History Bump

Aleshia, you posted this a week ago. What thinking have you done about it since then? You've indicated here an interest in female African American compositionists; are you ready to go with that? All the topic/titles you list are worth investigating, though some lend themselves better to a 611 course project than do others:
--Memoria: The Forgotten Key, Allowing Access to Information Technology Through Composition: Probably just too hard to undertake for this course, unless you've already laid some of the groundwork.
--The Solitary Journey of Literacy: A Self-Reflective History: Ditto. Sounds like a promising dissertation topic, though.
--20th Century African American Women Rhetoricians and their Contributions to Composition Studies: very do-able. It's a broad topic, but that's useful for a first-year student to do. It would give you a research base that you could continue to build on after this course is over. Jacqueline Jones Royster and Geneva Smitherman are two prominent compositionists whom you'd want to include. Go to CompPile to generate a bibliography of their publications; for Royster, you'll want to include:
Royster, Jacqueline Jones. "When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own." College Composition and Communication 47.1 (February 1996): 29-40.
Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Jean C. Williams. "History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 50.4 (June 1999): 563-585.
I'm emailing you a Smitherman bibliography. It's quite long, but it's not complete.
One possible thing to do here would be to do a historical review of the development of one African American compositionist's work. Another would be to situate one or more of these compositionists in the larger field, looking at how their work was (or was not) in dialogue with the field—whether, for example, it was bracketed by other scholars, embraced by them, whatever. Yet another possibility would be to look at the College Language Association journal for a selected number of years, simply describing what women were contributing to that journal. Any of these projects would be very useful and acceptable. The latter one would be original research that you could eventually publish.
--Feminist Discourse on Pedagogy: African American Women Access to Composition Studies. Interesting. How would you investigate it? In women's studies there's been considerable scholarship on the ways in which 20th-century white feminists assumed themselves as the generic model of woman. It would be interesting to pursue that question specific to the early feminist pedagogy scholarship in composition studies. Elisa, for example,
--Comparitive Survey of 19th and 20th Century African American Women Contributions to Composition Studies: To big for a course project, but a fabulous dissertation. Working on the "20th Century African American Women Rhetoricians and their Contributions to Composition Studies" project would establish some of the groundwork for this.