Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives

Foreword: Defining Composition Studies . . . Again, and Again

f o r E w o r d Defining Composition Studies . . . Again, and Again Andrea A. Lunsford Some fifteen years ago, Lynn Bloom, Don Daiker, and Ed White published Composition in the Twenty-first Century: Crisis and Change, a collection of essays from a conference by the same name that had been, according to the editors’ preface, three years in the making and that had a strong impact on the field. Their volume still makes for instructive reading, perhaps especially with fifteen years’ hindsight. Hoping to chart a “new geography of composition” (2), the editors and writers of this volume (including Stephen North, Shirley Brice Heath, David Bartholomae, Linda Flower, James Berlin, Anne Gere, James Slevin, and Peter Elbow) took on a number of then-pressing questions, as indicated by a selection of section titles: • “What Is Composition and Why Do We Teach It?” • “What Have We Learned from the Past and How Can It Shape the Future of Composition?” • “Who Will Assess Composition in the 21st Century and How Will They Assess It?” • “What Issues Will Writing Program Administration Confront in the 21st Century?” • “Who Should Teach Composition and What Should They Know?” • “What Direction Will Research in Composition Take and How Will Research Affect Teaching?” • “What Political and Social Issues Will Shape Composition in the Future?” • “What Will Be the Meaning of Literate Action and Intellectual Property?” viii ExP LORI N G C OM P OSI T I ON ST U D I ES In closing the volume, Lynn Bloom notes that conference attendees approached the new century “far from complacent about the past, uncomfortable with the present, uneasy about the future.” Taken together, she says, the essays in the volume recognized this state of mind and, in addressing the questions above, demonstrated “the need for a new map to provide direction through territory that superficially looks like familiar terrain” but that is, in some important ways, still “terra incognita” (273). Bloom signs off with a haunting image of the “map of the universe of composition at the emergence of the 21st century” as an echo of “Escher’s engraving of one hand drawing another hand. At first glance, the hands look like mirror images of one another; they are not. Nor is either image finished, though initially it appears to be. The process of conceiving, constructing, changing any field is ongoing, dynamic; it represents a world of hope, a world without end” (277). As the Bloom, Daiker, and White volume demonstrates, composition or writing studies has been working on maps of its territory for a long time, often in ongoing and dynamic ways. In fact, a search of the literature will turn up dozens of attempts to map the field along with its theories , objects of study, methods, and pedagogies, at least from the 1960s through the end of the twentieth century. We have been, and perhaps continue to be, much like that one hand attempting to draw another. In Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, and Perspectives, editors Ritter and Matsuda are in intertextual conversation with these earlier mapping expeditions and particularly with Bloom, Daiker, and White’s 1996 volume. Certainly they continue the search for definitions—of the nature of first-year writing (Downs and Wardle), of basic writing (Adler-Kassner and Harrington), and of writing across the curriculum (Malenczyk). And this collection also addresses methodological issues (Chiseri-Strater; L’Epplantenier and Mastrangelo; and Hawisher and Selfe) as well as concerns related to support for and assessment of writing and learning (Donahue; Fitzgerald; Estrem and Reid; Gunner; Yancey; Matsuda; Peeples and Hart-Davidson). Yet while this volume explores a number of the same issues and asks some of the same questions as those posed by Bloom, Daiker, and White a decade and a half ago, Ritter and Matsuda’s volume focuses much more specifically on the role of research in responding to such questions. As a result, Exploring Composition Studies aims to map a scholarly agenda for writing studies in the coming years. While all the essays here provide nutritious food for thought, to my mind several offer particularly compelling Foreword ix challenges to long-held assumptions. In “Teaching Composition in a Multilingual World: Second Language Writing in Composition Studies,” Paul Matsuda points toward the global linguistic and cultural turn that composition must make—and is indeed slowly beginning to make, with his leadership. A second essay highlighting the challenges of literacy and globalization...