Alt Dis: Alternative Discourses and the Academy

Patricia Bizzell has argued that teachers of composition, if they are going to prepare students for success in other classrooms and other contexts, cannot afford to ignore alternative forms of discourse that are appearing now in the academy. This edited collection of original essays both discusses and at times exemplifies extraordinary examples of just such alternatives-discourses that embody new and different forms of intellectual work

Together, their writings pose and answer some intriguing questions about the:

• use of nonstandard discourse to illustrate unconventional forms of intellectual work
  
• role of nonstandard discourse in scholarship from disciplines across the curriculum
• theoretical complexities of discourses defined as "alternative," "hybrid," "mixed," or "constructed"
• relationships among communities, discourses, and linguistic standards
  
• new conditions in composition classrooms made up of more students of English as a foreign language and students using non-standard dialects
  
• teacher-student relationships within the context of alternative forms of intellectual work.

Using unconventional structures and formats while acknowledging new modes and methods, this provocative volume argues eloquently for inclusion of a broader range of expression in academic writing.

Patricia Bizzell is Professor and Chair, Department of English, College of the Holy Cross. Among her publications are Academic Discourse and Critical Consciousness (1992) and The Bedford Bibliography for Teachers of Writing, Fifth Edition (with Bruce Herzberg and Nedra Reynolds, 2001).

Christopher Schroeder is a professor in the English Department at Northeastern Illinois University. He is the author of ReInventing the University: Literacies and Legitimacy in a Postmodern Academy (2001).

Helen Fox is on the faculty of the Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan where she heads the Graduate Student Writing Project. She is the author of When Race Breaks Out: Conversations about Race and Racism in University Classrooms (2001) and Listening to the World: Cultural Issues in Academic Writing (1994).