This article offers strategies for administrators who struggle to contextualize their writing programs in institutional climates increasingly focused on recruitment and retention, rather than discipline and discovery. As composition scholars negotiate disciplinary and institutional values, there are productive juxtapositions of university mission statements, writing program goals, and The Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing , which was jointly published by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project in January 2011.

Writing studies’ “recent enthusiasm” (Roderick CF 25) for complexity theory has morphed into higher education’s rabid embrace of reform. New curricula claim commitment to an “advanced,” “networked,” and “global” culture by erasing introductory composition, thereby dismissing the practices of those courses. Examples abound, but the author pays particular attention to the 2013 overhaul of general education at the nation’s largest public university. She then draws on a year-long ethnography of one English 111 class to show how this course is a hospitable environment for genres that seek what Systems Biologist Stuart Kauffman calls “the adjacent possible.” The “adjacent possible” represents unfinished combinations of complex structures—those that haven’t fully evolved but make visible what’s next in our expanding biosphere. The author defines one such genre and reveals how it offers another route to complexity and another understanding of FYC: as the gateway course to complexity.

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.

This essay explores Black male literacy practices as institutional critique at a large Midwestern land grant university. Through documenting a student’s process of reinstatement at his university, I demonstrate how vernacular perspectives, language, and networking strategies are used for developing self-efficacy and critical literacies. Black college males can use critical literacies to effectively navigate asymmetrical power structures at predominately White universities.

As compositionists have constructed a critical discourse on whiteness, they have tacitly theorized how students’ bodies can stifle efforts to both reflect on unfamiliar beliefs and critique their own beliefs. While Composition’s latent theories of “embodied censorship” challenge the notion that rationality or empathy can enable one to transcend one’s own body and thereby fully engage Others’ beliefs, they also divorce the body-belief dialectic from everyday social-material practices and conditions of production. Embodied censorship is represented not as a local process but as an abstracted product, with different forms of censorship tied to corresponding types of reified bodies. Pierre Bourdieu’s and Jennifer Seibel Trainor’s work, when synthesized, present an alternative theory. Bourdieu and Trainor illuminate how bodies, beliefs, and embodied censorship are dialectically, processually produced in everyday social-material practices, such as academic writing rituals. Their materialist social theory can help compositionists design pedagogies that approach academic writing rituals as a site for reworking embodied censorship and enabling students to understand unfamiliar beliefs.

In this interview, Dr. Gwendolyn D. Pough talks about her history in the field. She reflects on the commitments and research interests that shape her past work and new book projects. Throughout her reflection, Pough provides insightful advice for those who may struggle to find a home for themselves in the academy.

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.

This profile describes a new WPA’s choice to work incrementally to assess an inherited, fledgling First-Year Writing curriculum at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and change it over a three-year period with continual stakeholder involvement. The methods used for assessment were two rounds of instructor surveys and three rounds of direct assessment of student writing samples, motivated in part by the university’s reaccreditation review. The resulting curriculum’s main areas of focus are academic writing techniques, argument structure, and research-based writing.

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.

At three different institutions, public and private, in varying roles, I have found the very particular problem of how to inform micro-level classroom practices with macro-level disciplinary knowledge to be centrally important to our field’s development and our students’ learning—and singularly difficult to overcome. In this program profile, I outline how we have worked (and are still working) to overcome this problem at the University of Central Florida and describe some of our successes in reducing reliance on contingent labor and gaining support and resources for the elements of a vertical writing education (writing center, WAC program, minor, and certificate) beyond first-year composition.

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.

The essay examines the ethical tensions surrounding the common cultural and disciplinary demand that writers write “clearly.”  The essay seeks to advance the discipline’s engagement with Linda Kintz’s and Sharon Crowley’s separate critiques of the “ideology of clarity,” arguing that clarity potentially manipulates audiences primarily through either strategic or unintentional omissions of critical information.  Deploying Kenneth Burke’s notion of ingenuous and cunning identification, it advances an argument that, through persistent acts of omission, clarity can become a cunning rhetorical form, a form often set into motion by unintentionally manifested cultural pressures.  The essay ends by proposing five definitions of clarity currently circulating within the discipline, before a final reflection upon the inherent tension (both stylistic and disciplinary) between clarity and obscuration.

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.

Using data from two surveys and end-of-semester reflections, researchers learned that students enrolled in writing-about-writing (WAW) courses are initially intimidated by the demands of a WAW curriculum, but the students’ perceived inability to complete the requirements contradicted survey data and final written reflections. Ongoing public conversations surrounding WAW curriculum and movement may lead faculty working with high at-risk populations, including but not limited to Latino/as, hesitant to adapt this approach, but the researchers challenge these perceptions and call for additional research to confirm that students who complete WAW courses have an increased sense of self-efficacy towards academic writing.

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.

As a teacher, writer, administrator, researcher, theorist and philosopher, Louise Wetherbee Phelps has contributed to the construction and design of the discipline of composition and rhetoric at all stages, from its foundation in the 1970s to the eclectic dwelling in which we reside today. Louise is shaping the future of the discipline as well, mentoring and educating the next generation of scholar-teachers. She is invested in teaching and committed to cultivating stimulating intellectual engagement in composition and rhetoric. Louise’s former students often refer to her as a matriarch of the field, recognizing that her work has been foundational and highly influential. She has worked to bring recognition to rhetoric, composition, and writing studies on a local, national, and international level in such efforts as creating a stand-alone undergraduate and doctoral program at Syracuse University and securing our status as a legitimate discipline. Recently retired after a career spanning more than 30 years at Syracuse University, Louise has yet to slow down. In fact, she might be busier now than ever before. This interview takes you on a tour of the multiple, converging pathways Louise has traveled throughout her career as well as the new pathways she is forging in retirement. She discusses her work as a consultant, professor, and writer as well as the state of writing studies in the U.S. and in international contexts. She also provides insight into what constitutes a scholarly identity and how we might understand more holistically our own academic work and the work of others.

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.

Although student veterans comprise just four percent of the population of undergraduate students, this number is expected to grow as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to come to a close (“Out”). In recent years, higher education has become increasingly concerned with accommodating this emerging, diverse, and vulnerable population of students. This review essay discusses two Web-based initiatives that advocate for and about student veterans transitioning to higher education : In Their Own Words, Montgomery College Student Veterans and From Combat to Kentucky . Specifically, this review essay discusses how these two digital projects provide educators, administrators, and students (both civilian and veteran) the invaluable opportunity to hear the unique experiences and needs of student veterans in higher education. Hearing such stories can contribute to teachers and students’ learning practices by fostering identification with student veterans, despite our differences, while affording teachers and students a way of increasing our understanding of military culture and its large role in our nation’s present, past, and future cultural contexts.

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.

This article provides an analysis of the growing phenomenon of community writing groups for military veterans. Drawing on the scholarship on literacy studies, community literacy, and veterans’ writing groups, the author profiles three veterans’ writing groups and provides strategies for starting up, conducting, and sustaining such groups. The article also addresses the common questions, assumptions, and public perceptions that are currently circulating about these groups and the possible role, function, and purpose of writing in veterans’ lives.

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.

Despite widespread interest in the reintegration of Post-9/11 military veterans into civilian life, the literacies of Post-9/11 veterans, both academic and professional, remain largely untheorized. This paper addresses this dearth of information by examining the induction processes and resulting workplace literacies of soldiers, airmen/women, sailors, and Marines. Examining two recent war memoirs, one by an enlisted soldier and another by an officer, we examine uses of language, particularly in terms of the way military values are inscribed during the period of induction yet also are subject to interaction with the service member’s history and scripts prior to military service. We posit “residence time” as a theoretical approach for understanding veterans’ transition challenges. We hope that this model may be useful to higher education, civilian sector employers, and veterans themselves as the US draws down from the Post-9/11 wars and service members transition back into civilian sectors of society.

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.

In this interview, social psychologist James Pennebaker discusses the positive effects that writing about trauma can have for writers. When asked about student veterans, in particular, Pennebaker makes it clear that he would neither encourage nor discourage veterans to write about their war experiences, but that he would encourage them—and would, in fact, encourage all students—to write about emotionally significant issues. However, he would encourage students to do so for short periods of time only, and not as graded assignments.

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.

The one-on-one format of tutoring, which is the norm for writing centers, can foster the much-maligned view of a writing center as a fix-it shop and undermine the role of the tutor as a co-learner and facilitator of peer-to-peer interactions. The peer-interactive writing center approach , presented here, moves away from the one-on-one model and towards a format that encourages genuine peer collaboration, recreates the writing center as a place to actually engage in writing , and encourages students in their intuitions about writing . As a case study of such a peer-interactive approach, this profile provides an overview and evaluation of the Writing Drop-In Lab at the University of New Mexico, which provides a model for bringing the practice of writing tutoring into line with a view of writing as a collaborative, process-oriented phenomenon.

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.

The literature on public writing and community literacy has generally focused on how to get students to go public in effective and ethical ways. This article instead addresses a prior concern, the problem of why to go public. I argue that students (and Americans generally) are immersed within a cultural ecology of civic disengagement that manifests itself through powerful rhetorics of adaptation. These rhetorics encourage people’s adaptation to unjust societal conditions rather than activism to change these conditions. Hence, before helping students determine what kind of difference they should make, civically engaged writing teachers must help students see that they can make a difference . I call on engaged teachers to facilitate opportunities for students to confront, analyze, and challenge rhetorics of adaptation, and in turn, to maladjust creatively to the anti-civic surround by invoking counterhegemonic rhetorics of activism.

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 light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate—which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the development of process theory and also by the popularity of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions —was put to rest with the anti-positivist sentiment of the 1980s. The author concludes, however, that complexity-based descriptions of the writing act do align the discipline with the sciences. But the author contends that while composition scholars need not reject an alignment with complexity science, they must also be able to critique the neoliberal politics which are often wrapped up in the discourse of complexity. To that end, the author proposes that scholars and teachers of composition take up a project of critical analysis of analogical invention, which addresses the social conditions that underlie the creation and argument of knowledge in a world of complex systems.

In this conversation, Villanueva reflects on his major goals as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. He argues that his main concerns emerge from negotiating his various "insider" and "outsider" roles and personal experiences that have been shaped both by cultural meanings and cultural theories. Ultimately Villanueva rejects being called a "boss compositionist" and instead reiterates his commitment to being a student of rhetoric.

While “transfer” has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how transfer research might inform our future directions in writing and speech. We conclude by explaining what we have learned already from our literature review, our study of first-year student writing, our curricular pilots, and our efforts at ongoing exchange.

This program profile describes a new approach towards integrating communication within Mechanical Engineering curricula. The author, who holds a joint appointment between Technical Communication and Mechanical Engineering at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology, has been collaborating with Mechanical Engineering colleagues to establish a department-wide program with the goal of facilitating transfer of rhetorical instruction to engineering deliverables involving written and oral communication. To carry out this goal, the program incorporates a set of best practices informed by prior research in the areas of knowledge transfer, writing studies, and educational theory. These best practices and the theories informing them are described in this profile. In addition, the author offers preliminary lessons learned and presents implications for writing faculty interested in facilitating transfer through interdisciplinary initiatives.

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.

Previous transfer researchers within writing studies have made tremendous gains in understanding how social contexts and curricula influence writing behaviors. In this article, we argue that individual dispositions, such as motivation, value, and self-efficacy, need to occupy a more central focus in writing transfer research. After describing shifts from focusing on the educational context to the individual in composition research broadly, we examine previous writing transfer research, tracing a growing need in better understanding student dispositions. In the second half of the article, we identify five qualities of student dispositions and describe four specific dispositions—value, self-efficacy, attribution, and self-regulation—that influence writing transfer. The article concludes by emphasizing the role of the individual and by articulating new avenues of research for better understanding student dispositions in writing transfer.