The forces of globalization and the development of English as a lingua franca have made many scholars and practitioners highlight the urgent need for foreign language literacy. The Norman M. Eberly Multilingual Writing Center (MWC) at Dickinson College addresses that need by offering peer writing tutoring in eleven languages. This profile explains the development of the MWC, the rationale and benefits of the model, the collaborative governance structure that undergirds it, and the redefined pedagogical goals of tutor training.

Positioned within our field’s work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that helped me identify a key problem in my inquiry-based first-year composition classroom: while students were comfortable asking questions, they were not asking the kinds of questions that would help them move across assigned genres most successfully. I explain how this finding led me to develop a rhetorical reflection assignment and explore the rhetorical reflections of two students in my fall 2016 FYC course to identify and describe what happens when these knowledge domains are explicitly emphasized in reflective tasks and to consider questions for future study of this kind of reflective writing.

Extending research on the relationships between materiality and process, this article examines how writers’ preferences for particular materials—places, technologies, objects—develop over time. With a specific focus on how materials affect writers and how writers are affected by their writing tasks, this article considers how writers’ histories of turning toward and turning against materials shape their writing processes. The findings of this research show that writers’ material practices register both materially and affectively and are echoed in writers’ processes years later and shape how processes evolve as writers learn to write in new contexts.

This article searches after more nuanced understandings of safe space pedagogies in writing classrooms. Drawing on experiences of teaching a first-year writing course on a campus that had been tagged with white supremacist graffiti, this article uses autoethnography and narrative to rethink the function of place in composition pedagogy and develop feminist tools for teaching. This article suggests that classrooms should not be thought of as singular places, and for that reason a safe space pedagogy cannot be thought of in stable or static terms; instead, this article attempts to articulate a situated and contingent idea of safe space pedagogies.

This article explores the scope , foundation , and application of autoethnography in first-year composition and critical thinking classrooms. I broaden autoethnography’s scope from Mary Louise Pratt’s focus on colonial power dynamics to engage rhetoric, discourse, ideology, and materiality at large. I argue that indexing this broader conceptual scope to place-based education produces four key pedagogical effects : to increase students’ awareness of assumptions and practices, their engagement with learning, their opportunities to encounter difference, and their capacity to effect change. Place-based autoethnography, in turn, spatializes writing theory by attending to student geographies. Two assignments—the “autoethnography” and “cultural artifact”—redevelop writing as a space between chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order). I suggest that writing functions as a way to take up space and endow it with place, or value. Mapping the effects and affects of cultural artifacts from their lives, students chart the meaningfulness of objects and discourses in their socialization, leading to the aforementioned pedagogical effects. Consequently, place-based autoethnography is uniquely situated to engage students ( and teachers) with their lifeworlds.

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape— presence , persistence , permeability , promiscuity, and power —describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.

In this article, we investigate a new construct for conceptualizing learning transfer with writing knowledge: Transformative Experience (TE). With origins in educational psychology, TE has been effective for promoting transfer with scientific concepts in previous research, but not yet considered in relation to writing or other presumably procedural subjects. To investigate the usefulness of TE for revealing new dimensions of writer development, we present a brief case study focused on faculty members writing for scholarly publication. We use qualitative responses to a survey about faculty members’ experiences in a formal writing group to illustrate the three dimensions of TE in the context of writer development: active use, expansion of perception, and experiential value. Although we study advanced faculty writers, findings have implications for teaching and learning writing more broadly. Specifically, we argue that using TE as a framework for interpreting what learners do with writing knowledge widens the “warming trend” in transfer research, nuancing our understanding of writing transfer by attending to perceptual and experiential aspects of learning. We propose instructional interventions to test how incorporating TE into writing pedagogy might enhance teaching and learning for transfer.

In this interview Dr. Bruce Ballenger and I discuss his career, his many textbooks on writing, his recent collaboration on an extensive study of the revision processes of advanced writers, and the challenges of balancing a career with a foot in multiple academic fields (i.e. composition and rhetoric and creative writing). Dr. Ballenger retired from teaching at Boise State University in the spring of 2018.

This program profile describes a globally focused cocurricular writing program led by faculty, staff, and graduate students from academic affairs and student affairs. Revisiting the program’s first two years, the authors (three graduate students and a faculty member) assert that writing-oriented learning activities within Texas Christian University’s (TCU) GlobalEX program were productively positioned to enable students to engage with other cultures and hone skills for becoming intercultural navigators. Drawing on a similar approach from Fernando Sánchez and Daniel Kenzie to apply Michel de Certeau’s ideas about tactics in cultural work, our program profile identifies important features shaped by this program’s cocurricular context that can be productively drawn upon both in non-course contexts and in curricular spaces. These include writing reflectively within flexible structures arranged to support learning through progressive stages; capitalizing on multimodal composing genres conducive to collaboration; and situating writing in public contexts without the individual pressure of grades.

This profile of the Writing at Moravian program discusses how an application of activity theory has facilitated a collaborative and context-responsive (re)development of the First-Year Writing, Writing Fellows, and Writing-Enriched Curriculum programs at our small liberal arts college. Activity theory is presented as a lens and flexible tool that allows us to identify and evaluate the myriad dynamic components of these interrelated programs in order to align the objectives of each program to work towards our programmatic mission built upon the fundamental ideas of transfer, reflective practice, and threshold concepts.

This article profiles three new graduate instructors in a PhD program in literature who are teaching composition for the first time while enrolled in a teaching methods course. I argue that understanding graduate instructors’ prior beliefs about literacy has the potential to make practica instructors more sympathetic to the complex identity-based and ideological negotiations new graduate instructors must undertake in their first year of teaching while also pointing to ways to facilitate this work.

This article revisits the relationships among gender, service, and composition pedagogy through a qualitative study of active-duty military officers who teach first-year writing at the United States Air Force Academy, one of the five major U.S. national military service academies. The U.S. national military service academies are under-studied sites of writing; there is little published about the experiences of the active-duty officers who comprise a significant portion of the first-year writing teaching faculty at these institutions. Interviews with the officers about their first-year writing pedagogy are framed by an analysis of military leadership policy as well as scholarship on writing teacher development, feminist composition pedagogy theories, and critiques of the role of service in composition studies. This study describes the officers’ first-year writing pedagogy and argues that the experience of these officers, framed through the theories of military leadership and the military service ethos, introduces a new way to understand how the concept of service could operate in first-year writing pedagogy. The officers’ experiences also support arguments that service in composition classrooms is still problematically gendered: even within a military environment, female officers report that they have less freedom than their male colleagues to demonstrate an ethic of care towards their first-year writing students.

This study examines the ways in which 28 top-rated Canadian universities are using required and elective courses to focus on developing student writing skills. Currently, 40 percent of the universities rated in the top 15 of MacLean’s magazine’s 2018 ‘Comprehensive’ category require that their students take at least one course which focuses on writing, usually in the first year. Thirteen more top-rated schools require writing courses. Some also offer many upper-division courses to further develop and refine students’ writing and critical thinking skills, using Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs. These schools are responding to a clear call from professors, employers, government oversight agencies, and the students themselves for more advanced communication skills, especially writing, upon graduation.

Writing Studies’ emphasis on knowledge-transfer and learning stems from our pedagogical focus and is motivated by the fact that much of our research is about and our teaching is directed at students who will be entering other disciplines. Much of the research in the field has focused on tracing transfer and learning longitudinally through students’ college careers. This paper contributes to this larger body of research by presenting an approach to researching transfer and learning that focuses on the situated, moment-to-moment interactions that occur when students learn, when their dispositions form, and when they experience transfer. Initial findings from a study conducted at an R1 public university following this approach reveal that within these moments, students engage in complex boundary-marking interactions that iteratively define the material and discursive world and students’ place within it. The boundary marked in each iteration then affects future boundary-work, a phenomenon this study calls micro-transfer . The initial findings reveal that any given moment can have a profound impact on the trajectory of a student through a class, and that boundaries themselves have different characteristics and micro-transfer depends upon these characteristics. This study presents an initial set of categories of boundaries based on their flexibility and permeability and the field in which they form that could be a foundation for future research in boundary-work and micro-transfer in writing studies.

The article provides an account of the author’s experiment asking first-year students at a STEM university to represent academic essay structure as three-dimensional models built out of unconventional materials, such as cardboard, foam, felt, and glue. The author documents her students’ process of working with their hands in a workshop environment to translate academic writing into artifacts neither academic nor written. Through visual and verbal examples of student work, the author shows how students use the activity to analyze how abstract concepts such as structure, form, and design translate across materials and modes. The experiment suggests that activities asking students to theorize, apply, and transfer concepts across media and learning styles offers a way to connect writing to design-related initiatives across the curriculum.

This article tracks the emergence of the concept of “transfer talk”—a concept distinct from transfer of learning—and teases out the implications of transfer talk for theories of transfer of learning. The concept of transfer talk was developed through a systematic examination of 30 writing center transcripts and is defined as “the talk through which individuals make visible their prior learning (in this case, about writing) or try to access the prior learning of someone else.” In addition to including a taxonomy of transfer talk and analysis of which types occur most often in this set of conferences, this article advances two propositions about the nature of transfer of learning: (1) transfer of learning may have an important social, even collaborative, component and (2) although meta-awareness about writing has long been recognized as valuable for transfer of learning, more automatized knowledge may play an important role as well.

Diana George is professor emerita at both Virginia Tech and Michigan Technological University . In this interview, Diana reflects on moving late in her career to revitalize a first year writing program and writing center at a different university. She also discusses her approach to publication; institutional capital; finding balance across teaching, scholarship, service, and administrative duties; and the importance of collaboration and supportive colleagues.

This profile describes the first three years of initiating new writing-intensive seminars for the General Education curriculum at a small, career-focused, Catholic University. The primary reason for implementing the program was to initiate new writing-intensive seminars to replace existing writing-intensive General Education introductory courses that were not achieving hoped-for results of improving student writing skills, based on a faculty survey. It explains the strategies and theories used for involving faculty across the disciplines to teach theme-based courses each faculty member designs, the workshops that supported faculty efforts, and the administrative details of incorporating new seminars into the General Education program for students earning Associate or Bachelor degrees. Seminars are designed to be discipline-based and include writing-in-the-disciplines as well as writing-across-the-curriculum components.

Collaborative learning theory points to knowledge construction as an outcome of peer interaction, justifying widespread implementation of collaborative activities (like small group discussion) that scaffold toward individual writing projects. This article offers a qualitative investigation into the process of collaborating with peers and the extent to which peer interaction facilitates knowledge construction. More specifically, I present two case studies from FYC courses, one of a debate activity that successfully facilitated knowledge construction and the other of a Google document activity that was not successful. The methodology—triangulating interviews, observations, and an analysis of student writing—presents a replicable strategy for measuring knowledge construction as a result of peer interaction in FYC. I analyze these findings in light of the Community of Inquiry Framework, arguing that the knowledge construction (cognitive presence) that resulted from the collaborative activities I observed was supported by the instructor emphasizing multiple perspectives in the activity design (teaching presence) and establishing a strong sense of community (social presence).

This article argues that composition studies’ professional artifacts and pedagogical materials can perpetuate tacit ideologies about academic language that are in conflict with our field’s larger goals toward social justice and inclusion in FYC. In order to exemplify a systematic analysis of our artifacts and materials for their tacit language ideologies, the author compares how three popular FYC textbooks— The Norton Field Guide to Writing , Everyone’s An Author , and They Say, I Say— represent academic language in seven major categories: name, placement, definition, characterization, features, examples, and instruction. This textbook analysis illuminates how no representation or discussion of academic language can be neutral, and it also illuminates the obvious gaps that still exist between scholarship on academic language and textbooks’ representations of academic language. The author ultimately advocates for this kind of systematic and proactive analysis across our professional artifacts and pedagogical materials so they might be revised to better align with social justice and inclusion initiatives.

Writing transfer research often illuminates the writing abilities, attitudes, and assumptions college writers bring to a writing assignment, but faculty members across the disciplines may not have the tools for understanding what the students in their particular classes bring to their particular writing assignments. In this proposed model, students respond to a series of reflective prompts before, during, and after completion of a major upper-division writing assignment. Faculty members then reflect on how these responses might change the way they assign writing and teach course content. The disciplinary and course-based threshold concepts emerging from this process suggest a dynamic and situated approach that both facilitates faculty understanding of transfer and offers a method for responding to it.

In this article, we discuss what it means to learn troublesome “threshold concepts” about writing that cannot be adequately grappled with in a single course or assignment. Here, two faculty members and a graduate of a writing major reflect on elements of the writing curriculum, the writing center practicum, and the learning dispositions and experiences the student brought to the program in order to consider what ongoing, deep learning of writing threshold concepts can look like, as well as how programmatic and pedagogical elements may afford and constrain such learning.

While we in composition studies may have grown more sensitive to and welcoming of cultural and linguistic differences in the classroom, we remain far from united in pursuits to combat explicitly in our pedagogies the politics of standardized English. To move toward linguistic justice, we call for unified intention and action across our field to explicitly combat the very monolingualist ideologies so many of us, no matter our good intentions, uphold and perpetuate in our classrooms and institutions. One issue preventing unified approaches in contesting monolingualist ideologies, as we see it, is that we do not forefront in our minds and our practices the material consequences of monolingualist ideology, nor have we come to a holistic consensus on the monolingualism paradigm. With this article, we hope to clarify just what it is we’re rejecting when we contest monolingualism, and, in so doing, be better prepared to combat more explicitly the harms of linguistic hierarchies.

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers’ understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving conceptions of genre among thirty-three new first-year writing teachers, examining their understandings--and, occasionally, tensions--at different points in time as they encounter the concept in their teacher preparation and with their own students. Through written reflections and focus group interviews, we identify key patterns in how the teachers define genre over time and some of the influences on those dynamic conceptions. Findings from this research have implications for teacher preparation and curriculum development in the context of U.S. college composition.

In this interview, Shirley Wilson Logan reflects on her major roles as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. She describes her journey as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, only one of a few black women to do so. Logan is also credited with launching the study of African American women’s rhetoric as a field, writing one of the early books on African American women rhetors. Logan discusses her motivations for writing this book, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women , and makes connections between her scholarly focus and her work as both a teacher and an administrator.

The following is a side-by-side review of two recent additions to the growing “Keywords” genre: Keywords for Disability Studies and Keywords in Writing Studies. Often considered a niche issue, or, in the classroom, solely the concern of specialists, what Keywords for Disability Studies does is reveal the tacit norms behind (dis)ability that inflect all bodies and minds with meaning. Keywords texts offer a number of entry points into their respective fields, and, because of their formal structure, challenge readers and teachers to devise their own pathways through the text. Reading Keywords for Disability Studies alongside Keywords in Writing Studies reveals opportunities for all composition scholars and teachers of writing to both apply an awareness of (dis)ability norms in the field and the classroom and map productive intersections between the two fields of study.

This review of Eli Clare’s Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure (2017) and Eunjung Kim’s Curative Violence: Rehabilitating Disability, Gender, and Sexuality in Modern Korea (2017) shows how both Clare and Kim critique the politics of cure in the U.S. and Korea. Specifically, these texts reveal the (at times) violent ways that cure has been forced on disabled bodies, and unpack longstanding debates within the political, cultural, and medical sectors about eliminating disability at all costs, and refusing cure. Although both works are oriented towards the field of disability studies, this review highlights the intersectional aspects of both texts and the concrete, practical ways that rhetoric and composition scholars and teachers can benefit from this discourse.

In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack’s Autism and Gender , Anne McGuire’s War on Autism , and Melanie Yergeau’s Authoring Autism . Each of these texts centers disability—autism in particular—and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and personal autism narratives support extant social hierarchies that sideline autistic lives in scholarship and beyond. Central to these three books are issues of rhetorical play, textual narrative, and storying in contemporary autism discourse, so in this essay I aim to tie together these fundamental themes, placing them in conversation with one another. I begin the discussion with a brief overview of the history of autism before drawing from Yergeau, Jack, and McGuire’s texts to explore the lay of the discursive field of autism and forms of rhetorical (and physical) violence that are normalized in autism discourse. Finally, before concluding, I explore what the authors of these texts explicate about the rhetors who take part in a shifting discursive field.

This essay offers a review of Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future with the intent of reminding composition instructors of the importance of intersectionality and accessibility. Each text encourages us to challenge traditional perceptions of success and failure thereby also interrogating imbalanced power dynamics between instructors and students particularly in regards to writing assessment and other pedagogical priorities. Finding ways to acknowledge difference, and affirm it, is vital to our collective success especially in the writing classroom.

This program profile will describe how the University of Central Florida’s Student Accessibility Services’ (SAS) Faculty Liaison program functions in the Department of Writing and Rhetoric. The Liaison Program served to provide an intermediary between departments and SAS so faculty may brainstorm accommodations with colleagues familiar with their field, department, and courses in ways that do not fundamentally alter their course goals and objectives. Ultimately, what emerged from this program is the idea that access is and must be regarded as a networked practice in order for transformative access work to occur. Access, like writing, needs to be understood as a way to move among different communities of practice.

This program profile of the Critical Writing Program at the University of Pennsylvania focuses on how disability came to be a valued term, a structuring philosophy, and a pedagogical touchstone for the program’s philosophy, curriculum, and practices. After exploring various challenges involved in addressing the needs of students with disabilities, we provide an overview of our program’s efforts to address the needs of students with disabilities. In so doing, we explain how we came to adopt an orientation towards disability that depends for its philosophical force on a return to Derrida’s advocacy of the deconstructive notion of différance . Différance seeks to overturn binary thinking, challenge uninterrogated binaries such as abled/disabled and the normate templates that enact and enforce these, replacing them with a relational, fluid, contextual approach.

The Writing Center at Metropolitan State University of Denver, which serves a diverse population, rejects the accommodation model, which depends upon disclosure of difference, in favor of the principles of Universal Design for Learning (UDL), which assumes difference exists and plans in advance for it. Hiring, tutoring, space design, and marketing efforts have been aligned with principles of UDL in an effort to make the Writing Center accessible to people with a wide range of (dis)abilities, including linguistic diversity, social anxiety, and gaps in academic literacy.

This piece examines the Writing Studies job market from a perspective not addressed in previous literature: accessibility. I draw on work in the field of disability studies to argue that accessibility does not only affect those people who identify as having a disability; rather, it is a concept that speaks to how well all candidates are able to participate in the procedures and expectations for a tenure-track job search. Focusing on interview formats, this article ultimately argues for more generous interview practices that take into account the various ways in which candidates might be disadvantaged by rigid structures.

In this article, I explore normative assumptions regarding multimodality from the perspective of disability studies, and focus particularly on how coherence and wholeness work in disciplinary conversations and professional statements. I offer a reading of the hybrid graphic-written text The Ride Together as a way to resist these normative impulses and to explore a different kind of wholeness at work in the interaction between text and image. I argue for appreciating the rhetorical strategy of dis-closure, which I define as occurring when disability frustrates the normative expectations of multimodal, compositional, and narrative closure in productive and generative ways. I analyze multimodal collaboration and revision in The Ride Together , arguing that insights from comics studies, together with an appreciation of dis-closure, present alternatives to the limiting disciplinary focus on coherence and wholeness.

Informed by my embodiment as a Deaf instructor asking hearing students to challenge captioning conventions, this article shows how hearing composers can reimagine the design of their captioned videos, and appreciate students’ embodied responses to new rhetorical situations. The embodied methodology and methods in this article incorporate embodied differences and are directly influenced by the fields of disability studies, cultural rhetorics, and embodiment. This article foregrounds students’ embodied responses—their individual reactions to the videos and activities—in the form of their reflective letters on the process of designing and analyzing videos with dynamic visual text, or captions that move around the screen in interaction with other modes of communication. In addition to discussing their written responses and the skills they developed, I assess their group videos to show how student composers interpret the process of infusing captions with meaning.

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.