Roundtable: Cultural Rhetorics and Professional Writing
This roundtable offers multiple perspectives from four junior-level scholars and a PhD candidate trained in cultural rhetorics who have found themselves creating and implementing professional writing programs at starkly different institutions across the country. Although our institutional contexts are different, we each see embodiment and decolonial, feminist pedagogies as constellated threads that, when woven together, inform our practice of cultural rhetorics when applied to professional writing curricula. We see professional writing as strands of a larger curriculum that teaches students to deconstruct systems of power while also recognizing the value of technological writing skills. We also see how pillars of a cultural rhetorics methodology, such as relationality, serve as tools for us to use to advocate and make arguments for writing-focused programs at institutions facing increasing financial uncertainty. Given the push toward increasing enrollment in English Departments and the demand for marketability of writing programs, it can be challenging to implement a one-size-fits-all curriculum that serves the diverse needs of students.
The conversations in our roundtable will emphasize how cultural rhetorics offers a much-needed theoretical and methodological frame to construct professional writing undergraduate and graduate programs that embrace a feminist, decolonial, and community-centered writing pedagogy (Haas; Royster and Kirsch; Powell; Pough; King, Gubele, and Anderson). Such a pedagogy deconstructs systems of power by being oriented around bodies and grounded in Johnson et al’s (2015) work, which states, “just as bodies are always complicated by this conglomerate, so is rhetoric: they are both assembled by their orientations to larger cultural forces just as they are also a result of their own assemblage.”
Embracing the practice of storytelling, each roundtable participant will share a brief story featuring their approach to infusing professional writing with cultural rhetorics. Doing so, a constellation of approaches, from pedagogical to methodological, will emerge. At the end of the panel narratives, our moderator (a senior faculty member with extensive professional writing curriculum experience) will reflect on our narratives to surface shared issues, opportunities, and action items that emphasize the need for such an approach given higher education (and English’s) current state. ime will be set aside for discussion and further questions of how to practice a cultural rhetorics orientation to professional writing in the classroom and within institutions at large.
This roundtable offers multiple perspectives from four junior-level scholars and a PhD candidate trained in cultural rhetorics who have found themselves creating and implementing professional writing programs at starkly different institutions across the country. Although our institutional contexts are different, we each see embodiment and decolonial, feminist pedagogies as constellated threads that, when woven together, inform our practice of cultural rhetorics when applied to professional writing curricula. We see professional writing as strands of a larger curriculum that teaches students to deconstruct systems of power while also recognizing the value of technological writing skills. We also see how pillars of a cultural rhetorics methodology, such as relationality, serve as tools for us to use to advocate and make arguments for writing-focused programs at institutions facing increasing financial uncertainty. Given the push toward increasing enrollment in English Departments and the demand for marketability of writing programs, it can be challenging to implement a one-size-fits-all curriculum that serves the diverse needs of students.
The conversations in our roundtable will emphasize how cultural rhetorics offers a much-needed theoretical and methodological frame to construct professional writing undergraduate and graduate programs that embrace a feminist, decolonial, and community-centered writing pedagogy (Haas; Royster and Kirsch; Powell; Pough; King, Gubele, and Anderson). Such a pedagogy deconstructs systems of power by being oriented around bodies and grounded in Johnson et al’s (2015) work, which states, “just as bodies are always complicated by this conglomerate, so is rhetoric: they are both assembled by their orientations to larger cultural forces just as they are also a result of their own assemblage.”
Embracing the practice of storytelling, each roundtable participant will share a brief story featuring their approach to infusing professional writing with cultural rhetorics. Doing so, a constellation of approaches, from pedagogical to methodological, will emerge. At the end of the panel narratives, our moderator (a senior faculty member with extensive professional writing curriculum experience) will reflect on our narratives to surface shared issues, opportunities, and action items that emphasize the need for such an approach given higher education (and English’s) current state. ime will be set aside for discussion and further questions of how to practice a cultural rhetorics orientation to professional writing in the classroom and within institutions at large.
| manthey_pw_cr_handout.pdf |
