The body itself becomes a sundromos, an intensive gathering of forces
(of desire, of vigorous practices, of musical sounds, of corporeal codes),
trafficked through and by neurons, muscles and organs. Entwined with the
body in this way, rhetorical training thus exceeds the transmission of ‘ideas,’
rhetoric the bounds of ‘words.’ (Hawhee 160)
Yesterday I attended a Writing Program mini-seminar on the relationship
between the writing center and athletics and the presence of
student-athletes in writing courses. As a part of ongoing professional
development, most writing teachers at SU attend two mini-seminars each semester.
The speaker–a graduate student in rhetoric at Arizona–brought many insights;
he’s been instrumental in launching a satellite writing center in the athletic
department at UofA, and so the four-hour session was aptly named "Home Turf:
Defining Access and Success for College Student-Athletes." Early on, the
conversation hinged on the spatial quality of athletic performance; for
pre-reading, we looked at Hawhee’s "Bodily Pedagogies: Rhetoric, Athletics, and
the Sophists’ Three Rs," from College English, Andrew Zimbalist’s chapter
"The Student as Athlete" from Unpaid Professionals, Wilfred Bailey’s
"Summary: Time Constraints, Or Why Most College Athletes Cannot Also Be
Students," (College Sports, Inc.) and a few articles from
ESPN.com on whistle-blowers. We also talked through perceptions of
student-athlete privilege, so-called "problematic sports" of men’s basketball
and football (with no direct justification for crediting this commonplace to any
particular institution, much less SU), and part-time faculty bearing added labor
because of support measures (email check-ins from coaches, mid-semester progress
reports, etc.) initiated from athletics.
