This article seeks to present a model of critical factors that influence writing transfer by exploring and extending conversations happening in the field. The article identifies five critical and interconnected factors that support writing transfer: connection, perception, reflection, disposition, and fortification. These factors emerge from an integration of writing transfer scholarship and data from a longitudinal study of student writers. In that study, six participants were followed for seven years (from first-year composition past graduation and into the workforce) and asked to explain their experiences and perceptions of writing. I offer these five factors to spark a broader conversation about how multiple overlapping influences contribute to writing transfer and to encourage further research into how these factors interact and reinforce one another.

From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.

We report our qualitative study on two graduate student instructors’ experiences teaching alongside an experienced professor in an experimental super-sized first-year writing class. Using the framework of wobble (Fecho et al), we explore how mentors can help novice teachers navigate moments of destabilization and uncertainty.

This research team sought to gauge potential changes in the composition landscape by replicating, diversifying, and extending Bergmann and Zepernick’s 2007 study. To potentially measure the impact of years of transfer-focused work, we examined participants’ perceptions of first-year writing (FYW) classes at multiple institutions and in multiple fields at four diverse institutions. Gathering data from thirteen focus groups and sixteen interviews, the study included sixty-four total participants at four universities across the United States. Our findings diverged from the original study. The results indicated students felt that FYW was both personal and academic; that FYW taught students how to write; that FYW instructors were experts in their field; that FYW teaches best writing processes and practices; that personally relevant writing is important to writing transfer; and that for writing, there is “no box under the bed.” These findings suggest that transfer curricula may be working in tandem with other approaches, such as Writing about Writing, to shift students’ perceptions of the importance of FYW.

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

Positioning affective agency as a site of investigation, this study documents how first-year writing students create multimodal antiracist campaigns to critically address the sociopolitical issue of racial justice and to collectively challenge the hegemonic violence of racial profiling. In describing students’ affective engagements with the multimodal campaigns, this study demonstrates the potential of multimodal writing pedagogies in enacting affective agency, weaving antiracist assemblages, and transforming affective relations, all of which will provide starting points for social change and antiracist action.

Initiating a transdisciplinary composition stretch pedagogy, I examine students’ excavations of archives to advance epistemological freedoms in support of rhetorical sovereignty in student writings. Grounded in Latinx studies first-year composition, I analyze archival projects wherein Chicanx students seek rhetorical inheritances, questing to locate textual homes and emotions of belonging.

Archived tobacco industry documents reveal a relationship in the 1970s and 1980s between the author of a first-year writing textbook and the Tobacco Institute, a tobacco industry trade group. I present details of this relationship to argue for an expanded account of institutional influence on rhetoric and writing studies.

Using classroom play to promote comfort between composition students, encouraging greater participation and experimentation by helping students feel safe traversing educational and social boundaries, is supported in a theoretical lens connecting play to both pedagogy and various literacies valued in college writing. One practical framework, with student interviews, is described.

This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading, writing, and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric, at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.

This dialogue between a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and administrator proposes listening-oriented curricula to cultivate actionable empathy in FYC: an attempt at understanding and acceptance when engaging across difference that results in naming how power shapes engagement. Actionable empathy can help students become introspective, flexible communicators and help instructors develop pedagogical agency.

We advocate for the inclusion of Indigenous studies within first-year writing and academic English courses, particularly those taught to multilingual, international students. We argue that asking international students to learn about local and international Indigenous issues productively intersects with coursework in academic English. Our pedagogical approach emphasizes metalanguage and allows Indigenous studies and explicit language instruction to work in tandem, thereby recognizing the agency of Indigenous scholars and guiding non-Indigenous students in relation to it.

Based on a qualitative case study of students’ “theory of writing” essays, this study examines ways that first-year students’ community engagement experiences solidify and disrupt their writing knowledge, beliefs, and practices. Analysis of student writing demonstrates how different community-engaged writing projects inform first-year students’ writing theories and strategies.

Situated in disability studies, this article shares the results from a qualitative research project that examined how three community college students who wrote about addiction navigated the process-based activities assigned in their first-year writing courses. These findings illuminate how such exercises evoke a spectrum of emotion that shapes both process and product.

This multi-institutional study surveyed undergraduate students (n=669) about how and what they learned in hybrid and online first-year composition (FYC) classes, employing the Community of Inquiry (CoI) Framework to analyze their responses. The data illustrated a significant difference in hybrid versus online students’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship.

To equip students to analyze and create infographics with a rich understanding of rhetorical dynamics and sensitivity to how difference and equity issues are communicated, I propose a pedagogical approach to infographics drawn from Karen Barad’s concept of performative enactment and describe its implementation in a required writing classroom.

The interview featured in this essay, with two distinguished writing studies colleagues, helps us see in important new ways the dystopian world of higher education being built around us by neoliberal public policy—and what we can do to stop it.

A 1969 English 101 class at the University of Wisconsin, where linguists used ESL pedagogy to teach Black American students, has dense connections to the Dartmouth Conference. This work recovers a matrix of related linguists who did not disclose their interest in defining who qualifies as a native English speaker.

This article reports on one university’s experiment in resurrecting and reanimating the composition lecture, a one-hundred-plus student section dubbed “MonsterComp,” including the process, outcomes, and lessons learned. Although this restructuring of the first-year composition course was partially motivated by administrative pressures, the main motivation behind this experiment was to enhance teacher training and support while still retaining the workshop environment and low student-to-instructor ratio of traditional composition sections. The course involves multiple stakeholders, including the WPA and graduate student program coordinators, graduate student instructors, and course-based coaches from our university's writing center. Assessment of student work, observations of the course, and surveys administered to stakeholders indicate that the course was successful in terms of teacher training and preserving student learning outcomes.

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls procedural feminism, or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will directly engage. The author argues that employing procedural feminism can move students to become more ethical participants in public discourse while circumventing student resistance to ideological classrooms.

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Two-year college faculty have begun articulating ateacher-scholar-activistprofessional identity. After tracing the emergence of this concept and calls for solidarity in two-year college writing studies, we draw on two case studies to advocate for cross-sector disciplinary alliances that expand educational opportunity, improve professional equity, and advance social justice.

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

This article theorizes how students know when to activate knowledge acquired in FYC courses. Addressing knowledge activation as motivated by pursuing activity-specific objectives, the author calls for situating students’ encounter with and acquisition of rhetorical knowledge and practices of writing as knowledge of how to perform activities other than writing.

This article addresses an impasse between rhetoric and composition practice and theory. On one hand, from the poststructural through the posthuman, our most vigorous theories challenge classical notions of selfhood and agency. On the other hand, from institutional assessment through writing about writing, composition’s most vigorous practices entail fairly traditional ideas about selfhood and agency. This piece crosses over the impasse by suggesting that “self” and “agency” are vital fantasies for composition, and that negotiating these fantasies is an ethical process. At its heart, I argue, composition is any ethical, collective working out of these fantastical concepts that helps adaptive individuals more freely emerge.

This essay brings to light new evidence about the relationship between revision and reflective writing in the first-year writing classroom. Based on a robust study of student work, we illuminate a variety of complex relationships between the writing knowledge that students articulate in their reflections—including how they narrate their course progress, approach teacher commentary, and make decisions about their revisions—and the actual writing practices they execute in their revised essays. The essay offers pedagogical innovations that help students use reflective writing in ways that support substantive revision.

Writing educators have long sought to disrupt academic convention. However, we currently know little about students’ affective experiences when they are asked to compose differently. This article explores the results of a research study to illuminate the feelings and attitudes students experience when convention is disrupted and offers pedagogical suggestions based on the results.

Drawing upon a two-year study of student-veterans in college writing classrooms, this article analyzes three types of courses developed in an effort to respond to increased military-affiliated student enrollments: veterans-only, veteran-focused, and veteran-friendly. The article concludes with recommendations for an asset-based approach to professional development for writing faculty

0Make, O Muse...0.1 Knowing I was speaking about disruption, I thought what's more disruptive than playing punk music for an academic talk? So I played punk for you. I'll play some more punk for you after the talk. It's hard to be complacent when you listen to punk. If you want, stick that in your head as the soundtrack for today's talk. Punk and disruption may also produce in your mind's eye the image of friends working in a garage or the basement, and I encourage you to keep that image in your head, because whether they're taking a new approach to rock and roll or inventing the Apple computer, the garage tinkerer and inventor is our muse today as we reflect on making disruptive and innovative action in our discipline and our organization.1CCCC1.01 I've been coming to the C's for a long time, since I was a graduate student in the '80s. For me (like many of you, I'm sure), the CCCC is a natural academic home. And it's easy to see why: a wide range of pedagogical approaches visible in the program, all our theories on display, varied interests (FYC, creative nonfiction, creative writing, linguistics, rhetorical theory, history, technical and professional writing), and a general concern about writing both in the classroom and in society. The convention has one of the friendliest and most helpful group of members in higher education. It's a culture of fun (witness C's the Day and its Sparkleponies), and a culture of sharing and learning, where most of us are like Chaucers Clerk in that would we [all] learn and gladly teach1.02 We have an acceptance rate that's stingy-but not too stingy- so that we can put a lot of people on the program. There are workshops on Wednesdays, and we serve as a magnet for other organizations such as TYCA, ATTW, and WPA-GO to meet at the same general time.1.03 And during this same span of time that I've been coming to our convention (which is, unbelievably, almost thirty years), I have seen the C's take steady and meaningful steps to become more than a guild of writing teachers and researchers, but also an organization committed to openness, access, inclusivity:We have established travel and research scholarships that are designed to enable travel to and participation in the convention for both international and domestic scholars who may not have travel support from their institutions. These awards, along with reduced registration fees, have benefited a host of traditionally marginalized scholars, including contingent faculty, graduate students, retired members, Latin American scholars, tribal fellows, LGBTQ scholars, among others. And the one that started it all, the Scholars for the Dream in 1993, includes membership in NCTE/CCCC, travel assistance, and mentoring to help foster future leaders in our organization.We have an inclusive leadership structure, where elected positions on the executive committee, nominating committee, and chair rotation are broadly representative of the diversity of our organization. And we continue to evolve in this respect. Did you know, for example, that we have in the last five years added elected positions on the EC for graduate students and contingent faculty?What sort of new discussions are possible in governance with broader representation?We have created and supported research throughout our organization, rewarding scholars at all levels, from our undergraduate posters to graduate students, our book and article awards, and our wildly successful research initiative.We have taken steps to ensure inclusivity without regard to rank, tenure, job title, or type of institution. We feature undergraduate research posters, a graduate student on the EC, a thriving cross-generational (XGEN) initiative, and SIGs for grad students and retired professors. The program includes papers and roundtables from graduate students, adjunct and contingent faculty, tenure-track faculty, non-academic or alt-ac practitioners-from private institutions, two-year, four-year, regional universities, and R1's. …

In an era of normative austerity in US higher education, composition is being transformed by budget cuts, retrenchment, and marketization. Nevertheless, the field’s scholarship continues to compartmentalize questions concerning the material terms of practice away from questions of curricular philosophy. Because composition has not developed a deliberate, sustained inquiry into how scholarship and teaching are being shaped by the perpetual crisis of austerity economics, we are compelled to adopt myopic and reactionary stances toward our work. As a means of subverting composition’s perpetual crisis, Scott advocates disciplinary work that not only imagines new, globally focused, and politically conscious curricula but also actively pursues the creation of the work and learning environments that are necessary for their successful realization.

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet’s JAC article (“Composition as a Management Science”), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field’s key terms in actuality undergo (and perform) a political-economic function. This exploration forms the basis for an analysis of how the knowledge domains of the field can be more clearly defined through an effort to reframe the field as “writing studies,” for the purpose of moving beyond the worn out commonplaces and labor exploitation associated with first-year composition.

The authors report on a study of writing transfer using a relatively novel method. Specifically, they use screencast videos to study the work of a dozen undergraduates who had taken first-year writing and were now enrolled in an interdisciplinary biology class. The authors argue that students were able to adapt to the writing requirements in the biology class because they implicitly understood themselves to be engaged in Carter’s metagenre of “research from sources.” Because students in this study had been asked to engage in that metagenre at least since high school, they believed their writing habits were established well before first-year writing, and consequently they have trouble recognizing the influence of such a course on their subsequent work. The study also revealed that students coordinated multiple texts simultaneously in order to engage in processes akin to what Howard has called “patchwriting” but also similar to the habits of professional writers. Whereas professional writers have well established networks for seeking information, the students in this study worked in relative isolation, using a few sources found haphazardly through library or Google searches. The authors suggest that instructors spend more time helping students develop effective networks of information, including experts and organizations in addition to published sources.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

This article shares our experience designing and deploying writing assessment in English Composition I: Achieving Expertise, the first-ever first-year writing Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). We argue that writing assessment can be effectively adapted to the MOOC environment and that doing so reaffirms the importance of mixed-methods approaches to writing assessment and drives writing assessment toward a more individualized,learner-driven, and learner-autonomous paradigm.

Reviewed are: Literacy as Translingual Practice: Between Communities and Classrooms A. Suresh Canagarajah, editor Translingual Practice: Global Englishes and Cosmopolitan Relations A. Suresh Canagarajah Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies Scott Wible Other People’s English: Code-Meshing, Code-Switching, and African AmericanLiteracy Vershawn Ashanti Young, Rusty Barrett, Y’Shanda Young-Rivera, and Kim Brian Lovejoy

In this article, I turn to a grounded theory study that examines the experiences of students participating in an individual project-based FYW course, exploring up close the exploits,—practices, and products of one student “writing to assemble.” I question pedagogy stayed to theory that would treat writing as primarily a technology of representation, and in its place—introduce the concept of “writing as assemblage.” Positing a theory of the writing space that underscores writing’s more generative qualities, I call for a new definition of proficiency—for all manner of first-year writing courses.

We in composition studies have countered the suspicion that what we do is “simplistic in method and impoverished in content” by insisting on our own disciplinary expertise, an insistence that has gained us administrative support and, arguably, better working conditions. Yet this article explores a problem that arose for the author as a result of her own insistence on disciplinary expertise: she had great difficulty recruiting faculty from other disciplines to teach first-year writing classes. This article suggests a solution to this problem, a strategic disingenuousness derived from the strategy developed by popular sentimental women authors of nineteenth-century America to counter the disciplinary expertise of professional male orators and rhetoricians, who looked down on the untrained speaker. The stance of strategic disingenuousness that this article advocates is more radical than the denial of expertise touted by recent scholarship in WAC and WID: it requires WPAs to withhold their expertise in the absence of any assurancethat the faculty they are training already have within themselves the knowledge they need to teach writing. An admittedly inefficient and often exasperating stance, it nonetheless represents a way for WPAs to entice faculty to teach writing and build a strong community with them.

Reviewed are: From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 David Fleming Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post–Civil Rights Era Steve Lamos Retention and Resistance: Writing Instruction and Students Who Leave Pegeen Reichert Powell Rhetoric of Respect: Recognizing Change at a Community Writing Center Tiffany Rousculp Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times Patrick W. Berry, Gail E. Hawisher, and Cynthia L. Selfe

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Challenging histories of male-dominated composition instruction during the nineteenth century, this article recovers composition practices at the Cherokee National Female Seminary, locating the practices at the intersections of gender, race, and colonization. Through Indigenous storytelling and archival research methods, the author asserts that our cultural locations landscape our writing histories.

This article explores shared language development in secondary to postsecondary transitions. Based on survey findings of secondary students, the authors advocate using a shared language corpus to access and collect student and instructor language about writing to smooth secondary to postsecondary transitions and transitions beyond the FYC classroom.

This article examines founder Frank L. Gilyard’s role in the establishment of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum in Reading, Pennsylvania, through the dual lenses of African American rhetoric and performance studies. It concludes with an analysis of how these insights informed a community-based research course in honors first-year composition.

This article draws on qualitative research conducted as a part of a writing program assessment to examine the relationship between assessment, valuation, and the economics of first-year writing. It argues that the terms of labor in first-year writing complicate practices of valuation and the processes of consensus building that have become common in assessment models. It explains that if assessment is to be situated at a site and represent the work that happens there faithfully, it needs to account for how power, the economics of staffing, and differing ways of thinking about writing education necessitate struggle and the acknowledgment and representation of dissonance.

This essay revisits and expands on Gary A. Olson and Joseph M. Moxley’s 1989 article “Directing Freshman Composition: The Limits of Authority” by looking at revised notions of writing program administrators’ work and authority in 2012. Whereas the original essay surveyed only department chairs, our study includes data from both department chairs and directors of first-year writing to explore issues of authority. The essay complicates Olson and Moxley’s notion of authority, distinguishing among power, authority, and influence, and examining how they inflect the work of directors of first-year writing. In addition, common assumptions about the connections between WPAs’ tenure status and authority are re-examined in light of survey results.

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.

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.

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by manythousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. Weseek to understand more clearly through this conversation how culture and rhetorical tradition help shape the way we teach writing.

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.

While reading a series of undergraduate essay drafts, ten newly appointed graduate teaching assistants consistently projected their own anxieties about academic writing onto the authors of the papers, with two exceptions: the students were imagined neither to have the teachers’ compositional agency nor to feel their ambivalence about the academic writing conventions in question. Suggestions for repurposing the intellectual work of the TA-training practicum follow.