Engaging the Language of the Academy
1 What the Academy Is
2 What Knowledge in the Academy Is
3 What Thinking like an Academic Means
Active Voices: Utilizing Campus Resources
4 What Being a Student Means
Active Voices: Understanding Different Methods of Learning
5 What Reading in College Means
6 What Writing with Authority Means
7 What an Academic Discourse Community Is
Active Voices: Sprout Up
8 What Becoming an Academic Means
9 What Knowledge Transfer Is
Active Voices: Transfer Across Student Experiences
10 What Language to Write in
Active Voices: Heritage, Identity, and Scholarship

Engaging the Language of Writing
11 What Google Translate Is in the Academy
12 What Academic Freedom Is
13 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 1)
14 What the Rhetorical Situation Is (Part 2)
Active Voices: Students Provoke National Action
15 What Counts as Text
Active Voices: Historical Monuments as Texts
16 What Argument Means
17 What Counts as Evidence
Active Voices: Alta Gracia Apparel Company
18 What a Claim Is
19 What Counterargument, Rebuttal, and Concession Are
Active Voices: Freedom of Speech on Campus
20 What Ethos, Logos, Pathos, and Kairos Are
Active Voices: #HUStands
21 What a Logical Fallacy Is
22 What Toulmin’s Model Is
23 What Rogerian Argument Is

Engaging Writing as a Process
24 What Writing as a Process Means
25 What Prewriting, Drafting, and Revising Are
26 What Peer Review Is
Active Voices: Activism Across Generations
27 What a Two-Part Title Is
28 What a Thesis Is
29 What Summary, Paraphrase, and Quotation Are
30 What Analyze, Report, and Respond Mean
31 What Synthesizing Means
Active Voices: Cougar Pantry
32 What Metatext Is
Active Voices: Students Never Stop Learning
33 What Presentation and Design Are
Active Voices: I’m Lovin’ Diversity

Engaging Research in the Academy
34 What Information Literacy Is
Active Voices: Student-led Governance
35 What Conducting Research Means
Active Voices: Research Pays It Forward
36 What Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Research Is
Active Voices: Conducting and Repurposing Research
37 What Academic Databases Are
38 What Note-Taking for Writing Means
39 What Citing Sources Means
40 What Plagiarism Is
41 What Bullshit Is
42 What Wikipedia and YouTube Are in the Academy

Engaging Writing in the Disciplines
43 What Writing in the Humanities Is
44 What Writing in the Sciences Is
Active Voices: Fossil Free Stanford
45 What Writing in the Social Sciences Is
Active Voices: Campus Pride
46 What Writing in Business, Health Sciences, and Other Applied Fields Is
Active Voices: Campus Sustainability

Bibliography
Index

• Brief chapters define key academic concepts using accessible, comprehensive examples
• Access Points encourage students to reflect on and activate their prior knowledge in new academic contexts
• Action Points prompt student application of chapter concepts via in-class activities, fieldwork, or research
• Narratives that share the text’s title, Active Voices, share real-world stories of students inspired to enact positive change

Agency, Social Justice, and Active Voices

Active Voices is written for today’s students, presenting a set of concepts that allows them to gain agency in college writing and beyond. And Active Voices is written for today’s instructors, who are knowledgeable and innovative.

People act within institutions where they know the rules, that is, understand that others have certain expectations of how things are done, or that certain patterns of speech and behavior have certain meanings, and that individuals will react with sanction or in other, less predictable ways if the implicitly formulated or formal rules are violated.

– Iris Marion Young

Welcome to Active Voices, a textbook unlike any other in that it does not seek to explicitly teach students to write but rather to offer the background and contextual knowledge they need to make the most of your instruction. By explaining important concepts briefly and through accessible examples, Active Voices ensures that the writing instruction you offer has the best chance of succeeding so that students may be agents in their own lives, whether that’s in writing their own path through college or in becoming a more informed and critically minded citizen. Agency, I believe, in a highly impersonal and rigid educational system, must be an important goal of any social justice efforts.

Active Voices is written for today’s student

According to recent research, 36 percent of students at public four-year colleges identify as black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American or Pacific Islander while 44 percent of students at public two-year colleges do. Moreover, the number of students for whom English is not their first language continues to rise as does the number of first-generation college students (National Center for Education Statistics). If you’ve been around a while, no doubt you’ve seen this growth in the numbers of what many refer to as systemically non-dominant students.
For many students, dominant and non-dominant, attending college can be highly intimidating with its byzantine administrative structures, its often bewildering and disparate expectations, and its specialized discourse systems. Those students formerly considered non-traditional are at a special disadvantage. Without knowing how the game is played, however, all students are at risk of becoming passive players in a system whose rules they only vaguely perceive. The result is disengagement and lower success rates. Active Voices is meant to help students navigate the language, structure, and values of higher education.

Active Voices is written to provide access to the context for good college writing

What I’ve found over the years is that much of the teaching that needs to happen is based on an understanding of context. For example, when we talk about academic writing, what do we mean by “academic”? When we ask students to read something, what do we mean by “read”? The same goes for conducting research, developing a claim, or analyzing evidence. Many students simply haven’t had access to those terms.

That access is what Active Voices provides, through explanations of the core ideas, terms, and concepts that form the context in which students new to the academy find themselves writing and in which you are teaching. It does not seek to replicate the teaching process nor provide a step-by-step approach to a writing process, nor even less to provide a “boxed” formula for writing. Instead, Active Voices provides the ground on which good academic writing and good instruction of academic writing can happen so that students can gain agency in shaping their own lives and education.

Active Voices is organized to activate knowledge transfer

Research on knowledge transfer, from the seminal work of Perkins and Salomon, to the 1999 book How People Learn, and more recently Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak’s Writing across Contexts, has helped shape Active Voices. Each chapter starts with the most important concept condensed to a single sentence. This approach is designed to open a conceptual door for students to the ideas explained in the chapter.

Every chapter includes “Access Points,” questions that encourage students to reflect on and activate their prior knowledge as a means of facilitating knowledge transfer. At the end of the chapter is a short summary that reinforces the main ideas in slightly more detail and which may foster forward-looking transfer as well as serve as a memory aid.

Each chapter includes “Action Points,” activities designed to help students apply the concepts so that they may broaden and deepen their knowledge. The activities range from tasks that can be accomplished quickly in class, either through conversation or use of a smart phone, to tasks that ask students to explore their world a little more carefully, either literally or virtually, to tasks that ask students to explore ideas through research. Some activities are designed to be done alone and others in groups. All of the tasks can be modified easily and many can lead to more comprehensive writing.

Because each chapter is short, students can read the selections in ten to fifteen minutes. This is important, I believe, given the dominant cognitive mode of students raised in the digital age.

Active Voices is written for today’s writing instructor

As no doubt you are painfully aware, the vast majority of writing instructors at colleges and universities teach off the tenure track. At the same time, most contingent faculty have years and years of experience. A study I conducted several years ago, “Not Just a Matter of Fairness: Adjunct Faculty and Writing Programs in Two-Year Colleges,” found that adjunct faculty at two-year colleges have an average of five years of full-time equivalent experience and many have ten or more. Of course, the same can be said of contingent faculty at four-year colleges and universities.

If you are one of these instructors, you probably feel undervalued, certainly underpaid, and probably “contingent” in the full meaning of that word. At the same time, you probably feel confident in your classrooms, teach good classes, connect with your students, get excellent reviews, and feel proud of what you do. And given your experience, you probably don’t rely on a textbook much.

If you’re one of the minority, a tenured or tenure-track faculty member teaching writing, you probably have years and years of experience as well, and probably find yourself relying less and less on textbooks to support your teaching. If you’re like me, the idea of having students buy a textbook of 800 pages or more when you assign only a very small portion seems not only impractical but unethical. Moreover, you probably find that no textbook supports your philosophy and pedagogy fully. What I found myself wanting the past several years is a text that could lay a foundation on which I could build my own course rather than a text that I had to shape my course to fit.

It’s my hope that Active Voices supports the work you do as a teacher of writing, whether undergirding long experience and developed teaching materials or helping shape a new and innovative classroom. Ultimately, it’s my hope that Active Voices, in however small measure, can support the social justice efforts you, your colleagues, and your program offer your diverse range of students. As the epigraph for this preface suggests, our students need to know rules, even the implicitly formulated ones, if they are to thrive in our institutions.

Active Voices is written for today’s students, many of whom are systemically non-dominant. It makes apparent a set of core concepts that are too often invisible to students but which, when made clear and understood, allow a student to gain agency in college and beyond. Active Voices is written for today’s instructors as well, instructors who are knowledgeable and innovative.

Access and Agency

Knowing how college works and what things mean gives you power.

In the mid-1980s, David Bartholomae, an English professor at the University of Pittsburgh, was tasked with reading essays written by incoming students to his university. These new college students were required to write an essay on some banal subject such as “What does creativity mean for you?” Depending on how well they did on those essays, they would be placed in either first-year writing or a pre-college, basic writing class.

Very quickly, Bartholomae (pronounced “Barth-ALL-o-may”) recognized that the situation was unfair. Why? Students were never informed of how their writing would be judged. They were never told who their audience was. And they were never told how they were supposed to make their argument. This is critically important because without knowing the standards by which a piece of writing is to be measured—what it’s supposed to accomplish—a writer cannot make strategic decisions about how to shape their message. Can you imagine being judged on your performance but not being told what things you were being judged on or how?

The consequence of this was that students had to “invent” a university in their minds and then write to it. So Bartholomae published his article “Inventing the University” in the Journal of Basic Writing. Since in-coming students—especially those who ended up in pre-college writing classes—had little exposure to academic writing, they had to draw upon what knowledge they had. And for these students, nearly all their knowledge about writing came from their middle- and high-school instruction and nearly everything they knew about sounding authoritative came from their personal lives, what they had gathered from school, home, and popular culture. Unfortunately, this prior knowledge did not serve them well in this new situation. They ended up “inventing” a university in their minds that was very different from the actual university their reader-judges inhabited.

It’s not hard to imagine that students from less affluent families, students of color, and students for whom English is not their first language, would likely do worse in such a writing situation. Although issues of race and class, as well as the ways language can shape identities, are never far from the surface of Bartholomae’s analysis, he chose to focus on the ways students responded to the situation and how instructors could and should change their practices. College writing instruction to this day is heavily influenced by Bartholomae’s insights.

Active Voices helps demystify the college experience

What this book is designed to do is give you the basis by which you can demystify the college experience so that you can take control of your life as a student and, ultimately, a citizen. Instead of just drawing upon old knowledge in the hope that it can provide you with guidance for this new situation, you can use what you learn here to analyze the situation you find yourself in and develop new knowledge that is better suited. You won’t have to “invent” a university out of what you know from your past experiences but can piece together a more accurate picture so that you can actively read, write, and communicate in the college world more effectively. Of course, you never entirely abandon what you know, but you can reshape it to use in the new situation. That is what the students in Bartholomae’s study did not have: a way of assessing and reshaping their past knowledge.

It’s my hope that this book will provide access to the terms, concepts, and practices that make up “the academy,” the intellectual work of colleges and universities. It’s my hope that you will read through the short chapters with peers and instructors, have open and challenging conversations about the ideas you find here, and come out feeling better prepared for all your studies, your writing classes especially. As a first-generation college student myself, one who was wholly unprepared for the experience, I know I would have benefitted greatly from such discussions. Maybe I wouldn’t have quit college—twice—before finally figuring out how to do it.

Active Voices helps you develop agency

As you read the chapters that are assigned to you and which interest you, try to go beyond passive reading and look up from the text every now and then, and assess the value of what you’ve read. You might say to yourself, “Okay, so what this guy is saying is . . .” and complete the sentence. Then gauge your response: What makes sense? What challenges your previously held ideas? What might you do with that knowledge?

Your instructor may ask you to consider the questions in the text boxes labeled Access Points. These are designed to tap into your prior knowledge—what you already know but probably haven’t thought of—so that you can activate it and use it to shape what you are learning going forward. This process is based on recommendations from knowledge transfer research, which has helped us understand how people learn.

Your instructor may assign one or two of the Action Points activities. These ask you to apply the ideas to the world you inhabit so that you can make abstract knowledge more concrete and, therefore, more useful and real. Knowledge is not really knowledge if it belongs to someone else, and it is of little value if it is still in a textbook or in a notebook or on a computer. You must have it in your head so that you can use it, just like you need a tool in your hand. That puts you in charge. You have—to use a favorite word of student-learning research—agency. Agency means power to act on the world, to shape it, rather than being shaped by it. Agency is exactly what those student writers that Bartholomae studied didn’t have and what Active Voices is intended to help you gain.

Students entering college bring with them their own ideas of what college means. But few are aware of this. Consequently, they are disempowered, being judged and governed by rules that they are only dimly aware of or don’t even know exist. This book is designed to provide the concepts you need to build your own understanding of the academy. By so doing, you gain agency, the capacity to shape your own life as a college student and to read, write, and think in ways that shape the world.

Anti-racism and Active Voices: segregationist, assimilationist, and anti-racist

Race, class, and gender in the Western rhetorical tradition

A nonviolent rhetoric

Common White responses to anti-racism

Instructor Resources

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