Welcome to Issue 9.1 of Xchanges!
In this issue, we feature four essays by graduate-student scholars representing four universities: New Mexico State University, Seton Hall University, Illinois State University, and Old Dominion University. The studies published here consider an array of issues important to teachers and scholars of writing, rhetoric, and technical communication. Among the subjects discussed by these authors are the transformative value to students of learning communities, the ways in which instructor comments do (or do not) motivate undergraduate writers to revise their work, the multivalent nature of the term "Hispanic" and the rhetorical power of its various applications, and the benefits to students of an "intertextual approach" to writing instruction.
In their essay "Developing Curriculum for a Multi-Course Interdepartmental Learning Community to Promote Retention and Learning for Underprepared Engineering Students," Rachel A. Milloy, Matthew Moberly, and Rebecca Powell (New Mexico State University) reflect on their involvement in an engineering learning community with an innovative design. This design incorporated student reflection on the very nature of learning communities and their participation in one and it included the built-in assessment mechanism of bi-weekly meetings between instructor and student. This LC's adaptability and receptiveness to information emerging from beyond these writing instructors' home disciplines allowed the LC to recalibrate and adjust as necessary. These and other aspects of this LC allowed for a high degree of "buy-in" buy the faculty and student participants in the LC.
The essay "The Will to Revise: Commenting, Revision, and Motivation in College Students," by Elizabeth Bracey (Seton Hall University), investigates student motivation in revising written work. As many writing instructors know, students often feel driven to achieve a high grade (or merely to pass) in writing classes and this grade-motivation plays a bigger role than does writing-skill acquisition or the relevance of practiced writing genres to their chosen professions. Bracey investigates survey data that reports students' motivations for revising their work, whether their motivation stems from correcting grammar or addressing deeper content-related problems in their writing. Bracey calls for continued investigation into the relationship between student writing, instructor feedback, and the role of writing in students' future careers, as many students were well aware, based on her survey, that writing would play a critical role in their professions of choice.
"The 'Hispanic' Race Debate: Limitations of the Term in an Orlando School Board Controversy," by Kristi McDuffie (Illinois State University), investigates the robust debate surrounding the term "Hispanic" as related to an Orlando, Florida, law that dictated the racial composition of members of a school board. The law, originally enacted in 1964, obligated a school board to be comrpised of an equal number of "black" and "white" members. By 2009, when Hispanic residents of Orlando protested this binaristic view of race, the landscape of racial rhetoric, as this case reveals, had grown much more complex. McDuffie uses newspaper message board comments to examine the various ways in which "Hispanic" was used by the people of Orlando and what the political and rhetorical implications of such usage are, as related to the trio of concepts race, ethnicity, and culture.
George Shamshayooadeh (Old Dominion University) uses concepts from Mikhail Bahktin and Kenneth Burke in a writing course design that aims to empower students as authors who can "appropriate texts to achieve persuasion." "Invention and Identification Through Intertextual Appropriation of Academic Discourse" argues that students must be empowered to avail themselves, as writers, of language and ideas they have encountered in academic and outside-of-the-university textual domains, thinking of their "new" writing as more of an experience of appropriation than invention, an experience of deploying ideas that already exist and making these ideas their own, rather than inventing entirely anew. Such an approach can give writing students power and confidence. This intertextual approach, Shamshayooadeh argues, is a coordinated approach in the writing classroom that has a distinct capacity to "grant students agency."
This issue of Xchanges presents scholarly studies of issues relevant to instructors and students across a range of writing- and rhetoric-related disciplines. We hope you will enjoy the excellent graduate-student research in this issue. Enjoy!