In this profile we describe changes to the composition program at Missouri University of Science and Technology, prompted by the hiring of the university’s first writing program administrator (WPA). We describe our efforts to implement evidence-based best practices in undergraduate writing courses in a context where very little program specific evidence was available. We also describe how challenges of effecting change at a university largely composed of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) students has meant that many of the changes have been framed by the spirit of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) initiatives. Several new methods of assessment have been introduced to the program, including instructor feedback, student surveys, and skills tests. Allowing assessment to drive standardization has begun a process of measuring the transfer of student knowledge we believe other departments will find interesting. We close by outlining unresolved issues and ongoing challenges as the program moves forward.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction (“I think”) to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices (“we know”).

With distance education on the rise, a new program at the University of New Mexico provides an innovative way to teach first-year composition in a fully online format. The program, called eComp (short for Electronic Composition), insists that instructors receive formal and educational training before working in the model. In addition, the curriculum taught within the first-year writing courses attends to multimodal literacies, and students receive help with their drafts from various sources, including instructional assistants who are tutors embedded in each course shell. This profile describes the program, including the scholarship that informed its design, the pilot project, and results from a small-scale assessment. Furthermore, we discuss future expansion of the program. This program description can serve as a model—in whole or in part—for other English departments when structuring a successful, integrative online program that emphasizes teacher training and multimodal literacies.

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the “language” of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal compositions. The second section, montage style editing, as it appears in The Odessa Steps Sequence from Battleship Potemkin by Sergei Eisenstein, establishes that an awareness of “style” can bridge the gap between print and new media literacy. The third section outlines one advanced writing assignment called a “montage tap essay” in which students use a free online platform called Tapestry to create an interactive essay that ostensibly takes into consideration the particular cinematic affordances of editing, design, and writing.

This article presents an argument for the “re-turn” of essayist literacy in multimedia and multiliteracy contexts. For its democratic, pedagogical, and intellectual potential, essayist literacy is too important to be removed from composition curriculum, but it needs to be re-imagined within a diversity of essay traditions, including the turn toward multimedia writing undertaken in diverse writing classrooms. This article analyzes the findings from a study of one such ‘re-imagined’ essayist literacy unit/assignment in a composition course designed to focus on multiliteracies at a research university in the Northeast United States.

The Virtual Workplace Ethnography is a first-year composition assignment that positions students as knowledge makers by requiring them to apply a theoretical lens (“Working Knowledge”) to a video representation of a workplace. The lens provides multiple terms for analysis of workplace behaviors in context, providing a scaffolding for apprentice ethnographers that allows them to take an informed stance on their research. The “virtual” aspect addresses the complex ethical issues raised by ethnography by substituting a fictitious setting for an actual site. The essay explores the challenges of the assignment, offering examples of student texts and student metacommentaries on the work. The essay argues that this assignment addresses longstanding concerns about the challenges of making meaningful writing assignments in FYC and concludes by exploring the potential of the assignment in distance education.

This article reenvisions fallacies for composition classrooms by situating them within rhetorical practices. Fallacies are not formal errors in logic but rather persuasive failures in rhetoric. I argue fallacies are directly linked to successful rhetorical strategies and pose the visual organizer of the Venn diagram to demonstrate that claims can achieve both success and failure based on audience and context. For example, strong analogy overlaps false analogy and useful appeal to pathos overlaps manipulative emotional appeal. To advance this argument, I examine recent changes in fallacies theory, critique a-rhetorical textbook approaches, contextualize fallacies within the history and theory of rhetoric, and describe a methodology for rhetorically reclaiming these terms.

Attention to stories compositionists tell about teaching and learning reveals some of the ways that teachers orient to disability in the classroom. This article argues that these “anecdotal relations”—relations that are created and disseminated through narratives people share about disability—can frustrate productive negotiations with disability in the classroom. Two anecdotal relations receive particular attention in this article: disability as personal and disability as threatening. Critically recasting these anecdotal relations may offer potential for creating writing classroom spaces that welcome disability.

Existing pedagogical approaches to research source use commonly frame sources as materials to be incorporated into texts. The worknets project presented in this article provides an alternative concerned with slowly tracing associations along semantic, bibliographic, affinity-based, and choric aspects of the research source and across the contexts from which it was produced. These four sets of associations complement established approaches to source use while also illuminating qualities of a source that draw on network logics to support rhetorical invention and inquiry processes across the disciplines.

In this interview, Dr. Thomas Newkirk discusses his work in the field of Composition Studies over the past several decades. Newkirk argues for a vision of composition that maintains the connection between teaching and scholarship and re-affirms the significance of the field’s historical service-based mission of providing high-quality writing instruction to students across the age-span.

Approaching definitions (and the act of defining) as inherently political and ideological, this article argues that there is a lack of definitional precision surrounding critical pedagogy and its core terms (e.g., student empowerment ). This lack of precision can impede the successful and ethical implementation of critical pedagogy in the composition classroom. This article calls for a deeper articulation of what critical pedagogy is and does, and for sharing definitional power with students by enlisting their help in this articulation. Inviting students to participate in such definitional work may mitigate resistance by offering students a greater say, and a greater stake, in their own education. Defining these terms more precisely may also help instructors to enact and communicate critical pedagogy in a more open and purposeful way.

Lesbian-Gay-Bisexual-Transgender-Queer (LGBTQ) representation in composition readers remains limited and is frequently nonexistent. In addition, the LGBTQ-related materials that do find their way into composition readers are often problematic. In this essay I explain why WPAs and composition teachers should be concerned about LGBTQ representation in composition readers, and offer suggestions as to the kinds of LGBTQ content to include in readers that might then be used as part of an anti-homophobic pedagogy. I argue that WPAs and composition teachers can take specific steps—both within their composition programs and without—to move us, along with publishers, toward improving LGBTQ representation in our textbooks and in our classrooms. By doing so, we can help shape composition readers that are more inclusive and more representative of LGBTQ subjectivities, while also creating more inclusive and welcoming classroom environments for our LGBTQ students.

“Sharing” is a ubiquitous yet largely unexamined term in composition scholarship and practice. Scholars and teachers use the term widely to talk about practices such as peer review, collaboration, and student-teacher conferences, all of which have been used to support the relevance of composition as a social and communal act. Yet, as this article demonstrates, sharing has been aligned historically with assumptions and values that emphasize individual productivity at the cost of exploring the affective and ethical costs of social engagement and interaction. This article investigates tensions in the historical practices of sharing that create openings for alternative ways to understand and value the complex encounters writers undergo when they interact in the space of the writing classroom. Specifically, the article explores how sharing might be revised in composition studies to draw attention to the affective, corporeal, and ethical consequences of interpersonal contact.

This article reviews insights from place-based education and ecological models of writing to show how these theories can work together to shape locally focused composition pedagogies. From place-based education, the researcher takes an emphasis on physical specificity, and from ecological models of writing, the researcher takes an emphasis on discursive constructions of places. Both orientations to place are applied to an undergraduate professional writing class in Houston, an environment that illustrates vividly how unique physical changes interact with competing discourses in the present moment. The researcher describes a revision to a major writing assignment and discusses a need for assessment criteria that allow instructors to see the value of place-based and ecological models of writing.

This profile presents Stetson University’s writing program at the moment of transition from a typical one-course writing requirement housed in the English Department to an embedded, cross-curricular, multi-course writing requirement. The first stage of this transition was triggered when a new conceptually-based, writing intensive General Education curriculum required the development of WI courses; the second stage, building upon the faculty development initiatives surrounding WI course implementation, saw a broader infusion of writing instruction throughout the Stetson curriculum and the rejuvenation of the University Writing Center with a multidisciplinary support philosophy. As a result of these core changes in Stetson’s writing instruction, the one-course writing requirement is obsolete; writing instruction at Stetson is incorporated both vertically and horizontally.

Composition theory and pedagogy have variously understood writing as a noun or as a verb, a product or a process. This paper proposes a shift to theorizing writing as a gerund (writing g. ) and argues that this approach opens a space for more productive composition theory. A gerund orientation focuses attention on the virtual and affective qualities of the writing experience—what writing does to and with a writer. The study of writing g., or what this paper calls composition experience scholarship , frees composition scholarship from a pedagogic imperative while at the same time producing theory that has practical application.

Wendy Ryden and Ian Marshall’s Reading, Writing, and the Rhetorics of Whiteness is a difficult book, but an important one for scholars interested in rhetoric, whiteness studies, and basic writing. It is an eclectic and intricate set of musings on writing pedagogy, culture, and race, and it is this eclecticism that both challenges the reader and opens new possibilities for dialogue about the discursive and material dominance of whiteness.

Writing programs in institutions of higher education work to prepare students for real-world writing within any field of study. The composition of Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing offers an open-source text for students, teachers, and policy-makers at all levels. Exposure to an open space for learning encourages access to information, reinforcing the opportunity for transfer of knowledge beyond first year writing. This review closely examines the economical, ecological, and content-based sustainability inherent in the first two volumes of Charles Lowe and Pavel Zemliansky’s Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing and the potential future of open-source textbooks for first year writing classrooms.

The College Writing/Elon Academy summer partnership at Elon University offers a program model for supporting underrepresented students’ transition to college. While the modified section of a required first-year writing course has some limitations, the summer course supports students’ development of more complex writing processes and provides access to college capital prior to their university matriculation. In this profile we describe our course design, assessment of outcomes, and primary assessment results, and we offer reflections on and recommendations for designing transitional writing courses for underrepresented students based on our experiences.

Through an examination of four current trends in composition instruction, this article presents a new lens for envisioning composition instruction that integrates the best aspects of the writing across the curriculum, genre-based curriculum approach, ecocomposition, and writing across communities theories of writing instruction. The "literacy landscape" proposed herein explicitly values the integration of student learning “incomes” within the composition classroom and derives from the author’s experience teaching within a large composition program that employed aspects of the genre-based curriculum, and both WAC approaches. The literacy landscape is envisioned to act both as a lens for imagining a more comprehensive approach to administering composition programs, as well as to teaching composition.

A multiliteracies pedagogy has renewed our interest in materiality, or how the physical text interacts with the author’s choices and the context to contribute to the message, yet little attention has been paid to materiality in analog texts, such as the scrapbook, even though this medium contains affordances (capabilities and limitations) that encourage active engagement with the materiality of composition. This essay demonstrates the pedagogical value of the scrapbook for how it encourages student composers to select, appropriate, and redesign external cover materials to communicate the message inside the book and how it emphasizes the haptic sense (touch). In short, the scrapbook assignment is pedagogically important because it teaches students the concept of affordances and demonstrates to them how materiality impacts design, composition, and rhetorical choices; it also provides a low-tech, low-stakes entry into multimodal composing and reflexivity on the rhetorical decision-making process.

Once controversial or cutting-edge, freewriting has recently become “part of every writing teacher’s repertoire” (Bizzell and Herzberg in Elbow 393). On par with outlining or webbing, freewriting seems to be a go-to practice in a writing teacher’s tool kit. This downshift into uncritical acceptance presents an apt moment to reconsider how we implement freewriting practices in the college writing classroom. Toward this reexamination, this essay problematizes the pervasive assumption about freewriting that it is above all else easy, effortless, quick, and free from judgment, hesitation, and doubt . The essay suggests that this assumed ease remains one of the thorniest and obscured problems in the practice of classroom-based freewriting and hypothesizes that the mode required to freewrite is not necessarily natural or automatic for student writers, but rather requires training, conversation, and reorientation. In order for freewriting to be an effective means of stimulating critical and creative thinking, teachers of writing need to consider not only how we can add in analytical and reflective thinking about freewriting texts, but also how we can get students to do productive, questioning, and exploratory thinking within freewriting itself. Above all, facilitators of freewriting can benefit from assuming the difficulties of thinking through freewriting.

In this essay, I propose a concerted effort to begin devising a theory and pedagogy of failure. I review the discourse of failure in Western culture as well as in composition pedagogy, ultimately suggesting that failure is not simply a judgement or indication of rank but is a relational, affect-bearing concept with tremendous relevance to composition studies.

This article offers a rigorous and researched look at how consumer rhetorics form first-year college students’ understandings about life at the university. Examined in the context of consumer culture, students’ narratives about university life illustrate how they marshal, appropriate, and deploy consumerist metaphors and to what ends. Using Fredric Jameson’s concept of “cognitive mapping,” I argue that students rhetorically position themselves as consumer and as marketing strategist because these roles have significant standing in the contemporary capitalist culture, helping students adjust to a new place where they may feel powerless or disoriented. Following my analysis of these narratives, I suggest curricular methods that can be used in the classroom to question the meaning of an education. I advocate offering students the role of “active learner,” a role comparable to that of “consumer” but which also offers students a vantage point from which they can shape their university experience.

In this Retrospective, we revisit our 2007 College Composition and Communication article in order to clarify our primary argument, address some questions and critiques that have arisen, and consider anew the value of composition courses that study writing. We review our core argument that engaging students with the research and ideas of writing studies, building declarative and procedural knowledge of writing, improves learning transfer. Now, using the example of Jan Meyer and Ray Land’s notion of threshold concepts, we argue for the field to better name its knowledge and conceptions and to decide what portion is suitable for first-year students. We clarify the distinction between this broad underlying goal and our personal approaches to accomplishing it, emphasizing the diversity of approaches that have come to embody the study of writing in first-year composition. While maintaining that writing studies lacks recognition of itself as a field and of the value of its specialized knowledge to writing instruction, we revise our original argument to show how writing instructors from other fields and with other expertise can build familiarity with writing studies research without extensive, specialized study. Ultimately, we continue to advocate teaching our field’s knowledge in first-year composition, while expanding our sense both of how to prepare instructors to do so and of the value of such teaching.

Even as veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars seek higher education, civilians tend to know little about war and military culture. While this lack of knowledge makes veterans’ adjustments more difficult, it has a more pernicious effect on civilians themselves, as it limits civilians’ ability to act as informed, responsible citizens before, during, and after war. Writing teachers can help ameliorate this problem by incorporating war writing into their syllabi. Accordingly, this review essay provides an overview of the civilian-military gap, reviews memoirs by Army veterans Shannon Meehan and Kayla Williams, and suggests pedagogical approaches to teaching war writing.

This program profile describes the motivation to create a “veteran friendly” course offered within the composition program at City College of San Francisco. The author provides a discussion of the course and considers the challenges and successes he has faced over the three years of teaching it.

Considering veterans in the context of research on adult and nontraditional students in college writing classes, this article proposes Malcolm Knowles’s six principles for adult learning as an asset-based heuristic for investigating how writing programs and writing teachers might build upon existing resources to support veteran students.

In this article, I summarize an interview-based, qualitative research study conducted with ten Marine student veterans on their experiences with college composition courses, focusing particularly on the how the participants’ previous interactions with teaching, learning, and writing in the Marine Corps have impacted their perceptions and expectations of teaching, learning, and writing in the first-year composition classroom. Specifically, I focus on the way in which relevant conclusions from the study regarding Marine student veterans’ prior rhetorical knowledge and experiences complicate the novice-to-expert paradigm at work in many first-year composition courses. The piece concludes with suggestions for repurposing this paradigm to one that encourages faculty to make room for prior rhetorical knowledge while identifying areas where student veterans may need support.

In this interview, former CCCC Chair Marilyn Valentino expands upon her call to action at the 2010 CCCC, when she drew attention to the “ethical obligation” college writing professionals have to “react responsibly” to veterans in our classrooms and asked, “How can we build relationships, connect one-to-one, to help all students more fully invest in writing?” During this discussion, she focuses in particular on what role WPAs have in relation to student veterans as a demographic.

Higher education has become increasingly concerned in recent years with its role in sustainability studies, both in the sustainability of the physical environments of its institutions and in the education of students as citizens and experts in a world facing complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. This review essay discusses the importance of sustainability-minded pedagogies in the writing classroom through an examination of Fountainhead Press’s new V (Voices) composition reader series . The essay discusses ways to integrate the V series themed readers and their assignments into a sustainability-minded writing classroom, and it concludes by suggesting important links between sustainability pedagogy and writing transfer.

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions—we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively, ethically, and appropriately to the increasingly diverse language and literacy practices of 21st century college writers, this profile will focus on a program that reconfigures the intellectual operating spaces of Composition Studies by training junior writing program administrators in how to promote rhetorical action alongside the study of composition pedagogy and praxis and by advocating on behalf of ethno-linguistically diverse communities within and beyond the university.

This article discusses our university’s attempt to analyze whether our system of First Year Writing placement serves the needs of our diverse student body. The theory behind Directed Self Placement (DSP) is appealing, so our program adopted a modified version of it, and after several years, decided to evaluate it quantitatively. The authors, a First Year Writing professor and a psychologist trained in statistical analysis, teamed up to gather and analyze data. We sorted our sample by course grade, standardized test scores, gender, race, and prior course grades, running regressions and searching for correlations between these data and our DSP matrix. Our research shows that DSP in the modified form of our placement matrix does not predict student success as measured by First Year Writing grades as well as simple standardized test scores do. Though placing students using test scores alone has limitations, we conclude that DSP, at least in the simplified form in which we use it, does not correct for these limitations, and therefore is not preferable.

Technological and economic change within the business and social function of journalism are moving civic literacy practices ever closer to those of citizen journalism. In this article, I survey the changes underway as journalism becomes less a profession and more a practice, a way of reading and writing about society. I draw from journalism studies and civic literacy pedagogies to argue that the writing classroom has a valuable role to play in shaping civic literacy practices in concert with those of citizen journalism. Many of the practices of citizen journalism—including research, analysis, community engagement, the consideration of evidence and perspectives, a move toward new means of publication and social action—are exactly those capturing the attention of composition scholars.

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy’s role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods research approach is engaged through surveys, pre/post-semester questionnaire data, transcribed interviews, and writing-about-writing essays. Uncovering the 39.6% of students who—through this research—are discovered to feel constrained rather than liberated by technology and who believe that technology amplifies their place in the literacy hierarchy, this article articulates the identity politics inside the multimodal composition classroom and introduces the term “hypermediated fractures” into the pedagogical conversations surrounding feminist pedagogy and the teaching of digital literacies in first-year composition.

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper’s failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation—as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the utterance—often disadvantages students in their future writing endeavors. I conclude by suggesting one way to encourage students to situate their research writing as a part of—rather than separate from—an activity system. By making the research paper an integral part of a entire course sequence, students will be better equipped to understand the role that research and writing plays within a specific activity system.

In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of assignments, and using both content and pedagogy to enhance the possibility for positive transfer of learning for student writers. The problems in these areas of curriculum design, both in my work and in writing studies at large, as well as recommendations to eliminate those problems are explored here.

Using "threshold concepts" (Meyer and Land) as a lens, this article examines several issues related to learning within and across two general education courses—one in writing and one in history—in which students were concurrently enrolled. Analysis of data from students and instructors (of the history course) suggests threshold concepts that are shared among history and writing courses; however, the data also indicate that the extent to which these shared concepts are enacted through instruction is somewhat inconsistent. The article ultimately suggests that threshold concepts might prove a productive frame through which to consider questions related to writing and transfer, and also to general education more broadly.

This video captures the reactions of selected writing researchers at the Elon Research Seminar as they are asked to consider the problem of transfer and how it relates to the teaching of writing. As a research area and pedagogical concept, transfer is poised to create a lasting impact in the way writing is studied and taught. In this video, scholars who focus on how writing knowledge is transferred share their questions, insights, and goals as they move forward their research efforts on transfer.

This profile articulates the authors’ response to a statewide mandate to eliminate “remedial” writing instruction at four-year public universities, including their own. The profile describes the difficulties the authors faced in responding to this initiative, given the context of their regional comprehensive university and its specific challenges with retention and student success, and discusses their revision of the university’s writing program. The changes the authors made—eliminating a non-credit basic writing course and creating a credit-bearing basic writing course; instituting guided self-placement; and developing a flexible, WPA-outcomes based writing curriculum—have led to improved satisfaction, success, and retention rates among basic writers at their institution.

E-book devices (and devices that support e-books) are increasingly being integrated into the working lives of students and teachers. We discuss our pedagogical and institutional experiences with the Sony Reader in composition courses at both the graduate and undergraduate level, reporting on dynamics and challenges associated with three key literacy tasks: accessing texts, operating texts, and marking texts. We conclude with a heuristic that can help teachers and administrators adopt and design an e-book initiative.

This article examines the disjunction between, on the one hand, critical theory’s critique of the privileging of authorial intent in protocols of textual interpretation, and, on the other hand, continued obeisance to authorial intent in composition textbooks and pedagogy. By unpacking the implications of this disjunction, I show the limitations that the reification of authorial intent creates for composition pedagogy and student writing. I conclude by suggesting how bracketing authorial intent in the composition classroom might enhance composition pedagogy and student writing, while also challenging fundamental epistemologies of the field.

I see a parallel between the illiteracy I witnessed while working in the court system and the challenges facing first-year writers at the university. In both cases, problems arise due to unfamiliarity with the discourse community into which one enters. In response, because much of the language governing composition and rhetoric is rife with place and journey metaphors (note the metaphor I just used of entering into a community, suggesting it is a place), I posit that ecocomposition theory may provide a fresh lens through which to view classical rhetoric. After providing a read of Aristotle’s Rhetoric focusing on issues of place and ecology, I offer how such theory, which I playfully term “EcoStotle,” might be applicable to a first-year composition course. The benefit to this approach to classical rhetoric and ecocomposition is that it is grounded in argumentation, thereby promoting literacy for our students, whatever discourse community they enter.

This article looks closely at some of the lingering stereotypes that Composition Studies holds toward Web surfing and queries the resulting literacy hierarchy against our students’ reading and writing practices that take place online. This article claims that while good progress has been made in the way of revising twenty-first century definitions of (digital) composing, the academy has yet to fully revisit its boundaries of legitimacy surrounding (digital) reading. Additionally, this article contests the academy’s use of technology vis-à-vis email, Blackboard, or blogging as a placating attempt to integrate technology into the classroom without genuinely validating our students’ dominant literacies or their digital lives. This article leans on the theories of feminist composition pedagogy as it calls for the field to decenter its authority and revise curricula to incorporate critical digital literacies.

With a particular focus on the preparation of teaching assistants, this profile details the recent transition to a standardized English 101 curriculum at Southern Illinois University Carbondale (SIUC). More specifically, the profile details theoretical and practical incentives for the move, as well as political and logistical challenges encountered by Writing Studies staff in conceiving and implementing the new curriculum. The profile ends with a discussion of the perceived benefits of standardizing English 101 at SIUC and, presumably, by extension, in the context of similar institutional contexts.