This is a call for help from all you rhetcompers out there. This fall, I'm going to be teaching our introductory course (CCR 601), which bills itself as an introduction to scholarship in composition and rhetoric. The course has been taught in a number of different ways--never the same way twice, in fact--and while I'll probably be drawing somewhat on past incarnations, I feel a little bit of extra pressure as the grad director to do the course in a way that accounts for some of my concerns about the preparation that our students receive.
That's not really a critique per se, because it's silly to imagine that a single course could address broad curricular questions, but at the least, I'm conscious about the opportunity to intervene a little more directly. And I should add that this course is an introduction to scholarship, which distinguishes it somewhat from our other core courses (methodology (which they'll be taking at the same time), 20th century rhetoric, and modern composition studies).
I'll be porting some of the readings from my summer course, as well as the mapping assignment I blogged about a couple of months ago. I'm also planning a couple of other 3-4 week-sized assignments (as opposed to a big semester-end one): we'll probably do some practical exercises on what John Swales calls "occluded genres" -- conference proposals, abstracts, etc. -- for one of them, and I may ask them (as a way of leading up to the mapping project) to do some kind of genre thingamajig where they take a topic and locate essays on the topic from several different journals, paying specific attention to differences in style, research, scope, audience, etc.
So far, I'm a little shorter than I intended to be at this point in the readings department. I'm thinking strongly about Olson's Rhetoric and Composition as Intellectual Work, for instance, but haven't gotten much further than that. I would have liked to get copies of Culture Shock, but I'm not sure it'll be available.
And so, I'm looking for suggestions. The students will come from a fair range of background, and they'll be getting training/mentoring both in pedagogy and methodology elsewhere. What kinds of texts would you suggest for someone relatively new to the field, specifically aimed at preparing that person to join the field as a scholar, researcher, & writer?
What do you say?
Update: Here's the somewhat minimalist catalog description:
CCR 601 Introduction to Scholarship in Composition and Rhetoric Contemporary theories and practices of scholarship. Methodological debates and controversies. Connections between composition and rhetoric.
