Bruce Horner

English Only and U.S. College Composition.

In this article, we identify in the formation of U.S. college composition courses a tacit policy of English monolingualism based on a chain of reifications of languages and social identity. We show this policy continuing in assumptions underlying arguments for and against English Only legislation and basic writers. And we call for an internationalist perspective on written English in relation to other languages and the dynamics of globalization.

The problematic of experience : redefining critical work in ethnography and pedagogy.

the populations they work with and the changes that may arise from that work. Both thus face the challenge of negotiating differences and power. The course of these negotiations, we argue, depends on what experience is taken to mean and how it can be used. Signs of this convergence between ethnography and composition pedagogy appear in both the shared ideals and the shared dilemmas reported in recent accounts and critiques of such projects. We have in mind those projects which attend to the politics of their research and teaching methods in pursuit of their commitment to socially emancipatory ends. Many ethnographers and teachers might see themselves as working for socially emancipatory ends (if defining these in different ways), and presumably all would be concerned with methodology. For us, however, critical ethnography and pedagogy approach methodology not strictly in terms of its efficiency in producing or transmitting knowledge to inform subsequent (social) practice but in terms of its effects as social practice. Critical ethnog

Students, authorship, and the work of composition.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. Original Publication Information This article was originally published in College English, volume 59, number 5, in 1997.

Traditions and Professionalization: Reconceiving Work in Composition.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. Original Publication Information This article was originally published in College Composition and Communication, volume 51, number 3, in 2000.

Ideologies of literacy, "academic literacies," and composition studies.

In my contribution to this symposium, I take up the call of this journal in its mission statement for “new interactions between Literacy and Composition Studies.” From the framework of competing ideologies of literacy, I explore points of intersection as well as divergence between strands of what’s known as “composition studies” and what has come to be identified as the “academic literacies” approach to academic literacy. My focus on “academic literacies” rather than the broader area of literacy studies signals at least three of my biases: first, I wish to counter the tendency to allow the cultural norm for academic literacy to go unchallenged, a tendency that a focus on those literacy practices deemed nonacademic risks maintaining; second, and relatedly, insofar as work in composition studies remains tied by its location in the academy to programs charged with the study and teaching of academic writing, those of us identified with composition cannot allow cultural norms for academic literacy to go unchallenged; and third, some of the most promising work challenging such norms can be found in work taking an academic literacies approach.

Mobility and academic literacies : an epistolary conversation

A discussion on the impact of globalized mobility online and offline on frameworks for the study and practice of academic literacy.

The Rhetorics of English in Education

This Special Issue of Changing English is intended to raise questions about how ‘English’ is and might be defined, invoked, constructed, and of course learned and taught. Those questions arise in light of the increasing instability of English as a subject and, as well, proposals for resolving that instability, indicated by any number of publications (see for example Andrews 2010; Berlin 2003; Cope and Kalantzis 2000; Downing, Hurlbert and Mathieu 2002; Ellis, Fox and Street 2007; Leung and Street, forthcoming; Mailloux 2006; Seitz 1999; Shumway and Dionne 1992; Slevin 2001). The essays in this Special Issue addressing the ‘rhetorics of English in education’ provide a sampling of responses to that state of instability of/in English. In this introduction, we consider points of departure and provocations these essays provide to an understanding of such rhetorics in the ways they address and contest dominant notions of the origins and political effects of English as a language and its definition, place, and value in the curriculum as a ‘subject’ or field of academic practice. We proceed by identifying several of the key (rhetorical) tropes on English, for English, why English that circulate in these essays and the broader current debate in which they participate – including not least invocations of ‘rhetoric’ itself as an anchor to which subject English in education – in primary, secondary and tertiary settings, in a global and multilingual context – might achieve mooring. English, our contributors show, seems to search continually for such an anchor, with ‘rhetoric’ itself currently heralded as offering the kind of framework for English that, in the past, ‘media’, ‘general semantics’, ‘communication’ or ‘language arts’ were thought to have offered. In focusing on the rhetorical action of ‘English’, our attention to rhetoric therefore differs from increasingly more common invocations of rhetoric itself in contemporary discussions about English education. These invocations adopt a familiar narrative pattern and pursue the same fundamental argument: that (a highly partial version of Western ‘classical’) Rhetoric, with a capital, provides English with the theoretical framework, programmatic coherence, and justification it needs, and in fact represents its (unacknowledged) Edenic origin, to which it can and should return. In this narrative of English, literature often emerges as the antagonist (e.g. Willinsky 1990), seducing the subject from its proper role by the permissive Romantic, the ‘progressive’ or the liberal emphases on aesthetics and (sometimes) ethics (e.g. Reid 2004). Rhetoric thus appears to offer a way of returning to a theoretical Eden as a ‘new organising principle for English teaching’ (Green 2006, 11) that might offer some capitalising socio-political or ‘civic’ messages for teachers and students. From the slightly different perspective of a functional linguistics approach to critical literacy, rhetoric appears as a tragic figure in the grammarian mourning for the ‘loss of a robust tradition’, in contrast to a view of composition as its ‘pale shadow’ (Christie 1993, 76; cf. Crowley 2003). Rhetoric also figures in more future-oriented, even Changing English Vol. 18, No. 3, September 2011, 245–249

James Slevin and the identifying practices of composition.

This Article is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Scholarship by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisvilles Institutional Repository. For more information, please contact thinkir@louisville.edu. Original Publication Information This article was originally published in ADE Bulletin, number 143, in Fall 2007.