In her groundbreaking dissertation, “The Rhetoric of Participation: Interrogating Commonplaces in and Beyond the Classroom,” Genevieve Critel provides us with the language to investigate the idea of participation in educational contexts. As the CFP for this collection stated, and as discussed in the introduction to this collection, “Four commonplaces emerged from her research: Genevieve found that discussions and instantiations of participation often reflected upon the topoi, or commonplaces, of community, assessment, embodiment, and technology. Gen’s research on participation in the composition classroom serves as a seminal first step in examining an often taken-for-granted aspect of composition pedagogy.” By identifying patterns in how the idea of participation functions in scholarship, syllabi, and archives, Critel demonstrates how a systematic examination of participation in various contexts reveals underlying (and often problematic) attitudes about teachers, students, technology, and the purposes of writing instruction altogether.

[Go to "+" Commonplaces generating theory]