PROFILE

Shannon Carter is Associate Professor of English and Co-Director of the new Converging Literacies Center (CLiC) at Texas A&M University-Commerce. Her research interests include prison literacy and potential applications of New Literacy Studies and activity theory to writing center work and the basic writing classroom. Other, related interests include conservative rhetoric (published in College English, 2007) and academic labor issues (article forthcoming in CCC and chapter in Identity Papers, Utah State UP, 2006). Her book, The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction is forthcoming with State University of New York Press (March 2008), an article-length version of which appeared in the 25th anniversary issue of the Journal of Basic Writing (Fall 2006).

 

ABSTRACTS OF RECENT WORK

"Repairing (through) HOPE: Inmates Tutoring Inmates in a Total Institution" (Community Literacy Journal, Spring 2008)

This article analyzes one prison literacy program in Texas that trains inmate participants to teach other, likewise incarcerated and often dyslexic, men and women to read and write in English. Noting the regular recurrence of the words “repair” and “hope” in participant’s descriptions H.O.P.E. and associated activities, Carter makes extensive use of feminist epistemologist Elizabeth Spellman’s theory of “repair” and Paula Mathieu’s articulation of “hope” in her attempt to understand the nuances of repair and the hope it enables/generates behind these prison walls. Finally, given HOPE’s configuration as a faith-based program with Christian origins and Carter’s own position as a secular academic, the article ends with an extended discussion of the tensions between Bible-based discourses and the academy and, one hopes, locates a productive position amongst these tensions–where she neither resolves these tensions nor overcomes them (a “strategic orientation”) but merely tries to maintain involvement as researcher, activist, and teacher in reflective and critically aware ways (a “tactical orientation”).

"Living Inside the Bible (Belt)" (College English, July 2007):

When evangelical Christian students enter the academy, they often find that its tenets and values conflict with their reliance on the Bible as a source of truth and evidence. A pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, however, can help construct productive relationships between their religious community of practice and the academy’s.

"Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice" (Journal of Basic Writing, Fall 2006)

Abstract

The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and the "Basic" Writer"

The Way Literacy Lives offers a curricular response to the political, material, social, and ideological constraints placed on literacy education—particular basic writing—via the ubiquity of what Brian V. Street calls the “autonomous model of literacy” and instead treats literacy as a social practice. Accepting that a curricular solution to the institutionalized oppression implicit in much literacy learning is necessarily partial and temporary, I argue that fostering in our students an awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts empowers them to work against this system in ways critical theorists advocate. Building upon a theoretical framework provided by three, overlapping schools of thought (New Literacy Studies, activity theory, and critical literacies), the primary objective of the current study is to offer a new model for basic writing instruction that is responsive to multiple agents limiting and shaping the means and goals of literacy education, agents with goals that are quite often in opposition with one another. This new model is rooted in what I call a pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity, an approach that trains writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one.

"The Writing Center Paradox: Talk About Legitimacy and the Problem of Institutional Change" (College Composition and Communication, forthcoming)

Scholarship on writing centers often relies on validation systems that reconcile tensions between equality and plurality by privileging one over the other. According to feminist political theorist Chantal Mouffe, neither absolute equality nor absolute plurality are possible in any democratic system, a conflict she calls “the democratic paradox” and insists is the very essence of a “well-functioning democracy” that supports pluralistic goals. The following article argues that a similar logic shapes writing center work and, therefore, any attempt to promote change must likewise embrace the democratic paradox as it manifests itself in the writing center: “the writing center paradox.”