Call for Proposals—Special Issue of Computers and Composition:Digital Bridges: Using Networked Technologies to Connect Composition’s Stakeholders

Guest Editors: Savanna Conner (Arizona State University) and Patricia Webb Boyd (Arizona State University)

We lead increasingly networked global lives. Computers and Composition scholars have extensively studied the ways in which we shape and our shaped by network technologies like social media (e.g. Walls & Vie, 2018), mobile technology (Lutkewitte, 2016), wearable technology (Wood, 2018), and augmented reality (Greene & Jones, 2019). Whether we like it or not, we are constantly connected. Responsively, our community of scholars has widely researched such technologies and their potential uses within and outside of writing classrooms. The ubiquity of the sequestered classroom model (one teacher, many students), however, evidences the fact that our discipline has yet to thoroughly explore and enact the possibilities presented by the connected world in which we all live and write. There are still many opportunities to leverage writing technologies to create connections that will benefit teachers and students alike. We have yet to take full advantage of the potentials that connected technologies provide us for in order to encourage cross-fertilization of ideas and promote cultural awareness.

For this special issue of Computers and Composition, we are interested in collecting perspectives on how we can use networked technologies to connect the learners of otherwise sequestered learning spaces (like graduate, undergraduate, or teacher education classrooms) to diverse disciplinary stakeholders—whether those stakeholders are students, teachers, researchers, or administrators, and whether they are outside of our classrooms, departments, institutions, nations, or cultures. This issue of the journal will work towards the goal of better understanding what increasingly globalized networking, bridging, or connecting our otherwise sequestered classrooms can do for our students, selves, and the discipline both nationally and internationally; we seek to provide a forum for our Computers and Composition community in order to figure out how we might use writing technologies to network our learning spaces and productively engage with networked realities as they are experienced across the world.

Contributors might look to the following questions to inspire their thinking about possible topics for the special issue:

How can we use technologies to network students to other students from various classes taught by various professors? What are the potential benefits of doing so? How might teacher/scholars have already done this work, and what can we learn from their efforts?

How can these technologies connect students to scholar/teachers beyond their own instructors-of-record? How might such connections allow students to access multiple visions of the disciplines of Composition, Rhetoric, and Literacy Studies as well as begin to enter already occurring disciplinary conversations?

How can we use technologies to network teachers within and across writing programs to provide training and professional development in ongoing ways?

How can these technologies network graduate students with scholars/teachers in the field so as to professionalize them into the multiple facets of their future careers, including research, teaching, and service to their institutions and to the field at large?

How can we bring together disciplinary stakeholders who are distanced from each other not only by academic and disciplinary conventions, but also by factors like geography, culture, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and religion?

What possibilities are there for cross-global writing classrooms that engage students in writing across cultures, expanding students understanding of what writing in context means/requires?

How can we collaborate globally in order to challenge the sequestered nature of the teaching of writing in higher education contexts?

Additionally, we encourage contributors to consider connections with disciplinary stakeholders beyond their own settings, to investigate the multitude of contexts in which scholars, teachers, students, and researchers are embedded. In particular, contributors might propose strategies for crossing national, cultural, and linguistic borders with the help of networked technologies. Contributors might, too, explore how such crossings can generate understanding of both different cultures and those in which we are embedded. Further, contributors might explore how networked technologies can assist the work of teacher-scholars who already advocate connection; scholars and practitioners of Writing Research Across Borders, Writing Across the Curriculum, Writing in the Disciplines, service learning initiatives, campus-to-community connections, and community literacy projects may employ connective technologies to enrich how they network themselves within various contexts. We hope that such advances would foster stronger, more multidirectional, and more visible bridges between disciplinary stakeholders inside and outside of our field and the academy.

We look forward to reading your proposed ideas about innovative and insightful ways to use technologies to connect those otherwise-sequestered stakeholders who influence and are influenced by the college-level writing classroom. Collectively, we will advance the ways in which our field’s conversations explore, implement, and even model the connective capabilities of networked technologies.

Timeline:

Proposals due: October 30, 2019

Preliminary decision to authors: November 30, 2019

Drafts of 6,000-8,000 words due: March 30, 2020

Reviewer comments delivered to authors: May 30, 2020

Article revisions due: August 31, 2020

Publication: Fall-Winter 2021

Submission and Contact Details

Individuals and co-authors should submit a 300-500 word proposal that clearly identifies disconnected disciplinary stakeholders and proposes bridging them via the conscious and critical use of networked writing technologies. Proposals should briefly provide an overview of the projected article, as well as explain its contribution to the discipline. Proposals should be submitted as a .doc or .docx file, attached to an e-mail to Savanna Conner (savanna.conner@asu.edu) and Patricia Webb Boyd (patricia.boyd@asu.edu). The subject line should read “Special Issue Proposal: Using Writing Technologies.” Queries are encouraged and should be posed via e-mail to Savanna Conner (savanna.conner@asu.edu) and Patricia Webb Boyd (patricia.boyd@asu.edu).