Group strategies--group discussion, feedback, collaboration--seem so widely used in postsecondary writing as to have attained the status of lore. In seeking pedagogical community, writing teachers too often gloss over or deny the reality of competing voices. To understand the traditional appeal of the trope "community" for American…

This paper reviews the communicative behavior surrounding the coordination of expert and "semi-expert" groups of scientists and engineers by analyzing several histories of technology that focus on the coordination of research information between a research organization and many development organizations. For the paper's purposes,…

A study explored what an outside-the-classroom, authentic literature discussion involved. Three book club discussions (involving a leaderless group consisting of members of varying professions meeting monthly to discuss fiction and nonfiction reading selections) were audiotaped, transcribed and coded. Results indicated that: (1) when allowed to…

A collaborative faculty project was something of a failure for one instructor. About a year ago, the instructor invited everyone in the department to meet in her office every third week to talk about teaching literature and composition. The immediate concern was the use of writing in three general education literature courses that had been…

Pondering the purposes of family stories and transcribed dialogues between family members raises an insight or two concerning the attainment of literacy. For instance, an exchange between two elder members of a family, one a former school teacher, the other a Ph.D., illustrates the spirited nature of arguments in the family. The school teacher…

As two groups of teachers met to set up a HyperNews network for a grant project, it became clear that politics cannot be kept out of the classroom. In creating a community of diverse writers via HyperNews, six composition classes were linked for online discourse among departments: Asian American Studies, Chicano Studies, Pan African Studies, and…

Rhetorical ethos, or the character of the rhetor as she presents herself in discourse, is vital to the success of any student attempting to enter the universe of academic discourse. According to Aristotle, ethos is demonstrated by showing good sense, good character, and good will. However, in the modern university, with the diversity of…

A study explored how small groups of student readers interacted in a classroom over time to interpret short stories assigned by a teacher who functioned as participant/observer. The study focused on multiple readers in actual classroom situations to consider the relationship between the social and academic elements observable during day-to-day…

A study investigated the role of the Aboriginal Student Enclave, one of five campuses of Edith Cowan University (Australia) as a discourse community. The relatively small but cohesive university subcommunity is designed to provide additional support for Aboriginal students enrolled in standard programs and an environment in which the students are…

Workspaces are sites of contention over what is knowledge and who can say so; work-related education has never been a neutral arbiter. In a context in which workspaces routinely bring together physical place and cyber place in communication networks, traditional struggles over knowledge and knowing are affected by communications technologies (CT)…