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Special Issue: Undergraduate Research

(Re)mediating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric Special Issue (Summer 2011)

Guest Editors: Shannon Carter, Texas A&M-Commerce and Bump Halbritter, Michigan State University

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Are your undergraduate students writing with new media? Are your students reviewing multimodal compositions created elsewhere? What are you doing to invite and support this good work? Do your exemplar student authors need a venue in which to share their digital work? We invite undergraduate scholars to share their original, multimodal projects with Kairos readers for a special issue tentatively entitled (Re)medating the Conversation: Undergraduate Scholars in Writing and Rhetoric (Summer 2011).

If your undergraduates are producing multimodal texts on topics tightly related to rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, literacy, new media, and other topics Kairos typically publishes, we invite them to submit to the Topoi section.

If your students are creating strong multimodal texts on other topics, we invite them to submit to the Inventio section. Texts submitted for Inventio should include a reflective piece that accompanies the main project submitted, offering a behind-the-scenes account of the creator's rhetorical choices and experiences in producing this multimodal text. The Inventio text will help tie these topics to issues in rhetoric, pedagogy, technology, writing, literacy, and/or new media.

For both the Inventio and Topoi submissions, we invite instructors to submit a short essay for the Praxis section that describes the context from which these exemplar texts emerged: assignment, course goals, revision/feedback structure, and/or other relevant items.

Reviews: We also invite student reviews (by undergraduate students or whole classes) of student-produced work that is circulating in or outside the academy.

For details on the Topoi, Praxis, Inventio, or Reviews sections of this special issue, please see the full Call for Webtexts.

For this issue, the undergraduates are the stars. However, we believe that excellent work happens most readily when we are able to provide a strong infrastructure for such work. Thus, we would like for this issue to provide instructor voices in combination with these top student authors. Doing so will help facilitate the successful integration of new media into a greater number of classrooms.

If you will be inviting your students to submit, please let us know as early as possible (by Summer 2009, if you can). We wish to invite all participating instructors to serve as reviewers and hope that once accepted texts have been selected, those interested in this project will remain on board to serve as “Faculty Advising Editors” (FAEs), supporting these student authors as they ready their texts for publication in the Summer 2011 issue of Kairos. All reviewers and FAE's will be publically acknowledged in this special issue.

Deadlines and other important dates:

  • October 1, 2009: Proposals due (see “proposal guidelines” on the CFW for details)
  • November 15, 2009: Authors notified of accepted proposals
  • February 1, 2010: Full webtexts due
  • June 2010: Authors notified of webtext status
  • August 2010: final webtexts/revisions due
  • May 15, 2011: Publication date