Situated Stories: Valuing Diversity in Composition Research

Situated Stories seeks to enlarge our research community by expanding on both the questions we ask and the ways we go about answering those questions. Emily Decker and Kathleen Geissler believe that writing courses are sites for mutual negotiation, places where people from all kinds of backgrounds confront the dominant institutional values. In presenting these investigations, their book calls attention to the diverse students in today’s classrooms and to the pedagogical consequences of acknowledging this diversity.

The authors of these chapters introduce us to some new dimensions of composition studies. They describe the issues, challenges, and aspirations of a variety of writers; they share their struggles to define what it means to teach composition; they reflect on what it means to do research. United in their commitment to help students grow, to claim a place in the academy, to develop effective voices, all of these instructors have struggled to find the right names for things. Their articles offer new definitions of meaningful questionsand of legitimate answersall the time helping to define what it means to truly value diversity.