Department of

English

Dear Michael Spooner,

Please find a zip folder attached to this email. Inside this folder, I have included the front
matter and text to my revised manuscript The Literate Practices of Big-Time College Sports. I
would like thank you and the two reviewers for the thoughtful and extensive comments. In
keeping with these comments, I have made a number of significant revisions. Chapters 1-3, per
Reviewer 1s feedback remain essentially the same; I revised chapter 4; I completely rewrote
chapter 5. The manuscript now runs roughly 63,000 words.

Per Reviewers concrete editorial suggestions, the bulk of my deep-revision focused on

chapters 4 and 5. I first deleted all of chapter 5moving some small portions to other areas of
the bookand then I reworked my table of contents into two sections. Section1 is titled
Knowing our Student-Athletes and includes chapters 2 and 3. Section 2, which includes
chapters 4 and 5, is titled Teaching Our Student-Athletes. Within this larger conceptual
frame, in chapter 4 I still turn to my study of the writing center at the University of Oklahoma.
Titled How Can We Better Teach Student-Athlete Writers (Part I)? A Narrative of a Division I
Writing Center, I detail how the material circumstances in which we teach student-athletes
negatively constricts how we work with them. As I argue on the bottom of page 127, before
offering best practices for teaching student-athlete writers, we need to learn how to work with,
and sometimes against, the material circumstances in which student-athlete academically
operate. With this adjustment, I follow the feedback of Reviewer 1 who suggested I revise by
briefly describing the material circumstances writing centers in D1 schools find themselves
in; explain how theyre constrained. The original chapter was certainly guilty of trying to
accomplish too much, as Reviewer 1 noted, and my goal was to focus attention on these
material circumstances and student-athlete writers.

Additionally I revised my tone in chapter 4 per Reviewer 1s feedback. For chapters 1-3,
Reviewer 1 wrote the author weaves theory, observation, and narrative together nicely.
Chapter 4, however, was a bit clunky. I stripped the traditional case study organization from
this chapterremoving a section on data collection, researcher positionality, and the like held
over from The Writing Center Journal, which published a version of this chapter. I removed the
Kanye West connection from the opening of the chapter and relocated the section on UNC
academic fraud to my opening chapter. In sum, I aimed to streamline this chapter through
keeping the focus on a consistent tone and connecting this chapter more strongly to the
previous and the following chapter. Instead of positioning this chapter as chapter 5, as
Reviewer offered as a suggestion, I believe the new TOC organization and the argument that
material circumstances should precede pedagogical practicein other words, we need a
productive environment for working with writers before we talk about how to work with
writerswill help readers situate this chapter within the larger argument I make in the book.
Finally, Reviewer 2 offered concern about audience and suggested I write to a broader
comp/rhet audience. As I suggested in my April 11th follow-up email to you, I decided to
position the writing center as representative of other curricular writing spaces, like a first-
year composition classroom. I sketch this argument on page 130.
Chapter 5 is a new chapter now titled How Can We Better Teach Student-Athletes (Part II)?
The Literate Practices of Big-Time College Sports as Jazzy, Creative, Collaborative. Again, I
take up the concrete suggestion of Reviewer 1 who offered an intriguing possibility in the
reader report: explain why hes zeroing in on the jazz-improvisation aspects of the writing
center; and then connect that with the teaching of student-athletes in the center. It strikes me
that this line of inquiry could be really productive, particularly if he connected it to Chapter 3
and how hes said basketball players learn. But I think its something he needs to zero in on
and theorize more. I have taken this concept and formed chapter 5. I relocated all references
to jazz which originally appeared in chapter 4 and were based in the work of Boquet and
Eodice. These references provided the springboard to chapter 5. Recent work across diverse
fields such as business, clinical psychology, writing center studies, and ethnomusicology chart
the cognitive processes undergirding jazzspecifically improvisational soloingand offer
application to other creative learning organizations, such as teacher-training programs and
writing center tutoring and administration. I draw connections between techniques of
improvisation and college sports by bringing back quotes from student-athletes in chapter 3
and aligning principles of jazz improvisation with the three cognitive processes student-
athlete use to learn plays.

I conclude this chapterand thus the bookin a different manner. As I wrote on page 160, I
do not offer concrete suggestions for working with student-athlete writers because my
research on college sports and jazz improvisation illustrate the hesitancy by these
communities of practice to offer concrete, dictum. Instead both illustrate using flexible
guidelines formed within a general structure. I pose questions to think about student-athlete
writing instruction at the macro- (e.g., curricular development and writing program
assessment) and micro-level (e.g., class objectives, assignments, activities). These questions
should guide how we work with student-athlete writers, which will help teachers and students
of writing see the inextricable link between the body and writing and that this link connects
the classroom and the court in ways that were previously unseen, and, thus, unacknowledged.

Additionally, as I thought about Reviewer 2 as a representative audience, I tailored my

argument at the end toward more than just student-athletes. As I wrote in the introduction, I
am aware many of my colleagues might not work at schools with athletic programs. Data from
the National Center for Education Statistics and Beginning Survey of College Student
Engagement data shows that an incredible number of our students have strong athletic
backgrounds and are still physically active outside of the classroom. More than just our
student-athlete know and learn through their bodies. I enlarge my argument at the close to
include these many students.

After your read my revised chapter 5 you expressed some concern that I dont show anyone
writing at all and encouraged me to to return to writing more clearly in the discussion, not
throughout, but at strategic points. Agreeing with this point, starting on page 171 with the
section titled Student-Athletes and Prior Knowledge I draw attention to how I have
attempted to connect with student-athletes prior knowledge in my writing classes. I tell two
contrasting stories, partially drawn from my in-press Teaching English in the Two-Year College
article: one of failure and one of success. In these two stories I draw attention to students
writing challenges and even excerpts from students writing. Taken together, these stories
paint a rich picture of the practical challenges that come with inviting prior knowledge
grounded in bodily, athletic literaciesinto a curricular writing space. In the next section
starting on page 178 and titled Moving Forward with Student-Athletes, Prior Knowledge, and
Transfer, I pair these practical challenges with Chris Ansons recent College Composition and
Communication article where he describes the universal challenge of transfer regardless of
prior experience (519). I suggest that, for the case of one student-athlete I detail in this
chapter, curricular instruction may inform his prior athletic literacy. Instead of suggesting that
prior literacies inform current ones and that extracurricular literacies inform curricular ones,
I suggest a reverse position where what is learned in the writing classroom may inform
performance on the court.

Finally, while chapters 1-3 largely remain the same, following Reviewer 1s feedback, I did
remove several paragraphs from my lengthy section on theories of resemiotization in chapter
2.

Overall, I tightened the prose of the manuscript throughout. In revising for both clarity and
readability, I have reworked lengthy and unwieldy sentences. My hope is that these revisions
communicate the manuscripts central argument and focus to readers in a more clear, concise,
and straightforward manner.
I look forward to your response,

J. Michael Rifenburg, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of English
University of North Georgia

Blue Ridge Cumming Dahlonega

Gainesville Oconee
82 College Circle | Dahlonega, GA 30597 |
ung.edu