Supporting the professional development of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) is a strategic necessity for both English studies and higher education. At many academic institutions, GTAs represent a significant proportion of instructional staff for first-year composition courses (Young and Bippus 116). These courses serve a crucial institutional mission as an academic entry point for the majority of undergraduate students and have been closely linked with student retention, graduation rates, and academic performance (Garrett, Bridgewater, and Feinstein; Holmes and Busser). Based on a recent national study, Amy Cicchino found most rhetoric and composition programs offer intensive, but condensed, GTA training programs that typically include a preservice orientation, semester-long teaching proseminar, and peer or faculty mentorship (93). Yet, time is a significant constraint—most programs take place over a single semester or academic year and end just as GTAs gain enough teaching experience and confidence to become more interested in composition theory and professional development (Obermark, Brewer, and Halasek; Reid).

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.

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.

Four texts are reviewed that exemplify an important strand of writing center scholarship focused on power dynamics and identity politics in literacy teaching and learning, particularly but not exclusively within college writing centers. Each text takes up the entrenched problem of oppression and injustice toward students identified as being minority by institutional standards; each addresses possibilities for more productive, humane, and inclusive practice. Considered alongside scholarship by authors participating in this January's symposium issue and others concerned with disrupting monolingual, monocultural ideologies and institutionalized oppression, these texts add significantly to the conversation on theory and practice of critical literacy teaching and learning.

The essay reports the findings of a study of 911 students’ academic outcomes in relation to their placement profiles and a closer, qualitative analysis of 54 participating

Ferris looks at three books—Cross-Language Relations in Composition; Shaping Language Policy in the U.S.: The Role of Composition Studies; and Writing in the Devil’s Tongue: A History of English Composition in China—as they address the question of adherence to a monolingual or “standard” set of language and writing norms in composition, and consider how the answer to this question impacts our teaching.

This history explores the early growth of composition faculty between 1960 and 1990, arguing that composition has historically functioned as a site of flexible expertise. As archives of the Modern Language Association’s Job Information List attest, early job advertisements for composition “specialists” defined the work of composition in terms antithetical to specialization, expecting a compositionist to perform a variety of administrative work and to teach comfortably in multiple areas. The flexible identity of the field’s faculty aided its growth during a period when tenure-track faculty waned; composition thrived because faculty could serve multiple institutional roles. This essay calls readers to investigate the ways that composition’s flexibility has impacted and continues to impact the field’s identity and labor structures.

On February 8, 2010, eleven student activists at the University of California–Irvine protested a speech by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the United States. The disruptive nature of the protest by these students—advocates of Palestinian de-occupation and members of the Muslim Student Union—led to disciplinary action against their student organization and criminal prosecution in the local county court for disturbing the peace. This essay offers the results of an interview-based study exploring the rhetorical education of five of these college activists. The interviews reveal the powerful influence of family histories of activism and thoughtful reflections on the rhetorical dynamics of the Middle East conflict within local, national, and international publics. They also show student awareness of the limitations of the liberal-deliberative rhetorics that underpin most college writing courses. That students reported only a tenuous sense of connection between college courses and self-sponsored activist education suggests that teachers and scholars of rhetoric and composition may need to give cocurricular activism more consideration in the next phase of the “social turn.”

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When, why, and how do college students come to value their writing as intellectual property? How do their conceptions of intellectual property reflect broader understandings and personal engagements with concepts of authorship, collaboration, identification, and capital? We address these questions based on findings from the Stanford Study of Writing, a five-year longitudinal cohort study that examined students’ writing, writing development, and attitudes toward writing throughout their college years and one year beyond. Drawing in particular from interview data, we trace relationships between students’ complex and creative negotiations with intellectual property and shaping tensions within the academy, arguing for renewed pedagogical approaches that affirm students’ writerly agency as consumers and producers of intellectual property.

This essay considers how a male evangelical Christian in a first-year writing (FYW) course at a state university negotiates his identity in his academic writing for a non-Christian audience. It focuses on how “Austin” casuistically stretches a biblical text to accommodate his audience’s pluralistic perspective. Austin’s writing thus provides a discursive window into how writing academically for an FYW course might nudge students from dualism toward pluralism. It thus prompts compositionists not only to interrogate how writing academically may implicate students’ most deeply held beliefs, but also to make such identity consequences explicit to students.

Books reviewed in this article: The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns by Thomas Miller; From Form to Meaning: Freshman Composition and the Long Sixties, 1957–1974 by David Fleming; Interests and Opportunities: Race, Racism, and University Writing Instruction in the Post-Civil Rights Era by Steve Lamos.

Reviewed are Making Writing Matter: Composition in the Engaged University by Ann Feldman; City of Rhetoric: Revitalizing the Public Sphere in Metropolitan America by David Fleming; and Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World by Nancy Welch.

The author discusses his experience in a university project that led to the creation of a first-year writing text based on interviews with members of a local neighborhood. In particular, he analyzes the negative reaction that many of the community’s residents expressed toward the text’s portrayals of them. From the tensions that developed, the author concludes that English studies must go beyond mere expansion of the canon and reflect upon the very nature of value, including the importance of “use-value” with respect to the production and circulation of community-generated texts.

Because hybrid first-year college writing programs are an emerging phenomenon, it is important for composition specialists to identify their potential strengths and possible disadvantages. The author reviews the various forms that such programs have taken so far, and she engages in an extended critique of one particular institution’s model, questioning especially its claims to objectivity.

In higher education, issues of in loco parentis have been most often discussed in connection with campus administrative policies. College writing teachers need to reflect, however, on the ways they conceivably exercise parental authority in their own classrooms, through such models as the Stern Father and the Nurturing Mother.

Students in college writing courses need to understand world issues, including the oppressive effects of the global economy. But their teachers need to give them a sense of agency and authority, rather than simply telling them what political positions to take. One example of a writing assignment that might engage as well as inform students involves analyzing Parade magazine’s annual list of the world’s worst dictators.

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination yuyan, with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts. She proposes four lines of inquiry “against the grain” of English-only instruction—that living-English users weigh what English can do for them against what it has done to them; that they weigh what English can do against what it cannot do; that they understand English as being in the hands of all its users; and that they focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured to “imitate”—and discusses the implications of those lines of inquiry for composition in the United States.

Reviewed are Situating Composition: Composition Studies and the Politics of Location, by Lisa Ede; Self-Development and College Writing, by Nick Tingle; and The End of Composition Studies, by David W. Smit.

Reviewed are: Rehearsing New Roles: How College Students Develop as Writers, by Lee Ann Carroll, and Misunderstanding the Assignment: Teenage Students, College Writing, and the Pains of Growth, by Doug Hunt.

Illustrates how significant numbers of college students are "lost": they are unsituated in academic space. Suggests a rigorous exploration of the changing academic space outside of school offices and off campuses. Presents 4 assignments that provide a conceptual place (a topic) while also prompting students to make meaning out of the people–places that constitute their daily lives.

Focuses on the kind of assessment that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when educators talk about classroom assessment they talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. Hopes to draw educators into new conversations about assessment and the teaching of writing.

s Kathleen Yancey points out in her history of writing assessment, evaluation in some form or another has been an important part of college writing courses for over fifty years (“Looking”). Yancey’s history recognizes the often conflicted nature of assessment for the teaching of writing. Although most writing teachers recognize the importance and necessity of regular assessment, they are also rightly concerned about the adverse effects assessment can have on their classrooms and students. This essay focuses on the kind of assessment (I use the words assessment and evaluation interchangeably, distinguishing both from either testing or grading) that takes place within a classroom context, and therefore looks at assessing, grading, or testing writing, since when we talk about classroom assessment we talk of grades and tests, at times using all three terms interchangeably. This slippage of assessment, grading, and testing as interchangeable provides a discourse about assessment that is often critical and unexamined. The result of these strong connections among grading, testing, and assessing writing is that any possible connection between the teaching and the evaluating of student writing is seldom questioned or discussed. This has led us as a profession to believe that assessing student writing somehow interferes with our ability to teach it. There are of course some notable exceptions. For example, Edward M. White’s germinal text is called Teaching and Assessing Writing, and he includes the ways in which formal assessments such as holistic scoring can benefit classroom practice; but even White divides assessment and teaching into separate entities that can affect each other. Certainly portfolios have been constructed by some (Elbow, “Foreword”;

Addresses the climate of disappointment that characterizes English studies generally and composition studies--particularly writing program administration (WPA). Considers that the context of disappointment is shaped by a number of overlapping factors including: the widely perceived job market collapse in the humanities; the national abuse of adjunct teachers of first-year writing courses; and the general devaluation of the humanities.

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Describes the experiences of the author as she tries to transfigure her students enrolled in freshman writing and college preparatory writing classes at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, Oregon (located in the “dry side” of the state). Addresses students' racism, homophobia, and distrust of their own skills in writing.

Considers the wide variation of first-year composition programs and if they do indeed vary so widely. Considers what the programs have in common. Asks if it would be possible to articulate a general curricular framework for first-year composition, regardless of institutional home, student demographics, and instructor characteristics. Presents a list of outcomes approved by the Council of Writing Program Administrators.

he call for improved educational assessment, and specifically the assessment of writing programs, has become louder and more urgent in the past decade. I want here to explore the place of faculty and faculty values in the process of assessing the work of higher education. How can we find better ways to put the intellectual work of faculty and students at the center of our educational concerns and, as a consequence, at the center of assessment models? A focus on first-year writing courses seems to me to be especially fruitful in responding to these questions. A university education is the work faculty and students do together, work pursued closely and undertaken carefully over time. This being the case, the first-year writing course (often the only course required of all students at a college or university) can clarify in crucial ways the primary place of intellectual work-of study and thought-in our understanding of the meaning and purposes of the university. Such a clarification can thereby help to resist the commodification of education and the corporatization of its institutions. As I have argued elsewhere,1 the first-year course should not be foundational to but rather be organic with the rest of the curriculum; it should not ground but enact the intellectual work of the university; it should not anticipate but begin the students' education. Language that conceptualizes the first-year course in terms of foundation, preparation, and anticipation narrativizes and scaffolds this course in order to empty it out: the meaning of the course is elsewhere. Its outcomes, not its work, give it its value.

Kath leen Blak e Ya nce y is Pearce Professor of English at Clemson University, where she directs the Roy and Marnie Pearce Center for Professional Communication and teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in writing, rhetoric, and professional communication. Editor or author of six books and numerous articles and chapters, she chairs the College Section of NCTE and is vice-president of WPA. Her current interests include reflection as a means of enhancing learning; the design and uses of electronic portfolios; and ways of assessing digital texts.

Investigates how social class affects the educational narratives of working-class students—both their initial access to four-year institutions and their ability to persevere until they obtain bachelor’s degrees. Argues that a genuine concern with diversity should lead compositionists to question the selective functions of the academy and the role of composition in maintaining them.

Compares 20 years of teaching college writing (and reading countless drafts of student papers) to an immigrant father’s working 40 years in the family store in Terre Haute, Indiana (and selling 350,000 coats).

Concentrates specifically on the experience of using “Maus” (a narrative in comic strip form) with one class which met in spring 1996, after the accidental killing of a Black child by a Hasidic Jew in Crown Heights, New York. Uses the text at Medgar Evers College in a freshman composition course which also functions as an introduction to literature. Describes the classroom dynamics.

Shows how some key postmodern ideas about texts forced a teacher and her students to rethink typical writing assignments and typical student responses. Describes the assignments and considers how they invite postmodern critique. Suggests giving up grandiose, romantic notions that Freshman Composition can fix students either personally or politically.

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Offering an emancipatory response to the widening fissure between day-to-day experience and institutional conventionality, [Kurt] Spellmeyer [in Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] concludes with ideal of classroom practice that maintains a balance of communicative that silences no one, teachers or students (22-23). If freshman paper, for instance, were seen as threshold between two distinct contexts of social life and meaning, teachers could stop serving as initiatory gate-keep[ers], barring the way to pollution by the 'nonacademic.' (Bloom 846) Spellmeyer's reported view, seemingly endorsed by reviewer Lynn Z. Bloom, is that to eschew gatekeeping-at least in first-year college writing courses-is utopian aim, but in the good sense: the shimmering ideal at the horizon of current practice, the thing to keep moving toward. Gatekeeping is all caught up in power imbalances, silencings, the imposition of one value system (the academic) on another and presumably more natural one-an imposition seen as part of misguided and perhaps even fetishistic concern for purity (and consequent anxiety over pollution). Compared to such practice, any ideal is better, even one that's bit pie-inthe-sky. Views like these are such commonplaces that they are rarely defended in detail, or even fully articulated. Bits of explication, however, lie here and there in any

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Imaginative Literature in Composition Classrooms? Erwin R. Steinberg Fictionalizing the Disciplines: Literature and the Boundaries of Knowledge Michael Gamer Three Views of English 101 Erika Lindemann Notes on the Dying of a Conversation Gary Tate Through the Looking-Glass: A Response Jane Peterson

his essay resumes a discussion that began in 1992, when Gary Tate and I debated the place of literature in Freshman English during the annual meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. Those presentations, revised for College English, appeared in the March 1993 issue and generated several responses, four of which were published in the October 1993 issue. At that time, neither Tate nor I wished to respond to the responses, for our purpose had been to engage teachers in an important discussion about the nature and purpose of the first-year course. Having taken our turn in the conversation, we wanted others to have their say. What they said was revealing. Most of the responses in College English take exception, not to Tate's position (that literature belongs in Freshman English), but to mine (that it does not). Though you will want to read the four responses as they originally appeared, let me abstract their principal claims here:

Richards characterized in 1936 as dreariest and least profitable part of the waste that the unfortunate travel through in Freshman English (3) to pluralistic, multidimensional, architectonic discipline in our time. Theresa Enos and Stuart C. Brown in their introduction to Defining the New Rhetorics point out, for instance, that nothing short of the collective effort of multitude of perspectives would enable an encompassing view of and its place in the (vii). And as John Bender and David E. Wellbery observe in The Ends of Rhetoric, contemporary rhetorical inquiry occurs in an matrix that touches on all major academic fields (viii); as result, it has gained an irreducibly multidisciplinary character (38). Less talked about, yet equally important to putting contemporary redefinition of the classical art in perspective, is the fact that the transformation takes place not so much in congenial interdisciplinary matrix as in what Bakhtin terms verbal-ideological world-a world where the centrifugal and the centripetal forces carry on their uninterrupted work alongside each other (272), the ideal of interdisciplinarity inevitably comes into conflict with the imperatives of disciplinary politics, and the enthusiasm to open up is always conditioned by an urge to close down. Thus in responding to rhetoric becoming the central paradigmatic, epistemic activity, Derrida speaks out in Journal of Advanced Composition interview against what he calls rhetoricism or a way of giving all the power, thinking that everything depends on rhetoric. Rhetoric, he maintains, should stay within its traditional limits of verbality, formality, figures of speech (15).

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