If you asked the average person today what invention is, they would most likely gravitate toward the creation of tangible objects or devices, whether historic innovations like the lightbulb or newer ones like smart cars or Apple watches. However, invention encompass far more than these physical artifacts. They also include new processes, procedures, and even ideas.

Invention would likely evoke a very different set of examples for contemporary writing instructors. This group would probably turn to the techniques writers use to generate ideas: reading, brainstorming, mapping, freewriting, and class discussion, all strategies designed to help writers explore the full range of possibilities for their work. These pedagogical approaches treat invention as an active, recursive process rather than a single moment of inspiration or discovery.

Writing instructors might also reference David Bartholomae’s influential essay “Inventing the University,” though not as invention per se, but as inventing, an ongoing process that Bartholomae argues students must engage in when they enter academic discourse communities. According to Bartholomae, students don’t simply learn pre-existing academic languages; instead, they must actively invent their relationship to these specialized discourses, positioning themselves as legitimate participants in conversations they are still learning to navigate. This kind of inventing requires students to imagine themselves into the roles of scholars and experts, adopting the conventions and authority of academic discourse even as they learn to master them. In this sense, invention becomes not just a writing technique but a fundamental act of identity construction within academic communities.

While invention remains a cornerstone in contemporary writing instruction, the concept has classical origins. Its etymological roots reach back to classical rhetoric, where it was established as the first of the five canons of rhetoric, concerned with helping speakers discover and identify ideas for their speeches: essentially, the art of finding something meaningful to say. This classical understanding of invention was deeply systematic, providing orators with concrete strategies for generating content rather than leaving them to rely solely on inspiration or chance.

Central to this classical approach were the topoi, or common topics, systematic categories that included definition, context, comparison, relationships, and authority. These topics functioned as intellectual tools that rhetoricians could systematically apply to any subject matter, helping them not only to develop ideas but also organize and expand their thinking. For instance, when approaching a topic, a classical rhetorician might explore it through definition (what is it?), comparison (how is it similar to or different from other things?), or relationship (what causes it, what causes it?).

We’ll take a few moments at the beginning of this chapter to introduce ourselves and the various sites of invention where we had the opportunity to work alongside Kathi. It’s worth noting that while academic convention typically calls for referencing scholars by their last names, we intentionally refer to Kathleen Blake Yancey as “Kathi” throughout this chapter. This informality reflects not casual name-dropping, but rather the kind of scholar and mentor she has been to each of us, one who fosters genuine collaborative relationships that transcend traditional hierarchies. By sharing our backgrounds and the specific contexts of our work together, we hope to illustrate how invention operates differently across different spaces and collaborations.

Morgan: When asked to do this piece, I wasn’t sure what I would say about invention. But upon reflection, invention (and its partner collaboration) is likely at the heart of everything I do as a scholar: talking about ideas, getting started on ideas. And so, I have been drawn to other inventors like Kathi. I’m Morgan Gresham, and I am an associate professor of English at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. I worked with Kathi and Michael at Clemson from 2002 to 2006, and the space of invention that I am going to talk about today is the online version of the Class of ’41 Studio for Student Communication.

Michael: My name is Michael Neal, and my site for exploring invention centers on two academic writing programs: the reinvention of a graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition and the creation of undergraduate major in English called Editing, Writing, and Media. Through these writing programs, we see two models of invention, one that collaboratively creates something that prompts students to discover something that weren’t even looking for while the other strategically anticipates the desire for professional relationships, collaborations, and community. Both models function best when they are part of ongoing, recursive processes. Most importantly, this iterative approach responds to evolving demands, suggesting that programmatic invention is best when it remains adaptive and responsive.

Jennifer: Hi, my name is Jennifer Enoch. I worked with Kathi from 2013 to 2018 while I earned my doctorate at Florida State University. During that time, I collaborated with two other graduate students under Kathi’s guidance to create the online Museum of Everyday Writing, the of invention I would like to discuss today. As we collaborated, I learned from Kathi three vital and personally transformative lesson about invention that I would like to share with you today.

Written text on screen: The following videos tell our stories of invention through discovery, collaboration, and community engagement. We hope they might be inventive for you as well.

As a part of the Pearce Center in Clemson, I was tasked with inventing the online version of the Class of ‘41 Studio for Student Communication. I am sure that for some inventors, it is ultimately possible for the ideal–the vision in the inventor’s head–to become reality. However, that has never been the case for me. Rather, the pieces that come into being are shaped and reshaped; they are collected and displayed; they are reflected on and rearranged, assembling, collaging, refracting based on the tangible and intangible aspects: space, time, energy, affordability.

As Kathi has noted, sometimes you have a moment. One of those moments was the million-dollar donation to Clemson to build Class of ‘41 Studio for Student Communication (a real, physical space) at Clemson. That space became a state-of-the-art communication studio that had four separate spaces:

• Entry space with small seating areas, display walls, and a registration/check-in area.
• Studio A and Studio B were flexible studio spaces that could be used separately for smaller classes (up to 20 people) or together for larger gatherings.
• A small work area for 1-2 people, whiteboard wall, and break area with storage.
• A board-room style space with executive presentation technology.

After that space had been built and the Pearce Team had been working in that space for a while, we determined that we should build an online version. Understanding that the in-person studio was something different from a writing center or a computer classroom or a writing lab, we recognized that the online version would also be different from all those as well as OWLs and the like. First, we planned an electronic warehouse of communication information, an Electronic File Cabinet, if you will. Second, we would create an asynchronous network of conversations about writing and communication in and across disciplines. Third, and most ambitiously in 2004, we planned synchronous communications and assistance to participants to discuss issues in real time with other communicators and with specially trained consultants who could receive, view, and comment on multimedia and other projects in real time.

To accomplish these goals, we worked in three different spaces with partners. Path 1 was the electronic file cabinet to be housed at Writing Studio at Colorado State. Path 2 was a Moodle Studio at Michigan Tech, and Path 3 was a version of a version of the Class of ‘41 Studio in a MOO. In the end, we constructed the online version of the Class of ‘41 Studio for Student Communication out of common tools, basing our work on a type of quilting or weaving together of threads, creating a Studio made from nascent Google offered a great deal of opportunity. It was always difficult to find the resources to initiate an online writing space that would enable development and feedback on multimodal compositions. Adding to that, needing to teach the tools to students risked that the technologies we chose would rapidly be obsolete and students who might benefit from the online/digital/multimodal spaces won’t have the time or patience to learn “our” technologies to suit their purposes. It is easier (and quite frankly better) to meet students where they are.

One of our colleagues at Clemson called the physical Class of 41 Studio “the intellectual center of campus” because its contiguous spaces brought together faculty, students, staff, and others into conversation and into relationship. Its elements functioned as rhetorical and design tools that the multiple stakeholders can shape, reuse, play with, and invent with. Although Clemson’s conception of the Studio was to be composing (active, doing, shaping, inventive), the Online Studio unfortunately never made it past the prototypes. While we digital builders try to maintain a sense of hopefulness, it is clear to me that we are often disappointed with what we encounter as products, and perhaps that’s why INVENTION is key. We design, we build, we encounter troubles, and we move on, ever pursuing the idea of inventing so much with so little. And in anticipation of what might come next, or what might our next moment be.

When I think about invention, my teacherly impulse is to situate it within the ways writers generate ideas for their texts. However, I know invention is bigger than that. I’m particularly drawn to Anis Bawarshi’s discussion of invention in which he considers it a process of socialization where ideas are exchanged and in turn produce more places for invention. When I think of programmatic invention, then, my mind goes to the academic spaces we create that foster the invention of ideas and knowledge.

To various degrees academic invention emerges from necessity: the need to fill gaps, address changing disciplinary landscapes, and meet felt needs of individuals and communities. Yet invention also creates possibilities and opens spaces for innovation. In this section, I’ll illustrate this dual nature of invention through my experiences working with Kathi on two related writing programs: a graduate program in Rhetoric and Composition and an undergraduate major called Editing, Writing, and Media within our English Department.

For a bit of context, in 2005 Kathi moved to Tallahassee, FL, to reinvent a graduate program that had been largely dormant for several years. The previous year in her CCCC chair’s address “Made Not Only in Words: Composition in a New Key,” Yancey argued that composition needed expand its definition of writing beyond traditional print-based texts to include multimodal, digital forms of writing, the kind that students were increasingly composing and outside of school-based literacy practices. In her address, she essentially argued—though not in these exact words—for us to invent a new curriculum that would guide students to compose across different media and audiences, recognizing how digital technologies offer new possibilities.

Curricular invention at both the graduate and undergraduate level involved a balance between foundational knowledge and individual specialization that would be more adaptable. We established core classes that provided broad disciplinary grounding, which then supported the specialized courses and individual routes of study. This curricular structure allowed students to share common knowledge while pursuing in more depth areas aligned with their individual interests. What I learned from this curricular work is that programmatic invention requires ongoing processes rather than singular moments of course development. Sustained invention allows programs to adapt to the emerging needs locally and within the discipline. Thus, invention emerges from interactions, relationships, communities, and collaborations that are always in motion. Even as the two programs are housed within a larger English Department, this created productive tensions that compelled us to seek interdisciplinary connections while also articulating our distinctives.

Invention for us looked different between programs. At the undergraduate level, invention worked through what we might call a discovery model since we were creating something that students weren’t actively seeking. Students didn’t arrive at FSU asking about an EWM major since neither they nor their parents would even know to ask about it. And yet, we had a sense that if we built it, they would come, which indeed was the case. At one point not too long ago, FSU had the largest number of English majors of any university in the country, largely due to the overwhelming number of students we attracted. Students found out about us through the engaging classes we offered, word of mouth from other students, advising, and collaborations we established with other units on campus. This model of invention suggests that curricular innovation succeeds not only by meeting existing demand but by creating awareness of something that students didn’t even know they wanted.

For the graduate program invention operated differently, although in some ways, Rhetoric and Composition is a field that many students don’t know of until they take courses, meet faculty, visit a writing center, or other ways stumble upon us. But in this model, invention included articulating distinctive strengths and collective values within a relatively crowded landscape of strong programs across the country. In this invention, we considered what courses, professional development, experiences, relationships, collaboration, and learning students would encounter in our program. This required invention to be both responsive to field-wide needs but also grounded it the unique personalities, strengths, and opportunity of our local configuration. Returning to Bartholomae’s use of inventing, perhaps in this case invention included helping students see a range of possibilities available within the field and helping them navigate the various discourses and relationships that would allow them to pursue their personal and professional goals.

When I began my portion of this chapter, programmatic invention to me seemed more like a matter of strategic construction of places and curricula designed to foster intellectual ideas. After engaging with Morgan and Jenn and receiving feedback from the editors, I see invention differently… not that places and curricula don’t matter, but they serve as means rather than ends of invention. Programmatic invention is ongoing, recursive, draws people together to generate new ideas and reinvent themselves in response to change. Some ideas result from careful and strategic planning, while others are discovered in ways we couldn’t have anticipated.

Programmatic invention, then, is an enduring process that promotes serendipity, generating unforeseen connections, communities, and interactions that produce ideas and texts that we might not have known we were looking for. It cultivates the conditions needed for generative relationships, communities of practice, and collaborations. The value of programmatic invention lies in designing places for interactions and then, to use a Kathi-ism, “trust the process” that the program will foster productivity that allows individuals and the collective to reinvent themselves. This suggests that when ongoing invention is woven into the fabric of the program, it will function to be generative even beyond the visionary capacity of its origin.

Kathi always asked the same two questions at the end of every course she taught or project she supervised. What did you learn and how will you carry it forward? As such, it seems fitting to shape my thoughts about invention in the same way. What did I learn in creating the Museum of Everyday Writing? And how have I carried those lessons forward into my scholarship and my teaching?

The first lesson that I learned about invention is about the vital role of context. Often, I think and teach about context in relationship to the rhetorical situation, considering how my context will constrain what I am composing. There is a force working inward, focusing the chaos of infinite choice into something generative. However, we can also shift that perspective to consider context as exploring what is possible within a space, rethinking context as working outward to illuminate previously unseen possibilities or evidence of what previous scholars have accomplished within that space. Before Sarah Marshall, Megan Keaton, and I could dream of the MOEW, we needed to know that such a project was possible. Serendipitously, I was taking a research methods class with Michael at the same time that we were creating the MOEW, which is where I encountered his FSU postcard archive. This archive, coupled with Kathi's enthusiasm about the MOEW, allowed me to see that an online archive was something that I could just make, that I had the abilities, the access, and the authority to do just that. And further, these kinds of projects could have use and value within the field. In other words, thinking critically about context led to the invention of the MOEW, but also a kind of self-invention as a scholar, as someone who invents and writes projects that are personally fulfilling, that are valuable to other scholars, and that contribute to the field's knowledge. This sense of myself as a scholar is something that I work hard to carry forward to my students by introducing them to the significant variety of texts that scholars create in the field, by encouraging them to try their own big, weird, impossible seeming projects, and by showing them that their projects and their ideas have value.

The second lesson that I learned about invention has to do with collaboration or how to develop and use relationships. No one person knows everything or really composes alone. In creating the MOEW, Megan, Sarah, and I needed to rely on the community around us, leveraging the talents and the knowledge of our faculty and peers. But there is also room to think about the other side of collaboration. Sometimes it is necessary to limit collaboration with certain segments of your audience or with institutions existing within your context. Writing exists in relationships to institutions and discourses of power, particularly for those of us who are inventing within a university. For the MOEW, like other digital projects, that meant thinking critically about hosting, about the relationship created when we hosted our site on the university servers, and what that meant for ownership and control of the project. Ultimately, we decided to pay to host the MOEW on a commercial server, as we thought the security of remaining in control would be best for the longevity of the MOEW. In other words, we composed the museum in a way that both facilitated collaboration for some, such as students and researchers, and limited the collaboration with others. Thus, collaboration, and by extension invention, were significantly intertwined with audience, or rather, audiences, a lesson that I strive to teach students by asking them to think critically about who they want to be and what they want their writing to be in relationship to the people and institutions around them.

The third and most personally transformative lesson about invention that I learned from Kathi was that your invention is often someone else's reinvention. If a project like the MOEW or the undergraduate Editing, Writing and Media major, or the Class of 41 Digital Studio is going to continue there needs to be room for other people to reinvent it for the next group of scholars to take ownership and find their place in the project. In other words, projects like the MOEW need to be consistently reinventing in order to achieve longevity and really to fulfill their purpose as sites of research and invention for others. In the early days of the MOEW, Megan, Sarah, and I were the primary inventors, but as the museum began to expand, we welcomed undergraduate interns and other graduate student administrators. Those colleagues needed to have some ownership and agency within the museum in order to encourage continued participation and learning. To let go was a difficult lesson. I loved and still love the MOEW and was passionate about my work there. However, it was necessary to allow not just for reinvention, but for invention that was not my own and that was not guided by me. This lesson has served me well as a WPA responsible for first year writing and co-requisite English curriculum. Our program at Northwestern State University is stronger because other teachers reinvent it. Because I learned that lesson from Kathi.

Jennifer: One of the things that I noticed and was really drawn to about Kathi’s interview that inspired this chapter was her discussion of contexts, the way that invention works differently in different contexts and the way that lessons, to use her phrase, get carried forward to different contexts.

Morgan: I think that for me that carry forward piece was that we become what the institution is looking for in us in a lot of ways and that some of the strategies she gave us in terms of asking “What is the role I’m being asked to play, and what are the things that I can find meaning in within this.” It’s inventing yourself in the same way that you are inventing the institution around you.

Jennifer: With a project like the Museum of Everyday Writing or even a curriculum, one of the things it’s doing is functioning as a space of invention in multiple ways, and one of those ways is allowing people to invent themselves in that space and to find the things that they’re passionate about.

Morgan: For me, invention is partnered with collaboration. I can come up with an idea or two, but to really have those things come into being, I have to have collaborators. So, the places where we think, “Oh, I’m the lone person. I’m the person with the vision. I’m the person…” That’s not my space, and to recognize for me invention comes with a whole set of other folks who are bringing in their best ideas, and that we’re sort of piling through those ideas and really trying to figure out what can we do together as a group is the most meaningful part.

Jennifer: So, right now there is a lot of conversation happening at my institution about what the proper approach is. There are those of us who say that we need to invent ways to help students to use it [AI] in ways that we think are ethical, in ways that we think can benefit them, because they are using it. I don’t know that at this point it’s escapable, but that’s a real contrast to the contingent that is saying, “We need hard and fast rules in place that say no AI unless an instructor builds it into a lesson.

Michael: I see something similar with the camps that are being formed around our place, and in English we’ve tended to be in the more resistant camp to it. There are reasons to resist that I wouldn’t argue with but trying to imagine if we just talked about how much of AI is about collaboration and relationship building. If I think about what AI could do for invention, it might be to give us a starting place or some model building. A lot of us in our sections wrote about how we were basing our work on older models of something and then trying to update those, revise those, or combine them with other forces, and that there still needs to be some of that human element to bring something new to what is old.

Jennifer: But of course, she [Kathi] is who she is, so I’m sure she had this structure in mind from the beginning: that we would all have this slightly different perspective that would enable us to talk about sustainability and community in different ways.

Morgan: And I also think about how easy it could be for someone in Kathi’s position to create a lot of distance between the person who knows a lot of things and knows a lot of people. What has really happened, I think, has been that Kathi has introduced us to people and has introduced us to other projects that have led to other people and have led to other projects. It’s been really this sort of this networking situation that comes out of Kathi’s larger vision or perhaps Kathi’s own innate sense of networking and how we see that there is a node there and that we’re going to push out from that node to the next node and really sort of build this organic structure that allows us to do lots of different things across lots of different parts of the field.