Welcome to the Rhetoric and Composition Program at Appalachian. The program operates through three primary sites: undergraduate composition courses; graduate courses, including a certificate in Rhetoric and Composition and opportunities for teaching assistants with courses in theory and practice; and faculty development in the teaching of writing. The University Writing Center offers support to writers, and Georgia Rhoades offers workshops and individual consultations for teachers of writing through her work in the Hubbard Center.
Our goal is to help students develop strategies that will support lifelong thinking, reading, and writing. We design courses in process writing to help students become rhetoricians who focus on invention and revision as they develop drafts, who explore a variety of research methods and genres, who analyze and produce a variety of texts, and who reflect on their writing in the contexts of their general study and their lives. We encourage ethnographic research and other fieldworking, portfolio assessment, and writing communities in our courses, ideas reflected in workshops we have sponsored with Peter Elbow, Andrea Lunsford, Toby Fulwiler, Pat Belanoff, Tony Petrosky, Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater, and Hepsie Roskelly. Through our program activities we help teachers continue their professional development in conversation with theorists in the field and with each other.