Universities across the globe have begun to invest in transdisciplinary research: a complex form of collaboration that places divergent disciplinary specialists and community members in participatory research aimed at addressing an applied research question. For a collaboration to succeed in this knowledge work, participants must engage in radical boundary crossing among disciplinary and community knowledge cultures wherein language is the substance of these boundaries and crossings. Effective collaboration, communication, and writing are essential to the success of transdisciplinary research, but composition research on collaborative writing has yet to address what collaboration looks like in transdisciplinary settings. This article offers a theoretical synthesis that brings transdisciplinary research theory into conversation with composition theory and pedagogy by providing an overview of the core principles of transdisciplinary research, offering an activity systems interpretation of transdisciplinary research, and outlining a framework for incorporating transdisciplinary collaboration into university composition programs.

Research on writing pedagogy education (WPE) emphasizes the importance of engaging graduate student instructors (GSIs) in mindful reflection about their own practices and about composition theory. Little research, however, has explored what we learn from a systematic, empirical investigation of GSIs’ reflective writing. In this article, we describe a writing assignment we created for a graduate composition theory course that required GSIs to connect their own beliefs and experiences with the theory they read. We analyzed 60 essays to learn how new writing teachers understand and use composition theory. Our analysis shows that GSIs rely on three discursive patterns to write about theory (we call these cite-comment , cite-apply , cite-engage ) and adopt three orientations towards theory (using theory to explain prior beliefs and maintain a teacherly identity , to solve classroom problems and shore up a teacherly identity , and to accept uncertainty and become a reflective teacher ). We discuss connections between GSIs’ discursive strategies and their theoretical orientations. We conclude by sharing how we have revised both this assignment and our training program to help GSIs better engage theory as they reflect on their own experiences. Finally, we explore the implications of what we learned for WPE broadly.

Over the past two decades, reflective writing has occupied an increasingly prominent position in composition theory, pedagogy, and assessment as researchers have described the value of reflection and reflective writing in college students’ development of higher-order writing skills, such as genre conventions (Yancey, Reflection ; White). One assumption about the value of reflection has been that skill in reflective writing also has a positive connection with lower-order writing skills, such as sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. However, evidence to confirm this assumption has been limited to small qualitative studies or deferred to future longitudinal research (Downs and Wardle). In the mixed methods assessment study presented here, we first investigated this assumption empirically by measuring the relationship between evaluative skills embedded in the genre of reflective writing and lower-order writing skills that follow sentence-level conventions of academic discourse. We found a high-positive correlation between reflection and writing assessment scores. We then used qualitative methods to describe key features of higher- and lower-scored reflective essays.

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.

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.

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray’s A Writer Teaches Writing , fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray’s legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting and fails to do justice to Murray’s broader contributions to the field’s disciplinary ethos.

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.

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.

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 examines ways in which the fundamentals of both writing studies and sustainability studies overlap and complement each other, ultimately moving toward a theory of writing that not only is sustainable, but that also sustains writing practice across a variety of areas. For example, in order to be sustainable, both writing and geographical communities must consider several elements in any decision or employed strategy. Both writing (the act and the teaching of it) and sustainability studies are localized, regionally specific. Key to the argument’s theoretical positioning is the role of technology and technological innovation in both a community and a classroom in terms of inhibiting and facilitating sustainability and communication.