also wish she's have thought about, or at least mentioned the difficulty in selecting pieces from experienced writers who had time and exigency to write their works, but choosing as representative of inexperienced writers whatever they produced during proficiency exams which were most likely timed and in response to often unconvincing prompts. Also, in critique of what I called "social science-y," Barton uses terms like the context of "academic discourse," and "analyze," and "representative" that are portrayed as valueless, but which I think carry much ideological and constructed weight.

But again, the tone of the book is very textbook-y, and textbooks being meant to introduce and inform (if not indoctrinate) I can see how Barton may not have felt this chapter as being the right space for posing many of these questions. And, the chapter does do a great job of introducing discourse analysis as a genre and its many iterations. She describes structure and function (terms I was not familiar with in this context prior to reading) in manageable and accessible ways and the examples are quite illustrative (see 62-3).

I find among the most useful citations to the chapter's intent that of Thomas Huckin (1992) whose procedure for discourse analysis she reproduces on pages 65-66:
1. selecting an initial corpus
2. identifying salient patterns
3. determinging "interestingness"
4. selecting a study corpus
5. verifying the pattern
6. developing a functional-rhetorical analysis

I also found some interesting citations relative to my own project on pages 65 and 67.

Hope this has been somewhat helpful...

Researcher Profile



I was Rosa Parks and the Statue of Liberty. Our elementary school plays were unconventional (unless as a future mother to elementary school students I learn otherwise). I believe, though, that the enacting of such prominent figures of justice and deep democratic concern for all peoples was not lost on me even as a child. This same concern propelled me through an undergraduate degree in literary studies in which I analyzed the plight of characters subject to oppressive social circumstances. And in my dual studies in philosophy I looked for theories that helped explicate the larger systems and positionalities of subjects within them that nurtured and developed such circumstances. It was not until my first semester in a master’s program in English with a concentration in literature that I met Victor Villanueva and Bob Eddy who helped me initially see that all I was doing in Lit was rhetorical analysis of racism and sexism. Combined with problems and possibilities I saw as a FYC TA, I began to understand the Rhetoric and Composition was the place for me.

This conversion narrative, as they’ve been termed in many instances of Rhet Comp scholarship, is not at all uncommon, but it is indeed what brought me to seek a doctorate at SU’s Composition and Cultural Rhetoric Program. Still, my time at Washington State University with Victor and Bob, as well as Kristen Arola, Patty Ericsson, and Barbara Monroe did much to cultivate what I am beginning to formulate as my scholarly project. It seemed to happen through a series of accidents, really—if I hadn’t taken Barbara’s “Rhetoric of the Contact Zone” class my second semester, if patty’s zeal for participation in our professional community at every level hadn’t been so contagious, if Victor hadn’t provided me with a language for describing the serious economic disparity I’ve witnessed first hand, and if Bob hadn’t exposed us to so many works in composition that sought capture through practical pedagogies a way to deal with social injustice and attempt to reform the university as an institution from within, I don’t know where I would be now. (Though I’m fairly certain a lack of passion and particular skills would have barred me from any kind of successful career in Literature.)

In our Theories and Methodologies of Teaching English 101 course, Bob consistently begged us to consider the racial histories and politics that inform the writing classroom. We read Rochelle rock’s Sista Talk and Adam Banks’ Race, Rhetoric, Technology: Searching for Higher Ground. We thought about the material conditions of our students (mostly white, middle class) in comparison to the situation of writing classrooms in other parts of our country. And we asked “How? How can we use the space of the classroom to help our privileged students consider the cost of their own privilege on others whose perspectives are not readily available to us?” This question and the work of Paulo Freire, whose liberatory pedagogy left me feeling righteous and excited for when I’d teach for the first time in the Spring of 2007. But when I got to that classroom and found my students so resistant and unwilling or unable to challenge their own assumptions and positionalities, I became angry. Once, I screamed at one poor student “That’s the kind of racist comment that will get you kicked out of my classroom!” Another time during a conversation about Du Bois, I called my students out, exasperated: “I get the feeling that most of you think that people are, at any given time, where they are because they chose to be.” They nodded in incautious agreement. “Why would my mother choose to be a crack whore?” I practically screamed. One of my scholarly projects was born. It has since been fascinating to me how we position ourselves as teachers in the classroom, and how we can invite students of the dominant social categories into the conversation about oppression and social injustice in meaningful ways that maintains the dignity of everyone involved while not yielding to a bourgeois practice of niceness. I see conflict as healthy in a classroom and something we need to learn to artfully cultivate and navigate. I have also since learned that we need to be suspect when classrooms seem to be going too well. These events have led to one of my upcoming exam areas in Critical Pedagogy and these questions I’ve posed will doubtless be a source of lifetime contemplation, scholarship and growth.

In Barbara’s seminar we read Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which spoke well to my difficulties described above. We also read Scott Lyon’s “Rhetorical Sovereignty: What Do American Indians Want from Writing?” and Bizzell’s “Rationality as Rhetorical Sovereignty at the Barcelona Disputation, 1263.” In addition to having read Bootstraps and Canagarajah’s “The Place of World Englishes” for Bob’s class, these works taken together helped me to conceive of a fundamental problem at the center of my new work—whom did the content of my teaching actually serve? Whose writing was I teaching, professing to be correct? Out of this class was born my fascination with the politics of discourse. I have yet to really flesh out the scope of this project, but I have some of my preliminary projects and interests down. For Iswari Pandey’s class on contemporary rhetorical theory I wrote an analysis of what we mean when we use some of the most basic terms of this field: English, Basic Writing, and Academic Language. What I found is that these terms, as evidenced in Parks’ analysis in of the STROL debates in Class Politics, actually convey much more about power than they do about language. They function to create ominous and unstable communities of membership, and more often, exclusion. I see it as an essential part of the commitment to justice in rhetoric and composition work to remain true to our acknowledgement of the epistemic and ontological centrality of language and cultivate the best practices possible in our classrooms given the diverse literacies and languages of our students. This is another problem I see as inherent in the work I do as a teacher and scholar.

The third primary area of my research, and incidentally what will be my major exam area, is that of technology and literacy. In Bob’s class one of my esteemed peers suggested in conversation one day that idea of using MySpace in the classroom. Thinking back now it seems like such a simple moment that could have just as easily passed with my taking no notice, but it didn’t. I was an avid MySpacer myself and sought any opportunity to connect with my students on a personal level; so I tried it. This became the substance of my first two conference presentations, one at the Eastern Oregon Rhetoric Conference and the other at the C’s in 2008. The project also served as my portfolio paper for my Master’s degree and my writing sample for Syracuse University. Combining aspects of my other two research areas, in my students’ work (mostly reading response) on MySpace I saw alternative forms of discourse and prominent themes of racism and sexism that went unspoken in the primary work of the classroom. I saw a sense of abandon that made me question how students conceived of audience differently in online social spaces. I saw a building community that was absent from the community. In essence I saw possibilities, challenges, and a severely under-researched space of literacy.

Continuing my interest here was a class I taught for Upward Bound at the University of Idaho. The deft with which my first generation college student, or even first generation American in some cases, students of color from low-income families picked up the skills of writing and creating in digital spaces as we created a magazine and website with the Adobe Creative Suite seemed to complicate previous scholarship I’d read in which issues of access and ideological design in technology in effect shut down the conversation about the potential of technology to serve as a means to social justice. In our magazine these high school students explored questions of racism in material distribution, domestic violence, homelessness, the energy crisis, and even MySpace. They represented things that mattered to them in video, graphic design, podcasts, and traditional writing. I saw in their work an enthusiasm, and even hunger, for the chance at expression outside of the realm school typically insists is “fit” or “right.” This led to my second appearance at CCCC and as I’ve already expressed, my major area of scholarly inquiry. Among other things I’d like to investigate how we can reconcile problems in technology with its possibilities, how to work with teachers who represent the more Luddite among us as they begin to incorporate technology into their classrooms, how to work with those who still refuse, and how various technologies facilitate or silence the very diverse and politicized literacies of an increasingly diverse body of students. As I continue reading and growing here in the CCR program, these questions are also expanding to ask questions about service learning and community literacy, and I seek a dissertation and career that will enact these questions and values—but lets get through coursework first, yes?

Although I describe specific incidents as happy accidents that occasioned to fashion me into the scholar I see myself becoming, I must admit that a lot of these projects were a long time coming out of my own biography. My already alluded to mother’s (and father’s actually) addiction, my budding literacy, my need to rely on school and other communities during my formative years and my witness of things unsavory and unjust and just plain painful as a kid helped plant these seeds within me. Role models like a woman who stood up against a machine of racial political when she was already tired enough, migration stories that painting this nation, my home, as a place for gathering together and assembling of new and brighter families and opportunities were narratives I needed just to survive. I had no way of knowing then just how important these stories would be or how far they could take me.

If every scholar has one central project or questions that they spend their career thinking about, I want mine to be one that falls on the left side of the rhetorical spectrum I’ve identified. I want to know all the ways we can expand the means of and meaning of knowledge and authority such that we can expand the material realities of who has access to and can produce it. I want to work in a field that values many contributions from many voices with many methodologies. I want to see the problems and multiplicity and live in the ruins of it all. I recently came across one of the most beautiful quotes I’ve ever read. It was Michael Eric Dyson who wrote: “Social Justice is what love sounds like when it speaks in public.” Composition and Rhetorical Studies for me is like hearing the language of love in the most unlikely of places, and maybe even learning and teaching how it’s spoken.