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My work in discourse studies stems from my background in rhetoric, and a smattering of sociolinguistics, education, and folklore. In the 1980’s, I became interested in the composition issues which affect African American students. Rhetoric, the investigation of how we use language and why, provides an entry into understanding the academic exclusion or marginalization of so many African American and other culturally different students. To understand how African American students wrote, I explored the history of English-- how some were influenced by African American English, either negatively or positively, and others were not; how the academy viewed varieties of English; how attitudes about language influence learning; how stories students hear and tell and language events such as sermons color spoken and written rhetoric; how literacy in school affects writing ability. The result was Cultural Divide: A Study of African-American College-Level Writers (Boynton/Cook1993). Other work in that vein includes two edited volumes in the Boynton/Cook Crosscurrents series, Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines, co-edited with Michelle Hall Kells, (1999) and Latino/a Discourses and Teaching Composition as a Social Action, co-edited with Michelle Hall Kells and Victor Villanueva (2004). My favorite essay in Attending to the Margins is by Reenie Neal and in Latino/a Discourses is by Diana Cardenas. Both studied discourse with me.

Some of the researchers who most influenced this work include Roger Abrahams, Richard Bauman, John Baugh, Lester Faigley, David Bartholomae, Debra Tannen, Shirley Brice Heath, Dell Hymes, Thomas Kochman, Andre Tabouret-Keller and R. B. LePage, Claudia Mitchell-Kernan, Linda Flowers, Beverly Moss, Patrical Bizzell, and Mina Shaughnessy.

As a rhetorician, I have been frequently called upon to put my academic interests into practical use. I was instrumental in founding a writing center in the department of English (with the help of Larry Mitchell, M. Jimmie Killingsworth, and a number of dedicated graduate students). I also worked as Director of Writing Programs for five years. In 2001 I began building a writing-in-the-disciplines program for the university, housed in the University Writing Center. These pursuits encouraged me to consider the scholarly and theoretical underpinnings of writing program administration, and especially to read histories of writing instruction, writing centers, writing programs and writing across the curriculum. (There are more studies than I can mention, but David Russell, Sharon Crowley, and Thomas Miller come to mind as significant.) I was also drawn into political issues with this work (while also reading Nancy Grimm and the work of Jane Nelson and Kathy Evertz), which resulted in at least two of my publications, “A View of Status and Working Conditions: Relations Between Writing Program and Writing Center Directors,” co-authored with James McDonald (Writing Program Administration 24.3: 59-82) and “Revising the ‘Statement’:  On the Work of Writing Centers” (College Composition and Communication  43.2: 167-71).

Now as I am establishing writing-in-the disciplines at a state university with a 38,000+ undergraduate population, politics seems the most essential area of pursuit. However, assessment has taken center stage. I am working on a large-scale program assessment which should occupy my next few years. On some days this seems far removed from discourse studies, but then I find myself examining student writing, or trying to persuade a colleague that “writing” is more than “grammar,” or listening to the tape of a focus group complaining about illiterate students, and I am, again, immersed in language, politics, and texts.