
Conceding Composition
A Crooked History of Composition's Institutional Fortunes
Ryan Skinnell(Author)
Utah State University Press
Published on 1. September 2016
Book
Paperback/Softback
208 pages
978-1-60732-504-8 (ISBN)
Description
First-year composition became the most common course in American higher education not because it could "fix" underprepared student writers, but because it has historically served significant institutional interests. That is, it can be "conceded" in multiple ways to help institutions solve political, promotional, and financial problems. Conceding Composition is a wide-ranging historical examination of composition's evolving institutional value in American higher education over the course of nearly a century. Based on extensive archival research conducted at six American universities and using the specific cases of institutional mission, regional accreditation, and federal funding, this study demonstrates that administrators and faculty have introduced, reformed, maintained, threatened, or eliminated composition as part of negotiations related to nondisciplinary institutional exigencies. Viewing composition from this perspective, author Ryan Skinnell raises new questions about why composition exists in the university, how it exists, and how teachers and scholars might productively reconceive first-year composition in light of its institutional functions. The book considers the rhetorical, political, organizational, institutional, and promotional options conceding composition opened up for institutions of higher education and considers what the first-year course and the discipline might look like with composition's transience reimagined not as a barrier but as a consummate institutional value.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Logan
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Interest Age: From 18 to 99 years
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Dimensions
Height: 229 mm
Width: 152 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
Weight
308 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-60732-504-8 (9781607325048)
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Schweitzer Classification
Person
Ryan Skinnell is assistant professor of rhetoric and composition and assistant writing program administrator in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San José State University. He is a coeditor of What We Wish We'd Known: Negotiating Graduate School, and his research has appeared in Composition Studies, Enculturation, JAC, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and edited collections.