This article argues that teachers and WPAs can “hack” standard curricular spaces and institute more inclusive writing pedagogies. One form of hacking can occur through the design of Writing Studio, a one-hour peer workshop that provides a necessary off-shoot from normative composition instruction. Writing Studio disables composition as standard practice and institutes an open-access curricular space that reconfigures practice as usual. Drawing upon key concepts from disability, this article shows how the studio approach promotes writers’ interdependence, out of which develops writer agency and confidence.

This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence.

In this article, I argue for pedagogies that explicitly center the embodied perspectives of students and their audiences. Using Stephanie Kerschbaum’s concept of “anecdotal relations,” or orientations towards disability that inform rhetorical transactions, I analyze my academic experiences as a Chicana with “invisible” disabilities to highlight how race and disability are both highlighted and erased in pedagogical contexts. I present two personal stories from my time as a student and as an instructor, respectively, to show how instructors’ orientations towards race and disability are typically based around impressions of deficit even as the importance of race and disability as critical heuristics are overlooked. Then I explain how my students and I attempt to build critical embodiment into our writing to compose more inclusively to suggest how we may all become more attuned to our audiences’ embodied needs.

Expert readers’ responses to texts offer specific, meaningful insights useful in building English language arts models (ELA) for student writers. In the case of academic peer review, previous research has demonstrated that expert reviewers have specific expectations involving readers, texts, and processes. Identifying congruence between research on expert readers and the design of ELA models, however, has proven elusive—and detrimental to the advancement of student learning. One promising integrative direction is the study of two complementary ELA models, one emphasizing the role of meta-reading and the other of cognition. To explore the capability of an ELA model for writing studies informed by expert reader practice, we present a case study that has educative implications for the teaching of writing. Specifically, the study reports the observations of six expert readers reviewing manuscripts for an academic journal in writing studies. Following completion of an online survey of their reading aims as they reviewed manuscripts for publication, colleagues participated in a 30-minute semi-structured recorded interview about their strategies. The interview responses were coded using both meta-reading and cognitive models. Based on analysis of 529 reviewer comments included in the analysis, the findings support conceptualization of integrated, multi-faceted ELA models. While limited, our study has generative research and classroom implications for the development of writing studies pedagogy.

Despite claims that Creative Writing and Composition don’t speak to one another, this article finds that composition does borrow fictional craft elements and artistic tools. Moreover, these devices and tools show up in composition pedagogy in two ways: explicitly or implicitly. Many of the tools found come from fiction writers and poets, while some are from creative non-fiction writers. The article searches through 17 years of journal articles to show how artistic tools are discussed, used, and how teachers adopt or theorize them for writing students. What the essay proposes is a greater independence of the student writer as a harvester and user of rhetorical tools and to have students go past mere techniques into a more conscious use of the tools available to them outside of what the teachers offer, since there could be, and surely are, more options for analytical and artistic creation and criticism.

This article proposes a translingual/transdisciplinary rhetoric that aims to complement, rather than confront, current discipline-specific discursive, linguistic, and cultural conventions. Specifically, the article reviews various lines of inquiry on translingualism in composition scholarship and identifies and accounts for the challenges and resistance to this orientation in practice. After defining translingual/transdisciplinary rhetoric and conceptualizing what it means to practice it across disciplines, the author proposes tentative directions for achieving a translingual/transdisciplinary rhetorical norm in pedagogical spaces.

Enrollments of international students are at very high levels in the U.S., a development that has altered the demographics of first-year composition classes in recent years. Nonetheless, writing instructors and administrators often know little about these students’ backgrounds, which can make it difficult to design pedagogies that are responsive to their specific needs. Drawing on data from a qualitative, longitudinal study with a cohort of undergraduate international students, this article addresses three interrelated issues: 1) pre-college writing experiences of international students in both their first languages and English; 2) key points of challenge and discovery for international students as they enter the culture of U.S. academic writing; and 3) possible pedagogic interventions designed to better support international students. Situating findings in relation to recent scholarship on students’ transitions from high school to college, the article explores ways in which the experiences of international students are both similar to and different than those of their U.S.-educated peers.

Since the 2016 release of the Modern Language Association’s new style guidelines, scholars and teachers—along with writing centers, libraries, and editorial staffs--have been familiarizing themselves with the changes. Based on a standardized approach to citation, the eighth edition of the MLA Handbook asks us to adjust some long-entrenched habits. Perhaps more pressingly, the new MLA format reminds us of enduring pedagogical challenges regarding students’ information literacy, habits of source citation, and understanding of knowledge-making. With this issue of Composition Forum marking the journal’s progression to the new guidelines, we asked two scholars to explore the MLA Handbook ’s significance for our field’s scholarly and teacherly work.

As writing teachers increasingly engage students with audio media, it has become crucial to coach listening explicitly in the classroom, activities that students may otherwise approach passively. In this article I suggest that a rhetorical approach applicable to (or derived from) print texts is not enough to help students listen actively, and offer instead a materially engaged practice of listening that helps students to understand their interactions with compositions on a material level that involves bodily activity. My proposed pedagogy moves students toward a reflective awareness of their practices, encourages purposeful listening, and acknowledges the role that attention plays in listening. Such a pedagogy can help students to engage with audio compositions on their own terms, encourage them to understand listening as a dynamic practice with critical heft worthy of their time and attention, and open insights into affordances of sound that are obscured by print-centric approaches.

Tinkering is a longstanding material practice that has gained popularity in recent years as a learning strategy at numerous schools, camps, and makerspaces. This article seeks to establish in composition pedagogy tinkering’s playful, exploratory ethos by introducing a practice called critical-creative tinkering . In critical-creative tinkering, a writer dwells inside a source text by reading and rewriting it, generating an alternative text. Building on the itinerant status of traditional tinkers, this article promotes critical-creative tinkering as a pedagogy that moves or travels across the curriculum. Toward that end, it presents tinkering assignments and student responses to them from two different writing-intensive courses: an introductory literature course and a professional writing course.

To illustrate how genre pedagogy and public writing pedagogy can inform one another, this program profile describes the second-semester composition course at University of North Dakota, ENGL 130: College Composition II: Writing for Public Audiences. In this course, genre works as a rhetorical bridge across an interlinked sequence of research, professional, and public writing assignments focused on a contemporary topic of public interest. The course maintains a public orientation throughout: as a simulated genre system, the course constitutes a protopublic, or a rhetorical space in which students can learn about public debates, rehearse public discourses, and prepare for future performances of public genres with rhetorical awareness in their repertoire.

Of the 40% of internet users who have faced harassment online, young adults, women, and racial minorities are especially vulnerable, experiencing more severe harassment and experiencing it more often. This article attempts to reconcile the increasingly urgent calls for students to compose in public spaces online with the reality of potential harassment. Compositionists should avoid relying on a Habermasian understanding of the public sphere and instead embrace a political, ecological approach to public writing that recognizes publics as the result of the interactions between multiple texts and actors, and that attends to the ways in which power relations alternately shape, constrain, and enable those texts and actors. This model equips students with a more sophisticated framework for understanding internet publics, and will ultimately empower them to make informed rhetorical choices about which public networks to enter, ensuring not just more effective rhetorical action but safer online experiences.

Drawing from their experiences teaching two different activism-focused writing courses, the authors consider the benefits, pitfalls, and potential dangers of activist writing pedagogy. Scott provides a retrospective on a rhetoric and writing course focused on the employment of digital rhetoric, while Katherine reflects on an activist-rhetoric course that culminated in the execution of an annual Take Back the Night rally. Despite the risk of “politicizing the classroom,” the authors argue that activist pedagogy, when thoughtfully implemented, can help students (no matter their political leanings) learn how to write, act, and think—necessary skills for a democratic society. Yet, while both authors support activist-focused rhetoric and writing courses, they also examine the ethical, pedagogical, occupational, and even legal issues that might arise from teaching such courses.

With the proliferation of digital media and other forms of technologically mediated communication, this article argues that critical multimodal pedagogical approaches to public writing—particularly through interrogating mundane, everyday texts—have the potential to engage students with advocacy and its role in shaping public discourse. In this article, we propose a pedagogy that views multimodal composition as advocacy. Because all texts are embedded with advocacy, encouraging students to recognize their own advocacy practices, and teaching them to carefully approach how they construct texts, we argue, may better prepare our students to be more social-justice minded public writers and rhetors in the future.

This multimedia article focuses on my experience as a professor working on a campus adjacent to Ferguson, Missouri. I discuss the ways that Ferguson and Black Lives Matter pushed me to intentionally and meaningfully connect my teaching, research, and the local community. Through narrative, video and audio excerpts and analysis of conversations with Ferguson community members, and pedagogical reflection, I argue for an understanding of public rhetoric and writing that is more inclusive of listening, archives, collectivity, and social justice. I also highlight the importance of building rhetorical theory alongside public rhetors in local communities, helping students understand that the rhetorical tradition is far from a historical relic. Instead, it is a work-in-progress, living and breathing all around them.

Drawing on new materialist and public writing scholarship, this essay advocates for public writing projects that foreground distributed action by pursuing material ends . Analyzing the rhetorical consequences and pedagogical potential of the Children’s Peace Statue Project (1990-1995), a student-led activist project to fund, design, and dedicate in Los Alamos an international peace statue to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, I argue that such projects foreground durability : the slow grind of rhetorical action, its reliance on multiple texts composed and circulated over a span of years, across numerous sites, and encompassing multiple languages, registers, and media. Furthermore, through retrospective interviews with participants who contributed to this effort as children, I investigate the power of embodied learning to create durable literacy experiences—experiences that these participants reflect on vividly even twenty years after the statue was first assembled. Ultimately, understanding both objects and public writing as distributed networks foregrounds the attention to durability that I suggest needs to accompany our embrace of an ecological, distributed model of public writing.

In this interview, Paula Mathieu explores the rhetorical tactics and contemplative practices necessary to cultivate hope in a period of political tumult. Drawing on her scholarship on the “public turn” in Composition Studies, a term she gave us in her vital Tactics of Hope: The Public Turn in English Composition , Mathieu discusses tactics and strategies for teaching public writing and supporting the work of public writing teachers at a time when community partnerships and service learning are more susceptible to critique in political discourse. Mathieu traces out a synthesis between mindfulness and public engagement and underlines the importance of seeing the contemplative as productive and reflective of public engagement.

In this interview, Susan Wells discusses the teaching of public writing and the work of public rhetoric as they respond to both shifting and recurring political and social contexts. Drawing on insights from her extensive and current work on public rhetoric, including her foundational essay “Rogue Cops and Health Care: What Do We Want from Public Writing?,” Wells discusses the possibilities public writing instruction holds for cultivating students’ public agency, while also exploring the boundaries between what can and cannot be accomplished in the public writing classroom.

Within the field of Writing Studies, metacognition is rapidly being recognized as essential for the effective transfer of knowledge across contexts. This program profile describes a pre-college writing course at the University of Washington that builds metacognition, confidence, and fluency in writing. Through program evaluations, student surveys, and instructor feedback, this profile describes how the course has evolved over the past decade, how students and instructors experience the curriculum, and reflections and recommendations for instructors considering introducing metacognitive practices in their own writing courses.

This profile presents New Jersey City University’s Writing Assessment Program from its creation in 2002 to its elimination in 2017. The program arose as an attempt to raise the writing skills of the diverse, first-generation teacher certification candidates in the College of Education. Despite political missteps, the program gained greater administrative support in 2009, and in this second stage, the program capitalized on greater institutional support to use data-driven analysis to inform policy. In 2014, however, New Jersey moved to require the Praxis CORE, and the Writing Assessment Program became obsolete. This profile discusses the many ways in which a locally developed, student-centered, and instruction-driven assessment program can raise student skills and the losses involved in a shift from local to national assessment.

Scholarship on metacognition in the composition classroom shows how asking students to create reflective texts can help cue, analyze, and assess transfer. By following the composition processes of 13 students doing a remixing assignment, this project examines how genre mediates reflection. I use Rhetorical Genre Studies’ conception of uptake—focusing on the selection process of choosing a genre and the eventual genre production—to examine students’ reflective practice within this assignment. Tracing the students’ uptake selection processes and comparing them to what students reflect about in their reflective texts reveals how reflection is mediated through genre. I argue that reflective practice should take place through a variety of genres throughout the composition process, rather than just retrospectively on the finished product. Asking students to do multi-genred reflective writing throughout the composition process could allow students to map their uptake selection processes more effectively when moving across multimodal genres.

Recently, rhetorical genre studies scholars have challenged the field to de-center the study of genre as artifact to focus on the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain how those genres get used by writers: the genre uptakes. While prior research has begun to identify many of these consequential influences, these endeavors would benefit, I argue, from an emic, writer-oriented method that follows what writers perceive has impact on genres from a longitudinal and trans-contextual perspective. To that end, I extend previous research by introducing lifeworld analysis to the study and teaching of genre uptake. Lifeworld analysis, I argue, centralizes uptake, uptakes over time, and the background life from which uptakes are formed, as salient for literacy development. To support this claim, I present a lifeworld case study of one student (Ron), an electrical engineering major and participant in local and online maker culture, who I followed over four years of his undergraduate curriculum, from general education and discipline-specific courses into an online and local community makerspace. Ron’s case reveals the interplay between maker-consciousness and encounters with engineering and general education writing, highlighting how maker culture became a core scene of uptake for his performance of school-based genres. This lifeworld analysis shows the porousness and malleability of spheres of writing activity as well as the consequences of such perceived malleability for writers. Ron’s case grounds my introduction of an uptake awareness pedagogy: an attempt to help students recognize and strategically draw from expanded and often taken-for-granted temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories of their prior genre uptakes and those uptake histories.

This article argues that the field of Rhetoric and Composition has long harnessed the active potential of metaphor to change its own practices but has considerably overlooked student use of metaphor—a particularly urgent oversight given the metaphorical battleground that constitutes the discourse of contemporary higher education. Using this exigency, the article 1) explains how a more thorough reading of Lakoff and Johnson’s popular work on metaphor theory can re-energize Rhetoric and Composition to be more inclusive of student experiences in classroom coverage of metaphor and 2) offers imaginative but concrete pedagogical approaches and activities aimed at facilitating student learning of metaphor in the context of a consumer-based “University of Excellence.”

As multimodal writing continues to shift and expand in the era of Big Data, writing studies must confront the new challenges and possibilities emerging from data mining, data visualization, and data-driven arguments. Often collected under the broad banner of data literacy , students’ experiences of data visualization and data-driven arguments are far more diverse than the phrase data literacy suggests. Whether it is the quantitative rhetoric of “likes” in entertainment media, the mapping of social sentiment on cable news, the use of statistical predictions in political elections, or the pervasiveness of the algorithmic phrase “this is trending,” data-driven arguments and their accompanying visualizations are now a prevalent form of multimodal writing. Students need to understand how to read data-driven arguments, and, of equal importance, produce such arguments themselves. In Writing through Big Data, a newly developed writing course, students confront Big Data’s political and ethical concerns head-on (surveillance, privacy, and algorithmic filtering) by collecting social network data and producing their own data-driven arguments.

As Open Educational Resources (OER) increasingly receive attention from academics, educational foundations, and government agencies, exemplars will emerge that lower student textbook costs by moving away from commercial publishers through self-publishing or curating web-based resources. Joe Moxley’s Writing Commons serves as a scaled OER model in its careful consideration of the processes involved in producing accessible resources that meet user needs. Writing Commons hosts hundreds of peer-reviewed resources on writing instruction for use as a course text or supplement by students and faculty in a variety of disciplines. Moxley’s work on the site reflects the challenges and rewards of putting the entire publishing process of educational resources in the hands of faculty.

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it “can become a means for proactive change” (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our “equal opportunity” writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and “revision” the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the quid pro quo between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.

Multimodal pedagogy is increasingly accepted among composition scholars. However, putting such pedagogy into practice presents significant challenges. In this profile of Washington State University’s first-year composition program, we suggest a multi-vocal and multi-theoretical approach to addressing the challenges of multimodal pedagogy. Patricia Ericsson, the director of composition, illustrates how theories of agency are central to the integration of multimodality. Elizabeth Sue Edwards, a graduate teaching assistant, explores negotiating departmental standards and implementing multimodal assignments. Tialitha Michelle Macklin, also a graduate teaching assistant, discusses her journey from rejecting multimodal assignments to embracing them as an integral element of her pedagogy. And Leeann Downing Hunter, a non-tenure-track faculty member, approaches the challenge through the lens of adaptability. We believe that this multi-vocal approach to building a multimodal composition program offers: (1) a foundation for other writing programs to adapt and build upon; (2) an alternative to traditional approaches that rely on single theories and single leaders; and (3) a reconstitution of how the university works, integrating stakeholder voices from administrators to students themselves.

Occluded genres in academia work “behind the scenes” to support and develop an academic’s professional identity. However, while significant attention has been paid to occluded genres that support an academic’s identity as a researcher, very little scholarship examines how occlusion operates in genres of pedagogy, such as the syllabus, teaching statement, or assignment prompt. These genres promote and endorse an academic’s teacherly identity, not only by expressing a teacher’s authority and expertise in the classroom, but also by representing a teacher’s pedagogical philosophy, activity, and experience in other academic scenarios beyond the classroom. In this article, I explore the characteristics of occlusion associated with these genres as well as the implications faced when their rhetorical complexity is obscured by that occlusion. Ultimately, I argue for an increased awareness and study of the occluded contexts of pedagogical genres so that we may better understand how these genres facilitate the pedagogical activity and identities of teachers within academia.

This article proposes a “pedagogy of riffing” and examines how satire and some earlier forms of metacommentary can help first-year composition students appreciate the mediated nature of contemporary current-events discourse. Beginning with comic news and working back to those pioneers of cultural riffing, Mystery Science Theater 3000 , this article examines the nexus of rhetorical awareness, citizenship, and riffing. I argue that using forms of metacommentary, situated within a pedagogy of riffing, helps students to locate themselves in the larger discussion of politics and informed citizenship.

Comics—both digital and print—increasingly make their way to the classroom. Scholars in the field have illustrated the pedagogical value of comics, but there remains little discussion as of yet about how comics can inform critical literacy, a necessary skill for twenty-first-century communication. Here the authors discuss an approach to first-year composition that argues for using comics, like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home , as an avenue for grappling with critical literacy. This classroom activity was a part of a larger assignment sequence where students were asked to compose web-based literature reviews that incorporated multimodality. These literature reviews challenged students to incorporate multiple viewpoints into their essays, and critically discussing comics proved to be an effective method for fostering this critical literacy.

This article details how we integrate Jody Shipka’s approach to creativity and rhetorical awareness into a Professional Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology major at the University of South Florida. We situate Shipka’s pedagogy alongside postpedagogy, differentiating the latter from postcomposition. In short, we argue that postpedagogy echoes educational theory that insists upon the importance of disequilibrium. We then report how our students respond to our disequilibrating pedagogy, collecting survey responses via an IRB approved study. We hope these responses can help instructors interested in our postpedagogical notion of creativity anticipate and prepare for student discomfort and resistance—to recognize the fine distinction between productively confused and hopelessly lost. With that goal in mind, we conclude by addressing difficult questions of assessment.

In this interview, James Porter talks about his professional career and what he sees as the contemporary challenges for the field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. Throughout the exchange, Porter discusses his administrative concerns with the state of rhetoric in the field, the ongoing struggles with graduate education, the complexities of online writing instruction, and the potentials of programmatic collaboration. The interview concludes on a personal note about Porter’s scholarly trajectory, his collaborations, the fruits of his labor, and his advice for emergent scholars in the field.

In addition to teaching research and writing skills, First-Year Composition classes are well situated to help students develop strategies for managing stress and increasing well-being. I describe an assignment sequence in which students interview others from three generations about topics related to happiness and well-being, analyze shared transcripts, and present their findings in two genres. Beyond providing instruction in research methods, academic writing, and multimodal composing for non-academic audiences, this sequence supports the five elements of authentic well-being outlined by positive psychologist Martin Seligman: positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning and purpose, and accomplishment. These assignments and related course content foster emotional literacy by prompting students to approach happiness and well-being as academic subjects and to develop practical strategies for implementing what they’ve learned.

In the field of rhetoric and composition, literacy narratives are sometimes framed through the idea of “inventing the university”; this, unfortunately, creates a trope of literacy as success. I argue that the success trope limits student expression of “outlaw” emotions in literacy narratives—like loss, pain, and anxiety—and as a result, flattens conceptions of literacy and glosses over complex student life experiences and positionalities (race, class, gender, sexuality, etc.). This short pedagogical piece provides composition teachers with strategies that encourage students to identify a range of affective responses to the process of literacy acquisition.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a “sensual pedagogy” that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors’ emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in the classroom. The author considers how and why her own emotional labor was altered in light of these findings and what this might suggest about the need for increased professional conversation in our discipline regarding the impact of emotions in the writing classroom.

Sarah DeBacher and Deborah Harris-Moore offer their experiences with teaching in the aftermath of traumatic situations. DeBacher, who taught at the University of New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and Harris-Moore, who taught at UC Santa Barbara following a mass shooting, explore the difficulty of teaching writing in the wake of traumatic events.

This article asks us to consider what the process of healing and composition pedagogy have to learn from each other. More specifically, it identifies how the therapeutic potential of writing, which has been largely neglected in the academy in recent years, can influence the ways we teach transferable writing skills. The article considers how composition students and their instructors can write about painful experiences in ways that allow for healing while fostering the critical thinking and inquiry skills our writing classrooms are expected to teach.

This article revisits the scholarship on emotion in composition studies and extends this work through a consideration of emotion in community-based writing courses. With examples from student reflection essays from one such course, Writing With the Community, I explore emotion as a generative aspect of the students’ semester writing projects for community organizations. In particular, I examine students’ emotional responses to their community work, which include empathy, shame, anger, and unease, as I argue that students’ emotions were an effective means of attaining their writing goals and a necessary component of their desire for social action and justice. I also offer three concepts from education theorists—emotional scaffolding, encouraging students to inhabit an ambiguous self, and emotion as a mode of critical inquiry—which I develop as strategies for achieving common goals in community-based writing courses.

This article critically analyzes under-acknowledged influences on the recent turn toward emotions, happiness, and well-being in higher education generally and in writing studies specifically: positive psychology (the science of happiness) and positive education (teaching well-being). I provide an overview of their primary features and complicate their assumptions, values, and goals. I also highlight their overlap with and implications for writing studies, including connections and shared concepts between writing and well-being, the central role of writing in positive psychology and positive education pedagogies, and the potential for writing studies to critique and influence well-being education. I argue that embracing emotion as a key component of our pedagogy and scholarship introduces ideological commitments that may challenge and even undermine our personal and professional beliefs. Positive psychology and positive education deserve our sustained attention, and any consideration about emotions in composition will need to confront these movements’ influential version of teaching well-being.

This program profile explains and illustrates a pedagogical application of Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) to a one-semester, upper-division online Professional Writing course. We explain our use of a heuristic, which we liken to “night-vision goggles,” that enables students to systematically analyze field data that they gather from a participating worksite. We adapt an RGS methodology developed by Anthony Paré and Graham Smart to create our course heuristic and add a more explicit framework for investigating concepts of genre set, genre system, and activity system. We argue that our course design addresses transfer concerns by helping students develop meta-awareness, or specifically critical genre awareness, that they can then apply to future workplace writing situations.

In the U.S., international enrollment trends have increased the pedagogical imperative to address multilingual graduate student writers’ linguistic needs/growth in the process of their developing disciplinary expertise. In the context of this internationalization effort, what can two disciplines—Applied Linguistics and Composition—constructively offer in terms of a pedagogical approach to address such growing institutional demands? With regard to the various ways in which these disciplines approach the teaching and learning of disciplinary expertise, what might a research-informed English for Academic Purposes (EAP)/Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) curriculum arc look like and how might multilingual graduate writers respond to such an integrated pedagogical trajectory? Further, to what extent might such a curriculum be able to balance evolving student needs and institutional expectations for students’ linguistic development? This program profile examines the potential of Tardy’s 2009 model for building genre knowledge among a specific student population: first-year multilingual international graduate students enrolled in a "bridge" program at George Mason University. In addition to describing the practical work of enacting Tardy’s model at the program and course levels, the authors detail the results of a related study aimed at exploring students’ development of genre knowledge over the course of the bridge year. Results point to the complexity of designing and implementing an EAP/RGS-informed course structure which values the intersectional nature of disciplinary knowledge development and suggest the need for such an approach to explicitly foreground the visibility of language teaching, learning, and assessment in order to ease student anxiety around both language and genre development.

This article presents and illustrates a qualitative research methodology for studies of uptake. It does so by articulating a theoretical framework for qualitative investigations of uptake and detailing a research study designed to invoke and capture students’ uptakes in a first-year writing classroom. The research design sought to make uptake visible by disrupting habitual uptakes and encouraging students to design their own uptakes. The study employed the qualitative research methods of observation, survey, interview, and text analysis to uncover uptake processes and influential factors that inform them. Ultimately, this article argues that a disruptive methodology can provide much needed insight into how individuals take up texts and make use of their discursive resources.

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.

Since Carolyn Miller’s Genre as Social Action, North American Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) has facilitated analysis of how typified rhetorical actions constitute the contexts and communities in which writers write. In first-year writing (FYW) specifically, RGS approaches have focused on macro-level textual constructs, like the audience and evidence expectations of different genres, and have bolstered valuable attention to genre awareness and transfer. In its attention to context and macro-level features, however, RGS has focused less on recurring linguistic patterns in written genres, which has contributed to two gaps in genre-based approaches to FYW: few large-scale analyses of first-year written genres, and little attention to language patterns in genre-based FYW pedagogy and research. This article aims to interrogate these gaps and offer a way beyond them, in three parts. First, it historicizes the institutional separation of U.S. rhetoric-composition and linguistics. Second, it outlines recent pedagogical genre research in RGS and English for Academic Purposes (EAP), which together offer valuable insights for approaches to FYW. Finally, it delineates selected observations from a context-informed corpus linguistic analysis of 19,463 FYW argumentative essays that draws on both RGS and EAP genre traditions. The analysis highlights rhetorical cues of the essay prompts (often absent in EAP corpus linguistic research) alongside shared linguistic patterns (often absent in RGS studies). The analysis likewise outlines overall patterns that distinguish FYW from published academic writing. The article closes with implications for pedagogy, research, and assessment.

Traditional Rhetorical Genre Study (RGS) methods are not well adapted to study exclusion because excluded information and people are typically absent from the genre, and some excluded information is simply unrelated to the genre because of genre conventions or social context. Within genre-based silences, how can scholars differentiate between an item of silenced information that suggests exclusionary practices and another item that is unrelated to the genre? This article serves as an example of how augmenting RGS with rhetorical listening and silence can benefit our pedagogy, research, and practice. Incorporating exclusion gives a more complete understanding of a genre’s social action and responds to cross-cultural issues with genre practices. To illustrate the benefits of this combination, the article draws from the researcher’s ongoing inquiry into the construct of the “well-rounded individual” that has become routinized in the U.S. résumé and cover letter.

Rhetorical Genre Studies has noted the importance of emotion to the study of genre, focusing on how writers’ attitudes and dispositions influence their perception of a genre. To continue to validate emotions as part of the experience of creating and shaping genres, this study traces the emotional valences of one writer, “Jocelyn,” in shaping the genre of a sorority recruitment video, a genre of media used in sororities nationwide to showcase the sorority in a desirable way. Analyzing an interview with Jocelyn and coding the images in Jocelyn’s video and her model text for their rhetorical function suggests that Jocelyn replicated the rhetorical aims of her model text but selected certain images that were emotionally resonant for her and her group. Jocelyn is inspired to shape the genre to the extent that she finds the existing genre emotionally inadequate and emotionally inauthentic to represent her group. Jocelyn’s video “remakes” herself and her friends as “sorority girls,” but also “remakes” the sorority in a way that’s both palatable and emotionally authentic for her. I suggest the metaphor of “settling in” to genre to represent the embodied feedback loop writers use when they take up a new genre and unpack this metaphor for explaining the role of emotion in genre pedagogy.