Composition and education have long questioned a central premise of the academy and university life in higher education: What is a classroom? Recent research published in Psychological Science steers us toward a premise that is of paramount interest to our discipline. What would it mean for the natural world to serve the acting, thinking brains of our … Continue reading Can We Hold Class Outside, Professor? Nature, Cognition and Composition
A bevy of scholarship within both the sciences and the humanities have surveyed the implications presented by recent research into the human's brain's astounding and only recently-realized levels of neuroplasticicy. The brain, the body of research suggests, is not a static entity that exists in fixed and stationary configuration, but rather is malleable, changeable, pliant … Continue reading Developing Habits, Developing Minds: What Can Neuroplasticity Do For Composition?
Blame it on Oprah. Blame it on One City One Book. Blame it on the declining reading habits of ordinary Americans (as recent popular wisdom would have you believe). Just about every highschool, community center and early-college common curriculum in the past decade or so has tried out some version of a community-read initiative. SUNY Cortland, … Continue reading On the Value of “Soft Reading”
In her article published just a few weeks ago in Enculturation, Bonnie Tucker lays out a theory of what she refers to as technocapitalist disability rhetoric. Technocapitalist disability rhetoric (what I'll call TCDR), in Tucker's conception, is a familiar representation trope in which technology and engineering corporations utilize depictions of disability in an attempt to associate their … Continue reading Wired Utopia: Expanding Technocapitalist Disability Rhetorics
I've been reading a lot recently on literacy narratives, chronicles of time and transformation in which writers reflect on their past experiences reading, writing and communicating in conversation with others. I'm intrigued with what I might find myself writing were I to begin a literacy narrative project, especially considering my literacy, as it stands, is only just … Continue reading A Blast From the Past
I’d like to address the topic of Comparative Media Studies, a field N. Katherine Hayles introduces early in her 2012 book How We Think and that she revisits periodically throughout the progression of her arguments in the book. Hayles draws on a variety of examples where Comparative Media Studies (CMS from here on) is integrated into a collegiate seminar, with … Continue reading Comparative Media Studies
Lately I’ve been re-reading an old favorite I first read midway through college, right when I was just beginning to locate myself as a writer: Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book raises a number of issues I won’t even begin to detail in this post, but I wanted to pay … Continue reading Writing, Composition and Deliberate Living
Jacob Richter 