Lynée Lewis Gaillet

Understanding Academic Genres

In “Understanding Academic Genres,” we list and define typical formats associated with academic publishing (abstracts, conference presentations, book reviews, bibliographical essays, journal articles, book chapters, monograph proposals, book-length studies, edited collections, conference proceedings, etc.), providing guidelines for producing these texts. We also discuss other forms of intellectual inquiry and academic publishing (podcasts, grant writing, bibliographical entries, writing for non-profits, editing, blogging, annotated bibs, etc.) that provide other ways to begin producing and supporting research.

The Role of the Researcher

In “The Role of the Researcher,” we provide encouragement for carefully considering and defining relationships among material, audience, and scholarly venues. We hope that this discussion will prompt readers to find new avenues for capturing and documenting their work, and perhaps add a new dimension to ongoing research interests. We discuss various research methodologies, IRB guidelines, primary research methods and methodologies, research with human subjects, the scholarship of teaching, and research with students.

The Rhetoric of Submission

In “The Rhetoric of Submission,” we ask readers to consider how they might begin making their work public, and we point to heuristics and prompts for thinking about ways to merge research interests with publication venues. Here we offer suggestions for responding to Calls for Papers, contacting editors before submitting work, and establishing networks. We also define and outline steps for placing scholarship and offer guidelines for understanding the relationship among writer, reader, editor, and publication venue; reconsidering audience; negotiating submission guidelines; and determining realistic timelines. We also include a discussion about what happens after work is accepted for publication

Introduction: Negotiating the Terrain

In “Introduction: Negotiating the Terrain” we explain the rationale for this project, stipulate our intended audience, and outline the scope of this work. In this chapter, we introduce the external narratives appearing throughout the text, including current conversations on the realities of contingent faculty work in higher education, we define our terms, and we explore possibilities for expanding existing notions of scholarly inquiry. In addition to offering an overview of the text, we suggest strategies for using this volume as part of developing a scholarly research agenda and supporting professional development.

Digital Publishing and Intellectual Property

In “Digital Publishing and Intellectual Property,” we explore the possibilities and limitations of publishing online—as well as publishing with digital presses. We include a discussion of promotion and tenure issues often associated with electronic dissemination of scholarship, and provide readers with strategies for making digital work visible. This chapter also discusses shifting copyright laws in publishing and the process of developing courses for distance learning, particularly the challenges facing contingent faculty who may not be compensated for scholarly work. Finally, we offer readers strategies for aligning digital scholarship with institutional expectations, mission statements, and with founding principles of the profession.

Establishing a Community of Scholars

In “Creating Communities of Scholars,” we draw from recent scholarship on mentoring and professional development—along with our own experiences—to suggest ways both mentors and mentees can create spaces for professional development and opportunities and sustainable models of scholarship that are both ethical and highlight reflective pedagogical practice. We focus on crafting mutually beneficial relationships among contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, and directors of large-scale classes that contingent faculty members often teach. Here, we expand our audience to include these three groups because we see these relationships as opportunities for reciprocal mentoring, whereby various department members work together to improve instruction, morale, and working conditions.

Balancing Professional Work: Teaching, Research, and Service

In “Balancing Professional Work: Teaching, Research, and Service,” we argue that the happiest, most successful academics are those who blend professional tasks. Although the responsibilities of contingent positions are often time-consuming and poorly compensated, seeking ways to merge personal research interests with traditional academic responsibilities can alleviate burnout and help teacher-scholars envision ways to fully capture and document the work they may already be doing. In this chapter, we offer profiles and models for integrating teaching, research, and service and suggest ways to fully capture and document the work we do. By viewing interests through the lens of institutional mission statements and goals, teacher-scholars find opportunities for engaging in personally satisfying work that also meet institutional initiatives and mandates.

Kelly Ritter. To Know Her Own History: Writing at the Woman's College, 1943–1963

In addition to these marvelous set-pieces between the chapters, Elbow also offers separate, gray-boxed digressions within chapters where he traces the implications of some particular turn of thought at a length and with an elegance that would not be possible in footnotes. The effect of both these gray-boxed digressions and “The Literacy Stories” is a rich, layered reading experience, one with considerable options: You can skip the gray-boxed passages or not, read some and skip others, and do the same with “The Literacy Stories.” In short, what Elbow presents here is an intellectual feast. But, again, the explicit politics of all of this is what, finally, is most exciting. In the last section of the book, Elbow explores the way the culture of proper literacy tries to exclude speech (this, in fact, is the title of chapter seventeen) and, in turn, those for whom speech is a dominant resource in social and political lives. He then closes his book with a chapter that forecasts a new culture of vernacular literacy that will reflect what will be, in essence, a more just society. There will always be those predisposed to attack Elbow, and this fact is one of the signals of the sheer stature he has achieved over the span of nearly a halfcentury. But how many of those detractors could have predicted that on the eve of the fortieth anniversary of his first book’s publication, he would release an entirely new volume of over four hundred pages that is at once more philosophically rigorous, more historically nuanced, and more socially engaged than any of his preceding works—and that still delivers the sort of deeply refreshing, commonsensical, practical wisdom about the writing process that has become synonymous with his name?

Making Use of the Nineteenth Century: The Writings of Robert Connors and Recent Histories of Rhetoric and Composition

Since, more than most other college-level courses, the teaching of writing is tied in with larger cultural goals, dreams, and fears, our history, to be useful, must show us how this connection has developed and worked in the past. How, in other words, has the culture created rhetoric, and how has rhetoric then recreated the culture? Composition history cannot exist in a narrow valley of the ‘history of ideas,’ because all of our disciplinary ideas have been based in people’s struggle for a better life. Purely philosophical history is mandarin history. Meaningful historical writing must teach us what people in the past have wanted from literacy so that we may come to understand what we want.