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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.

What does a twenty-first-century writing pedagogy look like? What principles should undergird contemporary writing pedagogy and practice? How should writing teachers today design writing courses, motivate student engagement, and promote literacy practices? Each of the five books reviewed here takes up these questions in calling for sensitivity and care in understanding students and the many ways that they are positioned in the world, for more attention to reading pedagogy in conjunction with writing, and for the continued study of transfer.

This article examines how creative writing pedagogy and composition pedagogy can be put into productive conversation by using expressivism and social constructionism as a shared frequency, allowing for a deepening of the pedagogical options available to teachers. The end result of this analysis is a proposal for a dual course pairing of composition and creative writing. Within this proposed arrangement, creative writing, on the one hand, would emphasize expressivist pedagogies that grant students centrality in the classroom while still exploring the ideological implications of the writing act. Composition, on the other hand, would focus on scholarship, research, and theory, while still employing creative writing activities that keep student writers from feeling utterly marginalized.

Benson examines three books—Experimental Writing in Composition: Aesthetics and Pedagogies, Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, and Rhetorical Delivery as Technological Discourse: A Cross-Historical Study—that contribute powerfully to the scholarly conversation about the changing face of composition by illustrating how the narrative of newness associated with multimodal and experimental work hides a long saga of negotiation between the traditional and the new in the field of composition.

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 Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

Challenging the thesis of Stanley Fish’s recent book Save the World on Your Own Time, the author argues that political awareness was vital to the development of a productive basic writing pedagogy, and that composition teachers can responsibly work from their own political values in the classroom.

Reviewed are "Composition and/or Literature: The End(s) of Education", edited by Linda S. Bergmann and Edith M. Baker, and "Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars", edited by Judith H. Anderson and Christine R. Farris.

Toward the end of his life, Donald Murray felt that his approach to writing instruction was no longer appreciated by journals in his field. Nevertheless, his emphasis on encouraging students to surprise themselves through informal writing still has considerable value.

English faculty in community colleges feel pressured to make their composition courses acceptable for transfer to four-year schools. In particular, many of them feel obligated to emphasize academic research and argument at the expense of literature. But community college students will benefit from first-year courses that address a wide range of discourse by integrating literary study with writing instruction.

The author suggests that models positioning the multilingual writer as passively conditioned by “interference” from his or her first language, as well as more correlative models of the interrelationships of multiple languages in writing, need to be revised. Analyzing works written to different audiences, in different contexts, and in different languages by a prominent Sri Lankan intellectual, the author instead suggests a way of understanding multilingual writing as a process engaged in multiple contexts of communication, and multilingual writers as agentive rather than passive, shuttling creatively among languages, discourses, and identities to achieve their communicative and rhetorical objectives.

The author uses the example of a text a student was not allowed to display on his course website to explore how and why institutional ideologies particular to the historical development of composition and creative writing—especially when viewed in conjunction with current copyright law—render students’ multimedia compositions illegitimate. He suggests that the ideological apparatuses of writing instruction and the legal statutes of U.S. culture at large combine to radically restrict the production and circulation of students’ multimedia texts and inhibit students’ power as writers.

Reviewed are Teaching Writing with Computers: An Introduction, edited by Pamela Takayoshi and Brian A. Huot, and Silicon Literacies: Communication, Innovation and Education in the Electronic Age, edited by Ilana Snyder.

The authors argue for a structural revolution in English studies that builds on the epistemological ground shared by those in composition and literature. Their confederative “English studies” model integrates work in literature, discourse, language studies, and the larger culture with rhetoric and writing instruction horizontally, not hierarchically.

Hopes to promote recognition of the importance of the intersections between discourse, place, and environment through theoretical examinations and pedagogical approaches. Offers some preliminary working definitions for ecocomposition and examines the evolution of ecocomposition; distinguishes between ecocomposition and ecocriticism; and offers some perspectives on ecocomposition pedagogy.

Suggests that the teaching of both composition and creative writing would benefit from focusing less exclusively on the writing process and products and more on the writing subject. Claims that focusing on the writing subject through the lens of psychoanalysis provides several potential benefits. Concludes psychoanalysis can be a filtrate for the creative writing or composition teacher.

Opponents of expressivist writing pedagogy claim that encouraging the personal narrative in first-year rhetoric classis is a great disservice to students. Supporters of personal writing responded by making personal writing activities supplemental to traditional academic writings. Spigelman posits that personal narratives can actually serve the same purpose as academic writing and can accomplish serious scholarly work.

Urges compositionists to reframe Writing across the Curriculum (WAC) to reach beyond university boundaries. Reviews calls for an expanded conception of WAC, describes a program that carries writing instruction and literacy research beyond university boundaries, and suggests problems and benefits that may accompany this change of orientation for writing programs.

Gives an account in journal format of the author’s experiences teaching writing and literature at a missionary school in Nigeria. Describes difficulties and conflicts of beliefs encountered over a period of time with her colleagues. Presents a poem from one of her teaching assistants and discusses reactions and meanings involved in the different cultures.

Describes two ways that teaching and responding to student writing are being pressured by rapidly developing technologies now being introduced into educational institutions. Discusses (1) the increasing replacement of face-to-face contact by “virtual” interaction via multimedia technology, e-mail communication systems, and the recently expanded capabilities of the World Wide Web; and (2) distance education.

Explores the convergence between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience. Argues that critical ethnography and pedagogy need to redefine “experience” and its function for research and teaching and that composition can help this redefinition by looking for ways to build and constructively use a tension between teaching and research practices.

Explores the convergence between projects in ethnographic research and composition pedagogy that emphasize the critical power of experience. Argues that critical ethnography and pedagogy need to redefine “experience” and its function for research and teaching and that composition can help this redefinition by looking for ways to build and constructively use a tension between teaching and research practices.

Taps research in American studies to learn more about rhetoric and writing instruction in post-Revolutionary America. Merges the separate (and gendered) histories of early 19th-century American rhetoric, breaking down the separate spheres in contemporary historical and literary scholarship. Examines civic rhetoric found in texts that represent women’s schooling.

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Why is it that students seem to improve their texts so often, and desire to improve them more, when they're given nondirective feedback? Why do teacherless writing groups (where the writer gets conflicting responses from readers instead of teacherly direction) lead to more writing? How can Donald Murray (Writer 173) claim to get effective revision from writers in conferences lasting only five minutes? Stereotype of a Donald Murray conference: