In the simplest sense, this collection is a documentary in dialogue, one that celebrates the work and career of Kathleen Blake Yancey. A set of 26 video-recorded interview segments, featuring Kathi as the subject, opens the dialogue; a set of 26 corresponding contributor responses from scholars in the field carry it along. Each interview + contributor-response pairing is linked to one of 26 current, timely topics in Writing Studies that have also functioned as exigencies for Kathi’s work.
For each interview segment with Kathi, we used a set of questions keyed to the topic for every letter of the alphabet. For each letter, the interview segment articulates Kathi’s relationship to that topic—both why we chose that specific concept (e.g., A for Assemblage) and how that concept has played a role in her career. The recorded interview segments share Kathi’s insights on these topics and their impacts on the field, inviting you to listen in as one of the field’s exemplars reflects on her scholarly life and the life of the discipline.
Each (set of) contributor(s) then decided to compose a multimodal text on the abecedary-inspired 26 topics (e.g., Kristin Arola writes on A for Assemblage). Each contributor or team of contributors was tasked with watching Kathi’s interview segment on their respective letter as a prompt for invention and composing. Each contributor then decided for themselves how central or ancillary Kathi's responses to the interview questions would be to their respective chapter. In terms of text types, the 50 contributors responded with a variety of approaches, from essays with images to videos, presentations, ePortfolios, podcasts, and more that, together, kaleidoscopically explore the A-Z topics.
On one hand, it's a celebration.
The rationale for creating a documentary Festschrift of this type is inevitably based on the status and career of its subject. So, in part, the idea here is to celebrate Kathi’s career by revisiting it.
On the other hand, it’s a conversation.
In order for this project to resonate with a wider audience, it must also be about more than one person. Therefore, it is also about the more general co-constitution and interanimation of an academic career and the discipline in which it thrives and to which it contributes.
Meanwhile, it's an invitation...
...on at least two levels. First, to us as readers/interactors to articulate what we think the discipline of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS) comprises. The 26 A-Z chapters lay out the discipline as Kathleen Yancey sees it, providing one lens through which readers and viewers can understand what RCWS is and how it came to be. Second, the project is an invitation to rethink how we each stand in relation to and as a part of the discipline. Among the contributed chapters, there’s agreement, to be sure, but there’s also divergence; contributors branch off from Kathi’s version of RCWS and challenge readers and viewers to articulate their own key terms for capturing what knowledge is and how it is made in RCWS.
...as well as an experiment.
It’s an experiment in digital, multimodal, and scholarly textual production, the form and content of which are in harmony with some of the foci of Kathi's own career (namely: reflection, multimodality, portfolios, and collaboration). It’s also an experiment in multifaceted and multilayered collaboration: the interview questions were collaboratively composed, the interview segments were collaboratively recorded, the project is collaboratively edited, and many of the chapters are collaboratively authored.
Finally, this text is a documentary mash-up.
It exists to thread together some familiar materials—keywords and documentary methods, to name two—with a moment in which the discipline is critically re-examining its own history. So this text is also meant to help us understand the history of the field in a new way: through both a singular vision of what the discipline is and through multi-vocal articulations focused on specific topics.
In short, it’s for you!
It’s for you if you’re familiar with Kathi’s work.
Her status as a CCCC Exemplar, her scholarship, her journal editing, and her service as chair or president of a number of national organizations (among other accomplishments) has afforded Kathi a status that inspired this work and also serves as one of its objects of inquiry.
It’s for you if you're not familiar with Kathi’s work.
We know that her work appeals to broad audiences across RCWS, as well as in fields like Education. Indeed, her high profile might make the piece of interest to folks who are not directly familiar with her scholarly output but would like to be. This overall approach–of a text structured around major ideas that guide and have guided an exemplary scholar’s work in the field–may interest you if you’re a teacher or scholar in K-12 contexts who know Kathi’s influence from her work in those contexts (e.g., as President of NCTE). Topics like P for Portfolio or L for Literacy, for instance, have broad appeal, regardless of what level of writing education you work in.
It’s for you if you’re interested in innovative methodology and forms of digital scholarship.
Colleagues interested in digital writing & rhetoric will find this project of interest given how it develops an innovative genre in digital scholarly publication. In this sense, the form of the text itself invites certain kinds of audiences: especially those interested in multimodal composing and digital praxis.
It’s for you if you’re interested, broadly, in the history of the discipline of Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies.
Scholars interested in the history of the discipline will find both a synchronic sense of the RCWS (based on the topics themselves) and a microhistorical, diachronic version of the field’s history (through Kathi’s recounting of her career). On the other hand, scholars who are interested in broad understandings of RCWS–for instance, new graduate students and those teaching seminars for new graduate students–will find a capacious set of topics that cross theoretical, pedagogical, scholarly, and administrative areas.
It’s for you even if you’re only interested in a letter or two.
The interviews bring, we think, a surprising depth and breadth to the broad range of A-Z topics. Folks who are deeply invested in one or two letters will find specific pieces of the project worthy of engagement.
This is a multimodal, networked text that might not function like other genres with which you’re familiar. The text is structured as a network–one woven together visually and conceptually from connections not only between interviews and each corresponding chapter but also among the chapters themselves. Part of this is formal (through linked content across chapters), and part of it is conceptual (through treatment of similar topics across chapters).
To navigate the text formally:
On each chapter page, you will see the contributed chapter title and author(s) at the top. Below that, scrolling down, you will find the chapter’s content, which varies from alphabetic prose to images, videos, audio files, and so on. Two floating icons functioning as buttons are fixed to and located at the bottom corners of the screen on each page.
The left button, a video play icon, toggles the viewport for the Yancey interview video that corresponds to that letter’s topic. If you have the Yancey viewport open, you will see an icon at the center-bottom that looks like a printed page. Clicking on that icon will open the transcript for the Yancey interview. To close the viewport, click on the video play icon at the bottom left again.
At the bottom right of each page is an open book icon with the letters “A” and “Z” on it. That icon functions as a button that opens the main navigation bar for the whole collection, allowing you to move between and among letters and their corresponding topics.
To navigate the project conceptually:
Follow your interests where they lead you. Start with a chapter on a letter that interests you, and follow the links in that chapter as they pique your interest. Sometimes, those links will lead you to other chapters; sometimes, they will lead you to webtexts other than this one. If you do venture off to other webspaces, please come back and enjoy the other chapters– there are lots of connections to explore and new interests to discover!
Kathleen Yancey is Professor Emerita and Kellogg W. Hunt Professor of English and Distinguished Research Professor at Florida State University. She focuses her research on composition studies generally; on students' transfer of writing knowledge and practice; on creative non-fiction; on cultural studies of everyday writing; on writing assessment, especially print and electronic portfolios; and on the intersections of culture, literacy, and technologies.
In addition to co-founding the journal Assessing Writing and co-editing it for seven years, she is a past editor of College Composition and Communication, the flagship journal in the field. She has also authored, edited, or co-edited 16 scholarly books and two textbooks as well as over 100 articles and book chapters.
Her most recent edited collections include ePortfolio-as-Curriculum: Models and Practices for Developing Students’ ePortfolio Literacy (2019), Composition, Rhetoric, and Disciplinarity (2018), Assembling Composition (2017), and A Rhetoric of Reflection (2016). In 2014, her co-authored Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing was published; it won both the 2015 CCCC Research Impact Award and the 2016 Council of Writing Program Administrators Best Book Award. It has also provided the foundation for two CCCC-sponsored research grants supporting a first-of-its-kind study of the efficacy of Teaching for Transfer curriculum across 8 diverse institutional sites.
She has served as president or chair of several scholarly organizations: the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE); the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC); the NCTE College Section and the College Forum; the Council of Writing Program Administrators; and the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA). She serves on several boards, including the National Board for Miami University's Howe Center for Writing Excellence and on the Executive Board for the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL), and she is serving as a mentor for WASC's Community of Practice for Advancing Learning Outcomes Visibility. She has served on the Steering Committee of the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) and the Steering Committee for the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) VALUE project focused on electronic portfolios.
Yancey is also the recipient of several awards, including the Florida State Graduate Mentor Award, the FSU Graduate Teaching Award (twice), the Donald Murray Prize, the CWPA book award (twice), the CCCC Research Impact Award, the South Atlantic Review Best Essay Award, the Purdue University Distinguished Woman Scholar Award, and the CCCC Exemplar Award, considered by many to be the highest honor in Rhetoric and Composition. In 2019, she received the National Council of Teachers of English Squire Award, “given to an NCTE member who has had a transforming influence and has made a lasting intellectual contribution to the profession.”