Rhetoric and Writing

Communication to a global audience presents a number of new challenges; writers seeking to connect with individuals from many different cultures must rethink their concept of audience. They must also prepare to address friction that may arise from cross-cultural rhetorical situations, variation in available technology and in access between interlocutors, and disparate legal environments. "Thinking Globally, Composing Locally" explores how writing and its pedagogy should adapt to the ever-expanding environment of international online communication.  The volume offers a pedagogical framework that addresses three interconnected and overarching objectives: using online media to contact audiences from other cultures to share ideas; presenting ideas in a manner that invites audiences from other cultures to recognize, understand, and convey or act upon them; and composing ideas to connect with global audiences to engage in ongoing and meaningful exchanges via online media. Chapters explore a diverse range of pedagogical techniques and online forums used in global distance education.

This article (collaboratively written by Vani Kannan, Alexis Martinez, and Shyrlene Hernandez) shares an upper-division writing course's struggle to be accountable to both the #MeToo movement and the fight for Ethnic Studies in Tucson. These movements collided in our class after we planned a campus screening of the film PRECIOUS KNOWLEDGE, which chronicles the student-led movement to save the Tucson High School Mexican American studies program, and then received news that the director had sexually assaulted one of the student-activists in the film. In this article, collaboratively-written by the professor teaching the course and two students in it, we share our accountability process, and concrete methods for social-movement-accountability in the writing classroom.

Studying writing in higher education is codified in first-year requirements as a thing you learn prior to content—prior to history, literature, and so on. In the US context, professors, administrators, and even students often believe writing is a thing they should have learned before coming to college, and studying writing is therefore a regrettable corrective. But writing is not a thing people should already have learned. Research tells us that learning to write is a lifelong process. It is not a thing that should have already been learned—ever. Therefore, I advocate for more people in higher education to take up the study of writing as a necessary part of what they teach and study. But even for people who prefer not to study writing, it is still an opportune time to reorient our understandings of what writing in colleges and universities should be. It is time to shed the negative sense that writing instruction equals fixing deficiencies, and realize that studying writing is a crucial, and ongoing, process for students and faculty alike.