What We Are Becoming
Title
What We Are Becoming
Gregory A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty
6x9, 240 pages

Published: 2010

ISBN 978-0-87421-763-6
paper $29.95

ISBN 978-0-87421-764-3
e-book $24.00

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Greg Giberson is an assistant professor of writing and rhetoric at Oakland University in Rochester Michigan. He coauthored a proposal that established an undergraduate degree in Writing and Rhetoric at OU and is the chief advisor for undergraduate majors in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. He has presented and published on various aspects of the development and implementation of undergraduate degrees in writing, most recently in Composition Forum. He is also coeditor of the collection, The Knowledge Economy Academic and the Commodification of Higher Education from Hampton Press.

Tom Moriarty is an associate professor of English and director of the Writing Across the Curriculum program at Salisbury University. He is the author of Finding the Words: A Rhetorical History of South Africa's Transition from Apartheid to Democracy (Praeger/Greenwood, 2003) and is currently writing a book on downtown revitalization in small town America.

What We Are Becoming

Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Ed. Gregory A. Giberson and
Thomas A. Moriarty

This collection makes a vital contribution to the field and is an indispensable resource for building undergraduate writing majors.
—Janice M. Lauer

Greg Giberson and Tom Moriarty have collected a rich volume that offers a state-of-the-field look at the question of the undergraduate writing major, a vital issue for compositionists as the discipline continues to evolve. What We Are Becoming provides an indispensable resource for departments and WPAs who are building undergraduate majors.

Contributors to the volume address a range of vital questions for undergraduate programs, including such issues as the competition for majors within departments, the job market for undergraduates, varying focuses and curricula of such majors, and the formation of them in departments separate from English. Other chapters discuss the importance of flexibility, consider arguments for a rhetorical or civic discourse core for the writing major, address the relationship between rhetoric and composition majors, and review the role of multiliteracies in the major.

The field of composition has not come to a consensus on the shape, content, or focus of the undergradutate major. But as individual programs develop and refine their curricula, one thing has become clear: we must think about them in ways that go beyond our particular circumstances, theorize them in ways that secure their place on our campuses and in our discipline for years to come. What We Are Becoming is an effort to do just that.

Book Review Book News Inc. August 2010