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This chapter, a collection of the thirteen scholars that provided their perspectives and philosophies on first-year composition, has provided us with a consensus with composition pedagogy, that there is no consensus with composition pedagogy. Yes, philosophically, one could argue that all of the scholars want their students to learn how to write and communicate effectively, but that is an entirely too broad lens to look through. What this particular chapter has provided us is a glimpse at the sheer enormity and complexity of teaching composition. Each scholar expressed their core beliefs in what they felt was important to them as instructors but to their students, the ones that will take what they have learned from these instructors and go out into the world.

Should we expect a "one-size-fits-all" approach to composition? In an earlier discussion, I essentially said that very thing. It was born out of frustration with a lack of, in my opinion, coherency and consistency in instruction. Wouldn't some students be better writers than others because of the quality of their instructors? Wouldn't some students be unfamiliar with certain types of writing, persuasion, technical, etc because, in their course, they weren't exposed to it? Shouldn't there be a national standard for all instructors to follow to ensure every student receives the same compositional instruction?

The answer is no.

Just like a painter, or a musician, every writer is different. A person's uniqueness is what makes a writer a writer, regardless of his/her abilities, style of writing, topics they write, or field of writing they choose. So why should instruction be cookie-cutter perfect, if a student's inner identity will dictate what and how they write anyway? They shouldn't, and neither should instructors create Hemmingway or Morrison clones. Just as their students come to their classroom with unique perspectives, experiences, and philosophies, so do our instructors.

What these scholars have shown is that there is no one way, no perfect way in which to write or to teach to write. What they have done though is to find ways to connect with their students, to provide them with the clearance to fly and fall, to learn and reinvent, to innovate and collaborate. Most of these instructors taught their students that communication is more about discovery, rediscovery, and self-discovery; about flexibility and integration, about culture and community, and about themselves and others. They taught them to believe that anything is possible.

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The Rise of the Online Writing Classroom...Kase

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The Rise of the Online Writing Classroom...Kase

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The article, from the standpoint of 2013 is meant to serve as a reflective period of the past decade or so. The writers, Griffin and Minter examine how technology has moved to where it is at (2013) and how composition pedagogy has still not fully embraced the emerging technologies. They bring up a number of institutional, cultural, and socioeconomic issues that have been addressed this semester a number of times. Additionally, they go through the innovative ideas that have emerged from integrating technology into a composition course, such as the use of "smartphones" and "tablets." They look at how some instructors use technology to create more meaningful connections with the students--something that was feared to be lost because of the impersonal nature of technology--through collaboration. They address the issues of institutionalized bias against abandoning traditional composition pedagogical foundations, creating a more coherent composition pedagogy, the need to continually evolve through technology, and the general realization that composition pedagogy, as a whole, must change to fit the needs of their students and the future.

Although I agree with essentially everything in this article, I guess my concern is that very little has happened in the eight years since this article was published. It was clear in this article (2013) that technology was and is the future and that the sooner we understand this, the sooner we can make real movement for the education system to fundamentally change how students write and learn and teachers educate in the current technological world we operate in.

But, I would argue that we haven't grown much at all. In fact, I feel that, in spite of all of our technological advancements in communication software, social media platforms, multimodalities, and communication mediums, we have remained stagnant. Still, too many people, educators, and institutions, are dragging their feet when it comes to full adoption and implementation in the classroom and pedagogy, one can see it in the classroom today. Yes, "smart boards" and slick educational apps are being utilized; it's nice to see, but could we do more? I think we can.

As Griffin and Minter mention in their essay, new pedagogies need to be introduced into the classroom. It's not enough to throw educators and students the "newest" education platforms (that will invariably be discarded within three years); the classroom and how we teach composition needs to be reinvented. There seems to be an unconscious disconnect between what teachers are doing in the classroom with their use of technology and the understanding that a completely new way of teaching (composition, specifically) needs to occur. That's why this article, although interesting and accurate, resonated with a thud; eight years later and very little has changed. We all realize that fundamental change needs to occur, yet were still talking about integrating technology in the classroom, utilizing it to create new communication, bridging gaps between multilingual students, and creating a more open structure of education that focuses on collaboration, eight years later.

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The reflections shared in this chapter about what first year composition is and isn't are fascinating to me. They show the complexities of the field and give a glimpse of the many varied thoughts and ideas surrounding first year composition. This chapter drives home the fact that composition is an expansive field with an abundance of different philosophies and ideologies surrounding what is or isn't the most important thing for first year composition students to know. What is most evident is that all of the scholars featured in FYC and in this chapter want to see their students succeed regardless of the methods they employ in their classroom - which no doubt more than likely applies to most, if not all, who find themselves teaching first year composition.

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Reflections on “Red Flags of Dissent: Decoloniality, Transrhetoricity, and Local Differences of Race” by Rachel C. Jackson

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Reflections on “Red Flags of Dissent: Decoloniality, Transrhetoricity, and Local Differences of Race” by Rachel C. Jackson

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Throughout this article Jackson examines transrhetoricity - which she defines as an “analytical method and theoretical concept” used to “enable the observation and practice of inter-epistemic communication within pluriversal spaces and among the diverse variations of intersections occurring across them” (Jackson 79). Jackson makes it clear that these intersections should not be perceived as just two lines intersecting, but as many lines intersecting at various points (Jackson 79). Additionally, Jackson discusses how meaning shifts to and from different cultural sites given the connection they share via these intersections, and that the rhetoric resulting from the “dynamics of contact” show “pluriversal practices for deployment as decolonial strategies” (Jackson 79). Throughout this article I was amazed by the amount of words and terms that I had never heard of before, and was grateful for Jackson's detailed definitions as they helped provide context for what she is discussing throughout the article. Jackson gives her readers a lot to consider about the different forms of rhetoric, as well as colonialism/decolonialism, and how they are interconnected.

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Reflections on and Connections with Rice's "Falafel Memories" & My Own Experience with Food Writing

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Reflections on and Connections with Rice's "Falafel Memories" & My Own Experience with Food Writing

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The abstract of this essay piqued my interest right away as I had never consciously thought about a pedagogy for food writing before. As I continued reading it I was reminded of an essay that I wrote per the request of one of my undergraduate professors. This professor ran an online journal that features essays that are read by K-12 and college students in an effort to help them gain digital literacy, as well as a deeper understanding of what it means to be a global citizen.

Rice's argument about how writing about food opens itself up to exploring a larger issue was something that I connected with, as when I wrote my essay I found myself not just focusing on the food I was writing about, but the traditions behind it and how something like a traditional recipe can be used as a way to connect with the past.

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The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy

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Food and the World - A Stollen Tradition - by Gabrielle Trelstad . The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports

In the 1800s, some of my ancestors immigrated to the United States from Germany. Among the things that they brought over from Germany was a Christmas tradition - Stollen. Stollen is a German bread containing a variety of fruits, nuts, spices, and flavorings. In Germany it is traditionally baked and served during Christmas time.

My maternal grandmother was very proud of this Stollen tradition, and every year at Christmas time she would make Stollen for each of her six children and their families. She would make multiple variations of Stollen in order to meet the different tastes of her children. The variation that my family would get consisted of nuts and raisins being added to the bread, omitting the candied fruit that is typically added.

While I can imagine that making multiple versions of Stollen must have been quite an undertaking, considering what a labor of love making homemade bread is, my grandmother never seemed to complain. I can't help but think that she was so willing to make Stollen in varied forms each year as a way to connect her children and grandchildren with her parents and grandparents, as well as the homeland that her grandparents left behind.

Gabrielle is a student of History and English, and is a member of the class of 2020.
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Please contact Professor Liang if you wish to write for The North Star Reports

See also, our Facebook page with curated news articles at http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports
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The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy ( http://NorthStarReports.org) is a student edited and student authored open access publication centered around the themes of global and historical connections. Our guiding philosophy is that those of us who are fortunate enough to receive an education and to travel our planet are ethically bound to share our knowledge with those who cannot afford to do so. Therefore, creating virtual and actual communities of learning between college and K-12 classes are integral to our mission. In five years we have published over 300 articles covering all habitable continents and a variety of topics ranging from history and politics, food and popular culture, to global inequities to complex identities. These articles are read by K-12 and college students. Our volunteer student editors and writers come from Nursing to Biology, Physical Therapy to Business, and remarkably, many of our student editors and writers have long graduated from college. In addition to our main site, we also curate a Facebook page dedicated to annotated news articles selected by our student editors ( http://www.facebook.com/NorthStarReports). We have an all volunteer staff. The North Star Reports is sponsored and published by Professor Hong-Ming Liang and NSR Student Editors and Writers. For a brief summary of our history, please see the American Historical Association's Perspectives on History, at: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2013/1305/Opening-The-Middle-Ground-Journal.cfm

Professor Hong-Ming Liang, Ph.D., Editor-in-Chief and Publisher, The North Star Reports. Kathryn Marquis Hirsch, Managing Editor, The North Star Reports. Ellie Swanson and Marin Ekstrom, Assistant Managing Editors, The North Star Reports.

(c) 2012-present The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy http://NorthStarReports.org ISSN: 2377-908X The NSR is fully funded by an annual donation from Professor Liang. The NSR is sponsored and published by Professor Hong-Ming Liang, NSR Student Editors and Writers. See Masthead for our not-for-profit educational open- access policy.

Filed under Professor Hong-Ming Liang

Tagged as Editor-in-Chief, Europe, family and world history, food, Food and the World, Germany, Home Office, identity, Immigration Stories, migration, rituals

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Food and the World - A Stollen Tradition - by Gabrielle Trelstad . The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports

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Food and the World - A Stollen Tradition - by Gabrielle Trelstad . The North Star Reports: Global Citizenship and Digital Literacy, at NorthStarReports.org and facebook.com/NorthStarReports In the 1800s, some of my ancestors immigrated to the United States from Germany. Among the things that they brought over from Germany was a Christmas tradition - Stollen....

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Nothing is more powerful than the sense of smell. Rice discusses a common topic near and dear to all of us: food. He brings us in with a great anecdote, that, to some degree, we can all relate with. Additionally, he does bring up a valid point in that the topic of food is rarely if ever brought up or examined in scholarly work. Part of his argument is that food is not merely a topic of the process but can be a part of a larger story that enables actual academic discourse. I don't mean that professors will be arguing over New York or Chicago style pizzas (Chicago's is more of a pie, anyway), but that one could use food as their rhetorical device to talk about a larger issue, race, culture, humanity, etc; food is just the vehicle to get us there.

Rice mentioned in his piece Marcel Proust's Remembrance of Things Past,--a quick read if you have a spare evening-how his story really started upon the memory of a smell from food. Is it really that uncommon for the smell to be such a great invoker of memories? I remember picking a coffee mug out of my cabinets and the slightest whiff from the mug immediately sent me back to my grandmother's house (it was one of her old mugs; washed of course), and I was cloaked in sadness thinking about her (She had died five years earlier).

Food has always been a great intersection for family and friends; yet we hardly read about them in literature, and, as Rice mentioned in the essay, it has been all but invisible in scholarly work. Maybe this essay will serve as a clarion for others to explore the culinary world with a more critical lens on how it can be incorporated into other literary topics.

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Chapter 13 of FYC does an excellent job of highlighting the aspects of composition that we do not need to focus on. The beginning of this chapter presents the parts of composition that were not heavily talked about within this book and while the book is pointing out these aspects in an effort to show that these are important aspects that should be covered but we're not, I feel that these not being talked about emboldens the fact that these tenents are significantly less important than those that were talked about within this book. If grammatical conventions were so important their importance would not simply rely on the fact that writing using a certain style is only important to “satisfy readers expectations”. I believe we are in an era that requires teachers to engage students by showing them how engaging the act of writing is. We must do this so that they can think and write to help build a better world. If we bog them down with conventions that they will learn along the way, we are wasting the short time we have to make a lasting impact.

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READING RISK SCIENCE DIRECT: Computers and Composition

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READING RISK SCIENCE DIRECT: Computers and Composition

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The article I read on my own that I chose this week came out of the Science Direct journal. it was titled  “Reading Risk: Preparing Students to Develop Critical Literacy and Advocate for Privacy in Digital Space".  This article focuses heavily on surveillance capitalism and the prevailing risks of using social media and other online platforms that seek to sell users’ data at the expense of their privacy. The discussion within this article calls writing teachers into action and promotes the idea of teaching students about these risks. this article hopes to push writing teachers into developing a curriculum that helps students advocate for their rights in online spaces. it is yet another example of using critical thinking and reflective strategies in order to make students more aware of their consumption habits. as English teachers, we have an endless array of opportunities in which to teach students about critical thinking. critical thinking is a skill that can help students in all aspects of their life most importantly it can help keep them safe and hopefully he can help them not be taken advantage of.

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I read “Composing With Sound” by Ceraso and Ahern. I loved the two assignments they talked about because I have a side hustle as a sound designer and have been looking for a way to include some of the tools I own in a lesson. I think that the two lessons discussed here make for really interesting activities in which to engage students in composition. All of the articles we have read over the course of the semester have given me so many ideas about the different ways composition can be presented. It makes me want to build a curriculum where we study what compostion entails in every mode. Students would then hopefully be engaged by the novelty of exploring vastly different modes of composing each week, while building critical thinking skills that help them with become better writers.

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Grant: "Writing Wakan: The Lakota Pipe as Ceremonial Object" 

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Grant: "Writing Wakan: The Lakota Pipe as Ceremonial Object" 

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I couldn't get a new section added here, so I'm adding this under the other "Objects" option. I read this one because I"m also in Dr. Westerman's Native American Literature course right now, so I was interested to see how this composition theory intersected with what we've discussed in that course.

Although it doesn't get into the heart of the article at this stage, I really appreciated the way that Grant set this article up by placing indigenous scholarship in what he is careful to identify as Scott Lyon's "rhetorical sovereignty"-- something that is not just a synonym for "agency": "Sovereignty is, in part, the recognition that the methods, systems, materials, and even the scope of interlocutors involved are determined by the users' tradition and culture" (Grant 63). Therefore, if composition and other rhetorical studies are ONLY working in a Eurocentric approach which is built primarily according to an understanding of communication occurring between humans, we're missing emphases such as non-alphabetic literacies and material literacies of indigenous scholars (Grant 64). This alone is plenty to contemplate when approaching communications that operate under a different understanding of what that communication can look like or mean. Grant seems to also warn against sentimentalizing or dismissing the connectedness and communicative potential of non-human things-- something that can happen frequently to indigenous writers.