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Contents

The Authors

Our Exigence

Our Background and Process

Our Takeaways

References

Welcome to the Xchanges Symposium on the Status of Graduate Study in Rhetoric and Composition (Rhet-Comp). We are proud to present to you this collaborative effort by current and recent graduate students who identify as members of the Rhet-Comp community. To ensure that we foreground the voices of the authors over our own, we’ll begin our introduction with a synopsis of their contributions.

The Authors

Given the liminality of graduate study in general, the concerns of this symposium’s authors are immediate and pressing, as evidenced in Mandy Olejnik and Cara Marta Messina’s contribution, which opens the symposium by calling on the field to create policies and infrastructure to ensure more equitable discourse in the digital spaces that are so important to graduate students’ enculturation into Rhet-Comp. Despite these barriers to enculturation, Andrew Bowman and Bruce Kovanen demonstrate a deep awareness of our field’s history of labor activism in their recommendation that graduate students practice direct collective action to address the labor inequities that they and other contingent faculty increasingly face. Liz Miller meanwhile draws upon disability studies to critique neoliberal notions of wellness destructive to graduate students’ wellbeing and advocates for Rhet-Comp to instead integrate networks of care into the fabric of graduate study. Alexandria Hanson, Alejandra I. Ramírez, April M. Cobos, Heather Listhartke, and Skye Roberson then extend Miller’s critique to neoliberal notions of productivity that disadvantage single-mother graduate students in Rhet-Comp.

All of our authors took pains not just to critique but recommend strategies to actualize a more equitable field, frequently through the lens of their own encounters with inequity during the course of their graduate study. Caleb Lee González explores how counter-storytelling can function as a powerful scholarly endeavor through which graduate students of color can critique and transform graduate study in Rhet-Comp, while also rendering its mechanisms of marginalization more visible to their more privileged colleagues. Sherwin Kawahakui Ranchez Sales provides his own counterstory to draw our attention to the ways in which graduate students of color enrolled in predominantly white programs and institutions can disproportionately suffer from imposter syndrome, which is why the community cultural wealth that affinity groups provide is so invaluable.

Lida Colón then focuses on the unique challenges of Black graduate students in Rhet-Comp and how Digital Black Lit and Composition (DBLAC) provides a model for contributing to their success. Amanda Presswood and Virginia M. Schwarz of the Writing Program Administrators Graduate Organization (WPA-GO) call for equity-centered approaches to assessing programs and professional organizations. Thomas Polk, Alisa Russell, and Allie Sockwell Johnston of the Writing Across the Curriculum Graduate Organization (WAC-GO) caution against the ways in which our attempts at enculturating graduate students into Rhet-Comp can actually play out as exploitative. Bringing us full circle, Ashanka Kumari, Sweta Baniya, and Kyle Larson of nextGEN detail the formation of their own initiative in direct response to incidents on the Writing Program Administrators Listserv (WPA-L), and how graduate students will need to transform outdated discursive structures or invent new ones in order to address structural inequities in Rhet-Comp.

Our Exigence

Aptly enough, the idea for this symposium arose partly in reaction to the series of racist and sexist incidents on the WPA-L--arguably Rhet-Comp’s largest, most public online discursive space--and the outsized role graduate students played in protesting and enacting change. For those of us who have been discounted, marginalized, and oppressed in these volatile spaces, neither the fact that these incidents occurred nor the subsequent groundswell of digital activism by and for graduate students is as explosive or shocking as some have framed it. Instead, we see these incidents and graduate students’ reactions to them as more visible iterations of longstanding inequities in Rhet-Comp and student-led direct action against them.

Although the scholarly conversation within Rhet-Comp has rightly acknowledged the importance of graduate students’ enculturation into the field, we contend that the conversation has traditionally, narrowly focused on graduate students’ utilitarian function as teachers in training, only further reinforcing their status as cheap, disposable labor (e.g. Anson, 1993; Macrorie, 1963; Nyquist, 1991; Williams, 1949). And when we have talked about graduate students’ scholarly development, both historically and more recently, we have often employed the deficit model of the Other, the alien, the foreign, non-native, immigrant, or international student who “needs help” assimilating to the hegemony of formal academic discourse (e.g. Abasi et al, 2006; Ackerman, 1991; Alvarez et al, 2017; Angelova & Riazantseva, 1999; Berkenkotter et al., 1988).

The work collected in Anderson and Romano (2005) and Baliff et al. (2008) signaled a culture shift within Rhet-Comp toward including current or recent graduate students’ own voices and experiences, but structural change in higher education is slow going and hard won. It was not long before that the International Writing Centers Association (IWCA) (2001) issued the field’s first position statement specifically aimed at graduate student professional development. It would take nearly a decade for the Council of Writing Program Administrators to establish WPA-GO (Elder, Schoen, & Skinnell, 2014), a graduate student organization whose success in providing visibility and voice were subsequently emulated in IWCA-GO, WAC-GO, and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Committee on the Status of Graduate Students, the latter of which consisted only of faculty and had no graduate student representation at the time. And it would take nearly another decade for CCCC (2019) to issue their own graduate student-centered position statement. Meanwhile, graduate students’ own concerns related to the social, cultural, economic, and political conditions that affect their development remain primarily relegated to informal spaces such as teacher-training colloquia and social media. And although several special journal features arising from the recent WPA-L incidents have appropriately highlighted graduate student perspectives (Cox et al., 2019; Baniya et al., 2019), Rhet-Comp has yet to produce a scholarly publication devoted to graduate students sharing their own visions of the current status and possible future of graduate study in our field.

Indeed, much of the exigency in providing this space and moment is directly in response to how neither academia in general nor Rhet-Comp specifically knows how to conceive of graduate students as a defined group or category of experiences. In our programs and professional spaces, graduate students are usually, and often awkwardly, treated as “undergraduate students with more motivation” or “baby faculty,” as if they don’t have their own identity but merely exist in a fleeting cocoon stage before some mythical, ultimate transformation into their final form. This simplistic construction perpetuates a liminality/transitionality narrative that subversively denies graduate students their own unique identity and justifies the precariousness of their positionality within inequitable disciplinary and institutional structures.

We therefore committed to co-creating this symposium in Xchanges with leaders of graduate student organizations in Rhet-Comp to give more visibility to graduate students and the scholarly conversations and structural transformations that they want for our field and its approach to graduate study. Though the precarity within which Rhet-Comp graduate students find themselves at present is not new (WPA-GO, 2019), it has definitely been exacerbated by a global pandemic presently plunging the economy into recession and amplifying the financial hardship of already underfunded public and under-enrolled private colleges and universities (Flaherty, 2020). Even before this crisis, however, graduate students were at the forefront of developing innovative ways to resist and transform structural inequities, so that the critical analyses and recommendations collected herein only become that much more significant now, and the need to pay attention to them all the more pressing.

Our Background and Process

Symposium Co-Editors Al Harahap and Brian Hendrickson had held leadership positions in a number of graduate student organizations, and had been interested in finding ways to recognize the intellectual labor that graduate students were putting into their organizing and activism on behalf of supporting one another and contributing to a more equitable, inclusive, and intellectually rich field. In the spring of 2019, Xchanges Managing Editor Brian Hendrickson pitched the idea for this symposium to Rhet-Comp graduate student organizations DBLAC, nextGEN, WAC-GO, and WPA-GO, inviting them to brainstorm the structure of the symposium and identify its thematic keywords, yielding the word cloud included below as Figure 1:

Figure 1: Symposium Keyword Brainstorm Word Cloud

The three most central themes to emerge from the thematic keyword brainstorm were inclusivity, mentoring, and support, followed by accessibility, antiracism, equity, guidance, justice, labor, network, precarity, and sustainability.

Al Harahap then joined Hendrickson, shaping the vision for the symposium through the call for proposals and implementation of equitable editorial practices. For both of us, it was important that from start to finish, the symposium embodied the themes of inclusivity, mentoring, and support as identified by its graduate student authors. The call for proposals was distributed across a range of listservs and online forums, with a particular focus on recruiting graduate student members of the CCCC caucuses.

We received more proposals than we could showcase, but because the submissions represented such a broad range of perspectives and concerns under-addressed in the literature, we opted to include as many voices as possible. We also wanted to encourage conversation across symposium pieces, so we asked authors to read one another’s early drafts and integrate references to one another’s pieces into subsequent drafts.

Our Takeaways

One current running through all the symposium pieces is the emphasis contributors place, not as much on their experiences within Rhet-Comp graduate study specifically as on their experiences as graduate students along demographic lines of identity, such as class, dis/ability, ethnicity and race, sex and gender. This emphasis should come as no surprise as the demographic body has more and more won the visibility and attention it needs in and beyond Rhet-Comp, and with increasingly nuanced acknowledgement of our differences. One takeaway, then, is that our graduate degree programs are far from being the great levelers of inequality that we might sometimes wish them to be. What’s more, graduate degree programs in Rhet-Comp could more explicitly take up consideration of our students’ identities, the cultural and linguistic assets associated with them, and the differences in need between them. One identity axis that we are particularly glad is represented here is perhaps the least talked about in graduate student professionalizing literature: motherhood and its associated caretaker status. As well, we see our contributors speaking about these axes intersectionally, for example, in how single-mother graduate students are excluded from extracurricular activities and inadequately accommodated in their teaching schedules and modalities, reminding us that our programs must be as nuanced as our scholarship in taking identity into account.

Furthermore, we notice that our authors draw as much if not more from literature outside of Rhet-Comp, and speak as much if not more to their status as graduate students in general, than they do literature and identities specific to our field. This tells us that our field as perceived by the authors collected in this symposium still represents a capaciously interdisciplinary terrain; that the experiences of graduate students in Rhet-Comp are likely more universal than we might tend to perceive through our tribalistic frames of disciplinary specialization; and that there is something visceral and palpable about one’s status as a graduate student that carries deeper material, affective, embodied, and discursive connections to one’s demographic body than one’s disciplinary identity, and than recognized by our limited conceptions of the place of graduate study in Rhet-Comp.

It is due to this very visceral and palpable nature of those connections that our symposium authors are able to so incisively define their identities as graduate students against particular problems, with consideration toward specific needs, and with an eye toward concrete solutions. More than any of our other takeaways, we hope you’ll pay careful attention to their eloquently stated ideas. All eleven pieces make calls to action, whether to change the very material conditions of graduate learning, teaching, and training, or to substantially shift the mindsets and behaviors of graduate students’ peers and mentors, or as is often the case, a combination of both. In some way, by choosing the traditional discursive framework of the symposium through which to amplify graduate students’ calls for radical change, we are capitulating to the hegemonic forces within academia responsible for the very problems graduate students are now speaking up about, and indeed, we risk perpetuating them ourselves. Yet, as an open-access journal with a longstanding tradition of mentoring emerging scholars in Rhet-Comp and showcasing their innovative contributions to the field, Xchanges has always been a site of pushing back against conventional thought and ideas. We hope, then, that this symposium will serve multiple audiences: those who would benefit from reading their peers articulate their experiences and visions for a more equitable field; and the faculty members, mentors, administrators, and others in positions of power, who can help to effect the changes that these authors and their contributions so urgently and astutely demand.

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About the Authors

Sarah Lonelodge is a PhD candidate in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program at Oklahoma State University. She also serves as an assistant director of the first-year composition program and as president of OSU’s chapter of the Rhetoric Society of America. Her research interests include composition pedagogy and religious rhetoric.

Katie Rieger is a PhD candidate at Oklahoma State University in the Rhetoric and Writing Studies program and is an Assistant Professor of English at Benedictine College. Her research interests include student-centered pedagogy; educational technology for distance learning; writing center studies; and the intersection of intercultural communication and technical writing pedagogy.

Contents

Introduction and Literature Review

Research Design and Methodology

Participants and Ethical Considerations

Data Collection

Data Analysis

Findings/Discussion

Pedagogical Implications

Conclusion

Works Cited

 While movements such as WAC and WID provide marvelous ideas for writing in the disciplines, student voices also have much to tell us.

(Hass & Osborn, 2007, p. 11)

Introduction and Literature Review

The implementation of writing across the curriculum (WAC) programs has become a well-established approach. While facilitating student learning through writing and learning to write in the disciplines remains the central focus (McLeod & Maimon, 2000), determining the most effective curricular structure and pedagogical practices for achieving these goals continues to require further research.

With this goal in mind, we suggest that listening to students who organically discuss their learning is a powerful strategy for improving pedagogy in WAC and writing courses in general. Colleges and universities utilize a variety of tools, typically surveys and questionnaires, to measure student perceptions of courses, instructors, textbooks, learning outcomes, and other aspects of higher education in order to create better courses, teaching methods, and overall experiences for students. While the necessity for and significance of these tools are not in question, additional information from a source used voluntarily by students throughout the semester could be useful.

This opportunity to uncover more detailed information about student experiences is possible through an analysis of student tweets. The uniquely public nature of Twitter offers the potential to view students’ frustrations, proud moments, problems, and other thoughts. Therefore, our study utilizes public tweets, which we define as independently-authored and organic and not associated with any particular location, institution type, discipline, course level or other identifying or descriptive information. Through this method of listening to students, the (in)effectiveness of writing pedagogy is illuminated and best practices can be identified. While this aim is applicable to any course that incorporates writing, we focus primarily on implications for WAC programs in which writing is taught by non-writing-specialists in technical disciplines.

While a number of previous studies have measured the effectiveness of writing instruction based on student voices, few have approached student perceptions in the way we propose. Perhaps most often, student surveys, interviews, and/or focus groups are utilized. Michael Hass and Jan Osborn (2007), for example, surveyed 71 students in five courses in order to explore perspectives on writing. Their study resulted in five dominant “themes” for instructors to consider as they design writing assignments: “engagement, commitment, collaboration, a systemic approach, and opportunities for external confirmation” (p. 9). Specific to a WAC program, Naelys Luna, E. Gail Horton, and Jeffrey R. Galin (2014) surveyed undergraduates enrolled in a social work program. They found that pedagogical strategies, such as multiple revisions, peer review, and instructor feedback, were especially effective (p. 401).

While we do not wish to diminish these important research methods, we are interested in the potential limitations of these tools. Writing in 2015, Anne Ruggles Gere, Sarah C. Swofford, Naomi Silver, and Melody Pugh highlight two important factors. First, surveys, focus groups, interviews and similar research methods can affect responses: “as a team of researchers, we represented the institutional entity funding the research, and therefore the responses we received were likely shaped by our participants’ awareness of our affiliations with Sweetland, which oversees the ULWR” (p. 250). Second, the aforementioned methods are somewhat limited in scope: “we are not able to speak to what actually happens in the ULWR classroom. Instead, we speak to how students, faculty, and GSIs conceptualize their activities” (p. 250). While the implications of this study are certainly not diminished by these relatively minor limitations, our focus on public tweets provides some insight into the perceptions of students who are engaged in writing but diminishes the potential influence of audience(s) affiliated with their institution. In addition, the tweets seemed to be posted, most often, in the moment and voluntarily, which not only diminishes the potential issues with recall (see Luna, Horton, & Galin, 2014, for example) as opposed to end-of-semester surveys but also offers some insight into what actually happens in classrooms and during the students’ writing processes.

While many studies have explored Twitter as a subject of research, most focus on the website’s pedagogical implications and possibilities rather than the nature of public, voluntary tweets that are not associated with a particular course. These studies have shown that Twitter is useful in helping students engage with course material and reading assignments (Park, 2013), reinforcing concepts discussed in class (Lomicka & Lord, 2012), and in providing a medium for students to communicate with one another as well as the instructor (Johnson, 2011; Davis & Yin, 2013). The tweets discussed in these and many other studies focus on the pedagogical implications of the Twitter site as a means of communication, engagement, and reinforcement. While this is an important endeavor, public tweets not associated with a class requirement also offer a great deal of insight.

In their study on student tweets, Xin Chen, Mihaela Vorvoreanu, and Krishna Madhavan (2014) focused on public tweets of engineering students. These students used Twitter to discuss problems and frustrations associated with their area of study by tagging their tweets with #engineeringProblems. This study holds significant value as one of the first to utilize “informal social media data” or, what we have labeled public tweets, as data to learn about student perceptions regarding pedagogical practices. The authors discovered several themes from the tweets: heavy study load, lack of social engagement, negative emotion, sleep problems, comments on diversity, and others, which indicate a number of issues encountered by students. While this study focused on only engineering students and only problems due to the negative nature of the hashtag, our interest is in discovering both negative and positive attitudes about writing. Our study, therefore, utilized a keyword search that identified tweets for our purposes rather than a hashtag.

With the ideas of listening to student voices and considering their perspectives about the instructor’s “role in writing assignment design” in mind, we formulated this study as an exploratory inquiry into the complexities of how instructors and their pedagogies might influence students’ perspectives on writing assignments. In an effort to “[discover] what students themselves believe constitutes good writing and which pedagogical choices they perceive as most helpful to them in producing high quality written assignments” (Hass & Osborn,  2007, pp. 1-2), our study focused on the following questions: What do students say about their professors and their writing assignments in public tweets? Based on these perceptions, can we identify beneficial pedagogical practices and/or pedagogical practices that could be improved?

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About the Author

Jacklyn Heslop has her B.A from California State University, Stanislaus and is currently working on her M.A in English with a special emphasis on rhetoric and the teaching of writing at the same institution. She hopes to continue on to her PhD in order to continue her studies into memetics and/or writing centers. In addition to those already stated, her research interests are multimodal pedagogy, digital and visual rhetorics, and alternative forms of assessment (specs/contract grading).

Contents

Introduction

The Enthymeme: Filling in Missing Pieces

Cultural Inheritance: Darwin to Digital Rhetoric

Meme Creation and Reproduction

Enthymemes and Visual: Is There an Argument?

Reading the Meme

Conclusion: The Start of a Memetic Enthymeme

Works Cited

Introduction

We live in a digital landscape where most communication for the younger generation is aided by technology, specifically social media. News feeds, or social updates with occasional links to informational media, are filled with digitally mediated conversations that occur through words, images, or often a mixture of the two. Nearly every computer-savvy person knows of the heated debates and vulgar insults thrown out in the comment section of controversial or trending posts; yet, these have not been a source of serious study for argumentation theorists. While underexposed as a valuable source of communication, rhetoric has changed as a result of the reliance of impersonal modes of argument on social media and digital platforms.

The advent of the internet created a space for global communication that transcends time and location. One of the most common features of the internet era is the “meme.” Although typically thought of as a funny picture connected with a particular phase, “A meme is the simplest unit of cultural replication,” and as a result “Human development is a process of being loaded with, or infested by, large numbers of memes” (Bacalu 154). Memes, or memetics, are often known as simple phrases, referential images or videos, yet performances or “behaviors for collective appreciation” become “units” of our collective culture (Milner 18). For example, when a friend is known for an idiosyncratic tick, such as “talking” with their hands or nodding their head like a chicken, this behavior becomes “memetic” and will be associated with them. On a larger scale, memes become cultural references as populations mimic behaviors or images that work to reference established norms, thus becoming ingrained as traditionally appropriate behavior.

Memetics cover a lot of cultural landscape, but linguistic and visual memes flood our daily lives, so much so that their linguistic, and by extension their rhetorical value, needs to be explored further. In this paper, I aim to explore the creation of memetic media and compare the features of the internet meme to Aristotle’s concept of the enthymeme. My desire is to demonstrate the obvious links between the two that have, so far, lacked explicit exploration.

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About the Author

Kelli Lycke Martin is a graduate teaching instructor and PhD candidate at the University of Arizona. She wrote this article during the last year of her master’s program in Rhetoric and Writing at The University of New Mexico. Her research interests include cultural memory sites and historical discourse rhetorics of labor, resistance & protest.

Contents

Introduction

The Shrine

The Injury of Extraction

Shrines and Memorials

Memory of Santa Rita

The Future of Santa Rita

Works Cited

Introduction

Just at the intersection of New Mexico highways 152 and 356, the Santa Rita Shrine sits tucked in a battlefield of dying mining towns, a lone structure reminiscent of one of the largest mining communities in the Southwest. This shrine marks the existence of the town of Santa Rita, the townsite for the Chino Mine. In 1910, the company began open-pit mining on the edge of town. By the 1930’s, new technologies lined the pockets of company executives, and the mine transitioned entirely into an open pit, rapidly extracting more copper and slowly eating away at the land around Santa Rita. By 1970, the town was completely gone (Huggard and Humble 1-4). Now, the Santa Rita Shrine works as both a place of memory and a place of mourning for the community that lost almost everything to the mining industry.

In this article, I hope to illuminate how local monuments like the Santa Rita Shrine are places of empowerment and stand as a way of linking communities with their history through a shared sense of home. First, I will explain how I came to know about Santa Rita and the Shrine. Then, I will explore the unique sense of loss the residents of Santa Rita experienced as they witnessed the destruction of their physical home. Finally, using the publics approach from Jenny Rice’s scholarship on urban development in combinations with Carole Blair’s work in memorial sites as material rhetorics, I will explore the negotiation between company and community that led to establishing the Santa Rita Shrine, and how the Shrine became a local monument in memory of the town.