"Story Culture Live: Black American Story Spaces as Actionable Antiracism Work," was a keynote given at the Northeast Writing Centers Association Conference at the University of New Hampshire in spring 2023. The keynote details the genesis of my podcast, "Story Culture Live," which reimagines storytelling as actionable activism…

In face-to-face conversation, it's easy to react with shock and moralism to the incivility enabled by social media, easy to lament that we live in an era when communication has gone wrong. The digital era, however has also reinvigorated voice--both written and spoken--in other, less toxic, ways. We've seen a resurgence in oral composition (think:…

Courses: Persuasion; Persuasive Speaking. Objectives: Students will demonstrate the ability to apply persuasive concepts in constructing persuasive messages creatively, and students will present and analyze their persuasive messages.

The study of comics is an important part of the project of critiquing normative assumptions underlying multimodality and composition. Extending the efforts of the authors of "Multimodality in Motion"--which explains that "multimodality as it is commonly used implies an ableist understanding of the human composer" (Yergeau et…

To illustrate how genre pedagogy and public writing pedagogy can inform one another, this program profile describes the second-semester composition course at University of North Dakota, ENGL 130: College Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences. In this course, genre works as a rhetorical bridge across an interlinked sequence of research,…

Existing pedagogical approaches to research source use commonly frame sources as materials to be incorporated "into" texts. The worknets project presented in this article provides an alternative concerned with slowly tracing associations "along" semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric aspects of the research source…

A fundamental challenge that all public speakers face is getting and keeping the attention of audiences. Because audiences absorb large amounts of talk with little chance of taking the floor, the potential for inattentiveness and boredom is significant. In conversational interchanges, the brief duration of speaking turns and regular transfers of…

This essay introduces a novel way to conceptualize writerly invention -- invention as adopting a non-intentional intellectual stance wherein heuristics are experienced as acting upon the writer as opposed to being enacted by the writer. This view of invention complicates and extends the traditional, Aristotelian view of invention as discreet…

Long, unreadable sentences in her students' essays led Rachel Foster to improve her post-16 students' punctuation. Her journey resulted, however, in more than improved punctuation. It led her to theorise what historians are really doing in their "signpost sentences". She found herself showing students how an academic historian…

Setting out to teach Magna Carta to the full attainment range in Year 7, Mark King decided to choose a question that reflected real scholarly debates and also to ensure that pupils held enough knowledge in long-term memory to be able to think about that question meaningfully. As he gradually prepared his pupils to produce their own causation…

The use of Creative Writing methodologies and techniques in university Composition classes has recently become an element of contention, namely questioning whether or not creativity for composition and rhetoric curriculum is detrimental or productive for student learning. This essay discusses the beneficial aspects of using Creative Writing form,…

Too often, the authors assert, discussion of controversial issues in high school classrooms is channeled through the teacher, rather than engaging students in discussion with one another. Teachers fear that students won't know how to talk to one another productively about issues, or that they'll end up in shouting matches. But when…

On 9 April 1930, a philanthropist called Edward Harkness donated millions of dollars to the Phillips Exeter Academy in the USA. He hoped that his donation could be used to find a new way for students to sit around a table with their teacher and "feel encouraged to speak up". This led to the development of what is now known as the…

Seventh and 8th grade English-learners in selected urban schools will soon dive into some of the most celebrated speeches in U.S. history. They'll dissect, for example, Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream," and Robert F. Kennedy's "On the Death of Martin Luther King." Though their…

Digital oratory can be described as thesis-driven, vocal, embodied public address that is housed within (online) new media platforms (and that ideally takes advantage of the developing/flux-laden conventions that the online video context provides). This new form of public address lies somewhere between traditional speech-giving and media…