This essay examines the current state of online writing instruction in light of changing technologies and everyday literacies in order to understand their impact on access to higher education and on the material conditions of teaching writing.

This article considers connections between the work of composition and rhetoric and the growing field of faculty development. It defines faculty development, explores reasons composition and rhetoric scholars might be drawn to and successful in faculty development positions, and examines existing and potential intellectual connections between these two fields of inquiry.

By challenging misconceptions about students and instructors at two-year campuses, this article critically examines practices of knowledge making in writing studies, arguing for the repositioning of writing instruction at two-year and open-admissions colleges from the margins to the center of the profession.

On the Blunt Edge: Technology in Composition’s History and Pedagogy Shane Borrowman, editor Going Wireless: A Critical Exploration of Wireless and Mobile Technologies for Composition Teachers and Scholars Amy C. Kimme Hea, editor Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study Ben McCorkle Digital Detroit: Rhetoric and Space in the Age of the Network Jeff Rice Technologies of Wonder: Rhetorical Practice in a Digital World Susan H. Delagrange

Grounded in the principle that writing assessment should be locally developed and controlled, this article describes a study that contextualizes and validates the decisions that students make in the modified Directed Self-Placement (DSP) process used at the University of Michigan. The authors present results of a detailed text analysis of students’ DSP essays, showing key differences between the writing of students who self-selected into a mainstream first-year writing course and that of students who self selected into a preparatory course. Using both rhetorical move analysis and corpus-based text analysis, the examination provides information that can, in addition to validating student decisions, equip students with a rhetorically reflexive awareness of genre and offer an alternative to externally imposed writing assessment.

This article situates the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing in current educational policy and in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. It argues the Framework positions the discipline to address gaps in American education by reinvigorating historical and traditional frames for writing instruction—ancient rhetoric and the liberal arts tradition. Although this realignment challenges technocratic assumptions about education, it raises pragmatic and ethical questions about assessing habits of mind that rhetoric and composition must consider.

The Cherokee Syllabary: Writing the People’s Perseverance Ellen Cushman Keepin’ It Hushed: The Barbershop and African American Hush Harbor Rhetoric Vorris L. Nunley Diverse by Design: Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions Christopher Schroeder Code-Meshing as World English: Pedagogy, Policy, Performance Vershawn Ashanti Young and Aja Y. Martinez, editors

Drawing on qualitative research conducted at the University of Michigan, this article examines the extent to which composition instructors theorize and teach reading-writing connections and argues that explicitly teaching reading-writing connections may increase student motivation to complete assigned reading. The article also discusses using model texts as an effective means of teaching those connections.

This article offers a case study of how three African American students enrolled in a first-year writing course employ Ebonics-based phonological and syntactical patterns across writing assignments, including those that also require students to compose multigenre essays.

Reviewed are: Adam J. Banks, Digital Griots: African American Rhetoric in a Multimedia Age, Margaret Price, Mad at School: Rhetorics of Mental Disability and Academic Life, Mary Soliday, Everyday Genres: Writing Assignments across the Disciplines, Myra M. Goldschmidt and Debbie Lamb Ousey, Teaching Developmental Immigrant Students in Undergraduate Programs: A Practical Guide, Greg A. Giberson and Thomas A. Moriarty, editors, What We Are Becoming: Developments in Undergraduate Writing Majors

Over the past two decades, critical discourse analysis has emerged as a major new multidisciplinary approach to the study of texts and contexts in the public sphere.Developed in Europe, CDA has lately become increasingly popular in North America, where it is proving especially congenial to new directions in rhetoric and composition.This essay surveys much of this recent literature, noting how rhet/comp has incorporated CDA methodology in a variety of studies of inequality, ethics, higher education,critical pedagogy, news media, and institutional practices. CDA uses rigorous, empirical methods that are sensitive to both context and theory, making it ideal for the demandsof a range of projects being developed in our field.

I draw upon Eileen Schell’s notions of “maternal pedagogy” and an “ethic of care” to analyze archival material from the National Education Association and Educational Testing Service pilot “lay reader” programs of the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that there are striking similarities between the material and social circumstances of these postwar lay readers’ labor and that of contingent faculty in first-year composition today. I additionally contend that lay reader program narratives and policies evince a longer historical trajectory of labor problems in the teaching of writing than we typically recognize. Thistrajectory illustrates a continual need for various types of “help” in achieving effective writing instruction, yet paradoxically values labor-intensive models for teachers that emphasize the personal (and interpersonal). Such conditions create a problematic “motherly” discourse for the discipline that is magnified by the gendered imbalance already typically found in the first-year writing teacher workforce.

Our pedagogical histories lean on textbooks, institutional records, and the words of famous teachers. Students rarely appear in situ. Here, the voices of two very different Progressive Era students cast spotlights on the shadows of long-ago classroom practices—offering a liveliness that is difficult to recover, but worth seeking.

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a first-year composition project emphasizing rhetorical ecologies.

In this essay, I offer William James’s notion of pragmatic belief as a framework for re-envisioning religious discourses as rhetorical resources in composition teaching. Adopting a Jamesian pragmatic framework in composition teaching, I argue, entails two pragmatic adjustments to current approaches. The first adjustment concerns the way we think about the relationship between academic discourse and religious discourse. And the second adjustment relates to the stances we adopt when responding to religious students’ texts. Along with outlining these adjustments, I illustrate the ways James’s framework productively informed my response to a faith-based narrative that an evangelical student wrote in one of my first-year writing courses.

This essay examines the definitions and practices of argument perpetuated by popular composition textbooks, illustrating how even those texts that appear to forward expansive notions of argument ultimately limit it to an intent to persuade. In doing so, they help perpetuate constricted practices of argument within undergraduate composition classrooms.

This essay describes my design and implementation of a composition course focused on the Native American rhetorical device of survivance at work in debates on Indian removal and U.S.-Indian relations in general. Using a contact zone approach, I found that the course improved writing and thinking skills by pushing students out of their ideological and intellectual comfort zones. As a deeper benefit, the study of Native American rhetorical strategies renders the Western rhetorical tradition not only as a framework for inquiry but as an object of analysis and critique itself.

Exploring language practices, beliefs, and management in a first-year writing program, this article considers the obstacles to and opportunities for transforming languagepolicy and enacting a new multilingual norm in U.S. postsecondary writing instruction. It argues that the articulation of statements regarding language diversity, co-developedby teachers and program administrators, is a valuable step in viewing and constructing the classroom as a multilingual space.

This article examines the “master” and “little” cultural narratives students perform in literacy narratives. Results show that students incorporate the literacy-equals-successmaster narrative most often, yet they also include in little narratives figures such as the hero, victim, and child prodigy. I consider how these findings can improve instructionon this topic and conclude with pedagogical recommendations.

Calling for an explicit commitment to graduate-level writing instruction in English studies, the authors describe a critical writing workshop that serves this purpose. The aim of the course is to create a formal curricular space through which students can brainstorm, create, and sustain a wide variety of critical writing projects.

Reviewed are: The Idea of a Writing Laboratory, Neal Lerner Generation 1.5 in College Composition: Teaching Academic Writing to U.S.-Educated Learners of ESL, Mark Roberge, Meryl Siegal, and Linda Harklau, editors The Community College Writer: Exceeding Expectations, Howard Tinberg and Jean-Paul Nadeau College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for University Writing Instruction, Anne Beaufort

Vision, Rhetoric, and Social Action in the Composition Classroom Kristie S. Fleckenstein Rhetorics, Literacies, and Narratives of Sustainability Peter N. Goggin, ed. Rhetoric and the Republic: Politics, Civic Discourse, and Education in Early America. Mark Garrett Longaker The Responsibilities of Rhetoric Michelle Smith and Barbara Warnick, eds. Active Voices: Composing a Rhetoric for Social Movements Sharon McKenzie Stevens and Patricia M. Malesh, eds.

Responses to Rosalie’ Morales Kearns’s “Voice of Authority: Theorizing Creative Writing Pedagogy” and Johnathan Alexander’s “Gaming Student Literacies and the Composition Classroom: Some Possibilities for Transformation.”

We argue that the Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers, with its dual emphasis on literacy and occupational skills, can serve as a new model for writing classrooms and writing program administrators. We further contend that the “contact zone” classroom should be replaced with community-based “federations.”

Contemporary argument increasingly relies on quantitative information and reasoning, yet our profession neglects to view these means of persuasion as central to rhetorical arts. Such omission ironically serves to privilege quantitative arguments as above “mere rhetoric.” Changes are needed to our textbooks, writing assignments, and instructor development programs to broaden how both we and our students perceive rhetoric.

As they prepare to teach writing, new teachers should respond to writing assignments that we deliberately design to be difficult, exploratory, or critically reflective, so that they may better develop flexibility and engagement as learners, teachers, and theorists in the field of writing instruction.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

The pharmaceutical industry’s corporate responsibility reports illustrate how the liberal rhetoric of civic engagement can be reappropriated to serve the market-driven aims of risk management and public relations. Tracing the ideologic linkage of corporate responsibility and service-learning versions of civic engagement, and contextualizing postsecondary service-learning along a larger neoliberal trajectory, should prompt us to reconsider basic questions about the means and ends of our institutional and pedagogical work.

Responding to cultural concerns about the ownership of writing and the nature of plagiarism, this article examines discourses about plagiarism by ESL students and argues for a plurality of approaches to understanding the ownership of language and textual appropriation. First, it uses speech act theory to explain the dynamics of plagiarism; second, it examines transnational political contexts for writing pedagogy; and third, it offers a Daoist understanding of language.

The article describes and analyzes the exclusion of LGBT content in composition courses by reporting on a study of how queerness is (and is not) incorporated into first-year writing courses. The authors critically examine the presence or absence of LGBT issues in first-year composition readers; offer analyses of how some first-year readers handle issues of queerness; and consider how queerness, when it is included in composition textbooks, is framed rhetorically as a subject for writing. The article concludes with recommendations for those seeking to explore issues of sexuality in ways that are productive for students, other faculty, and our profession. Ultimately, the authors demonstrate that, while some ground has been gained in understanding sexual difference as an important domain for students to explore, there is still much work to be done in creating textbooks that invite students to think critically and usefully about the interconnections among sexuality, literacy, and writing.

Recent appeal to the concept of design in composition studies benefits teaching writing in digital media. Yet the concept of design has not been developed enough to fully benefit composition instruction. This article develops an understanding of design as a matter of resolving wicked problems and makes a case for the advantages of this understanding in composition studies.

Contract grading has achieved some prominence in our field as a practice associated with critical pedagogy. In this context we describe a hybrid grading contract where students earn a course grade of B based not on our evaluation of their writing quality but solely on their completion of the specified activities. The contract lists activities we’ve found most reliable in producing B-quality writing over fourteen weeks. Higher grades are awarded to students who produce exemplary portfolios. Thus we freely give students lots of evaluative feedback on their writing, but students can count on a course grade of B if they do all the required activities—no matter our feedback. Our goal in using contracts is to enable teachers and students to give as much attention as possible to writing and as little as possible to grades.

When examined rhetorically, Savannah River Site Community Preparedness Information calendars from 1994, 2004, and 2008 represent living rhetorical practices aimed at changing the public mind. My technical communication classroom at USC Aiken is uniquely situated for us to examine documents constantly generated by the site’s Public Affairs Department.

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton’s multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the multiple lenses of writing-to-learn and writing-in-the-disciplines perspectives. Although my findings indicate limited purposes, audiences, and genres for the majority of the assignments, instructors teaching courses explicitly connected to a Writing Across the Curriculum program or initiative assigned the most writing in the most complex rhetorical situations and the most varied disciplinary genres.

This article argues that mid-1970s discourses of literacy crisis prompted a problematic shift toward color-blind ideologies of language and literacy within both disciplinary and institutional discussions of writing instruction for “high-risk” minority students. It further argues that this shift has continuing import for contemporary antiracist writing instruction.

Computer technology is expanding our profession’s conception of composing, allowing visual information to play a substantial role in an increasing variety of composition assignments. This expansion, however, creates a major problem: How does one assess student work on these assignments? Current work in assessment provides only partial answers to this question. Consequently, this article will review current theory and practice in assessment, noting its limitations as well as its strengths. The article will then draw on work in both verbal and visual communication to explain an integrative approach to assessment, one that allows instructors to consider students’ work with visuals without losing sight of conventional goals of a “writing” course. The article concludes by illustrating this approach with an analysis of an unconventional student text “a T-shirt”that students submitted as the final assignment for a relatively conventional writing course.

The indigenous rhetoric of the Plateau Indians continues to exert a discursive influence on student writing in reservation schools today. Plateau students score low on state-mandated tests and on college writing assignments, in large part because the pervasive personalization of Plateau rhetoric runs counter to the depersonalization of academic argument. Yet, we can teach writing in ways that honor all students’ “and not just Plateau students’ rhetorical sovereignty” even as we prepare them for academic writing.

Based on an ethnographic study of a writing course taught by a talented instructor who integrated process and critical pedagogy approaches, I argue that many students actively engage with the concerns of critical pedagogy when the classroom ethos strongly supports their agency’ their ownership of their developing ideas and texts.

This article argues that the teaching of public writing should not neglect issues of circulation and local need. In a series of case studies involving small press papers and homeless advocacy, the authors seek to extend recent work begun by Susan Wells, John Trimbur, and Nancy Welch, which raises crucial questions about public rhetoric in the writing classroom.

This article uses the convergence of our positionings as feminists, pragmatists, and rhetoricians to theorize communicative gaps related to different beliefs about writing instruction as sites of generative dialogue. We offer a WPA/TA discourse model centered on productive resistance and on discursive power to posit feminist pragmatic rhetoric as a communicative art of writing program change.

This article explores the literacy narratives of two “gamers” to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula. Ultimately, the author argues that we should use complex computer games as primary “texts” in composition courses as a way to explore with our students transformations in what literacy means.

With the “counterhegemonic figured communities” of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy and composition.

There has been little discussion of hospitality as a practice in college writing courses. Possible misuses of hospitality as an educational and ethical practice are explored, and three traditional and still tenable modes of hospitality are described and historicized: Homeric, Judeo-Christian, and nomadic. Application of these modes to instructional situations may lead to new and sometimes counter-establishment methods, in terms of course objectives, shared labor of teacher and students, writing assignments, response to writing, and assessment of student work. Perhaps the most radical form is transformative hospitality, which accepts the possibility that host and guest, teacher and students, will all be changed by their encounter, a potentiality that is characterized by risk taking, restlessness, and resistance to educational entrenchments. Traditional hospitality as practiced in writing classrooms does not mark a return to student-centered pedagogies of past decades but does stake out a position that might be considered marginal apropos the current political and educational climate in the United States.

This article argues for approaching pedagogical outcomes as ends-in-view that guide, but do not determine or limit, pedagogical possibilities. Reflecting on moments from a service-learning literacy course, the writers argue that experiences of chaos in the classroom, while often uncomfortable, can open opportunities for reflection and inquiry.

As faculty are increasingly recruited to participate in retention efforts on their campuses, I argue that composition studies professionals should pay attention to the scholarship on retention, one of the fastest growing areas of research in higher education. Moreover, the questions surrounding which of our students persist until graduation and why should qualify our arguments about access and reframe our conversations about pedagogy.

Contemporary composition classrooms have understandably distanced themselves from the elitism associated with the terms taste and propriety. However, writers do need to learn how appropriate discourse is rhetorically negotiated. Understanding and reinventing propriety’s rhetorical function can enable students and teachers to develop notions of propriety that consider complex histories and perspectives.

The goal of teaching students to write for the university assumes that in first-year composition students can be taught ways of writing (genre and genre knowledge) that they can then transfer to the writing they do in other courses across the university. This goal and its underlying assumption are problematic for a number of reasons illustrated here through a study of a large midwestern composition program. The study validates theoretical critiques of general skills writing courses made by genre and activity theorists over the past decade. The difficulties of teaching varied academic genres in only one context suggest we might better serve first-year students by reframing the goals of FYC, such that the course does not promise to teach students to write in the university but rather teaches students about writing in the university.

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Sirc’s essay also uses the writing course as touchstone “this time, to wrestle initially” with the issues Allen Tate pondered in his 1952 essay . . . “The Man of Letters in the Modern World.” Sirc challenges contemporary instructors of writing, claiming that “the vox pop criticism of iTunes writing represents a new Attic style, one well worth studying and teaching to.”

Rhetoric and composition’s increasing attention to multimodal composing involves challenges that go beyond issues of access to digital technologies and electronic composing environments. As a specific case study, this article explores the history of aural composing modalities (speech, music, sound) and examines how they have been understood and used within English and composition classrooms and generally subsumed by the written word in such settings. I argue that the relationship between aurality (and visual modalities) and writing has limited our understanding of composing as a multimodal rhetorical activity and has thus, deprived students of valuable semiotic resources for making meaning. Further, in light of scholarship on the importance of aurality to different communities and cultures, I argue that our contemporary adherence to alphabetic-only composition constrains the semiotic efforts of individuals and groups who value multiple modalities of expression. I encourage teachers and scholars of composition, and other disciplines, to adopt an increasingly thoughtful understanding of aurality and the role it—and other modalities—can play in contemporary communication tasks.