Ah yes. A robot army. How else defend planet Earth against alien invaders, ninjas, and zombies. Last night, I studied how to befriend an unfamiliar robot. Tonight, I think I’ll look into riding mechanized calvary. What? Yup. You can thank University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign-bound-student Allie for this. Yes, outstanding English major that she is handed me the manual yesterday. I can’t think of a better way to ease my way into summer! Thanks Allie!

I think I am going to adopt “a robot army” to refer to another project I’ve started to work on with one of my comp comrades. What is this mysterious project worthy of Area 51 designation you ask??? Well, I’ll confess from the onset that it’s not going to be all that interesting to anyone who is not a comp/rhet geek (or at least an academic geek). The project is to build a comp/rhet concentration within our English major.

We now have four, count ‘em four, composition and rhetoric faculty in our department and we’ll be posting a job for #5 in the fall. This is good. But hiring new composition faculty has posed other questions for me, namely: What kind of professional opportunities will there be for new faculty? What kind of courses will they want to develop and where will those courses fit in the overall picture of our program? What is the identity of our little composition-engine-that-could?

So, for the past several months I’ve been poking around looking for info on undergraduate composition majors and concentrations. Most recently I’ve been making my way through Coming of Age: The Advanced Writing Curriculum. and getting more and more convinced of the importance of an intellectual and institutional space for our composition program. As I wrote and rewrote the previous sentence, I grappled for how to phrase what I’m getting at. I started with “an intellectual and institutional center,” then “focal point.” But neither of those (not to mention the multiple versions of that sentence that are now part of the virtual shadow) really made sense.

You see, I think the most accurate way to describe what we have tried to do in the composition program is to emphasize “conversation” as the model of our program. That is, there is not one direction, one set of principles, but an agreement as to the importance of talking about and discussing student writing, composition and rhetoric as a field, and different ways of approaching our work. A program that encourages differences.

That’s how I’ve thought about it anyway. But, to be honest, it’s not an approach that we’ve sat down and agreed upon or committed to. Our comp/rhet conversation is an approach that developed more or less organically…perhaps indicated some of the implicit commitments we all shared as individuals and members of the bigger comp/rhet conversation. Several of us have developed courses, revised old ones, and done some pretty cool stuff in our classes. Two of us regularly use blogs for example. We have weekly composition conversation and will begin year three of our reading group next fall. So, all in all we’ve been a pretty active bunch.

But, for me , I find myself wanting to take the next step and formalize (not a good word) our inquiry around a concentration/minor/major of some sort. Part of this has to do with seeing some of our best students take an interest in composition and rhetoric after taking classes with one of us. Part of of has to do with the kind of shift in literacies that Kathleen Blake Yancey pointed out. And I think it would be fun. Yes, fun. Comp/rhet geeks like this kind of stuff.

Anyway, I should get back to grading. Last week of the semester this is (that’s my Yoda dialect). More soon!