Full Description

Situated Stories contributes in important ways to the ongoing public conversation about the nature of contemporary society.
—Composition Studies

Situated Stories seeks to enlarge our research community by expanding on both the questions we ask and the ways we go about answering those questions. Emily Decker and Kathleen Geissler believe that writing courses are sites for mutual negotiation, places where people from all kinds of backgrounds confront the dominant institutional values. In presenting these investigations, their book calls attention to the diverse students in today's classrooms and to the pedagogical consequences of acknowledging this diversity.

The authors of these chapters introduce us to some new dimensions of composition studies. They describe the issues, challenges, and aspirations of a variety of writers; they share their struggles to define what it means to teach composition; they reflect on what it means to do research. United in their commitment to help students grow, to claim a place in the academy, to develop effective voices, all of these instructors have struggled to find the right names for things. Their articles offer new definitions of meaningful questions—and of legitimate answers—all the time helping to define what it means to truly value diversity.

Additional Resource Information

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Contents

Contents:
I. Composing Research/Valuing Diversity
1. Indiscretions: A Story of Investigating Gender and Literacy, S. Rose
2. Portfolio Assessment and the Construction of High School Writing Instruction, R. Herter
3. "Getting It": When What Is Not Said Is the Most Important Data, H. Fox
II. Dimensions of Diversity
4. "They've Got the Power-They're Hearing": Case Studies of Deaf Student Writers at Gallaudet University, B. Brueggemann
5. Going for Broke: Valuing Differences in the Classroom, R. Moreno
6. Danger Zones: Risk and Resistance in the Writing Histories of Returning Adult Women, A. Aronson
7. The Unclaimed Self: Valuing Lesbian and Gay Diversity in the Writing Environment, P. Olano
8. The Role of Response, S. Ebest
9. The Morrises: A Study of One Family's Writing, C. Chapman
10. Item 50: Dialect Diversity and Teacher Preparation, T. Lardner 11. English-Yours, Mine, or Ours: Language Teaching and the Needs of "Nonnative" Speakers of English, Y. Chiang
III. Valuing Diversity: Next Steps
12. Multiple Languages, Multiple Literacies, A. Roy
13. Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts, and Differences, D. Davies
14. Women Students' Autobiographical Writing: The Rhetoric of Discovery and Defiance, J. Ritchie, M. Kaur & B. Choo