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This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

This essay explores how undergraduate rhetoric and composition courses incorporate archival research. It reviews a number of assignments described in recent publications where students undertake archival research to recover lost voices, (re)read the archive as a source of public memory, and create their own archives. These assignments demonstrate a feminist pedagogy of undergraduate archival literacy in emphasizing the feminist values of collaboration, invitation, and activism in local contexts. Finally, this essay shows how students who develop the kind of archival literacy discussed in this essay often transform their definitions and practice of academic research, while professors who teach such assignments often transform their definitions and practice of undergraduate research.

This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

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Drawing from recent work in the areas of economics and sociology, this article applies theories of precarity and the precariat, terms that denote the marginalized status of contingent workers, to the composition classroom. Reviewing the economic and social conditions precipitating workforce casualization, the article argues that theories of precarity support the efforts of scholars in composition studies thinking beyond the concept of social class and toward models of solidarity. Building upon the work of these scholars, the article advocates attention to the shared precarity of students and proposes methods of enhancing solidarity at the university.

Disciplinary histories of composition studies argue that the mission of communication programs shifted during World War II: from striving to democratize higher education to promoting uncritical patriotism. Historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) rarely figure into these histories, in part because they seldom appeared in the era’s scholarly publications. Recently digitized African American newspaper archives invite a counter narrative of wartime democratizing pedagogy. Press coverage highlights the Hampton Institute Communications Center, the most widely publicized and politicized site of literacy instruction during the war. The controversy it engendered shows Hampton and other HBCU curricula forwarding wartime literacies that constituted patriotic resistance to Jim Crow segregation.

At a historical moment when both violence and its mass mediation proliferate, this essay takes as its exigence the reinforcing and troubling relationships uniting violence, image, and vision. It offers rhetorical looking as a pedagogical strategy designed to undermine violence through visual engagement, and it focuses on the atrocity image—a photographic depiction of human-on-human violence—as both a site of violence and a site for intervening in violence. Comprising four interlocking and reciprocal tactics that operate nonlinearly, rhetorical looking performs slow looking, a mode of perception that moves beyond reception and critique to attend to a photograph’s image content and to the perceptual habits by which that content is evoked. By reflecting on its own processes—revealing agency and answerability in looking—rhetorically looking potentially fosters actions that respond to rather than dismiss violence.

Intended to contextualize and elaborate on the Two-Year College English Association's 2016 Guidelines for Preparing Teachers of English in the Two-Year College, this article examines the history, current status, and possible futures of graduate preparation for two-year-college English professionals. It traces the five-decade history of efforts among two-year-college English faculty to articulate the distinct demands and opportunities of their profession and to hold university-based graduate programs accountable for providing meaningful preparation for future two-year- college teacher-scholars. Based on our survey of this history and the current landscape of graduate education in English studies, we argue that transforming graduate programs to meet the needs of the teaching majority will require embracing the four principles articulated in TYCA's 2016 Guidelines: develop curricula relevant to two-year-college teaching; collaborate with two-year-college colleagues; prepare future two-year-college faculty to be engaged professionals; and make two-year colleges visible to all graduate students.

This essay explores how Black LGBTQ students use writing to translate and transmit African American vernacular language codes in their everyday lives. Through documenting how students experience and interpret homophobia through the prism of African American vernacular English (AAVE), I demonstrate how some use language and literacy practices to critique and perform dominant gender behaviors reflected in their community. I theorize a Black queer rhetoric as a framework for understanding and nuancing the discursive limits of African American vernacular English

This article sheds light on moments when educators affirm and when writers assert their epistemic rights— the rights to knowledge, experience, and earned expertise. Affirmations and assertions of epistemic rights can work to counter epistemic injustice, or harm done to people in their capacities as knowers. Though an understanding of rhetoric as "epistemic" or "epistemological" is not new (e.g., Berlin; Dowst; Scott; Villanueva), I argue that we need to bring attention to the related terms and conceptual frameworks of epistemic rights and epistemic injustice. Together, these terms help to explain the wrongs (micro-inequities leading to macro-injustices) that manifest when writers are stripped of language, experience, or expertise and their attendant agency, confidence, and even personhood. This study highlights both the social stakes involved and the interactional work needed for putting one's words into the world. Hence, this project contributes empirical research in addition to an understanding of epistemic rights that can counter epistemic injustice.

Complexity leadership theory provides a perspective on leadership that values, rather than avoids, the realities of a complex environment. As we are now fully part of an age of networks, facilitating leadership toward collective action means embracing a distributed model reliant on multiple modes of communication distributed over multiple nodes in complex networks. A complexity theory of leadership that is practiced within the context of multimodal authorship favors collective action over individual action, collaboration over centralization, and connectivity over isolation. It is in the power of multiple networks interacting and becoming a complex adaptive system that collective action leads to positive change.

How does one balance dedication to two communities that are never served equally well? I consider a theoretically based response through Gramsci’s hegemony, the Brazilian sociologist José Maurício Domingues’s collective subjectivity, and Laclau and Mouffe’s particular brand of post-Marxism. Together, they provide a way to think about leading, holding onto the traditions of the academy while trying to change those traditions so that those who are perforce Othered can be afforded greater than mere recognition or accommodation. I argue that one must adopt a necessary mindset that places the emphasis on the collectivities to which one belongs, relegating the individual to the backdrop, to the extent that is possible.

In this article, I explore the ways that non-tenure-track faculty might develop a place in collective leadership alongside tenure-track faculty. Drawing on theoretical framing from Theodore Kemper’s research on structures of emotion in social movements, I offer a way to better understand how authentic respect for teaching and service as scholarly work helps develop opportunities for non-tenure-track teachers to develop their expertise as leaders. I illustrate some of these possibilities and suggest that these leadership opportunities may ultimately help increase visibility and respect for non-tenure-track faculty.

This article foregrounds story as a rhetorical mode of Indigenous leadership to argue for the value of local scholars working in place. Utilizing recent scholarship in Native rhetorics, educational leadership, decolonial theory, I offer my own experience as a Cherokee citizen and Indigenous researcher to illustrate the value of local cultural knowledge to the field and the academy. I suggest the reconsideration of cosmopolitan values and institutional practices that alienate Indigenous scholars from their communities.

Our article examines the challenges that “outsiders” face as academic leaders in higher education, with a special emphasis on the specific complications prevailing in the rhetoric and composition fields within English studies. We survey descriptive statistics and historical evidence to locate several of the problems confronting women and others newly and provisionally admitted to—and more often, still excluded from—the highest levels of academic leadership. Then, we bring together feminist-revisionist advocacy tools and Ernest Boyer’s alternative vision for “engaged scholarship” to suggest ways that leadership work formerly categorized as simply administrative duty or mere service be recognized for its broad-ranging impact both on campuses and the public domain.

In the early twentieth century, students produced and used a variety of texts to commemorate their school experiences and foster a sense of community among themselves. Through the compositional practices and values associated with these texts“particularly those of school literary annuals and memory books”the genre of the modern school yearbook emerged. This article draws on primary sources to trace the emergence of the yearbook as a form and practice at one Louisville high school for girls, where yearbooks both reflected and shaped the experience of high school for students who manifest complex genre knowledge and identity work in their compilations and inscriptions.

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Arguments about literacy (and its boogeyman antonym, illiteracy) allow for, perhaps even insist upon, a certain degree of rhetorical flexibility. The idea of literacy slips into familiar commonplaces, hard to resist“or heard whether we mean them or not”in arguments with administrators, the public, our students, ourselves. Literacy’s trailing clouds include the sorts of promises that literacy scholars have learned to distrust, even as we’ve probably heard ourselves make them. None of the books in this review can sidestep these binds of literacy education, and in fact in their own ways, each of them embraces those binds as central to their analyses.

Transfer student writers, who comprise more than one-third of all college students, are simultaneously experienced writers and first-year students at their new institutions. Despite their complicated positions, these students have received very little attention from composition specialists. This article responds to the paucity of attention to transfer student writers by reporting on a multiyear study that alternated between investigations of the experiences of these students and programmatic changes designed to address their expressed needs and concerns. The guiding principle of this work, and of the advice offered to colleagues interested in supporting transfer student writers on their own campuses, is a combination of institutional and student changes or mutual adjustments.

Grounded in a multimodal turn in composition studies, this article reports findings from a quantitative taxonomy analysis of four visual rhetoric and multimodal composition textbooks. This analysis reveals that while theories privilege the production of visual and multimodal compositions, the practices encapsulated in these textbooks promote the consumption of such compositions more so than production. As a result, instructors will have to be mindful about their uptake of visual and multimodal textbooks if they want to teach in ways that are theoretically grounded and rhetorically rich.

This article presents data collected from forty writing instructors in order to explore the ways in which Christian students’ discourses seem to violate certain academic norms and to argue for the intentional engagement of these discourses. Such engagement encourages a move away from entrenched “us vs. them” narratives and toward productive mediation of competing discourses. The article concludes by offering specific pedagogical strategies that instructors might use to address academic norms with devout students.

The books reviewed here share the theme of women “making it†in the world of rhetoric and composition academe. The reviewers first critically summarize each of the three collections; then narratively synthesize their personal experiences with four prominent themes across these collections: knowing, balance, mentoring, and change. This four-part woven analysis, shows and tells tales from women about what has been lurking in the academy’s closet and what still needs to change.

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The author proposes a concept of ethics for the writing course, one derived from a moral theory that is both old and new and one that engages us when we teach such practices as making claims, providing evidence, and choosing metaphors in corollary discussions of honesty, accountability, generosity, intellectual courage, and other qualities. These and similar qualities are what Aristotle called “virtues,” and they are the subject of that branch of moral philosophy known as “virtue ethics” today. While the word virtue may sound strange to us today, Duffy argues that the tradition of the virtues has much to offer teachers and students and can clarify what it means, in an ethical sense, to be a “good writer” in a skeptical, postmodern moment.

The author proposes three ways that engagement with religious rhetorics in undergraduate writing courses might enable teachers of rhetoric to cultivate writers’ civic capacities. To give readers a sense of what courses on religious rhetorics that aim to improve writers’ civic capacities look like in practice, DePalma discusses three undergraduate writing courses recently taught in different kinds of institutional settings and the kinds of learning that occurred as a result of students’ engagement with religious rhetorics in those courses.

Stephanie West-Puckett argues for open badging as an alternative born-digital assessment paradigm that can, when attendant to critical validity inquiry, promote full participation and more equitable outcomes for students of color and lower income students. Her case study of digital badging in first-year composition demonstrates how students and teachers can negotiate “good writing,” interrupting bias through the co-creation of digital badges that demystify disciplinary knowledge and serve as portable assessment objects that build social capital across contexts.

This special issue takes up a singular question: What would it mean to incorporate social justice into our writing assessments? This issue aims to foreground the perspectives of contributors whose voices are not typically heard in writing assessment scholarship: non-tenure-track faculty, HBCU WPAs, researchers interested in global rhetorics, queer faculty, and faculty of color. These voices have too often not been heard in writing assessment scholarship. There is no doubt that the first step toward projects of social justice writing assessment is to listen to those who have not been heard, to make more social the project of socially just writing assessment. The guest editors argue that there is much to be learned by making the writing assessment “scene,” as Chris Gallagher would say, more inclusive.

Race and class are deeply embedded in the way the field and teachers think about linguistic and written performance. Yet, addressing and understanding racial and linguistic prejudice remains important to the fairness of one’s pedagogies, assessment practices, and curricular development. The author argues that social justice approaches to assessment require instructors and program administrators to rethink assessment concepts such as reliability and validity with an eye toward the ways disadvantage is embedded in the very construct task responses and assessment materials used to define quality writing. Because historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) present a unique blend of culturally relevant teaching and traditional (i.e., White) definitions of quality writing, they provide a unique site for inquiry into questions of writing assessment and social justice. Specifically, in engaging with the push-pull legacy toward language use and race that is found at HBCUs, the author indicates ways we might enable teachers, administrators, and students to resist monolingual, racialized consequences embedded in their views of writing assessment and rethink the foundational measurement concepts of reliability, validity, and fairness.

The Pew Hispanic Research Center reports that between 1996 and 2012, enrollment in US higher education among Latinxs between the ages of 18 and 24 increased by 240 percent. In 2012 college enrollment among Latinx high school graduates aged 18 to 24 surpassed that of Whites for the first time in history, and NCES calculations show that more than half of those Latinx students enroll in two-year schools. Hence, in 2015 Latinxs found themselves the explicit targets of community college recruitment efforts aimed to capitalize on the increased presence of students from Latinx backgrounds. Once they pass through the doors, however, Latinx students too often find institutions ill-prepared to support their retention and success. Policies intended to guarantee equity might be effective in an environment where everyone is, in effect, the same, or when people are different in institutionally sanctioned ways, as when a student is diagnosed with a disability. However, in the case of multilingual students, such policies can mean they are consigned to a kind of institutional purgatory. They are neither in nor out; they gain access to college but remain blocked from advancement by required courses or chosen programs of study.

The translingual turn has prompted various attempts at bringing “translingual writing” into various curricula. However, if such writing, indeed any writing, continues to be bound to prevailing assessment practices, then we potentially sustain and exacerbate inequitable sociolinguistic economies and relations. Lee argues that questions of whether to invite and how to assess translingual writing are secondary to questions of how to go about translanguaging assessment, which entails the application of theoretical tenets of translingualism toward a reimagination of existing assessment ecologies.

ost writing assessment at the college level is geared toward “homegrown” or “traditional” students: the ones who start their first year of college education at the same institution from which they later graduate. Assessment at Alexander’s institution was mostly effective for those same students but was less successful for some transfer students, as shown in assessment data. Instead of trying to force those students to learn the “norm” standards, the author, as WPA, began conversations with faculty at the community colleges where these students begin their college careers to determine how to honor the many different writing knowledges that these students bring to the classroom. Looked at through a lens of queer theory, this is the path to “queering” writing assessment.

Decisions about writing assessment are rooted in racial and linguistic identity; the consequences for many writing assessment decisions are often reflective of the judgments made about who does and does not deserve opportunities for success, opportunities historically denied to students of color and linguistically diverse writers. Put simply, assessment creates or denies opportunity structures. Because writing assessment is also racially and linguistically affected by the identities of those performing assessment, the role of writing program administrator (WPA) becomes a social justice role that challenges racial and linguistic biases and interrogates institutional structures, so that all students have the same opportunities for success.