Rebecca Moore Howard
Office: 237 HB Crouse
Office hours: Tuesdays 1:15-2:15;
Thursdays 1:15-2:15 & 4-5;
and by appointment
Telephone: 443-1620
FAX: 315-691-9821
E-mail: rehoward@syr.edu
Home page http://wrt-howard.syr.edu

CCR 651, Interdisciplinary Studies in
Language and Literacy: Provincial and Global Issues

Spring 2004
Time: 10-12:50 Tuesdays
Place: 020 HB Crouse
Course website: http://wrt-howard.syr.edu/Syllabi/CCR651S04.html

Course description

The official catalogue description for this course was written several years ago, and it was written in comprehensive scope and great detail. In this outing of CCR 651, we actually will be covering most of the items on the official description's shopping list, though cognitivist perspectives and issues of identity formation will stay pretty much in the background, and there's precious little of this syllabus that has anything to do with literary studies.

The approach we'll take is not predicted in the official description: in this section, we'll be all be reading some very contemporary treatments of language and literacy in composition studies, and we'll be putting these treatments into dialogue with some theoretical works (especially from cultural studies and Marxism) that can potentially inform our perspectives on language and literacy in composition studies. Then we'll be adding some works that look at issues of language and literacy in global contexts. My objective is for us to put compositionist analyses of language and literacy in theoretical and global perspective, trying to move from what has historically been a provincial (i.e., American) focus in composition studies to a global one. This class will explore arguments for class, culture, capital, and race as explanatory frameworks for the impulse to establish, maintain, and teach language standards, whether those standards are based within a language (e.g., Standard Written English) or on a single language for global use (viz, English).

Students in CCR 651 will produce a major text or prospectus for a major text in literacy studies--e.g., a journal article, an exam proposal, a dissertation proposal, a dissertation chapter. First-year students may opt to write a seminar paper for their major project. Everyone in the course will be responsible for very active analysis and synthesis of assigned texts. Our collaborative work for the semester will focus on designing WRT 105 and 205 teaching materials that connect language, writing, race, and globalization.

So much of grading is done with smoke and mirrors that I never know quite what to say on this topic. How can anyone ever come up with a grading system that she feels comfortable with and that actually describes the work that students do in the class? Here's the best I can do:

1. Every week, you'll be reading a book and writing a summary of one chapter. The purpose of these summaries is so that the whole class can assemble a study guide of the assigned sources, something that you can each refer back to later, to review the sources for comprehensive exams, your dissertations, or what not. I'm not going to grade these summaries, but if you're not doing a satisfactory job on them, I'll sure let you know about it. I expect good work on these summaries, and you can't get a good grade for the course if you're coming up short.
2. Twice during the semester, you'll be giving the class a report on a book that you've read from the recommended reading list. This report will be both written and oral: you'll provide class members with a 2- to 5-page summary, outline, or other overview of the source, and you'll also do a 10-minute oral presentation, linking the source to the assigned material of the course. I'll grade you on these two reports. (BTW, on the weeks when you've giving a report, you won't be expected to read the assigned reading; instead, you can rely on your classmates to overview that for you.)
3. By midsemester, you'll be drafting (and circulating among class members) a position statement on literacy or literacy instruction. This position statement should substantially incorporate a variety of sources (though not necessarily all of them) assigned in this course. (It does not need to draw on any other sources, but it may, if you wish.) At the end of the semester, I'll ask you to hand in a final draft. This paper should be 12 to 25 pages long. It should synthesize sources and advance an argument that you believe you can stand behind. It should be a text that you can later develop into an exam field, scholarly article, course proposal, or dissertation chapter, if you wish.

I'm intending that your course grade will be roughly calculated from 50% for the position paper and 25% for each of the two reports. If you've done a poor job of keeping up in the course or of writing your weekly chapter summaries, that grade will be reduced, perhaps substantially.

A number of second-year students will be in this class, some of whom are tracing long-term projects in literacy studies. If you are one of these students, please make an appointment to talk with me immediately, so that we can modify your trajectory through this course, so that you get the overview of literacy studies but also get to concentrate on your ongoing project.

If you are submitting work for a grade in CCR 651, it should not be work that has, in any substantial version, been submitted (or will be submitted) in another course. If your work for this course overlaps with something you have done or are doing elsewhere, you must alert me to that fact so that you and I (and perhaps the other professor, as well) can assure that you're not getting double credit for a single job but are instead building connections between courses.

When you submit summaries and overviews of sources, whether for your graded reports or for your weekly chapter summaries, they, too, should be work that you have yourself produced. If you're relying on secondary sources, you need to acknowledge your indebtedness in the customary academic manner, through quotations, citations, and lists of works cited.

Cite sources (with page references) of quotation and summary or paraphrase. Provide a list of works cited. Use the MLA style sheet.

Visible patchwriting (copying from a source text and then deleting some words, altering grammatical structures, or plugging in one-for-one synonym-substitutes) or excessive reliance on quotation is unacceptable in final-draft doctoral work in composition and rhetoric--and in publications in the field, as well.

Proofread your written work carefully. Mechanical and grammatical errors such as comma splices, sentence fragments, dangling modifiers, incorrect punctuation, and misspellings are also unacceptable in the work of candidates for the Ph.D. in composition and rhetoric. All of us make such errors from time to time, but none of us can afford to become known for them.

1. Bourdieu, Pierre. Language and Symbolic Power. Ed. John B. Thompson. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1993.
2. Brandt, Deborah. Literacy in American Lives. Cambridge UP, 2001.
3. Burke, Lucy, Tony Crowley, and Alan Girvin, eds. The Routledge Language and Cultural Theory Reader. New York: Routledge, 2000.
4. Du Bois, W.E.B. The Education of Black People: Ten Critiques, 1906-1960. Ed. Herbert Aptheker. New York: Monthly Review P, 2001.
5. Parks, Stephen. Class Politics: The Movement for the Students' Right to Their Own Language. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2000.
6. Pennycook, Alastair. Critical Applied Linguistics: A Critical Introduction. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2001.

Required articles

1. Friend, Christy, and Marc Minsker. "Merit vs. Diversity? A Simulation Exercise Introducing Students to Ethical Arguments." Kairos 7.2 (Summer 2002).
2. McCarthy, Cameron, Michael D. Giardina, Susan Juanita Harewood, and Jin-Kyung Park. "Contesting Culture: Identity and Curriculum Dilemmas in the Age of Globalization, Postcolonialism, and Multiplicity." Harvard Educational Review 73.3 (Fall 2003): 449-465.
3. Schueller, Malini Johar. "Articulations of African-Americanism in South Asian Postcolonial Theory." Cultural Critique 55 (2003): 35-62.
4. Sheils, Merrill. "Why Johnny Can't Write." Newsweek 92 (8 December 1975): 58-65.

Recommended reading

Each student in the course will read and report on two of these books during the semester:

1. Brodkey, Linda. Writing Permitted in Designated Areas Only. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P, 1996.
2. Chiseri-Strater, Elizabeth. Academic Literacies: The Public and Private Discourse of University Students. Boynton/Cook, 1990.
3. Clark, Urzula. War Words: Language, History and the Disciplining of English. New York: Elsevier, 2001.
4. Delpit, Lisa. Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom. New York: New Press, 1995.
5. Dunn, Patricia A. Talking Sketching Moving: Multiple Literacies in the Teaching of Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 2001.
6. Flannery, Kathryn T. The Emperor's New Clothes: Literature, Literacy, and the Ideology of Style. U Pittsburgh P, 1995.
7. Fox, Tom. Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.
8. Gee, James Paul, Glynda Hull, and Colin Lankshear. The New Work Order: Behind the Language of the New Capitalism. Westview, 1996.
9. Gee, James Paul. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology in Discourses. 2nd ed. Bristol, PA: Taylor and Francis, 1996.
10. Haas, Christina. Writing Technology: Studies on the Materiality of Literacy. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1996.
11. Havelock, Eric. The Literate Revolution in Greece and Its Cultural Consequences. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1982.
12. Heath, Shirley Brice. Ways with Words: Language, Life, and Work in Communities and Classrooms. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1983.
13. hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Duke UP, 1994.
14. Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities. New York: Crown, 1991.
15. Kress, Gunther. Before Writing: Rethinking the Paths to Literacy. New York: Routledge, 1997.
16. Nettle, Daniel, and Suzanne Romaine. Vanishing Voices: The Extinction of the World's Languages. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.
17. Pennycook, Alastair. The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language. London: Longman, 1994.
18. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.
19. Rodby, Judith. Appropriating Literacy: Writing and Reading in English as a Second Language. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1992.
20. Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America's Underprepared. New York: Free Press, 1989.
21. Royster, Jacqueline Jones. Traces of a Stream: Literacy and Social Change Among African American Women. U Pittsburgh P, 2000.
22. Scribner, Sylvia, and Michael Cole. The Psychology of Literacy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981.
23. Smitherman, Geneva. Talkin that Talk: African American Language and Culture. New York: Routledge, 1999.
24. Street, Brian V. Social Literacies: Critical Approaches to Literacy in Development, Ethnography and Education. New York: Longman, 1995.
25. Stuckey, J. Elspeth. The Violence of Literacy. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann/Boynton-Cook, 1991.
26. Welch, Kathleen E. Electric Rhetoric: Classical Rhetoric, Oralism, and a New Literacy. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1999.
27. Yagelski, Robert P. Literacy Matters: Writing and Reading the Social Self. Teachers College P, 1999.

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