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From the Editor 245
College English, Volume 75, Number 3, January 2013
From the Editor
E
Kelly Ritter
very so often, the stars align and the submissions we get speak to one another—unintentionally—in very productive ways. Generally, my quest is to assemble issues that cohere on some level, or start a thread of related questions, quests, or even controversies for readers to enjoy across issues during the publication
year. But rarely—at least so far in my editorship—have article submissions also come to me in a sequence that allows them to appear side by side in a single issue, in direct dialogue. The issue you are holding represents one of these rare, fortuitous moments, when we are able to showcase two article pairings that became, in rhetorical terms, a kairotic moment. One of these pairings is on basic writing and the other, on religious discourse and first-year writing.
I think one could safely argue that both religious discourse in the writing classroom and basic writing as reflective of local or national political agendas are frequently marginalized subjects of study in the field of rhetoric and composition. Now, certainly our field has seen fine scholarship in both of these areas, and our classrooms and programs are all the better for this scholarship. But when we talk about rhetoric and composition in the university (or in the supermarket, or in our neighborhood gatherings), I am certainly far less likely to hear informed and sustained conversation on either of these topics, outside of the polemical kind. I therefore see a kinship not just inside, but also between, each of this issue’s two pairings. Basic writers are often regarded as “different” or “difficult” or “not fitting” in the typi-cal writing classroom (whatever that is), and the political response to their needs is often fraught with anxieties over access, standards, and community values (both the university’s and the public’s). First-year writers with strong religious views, or whose academic identity aims to be built upon their faith in any number of ways, are also seen as different, difficult, or out of place—at least in secular institutions. And public institutions often struggle with the balance between respectful regard and the infamous church-state line in the delivery of a public education. Basic writers and writers of openly expressed faith can share that hot-potato status in first-year
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246 College English
writing programs, therefore, and can be profoundly affected by the ways in which the nonacademic public affords them agency inside or outside the “mainstream” college or university community.
From a purely selfish perspective, I’m especially interested in this issue of Col-lege English as a reader because—as many of you know—basic writing scholarship is near and dear to my heart. But I’m also interested because religious discourse and writing instruction is something I would like to learn more about, especially as a teacher who finds herself transplanted to the South, where faith is fairly important to many of my institution’s students. Plus—my own predilections aside—I hope that if nothing else, our field’s journals help readers like me learn more about the areas of research that they feel they should know something about, and, ideally, understand.
I am thus pleased to be able to showcase four very thoughtful and, I think, thought-provoking pieces on these two types of marginalized writers in the academy. Jeffrey Ringer’s “The Consequences of Integrating Faith into Academic Writing” uses Kenneth Burke’s concept of casuistic stretching, or “one introduces new prin-ciples while theoretically remaining faithful to old principles” (qtd. on p. 274) to better understand the rhetorical strategies and writerly positioning of his evangelical first-year student “Austin.” Ringer argues that “construct[ing] a discoursal identity [. . .] makes it possible for Austin to reenvision his evangelical identity in pluralistic terms” (291) while noting that a good deal more research—developed cautiously, and without assuming any existing students (such as Austin) can serve as singular mod-els—is needed into faith-based discourse in the writing classroom. Comparatively, T J Geiger II’s article, “Unpredictable Encounters: Religious Discourse, Sexuality, and the Free Exercise of Rhetoric,” is concerned with religious discourse in first-year writing, but insofar as it intersects with sexual identities, particularly as they are theorized in a cultural studies-based writing curriculum (in this case, at Syracuse University). Geiger contends that “one assumption the field makes about the value of religion in the classroom [is that] some students bring religion with them as an identity with attendant rhetorical resources. In particular, a topos of religion as per-sonal is privileged” (250). He thus puts forward the need for “a pedagogical option that takes religion seriously as a topic and identity, but that does not necessarily start from or privilege students’ personal experience with religion,” and his employment of the free exercise of rhetoric allows him to “understand religion as both a personal commitment and a discursive field with which believers and nonbelievers alike can (and, at times, must) engage” (250).
Following these two articles, readers will find Joyce Olewski Inman’s “‘Standard’ Issue: Public Discourse, Ayers v. Fordice, and the Dilemma of the Basic Writer” and David Nielsen and Patrick Sullivan’s “‘Ability to Benefit’: Making Forward-Looking Decisions about Our Most Underprepared Students.” Both Inman and Sullivan and
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From the Editor 247
Nielsen cast their subject (basic writers) in the context of cultural and political as-sumptions about these writers (in Inman’s article, through the Ayers v. Fordice case regarding desegregation in Mississippi, a case that lasted over twenty-five years from initial filing in 1975 to final decision in 2001; in Sullivan and Nielsen’s article, through the notion of “ability to benefit” as a 2001 federal guideline that lingers on campuses today regarding the award of financial aid). Whereas Sullivan and Nielsen’s article interrogates the very nomenclature of ability to benefit using both local research from their own community college and recent scholarship on basic writing, Inman takes an archival approach through a close investigation of this important case itself, noting in particular the public response to Ayers v. Fordice in order to “initiate a conversation regarding how media and community responses to such legal discourse frame writing programming at the local level” (299). But both articles question the public regard for students whose literacy levels—whether as constructed by a racist public or by a hands-off government—are seen as beyond or below the reasonable measures a community can and should take to educate its citizens. Inman and Sul-livan and Nielsen both question why basic writers are regarded en masse rather than as individuals, and what happens when race and class are added in as critical factors in educational practices.
This issue of CE will, I hope, leave our readers ready to enliven and inform the campus or community conversation that’s already taking place regarding student writers—especially the writers discussed in this issue, who fall just outside the main-stream. And for those of you wanting more dialogue on the positive and negative intersections of campus and community (or communities, as the case may be), and how rhetoric and composition as a field often starts those dialogues, I hope these articles will be a little bit of what you are looking for, too. Happy reading.
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