Winner of the 2015 CCCC Advancement of Knowledge Award
Unlike much current writing studies research, Toward a New Rhetoric of
Difference addresses conversations about diversity in higher education,
institutional racism, and the teaching of writing by taking a
microinteractional look at the ways people define themselves and are
defined by others within institutional contexts. Focusing on four
specific peer review moments in a writing classroom, Stephanie L.
Kerschbaum reveals the ways in which students mark themselves and
others, as well as how these practices of marking are contextualized
within writing programs and the broader institution.
Kerschbaum's unique approach provides a detailed analysis of diversity
rhetoric and the ways institutions of higher education market diversity
in and through student bodies, as well as sociolinguistic analyses of
classroom discourse that are coordinated with students' writing and the
moves they make around that writing. Each of these analyses is grounded
in an approach to difference that understands it to be dynamic,
relational, and emergent-in-interaction, a theory developed out of
Bakhtin's ethical scholarship, the author's lived experience of
deafness, and close attention to students' interactions with one another
in the writing classroom. Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference enriches
the teaching of writing by challenging forms of institutional racism,
enabling teachers to critically examine their own positioning and
positionality vis-à-vis their students, and highlighting the ways that
differences motivate rich relationship building within the classroom.
