Posts
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3/7: Ghostwriting and Agency
Deborah Brandt is a historian and scholar of writing. In her recent book The Rise of Writing, she studies the history of power as related to writing and how that history has changed over time. Brandt defines ghostwriting as a kind of professional writing where an author takes on “substantial parts part of a composing process for which someone else […] will be credited” (Brandt 31). Ghostwriting is controversial because it destabilizes a traditional idea of authorship; namely, we are often taught that the author who originates a text has some kind of power, at the very least in their association with a text they produced. Ghostwriting works in the…
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3/5: Intra-action between Human and Nonhuman Agents
Intra-Action in Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” We’ll return to our collaborative document from last time to reorient ourselves to Cooper’s text. Look closely at pages 129-130 in Cooper and try to define her term intra-action. Later in her chapter, Cooper closely reads then-candidate Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign speech delivered in Philadelphia to explain how agents intra-act to create agency. Obama’s exigence–or the need to which he is responding–involves controversial comments made by Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a now-retired pastor of a church that President Obama once attended. Cooper describes the collaborative process that Obama, his speechwriter Jonathan Favreau, and Obama’s aides participated in to compose the speech (143). We will…
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2/29: Agents/Agency of Collaboration
Defining Our Terms The words “agents” and “agency” are probably familiar language to all of you. We’ll start by tracking popular definitions of these terms and then move to defining their specialized understanding in the fields of writing studies, composition, and rhetoric. Access our collaborative document where we will define terms. We will expand our definitions by first looking at an excerpt of Nowacek’s Agents of Integration. Marilyn Cooper’s definitions of agents and agency in her book The Animal Who Writes are even more complex than Nowacek’s, in that Cooper puts these terms into a historical and disciplinary context. Cooper begins by offering a definition to create a starting point…
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2/13: Zoom Class
Access Our Class We will meet via Zoom for class from 9:15-10:30a. As always, attendance is required, as we will be doing collaborative work towards our Collaborative Learning History Project. Zoom invitation is below. Join Zoom Meetinghttps://us02web.zoom.us/j/86228187205?pwd=Mk1vMFRxdGg2clJNMzJSb1l1ckxLUT09 Meeting ID: 862 2818 7205Passcode: 612885 Group Work Based on our work last week, I’ve placed you into the following groups: If you are not in a group yet, I’ll meet with you during class to make a plan. In your groups, look more closely at the following collaboratively authored texts: Efthymiou & Zea’s “Doing More with Barely Enough,” McNamee & Miley’s “Writing Center as Homeplace,” and Lunsford & Ede’s “Writing Togther” (available…
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2/6: Refining One Voice to Engage with Other Voices
WordPress Work Your blog post about your collaboration within a community is due today. I want you to start strong on your WordPress blogs because you will be composing there often. We’ll take a good part of this class period to ensure that everyone knows how to title their site and post blogs, looking at some of our peers’ work as models. I encourage you all to check out Fatima’s, Jaqy’s, Katherine’s, Mitchie’s, Peter’s, and Simran’s sites linked in the Blog Roll on the right. As we look at a few of our peers’ examples together, keep Bruffee’s article “Collaboration and the ‘Conversation of Mankind'” in mind. For Bruffee (1984),…
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2/1: Kenneth Bruffee Introduces Collaborative Learning to College English Teachers
RHETORICAL SITUATION We’ll begin by orienting ourselves to Bruffee’s “Collaborative Learning and the ‘Conversation of Mankind'” by understanding the rhetorical situation of this piece. In other words, we will chart what we know about the author, audience, and text to take stock of the information we have going into this reading. Group Work In your groups, (quickly) answer the following questions. You should use textual evidence from Bruffee’s article, and I welcome you to use any relevant personal evidence, as well: After we share as a large group, we’ll look together at p. 642, where Bruffee describes what I’ll call a discourse community: “A community of knowledgeable peers is a…
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1/30: The History of Collaboration
In-class Writing Prompt How do you write? How have you written over the course of your life? Describe your writing experiences in school. Describe your writing experiences outside of school. When have you written alone? When have you written with others. After sharing our writing as a group, we’ll look together at Fitzgerald and Ianetta’s excerpt from The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors that focuses on authorship studies (you can find this piece in Blackboard). This excerpt gives a brief history of how authorship has been understood over time, how the early history of authorship, beginning with the classical period, understood writing as divinely inspired. Through the Renaissance and Romantic…
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1/25: Welcome to ENGL 201W
This course introduces you to collaborative learning practices in higher education and academic publishing. You will reflect on your own learning and literacy histories to understand how your past experiences shape your current writing practices. In addition to reading examples of collaborative authorship, we will practice collaborative authorship in our classroom community. You should expect to write individually and in groups on multiple platforms using a range of tools (pen, paper, word-processing platforms, websites, AI, etc.). Icebreaker We’ll start the day with a collaborative icebreaker, The Marshmallow Challenge! In the spirit of collaboration, this icebreaker asks you to work together toward a common task, one that may be somewhat disorienting.…
