Conversations in Cultural Rhetorics
A Brown Bag Workshop Series

WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 26TH
1 – 3 p.m.
MSU WRITING CENTER, 300 BESSEY HALL

Anyone interested in Cultural Rhetorics is invited!
This workshop will:
o Share ideas about cultural rhetorics theories and methodologies
o Suggest ways to collaborate on projects grounded in cultural rhetorics
o Build a network of faculty and students doing cultural rhetorics work

Featured speakers include:
o Dr. Malea Powell, Associate Professor, WRAC
o Daisy Levy, Doctoral Candidate, WRAC
o Donnie Johnson Sackey, Doctoral Candidate, WRAC
o Jennifer Sano-Franchini, Doctoral Candidate, WRAC

Want more information?
Contact: Madhu Narayan (narayanm@msu.edu) or
Andrea Riley-Mukavetz (rileyan1@msu.edu)

Dr. Liza Potts jokes that the reason she ended up at MSU is because she thought she’d give living in the Midwest a go. But in reality, what made her jump at the opportunity to join the WRAC faculty was the ability of Michigan State University to combine different interdisciplinary studies and focuses in a way very much tailored to her own way of thinking and working.

She began her career as an undergraduate at Florida Atlantic University, where she adjusted her English degree to accommodate her interest in writing for technology. From there she gained real-world experience working as director of design research at Electronic Ink, as a program manager focused on user interface at Microsoft, and as a technical writer at ProQuest. Working at a variety of places gave Potts a large repertoire of experiences and industry knowledge valuable to students and programs alike at Old Dominion University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and lastly our own MSU.

All of these different skills and the ability to apply them synchronously drew her to the Technology, Culture, and Creativity cluster in the College of Arts and Letters. A position here was something she could not turn down as well as something that she could be passionate about.

That passion and intense curiosity to continuously learn more expresses itself in the classroom where Potts teaches AL 285 Introduction to Digital Humanities.
She says, “One of the coolest things is that it brings together students with all sorts of backgrounds, perspectives, and studies and gets them all working on the same projects.” She also will be teaching WRA 360 Visual Rhetoric and WRA 420 Content Management in the spring.

Potts’ attitude towards teaching is one of mentorship and apprenticeship, where she embarks with her students on a journey through the semester. Naturally, she is a wonderful resource for her students with relevant professional experience, but she is also open to learn from her students and ready to see what they can teach her, which is what gets her excited about beginning a new semester with new students.

Potts’ research outside of the classroom focuses broadly on digital humanities and how people use things like Twitter, Facebook, and IM to respond to natural disasters and to support one another. She points to the bombing in Mumbai as an example where before the media could even get there to tell the news, Twitter was blowing up with firsthand accounts and information. Her upcoming book, titled Experiencing Disaster: How Participatory Designers Can Support Participatory Cultures, is written for practitioners in the industry as well as teachers and researchers in academia to help them understand that this is a valid area of research with numerous ways to innovate and be creative. Potts describes her research as  taking on a “quasi ethnographic spin because to design experiences, you have to be embedded in those experiences. We’re past the point where you can expect ‘users’ on these sites. We have ‘participants.’”

Dr. Liza Potts jokes that the reason she ended up at MSU is because she thought she’d give living in the Midwest a go. But in reality, what made her jump at the opportunity to join the WRAC faculty was the ability of Michigan State University to combine different interdisciplinary studies and focuses in a way very much tailored to her own way of thinking and working.

She began her career as an undergraduate at Florida Atlantic University, where she adjusted her English degree to accommodate her interest in writing for technology. From there she gained real-world experience working as director of design research at Electronic Ink, as a program manager focused on user interface at Microsoft, and as a technical writer at ProQuest. Working at a variety of places gave Potts a large repertoire of experiences and industry knowledge valuable to students and programs alike at Old Dominion University, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and lastly our own MSU.

All of these different skills and the ability to apply them synchronously drew her to the Technology, Culture, and Creativity cluster in the College of Arts and Letters. A position here was something she could not turn down as well as something that she could be passionate about.

That passion and intense curiosity to continuously learn more expresses itself in the classroom where Potts teaches AL 285 Introduction to Digital Humanities.
She says, “One of the coolest things is that it brings together students with all sorts of backgrounds, perspectives, and studies and gets them all working on the same projects.” She also will be teaching WRA 360 Visual Rhetoric and WRA 420 Content Management in the spring.

Potts’ attitude towards teaching is one of mentorship and apprenticeship, where she embarks with her students on a journey through the semester. Naturally, she is a wonderful resource for her students with relevant professional experience, but she is also open to learn from her students and ready to see what they can teach her, which is what gets her excited about beginning a new semester with new students.

Potts’ research outside of the classroom focuses broadly on digital humanities and how people use things like Twitter, Facebook, and IM to respond to natural disasters and to support one another. She points to the bombing in Mumbai as an example where before the media could even get there to tell the news, Twitter was blowing up with firsthand accounts and information. Her upcoming book, titled Experiencing Disaster: How Participatory Designers Can Support Participatory Cultures, is written for practitioners in the industry as well as teachers and researchers in academia to help them understand that this is a valid area of research with numerous ways to innovate and be creative. Potts describes her research as  taking on a “quasi ethnographic spin because to design experiences, you have to be embedded in those experiences. We’re past the point where you can expect ‘users’ on these sites. We have ‘participants.’”

Rhetoric & Writing is pleased to announce a funding opportunity for research clusters in WRAC and R&W. The program draws on a pool of resources that the R&W program receives each year from the Provost to advance research productivity for graduate students. In the past, these funds have been awarded directly to students who apply for them each Fall, typically in the form of small research fellowships supporting travel to conferences.

R&W will continue to make these funds available for individual students, but this year there will be an additional option. Students can elect to apply for funds as part of a research cluster that is a) led by a faculty mentor and b) commits to research activity that will provide the student(s) in the cluster with an “authorship opportunity.” An authorship opportunity in this case is defined as a chance to produce a project that will be submitted for publication, external review, and/or exhibition in some manner. Traditional conference presentations are excluded from this definition – students can apply as individuals for travel support to present at a conference – but papers submitted for review to proceedings would count as authorship opportunities. The goal is to engage more students in the process of moving their work from conception to publication, and to provide a framework wherein faculty who mentor students in this process can receive credit and some benefit for doing this important work.

This program is an experiment designed to boost the research productivity of our graduate students, make research and scholarship more high-profile across the department, and to recognize and value the mentoring by faculty that is important to our program’s success. We also hope it provides ways for folks with similar research interest to come together, share ideas, and do exciting work. We have the support of the College of Arts & Letters Associate Dean for Graduate Studies, Jim Nelson, who has provided funds to support a Graduate Fellow to aid in coordinating the application process, planning our end-of-year symposium, and providing one-to-one consultations and support to students as they work on writing for publication. I’m pleased to announce the Lee Sherlock is our Graduate Fellow for the program. Lee is a third year PhD student with lots of experience with large and small group research projects as well as writing and reviewing for peer-reviewed journals in the field. Lee has also worked in the Writing Center and has coordinated graduate writing groups. All of this experience makes Lee a tremendous resource for the clusters to draw upon.

What follows here is a list of frequently asked questions – garnered from our conversations with all of you – as to how the program will work in this inaugural year. We hope that many of you will participate. If you have a question that you do not see addressed here, please do ask! Lee Sherlock and I are happy to help clarifying things.

(more…)

Bruce Ballenger, professor at Boise State University and author of the textbook The Curious Researcher, came to MSU on March 13th and 14th to speak to WRAC First-Year Writing faculty. He also spoke to librarians, instructors from the English Language Center, and Tier II Writing faculty from the College of Arts and Letters. Ballenger came to speak about inquiry-based learning, which First-Year Writing professor Nancy DeJoy describes as “the idea that you start from really good motivating questions, then you go through inquiry processes, looking not just to find answers but to learn new things.”

The Curious Researcher is currently used by a number of First-Year Writing (FYW) instructors in their classes. Several FYW students were able to attend Prof. Ballenger’s presentation at Erickson Kiva, where he signed books, took questions, and invited people to do some writing exercises. He conducted small group sessions, one of which took place in WRAC’s Hal Currie conference room in Bessey Hall.

Cheryl Caesar, a FYW instructor in WRAC, said she really enjoyed the event: “I thought it was reinvigorating at this point in the term. It gave me some new ideas for getting students interested in research papers and inquiry-based learning in general.”

Both Cheryl and the other FYW faculty attending Ballenger’s presentation and workshops came away with some great ideas for their future students. One of her favorite parts was an exercise Ballenger designed: “He had us pass a banana around the room and each person that held the banana had to come up with a question about that banana. About 70 people participated. It started with really basic questions like ‘I wonder how many people touched this banana before I did?’ and then it morphed into questions such as ‘I wonder how many people have touched this banana from when it was harvested to when I bought it in a grocery store?’ I definitely want to try a similar exercise with my students.”

“Bruce is a really fun guy,” Nancy said. “People laughed and shared different stories and ways to talk about his book with students. I was very pleased with how the events turned out.”

Recently, Michigan State’s First-Year Writing Program (FYW) has embarked on the task of designing a custom handbook and reader for the 6,000+ students who complete this requirement every year. Nancy DeJoy, in collaboration with her peers Deb Carmichael, Joyce Meier, and Christie Daniels, chose the Little Brown Handbook by Longman/Pearson as the basis for their customized MSU handbook. They chose this one for a variety of reasons: it emphasizes culture and language issues throughout, which is an important quality when considering the FYW audience. The number of international students at MSU has been increasing each year, providing interesting opportunities for teaching about the transition to writing for academic purposes within a global context.

DeJoy noted that MSU’s FYW program is considered innovative in its approach, emphasizing inquiry, creative thinking, and decision-making: “We start by asking questions, rich open-ended questions. We aren’t searching for ‘right’ answers, but exploring the process of discovery by asking good questions and generating responses via reflection and research. . . . We start with the assumption that incoming students can participate and contribute.”

So although the Little Brown Handbook fit the program well, there was room for improvement. For instance, the handbook is now designed to complement The Curious Researcher by Bruce Ballenger, a text used in all Tier I Writing courses. In collaboration with librarian consultants Ben Oberdick and Sarah Miller, DeJoy and her team have added a guide to MSU’s library and its resources. Another useful addition to the handbook is the “Resources for Teachers” section, which contains information about how the program exists in relationship to the MSU mission statement and gives background for the order and purpose of the course assignments.

New additions have also been made to Reading and Writing Literacies, the reader that DeJoy and another team designed for the teachers and students of First-Year Writing at MSU. All instructors in the FYW Program were invited to suggest readings that they would like to see included in the new reader. Graduate students Bonnie Williams and Steven Lessner, R&W alum Dr. Collin Craig, and undergraduate Anna Kalkman helped select readings. These additions will have proven a worthy investment in the long term. Now that the content is hand-picked by faculty and students, the reader can be edited more easily to reflect the needs and interests of the teachers and students. New readings can be added each year via an e-portal that is accessed on the web, decreasing the cost of book manufacturing. And the best part is MSU will not be raising the prices of its handbook and reader for student purchase.

Throughout the customization process, the FYW Program has made an effort to involve the entire department. Prof. DeJoy even proposed that the publishers fund a contest for design elements in the custom books. A recent graduate of the Professional Writing Program, Ben Rubinstein, won the rights to the job. Ben noted that in his Professional Writing courses, the importance of audience was emphasized heavily, and he claims that he won because instead of showing off all his Photoshop skills, he kept a simple, academic look. Another valuable lesson was how to deal with the dilemma of the middleman, which designers often are: “You might hear that every project is going to take you twice as long as you think. That’s a lie. Every project is going to take you three times as long as you think. And that’s only a slight exaggeration.” DeJoy hopes this will be the first of many collaborations between and among FYW instructors and PW students.

For WRAC department faculty, the goal is to teach their students not only to write but to write well. Two professors, Bump Halbritter and Julie Lindquist, felt that they didn’t know enough about their students to teach them well. So they decided to do something about it.

“The project started as two teachers who were skeptical about how well they knew their students, and who wanted to figure out better ways to learn about this,” Bump said. “We wanted to know how much we could learn from students by talking with them.”

As a result, they launched LiteracyCorps Michigan, a series of interviews with students from across Michigan, to explore that question.

The project consists of four phases: first, they contact a student to do an interview and ask the student to bring in three artifacts – one each to represent their past, present, and future selves. The interview is based on the student’s artifacts, and from there some kind of story or narrative is created that serves as the foundation for inquiry throughout the rest of the process. At the end of this interview, they ask the student to choose a location that is of some significance to them for the next interview.

During this second interview, they discuss why the student chose this location and what it means to them, and they also watch some of the footage from the previous interview. At the conclusion of this interview, the student is given a camera and told to film in another location that is important to him or her. Thus far, most of the students have chosen their hometowns. While there, they shoot various scenes and interview family, friends, and members of the community.

After reviewing the footage filmed by the student, Bump and Julie plan with the student which stories to pursue. Then they return as a group to the area, and again, they film various scenes and interview family, friends, community members, etc.

LiteracyCorps Michigan is “helping to make visible the kinds of lives students live. Students have talents and abilities that aren’t recognized as relevant to their lives as students.”

The project has been going on for almost five years and so far Bump and Julie have presented films and talks at local, national, and international venues about Liberty Bell, from Flint, MI, the first student to have completed all four phases of the project. Here is a short clip of some of the footage from their work with Liberty:

Bump and Julie continue to recruit new participants and film interviews with existing participants, each in various stages of the study. Julie said the project has been on hiatus for the moment while she and Bump juggle other responsibilities. (Julie, for example, begins an appointment as director of the First-Year Writing program and Bump is editor of CCC Online). It’s also been a bit of a challenge to find the money and time for both of them to pursue the project with sustained effort. That said, Bump and Julie continue to work on the project whenever they can. They have even begun a collaborative study that combines data from LiteracyCorps Michigan with data from the Stanford Study of Writing, headed by Andrea Lunsford.

Bump said, “It’s the most drafts I’ve done for something. We’ve been revising this for four years.”

Julie added, “It takes time, not only to conduct the interviews but also to process what we already have. It’s a project that explores meanings and experiences of literacy–it’s about discovery, and that process can take a long time.”

If you or someone you know is interested in working with LiteracyCorps Michigan, either as a participant or an assistant, please contact Bump (drbump@msu.edu) or Julie (lindqu11@msu.edu).