Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.

We suggest that literacy narratives can be an important part of a curriculum designed to encourage students to understand themselves as developing learners and students. We know that there is great potential for literacy narratives—for narrativizing—when invited within a scaffolded curriculum of collaborative narrative inquiry. We place literacy narratives in the service of documenting learning—that is, within a pedagogical scaffolding designed to lead students through a series of moves that feature inquiry and discovery (about literacy). As such, the literacy narrative that emerges as most important is the final reflective narrative: the one we have spent all semester preparing students to write. That act of deferral creates an opportunity to put the literacy narrative (LN) assignment to different earlier use as a means for creating an ongoing, experiential literacy-learning narrative that will be realized as a reflective narrative: one we call the experiential-learning documentary (ELD).

Building on studies of alternative rhetorics, this article envisions personal writing pedagogy as a relational endeavor that fosters rhetorical alliances among disparate communities. I detail a particular course design through which “personal reflection” becomes a means of enacting more radical forms of belonging.

This article describes an interdisciplinary professional writing program and its benefits for students (in terms of knowledge, habits of mind, and developing careers). The authors present qualitative research findings about habits of mind and knowledge domains of successful students, which may prove valuable for faculty teaching in similar programs as they consider curriculum design, or for faculty pondering issues of career development for master’s degree graduates.

Globalization, or “fast” capitalism, has changed the workplace and writing in it dramatically. Composition epistemologies and practices, elaborated during the twentieth century in tandem with Taylorized workplace literacy requirements, fail to embrace the complexities of writerly sensibilities necessary to students entering the new workforce. To update these epistemologies and practices, MA students in professional writing were positioned as autoethnographers of workplace cultures, reporting to classmates on organizational structures and practices as they affected discursive products and processes. Their studies produced a database of petits recits on workplace cultures, and their work is analyzed for the ways in which it forecasts subjective work identities of writers in the years ahead. Implications are drawn for composition administration, curriculum design, course design, and collaborative work among academics and writers in private and public spheres.

Discovery of Competence shows how the writing classroom can be reconceived as an environment for collaborative inquiry by students and teachers. It presents new ways of thinking about program design, redefines the nature of writing assessment, and offers alternative conceptions of multicultural curriculums. Drawing on students' writing and research, it suggests how teachers can recognize their students' competence and help them build on it systematically. While the book speaks to all teachers of writing, it will be of considerable interest to those who work with diverse student populations, including ESL students. The authors make it clear that the writing classroom is a place where both students and their teachers may build on their competence and realize their possibilities as writers and learners.

Introduction: A Model of Discourse Development Reading and Writing as Social Activities The Answers Are Not in the Back of the Book: Developing Discourse Practices in First-Year English THE SOCIAL STANCE The Artful Conversation: Characterizing the Development of Advanced Literacy Making Sense of Reading The Development of Poetic Understanding During Adolescence Writing and Reasoning about Literature THE TEXTUAL STANCE Writers, Judges and Text Models The Development of Persuasive Argumentative Writing Adolescents' Uses of Intertextual Links to Understand Literature Verbocentrism, Dualism, and Oversimplification: The Need for New Vistas for Reading Comprehension Research and Practice THE INSTITUTIONAL STANCE Developing Reflective Thinking and Writing Teaching English for Reflective Thinking Reading, Writing, and the Prose of the School THE FIELD STANCE Telling Secrets: Student Readers and Disciplinary Authorities Assessing Literacy Learning with Adults: An Ideological Approach Developmental Challenges, Developmental Tensions: A Heuristic for Curricular Thinking Author Index Subject Index

Drawing on scholarship in a variety of disciplines - philosophy, political theory, sociology, sociolinguistics, anthropology, literary theory, rhetoric - the authors outline an approach to the study of literacy that does not neglect the cognitive or individual aspects of literacy but rather sees them as largely shaped by the social forces of our political, economic, and educational systems. Ranging from the first-year writing class to adult literacy programs, the essays point the way to effective teaching strategies, program design, and research opportunities.Seven new chapters - on such topics as collaborative writing, discourse communities, women's literacy, and functional literacy - and eight previously published ones make up the book, providing a comprehensive theory of writing as social action.