ABSTRACT
In A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966 (1996), Joseph Harris examines debates in composition theory and pedagogy in order to explain changing attitudes toward college writing. Harris recognizes a progression from seeing the composition classroom as an academic discourse community, in which members share values, assumptions, and purposes and use communication to achieve their goals, to seeing it as a conflicted “contact zone” (Pratt), in which students do not share values and assumptions but use communication to express difference. Harris prefers to view the classroom as a negotiated “common ground” (Spellmeyer), in which shared purposes are discovered and communicated effectively despite differences. His own hope is that college writers will be prepared to contribute to public spheres through “multiliteracies,” including digital media genres, in which content is dependent on form in new ways. Harris argues that in the context of globalization, contemporary writers must know how to use multimedia resources to interact effectively with others—in formal, informal, dialectical, and abbreviated forms of English. In Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts (2006), Harris fills a gap in rhetoric and composition scholarship by providing specific strategies for students rewriting argumentative papers that fall short of a high academic standard. With John Miles and Gary Paine, Harris is also co-editor of Teaching with Student Texts: Essays toward an Informed Practice (2010) and with Jay Rosen and Gary Calpas, co-editor of Media Journal: Reading and Writing about Popular Culture (1995, 2nd ed. 1998). He is a past editor of SWR: Studies in Writing and Rhetoric (2007–12) and of the journal College Composition and Communication (1994–1999).
