Sean D. Williams

Two Approaches to Using Client Projects in the College Classroom

Client projects are an opportunity for universities to create long-lasting, mutually beneficial relationships with businesses through an academic consultancy service. This article discusses the rationale and logistics of two models for conducting such projects. One model, used at Clemson University, is a formal academic consultancy service in which students are paid for their work with for-profit businesses. Another, used at the University of North Texas, also incorporates for-profit clients but operates in the more traditional classroom setting where student teams are not paid for their work. Whatever the approach, client projects facilitate communication between academia and business, enlist the services of professionals in a variety of fields to help shape the education of future graduates, offer opportunities for students to gain practical experience that surpasses any classroom simulation or case study, and keep instructors in touch with business trends and practices.

Part 1: Thinking Out of the Pro-Verbal Box.

Abstract As the World Wide Web and other visual media gain prominence in students’ lives, we, as teachers of composition, have to re-evaluate our strict adherence to the verbal medium. If our classrooms focus on a single mode of representation—the verbal—then the concurrent implication is that only one voice deserves to be heard. In such a classroom, students will not be able to recognize that verbal forms and visual forms—or better yet their combination—carry an equal degree of complexity, representative richness, and rhetorical power. Basing composition almost exclusively on verbal instruction counters the very nature of literacy education, because our current verbal-based education system produces illiterates in our highly visual and multimodal modern society. Drawing on composition scholarship published in three major composition journals, this article demonstrates composition’s verbal bias, argues that this bias is both politically and rhetorically suspect, and calls for a composition pedagogy that integrates verbal instruction with visual instruction.

Part 2: Toward an Integrated Composition Pedagogy in Hypertext

Abstract Because digital technology increases student access to a diversity of expressive media, we as composition instructors must model our engagement with the multiple forms of literacy that constitute students’ lives. We must reimagine composition, therefore, as a discipline that teaches a composite literacy that integrates verbal and visual media within hypertext. To help students develop the skills necessary to compose and to critique new media compositions, I argue that composition instruction should be based upon a design model mirroring composition’s process-based pedagogy, by asking students to plan, transform evaluate and revise media-rich, hypertextual documents. I also comment on a sample assignment that demonstrates how an integrated composition might be constructed using the design model and conclude by arguing that, in addition to helping students acquire skill with a new literacy, this pedagogy encourages students to recognize that multiple perspectives always attend any issue under discussion.

A Narrative Perspective on International Entrepreneurship: Comparing Stories From the United States, Spain, and China

Research problem: This study investigates entrepreneurship as a rhetorical practice and seeks to illustrate how narratives of individuals from different cultures create a discourse of entrepreneurship. We offer theoretical and methodological considerations for comparative international analyses in entrepreneurship research. Research questions: (1) How do the stories that are told by entrepreneurs from different cultures reveal their values? (2) What can those stories tell us about entrepreneurship in different cultures? Literature review: An emerging stream of authors proposes to study entrepreneurship from individual narratives, but studies on entrepreneurship rhetorics are scarce, seldom use an international approach, and rarely cover the cultural aspects. Methodology: We collected entrepreneurial narratives in the US, Spain, and China, and deployed a novel two-fold method to retain cultural nuances and validate translation accuracy. Narrative data were studied based upon the coding, constant comparison, and memo writing used in grounded theory. Results and conclusions: We identify three core metaphorical devices used by participants to structure their entrepreneurial journeys (action and learning, autonomy and money, and exceptionalism and networks), and we suggest that the use of these metaphorical pairs varies both within and across cultures. These findings offer preliminary evidence, for the first time in the literature, that building a rhetorical understanding of entrepreneurship requires that we consider two axes: the individual and the cultural.