Expanding Literate Landscapes

Challenging narrow, institutionally-bounded accounts of the relations among writing, the social, and learning, Expanding Literate Landscapes presents five longitudinal case studies of writers to argue for a more dispersed, complexly mediated and heterogeneously situated understanding of trajectories of identity, practice, and literate development. We offer analysis of disciplinary activity that begins with the mediated activity of persons in situated sites of engagement, but we link this activity to broader histories of practice and to the historical production of mediational means. By situating disciplinary development along historical trajectories that stretch beyond a particular focal discipline and into the broader literate landscapes learners inhabit, the portraits of writing, learning and enculturation we offer here illuminate the dynamic interplay of multiple literacies that can inform disciplinary writing.

Drawing upon a wealth of digital data (i.e., sample texts and artifacts in a wide range of media, still images, audio- and video-recordings of text-based interviews, observations, and video-recordings of persons participating in literate activities) from longitudinal case studies of undergraduates, graduate students, and working professionals writing for disciplinary worlds and their other literate activities, we argue that the development of disciplinary ways of being needs to be understood in relation to, rather than apart from, learners’ broader literate lives.

The goal of the CCDP imprint is to honor traditional academic values of rigorous peer review and intellectual excellence, but at the same time to create a venue for innovative digital scholarship and expression in the field of English composition and rhetoric. Volumes in the CCDP series are published under a Creative Commons copyright license, and are available open-access.