Hi all,

I'm definitely interested in seeing what we can put together for Cs related to this class' work. Rather than trying to rearticulate what my project will be about(it was hard enough the first time), I'm just going to cut and paste some of my proposal below (WARNING: not for the faint of heart). But to put it simply, I want to take a critical look at how the SRTOL movement was shaped not just by our concern for students and are respect for linguistic differences, but also for a desire to establish composition as a legitimate field of study.

Issue: I am interested in the ways that the ideological shifts within our discipline have shaped our understanding of the student writer, regardless of whether the student is deemed prepared, underprepared, or unprepared for college writing. It seems to me that the discipline’s shift from Current-Traditional (C-T) Rhetoric to a process-centered pedagogy diminished the value of a final product, emphasizing instead the rhetorical principles of invention and arrangement. This pedagogical shift is also political, for it helped the field of composition establish itself as a legitimate discipline worthy of scholarly inquiry, rather than a service course designed solely to help students write better for their other, more important, classes in the university.

All of this has an influence on students who come to the university with non-standard dialects such that if they enroll in a mainstream comp. course, they will not likely find some of the nitty-gritty language instruction they need. I plan to pay particular attention to the SRTOL movement and the rise in studies of non-standard dialects, which I believe reflect our underlying pedagogical beliefs of the student-centered classroom, and how these issues have unnecessarily relegated our professional discussion of grammar to journals and conference sessions whose audience is teachers of basic or second language writers rather than mainstream composition students.