Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/ dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have…

In this article, the author uses storytelling to retell moments in the history of our field. Using personal anecdote alongside critical race theory and critical whiteness studies, she critiques the Writing About Writing movement by re-situating it in history: first narrating it as a contemporary of the Translingualism movement, and then comparing…

This symposium, "Barack Obama's Significance for Rhetoric and Composition," aims to provoke and renew disciplinary conversations about the meaning of an age now nearly past, as well as to pose questions that resonate for presidential rhetoric generally. It includes: (1) "Obama's Rhetoric: Black Talk Flow, White Folk Fluent"…

For the past few decades, composition researchers have devoted critical attention to studying the ways that African American students employ Africanized linguistic and rhetorical patterns successfully in expository writing situations. More recently, research has focused on the use of African-based rhetorical patterns, since the use of African…

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for "high-risk" minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary…

This essay examines a Brooklyn College-based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC's 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday…

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students' vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may,…

"Freedom Schooling" looks at a Freedom School class taught by Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (Kwame Ture). Specifically, this article explores the philosophies of language and education that informed this class and the organic relationship fostered between the classroom and the political goals of African American communities during the…