By Andrea A. Lunsford. I’m grateful to the editors of Composition Forum, Aja Y. Martinez, and the authors of this symposium for the opportunity to read and reflect on the essays included here, since doing so led me to do some very memorable time traveling. And specifically to the mid 1980s and my first encounter with what would become known as Critical Race Theory (CRT)—in the work of Patricia Williams, particularly her “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.” In those years, Lisa Ede and I were studying (and practicing) collaborative writing, with its implicit challenge to traditional notions of singular authorship as the only valid and valuable form of academic publication. We were attuned to scholars who were resisting such values, rejecting the unwritten but powerful rules against anything other than single authorship, and who were pushing the boundaries of traditional academic discourse in other ways as well.

By Ruby Mendoza and Erin Green. In 2025, during a political climate where civil liberties and freedoms are under attack, a monumental book was published titled The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas that Created a Movement. Authors Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith released this brilliantly composed book during a kairotic moment where critical race theory (CRT) is under attack across the nation in mainstream media, presidential debates, and even school board meetings. Given the attacks on and speculation about CRT’s place in society, it is evident that many are unfamiliar with the creation of CRT. In response to this moment, The Origins of Critical Race Theory serves as a text that counters dominant discourse and humanizes the movement of CRT. This historical non-fiction book serves as a critical reminder of how CRT has been centered around amplifying, supporting, and uplifting communities that are often systematically marginalized by dominant colonial ideologies and policies. Our book review conveys not only the monumental importance of creating accessible knowledge to the general public about CRT, but also emphasizes how this book can also support composition studies.

Even though learning outcomes have become an expected part of writing programs, how they are defined and subsequently used is often unclear. This study did a textual analysis of the terms used for outcomes on 42 universities’ first-year writing webpages. The study found that university writing programs use different terms for outcomes and define those terms differently across programs. The lack of clear definitions for outcomes across programs makes these documents difficult for writing programs, faculty, and students to use. Consequently, the author argues that composition studies needs to study definitions of outcomes terminology and then clearly define those terms in the materials programs, teachers, and students use. The author then presents suggestions for how programs and teachers might do this definitional work to make outcomes more useable for effective course design.

In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the classroom. Through reflective anecdotes and theoretical frameworks, this article underscores the significance of shared values, respecting diversity, and democratic engagement in shaping transformative learning communities. Emphasizing practices such as establishing common ground, engaging in creative expression, and co-constructing syllabi, the article advocates for a holistic approach to education that prioritizes empathy, agency, and reciprocity. By integrating the contemplative practice of community building into the fabric of academic discourse, Muir envisions a future where students and educators alike embrace interconnectedness, compassion, and collective growth.

Discourse-based interviews (DBIs) uncover tacit knowledge within written composing processes. Existing visual research methodologies offer tools for a necessary expansion of DBI to the study of tacit knowledge in visual and multimodal texts. This article outlines a feminist application of eye tracking as a visual research method used in combination with stimulated recall interviews to study tacit knowledge within college students’ reading practices of comic books. Study participants read excerpts from two female superhero comics while eye tracking equipment recorded their eye movements. In a later interview, participants watched video clips of their recorded eye movements overlaid on the comic book excerpts and reconstructed their reading processes. This article summarizes major findings from the study, including impacts of rhetorical genre expertise, gender, and comics culture on participants’ reading practices. The study demonstrates that eye tracking combined with stimulated recall interviews uncovered tacit knowledge that participants accessed as they read comics.

This article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore the writing lives of students as part of a larger project focusing on participants’ experiences of writing within and beyond the university. We explain this innovative, iterative research method combining multiple texts and maps, characterizing it as a kind of triangulation operating inside the frame of the interview. Through students’ triangulated multiple representations, the interviewer learns about, and from, students’ tacit knowledge of their experiences as it is made explicit through multiple modalities: visual as well as linguistic (oral and written). Our study suggests that engaging students in multiple modalities allows researchers to get a more comprehensive understanding of participants’ experiences. Moreover, as we demonstrate from our findings, students found that the mapping activity helped them understand their own writing and the relationships among their spheres of writing more fully. We argue for the value of engaging research participants in multiple modalities as a way of eliciting tacit knowledge through triangulating the data in the discourse-based interview.

Discourse-based interviews allow researchers to gather data about a writer’s understanding of what informs a task. This method was essential for a research team seeking to understand the impact of programmatic learning objectives on student writing development. Three decisions in the approach to this research project sought to center the student participants and make them quasi-researchers: the alignment of a clearly articulated theoretical framework with the methodology, the collection of supporting data from other methods, and modifications to the interview protocol. The study found that a writing program can facilitate the transfer of writing skills by implementing consistent, explicit, and intentional transfer-oriented learning objectives in both FYC and advanced composition courses.

This article connects discourse-based interviews with larger conversations about queer research methods. Using examples from an ongoing research project about LGBTQ+ students’ experiences as academic writers, this article describes how discourse-based interviews can be productively and ethically utilized as part of queer rhetorics research and provides a framework to attune future researchers to the need for accountability, rhetorical listening, and attention to discomfort.

In this essay, we argue that Twitch is an incredible platform for cultivating discourse-based interviews (DBIs) and has yet to be addressed in DBI research involving digital tools. To demonstrate that argument, we detail the methods behind collaborative research project between two undergraduates and a faculty studying game developers on the platform. Our collaborative approach to studying game developers on Twitch is framed as a 2022 update to Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s landmark essay The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings. After providing an overview of Twitch and recent scholarship, our essay describes three major challenges associated with cultivating DBIs from the platform: recruiting participants, managing files ethically, and scaling the project. Our focus on two interviews with one game developer reveals how a DBI on Twitch allows for participant agency. Based on that experience, we close with two recommendations for future DBIs that turn to Twitch: keep the project small, and go deep.

The discourse-based interview (DBI) allows researchers to explore writers’ tacit knowledge. This article describes how we taught and learned to adapt a DBI-based interviewing process through the reflections of both the professor and two graduate students in a graduate-level course, Field Methods in Technical Communication. By participating in a large-scale research project focusing on how online PhD students viewed their education post-graduation, current graduate students learned about planning, conducting, and analyzing interviews. The authors reflect on how they not only learned qualitative methods, but how the experience made them feel like part of a research community (as well as an academic community). Taking a dialogic approach, the professor and both graduate students weave narratives, reflections, and the voices of their participants to share their experiences in uncovering tacit knowledge using a DBI-inspired process.

This article illustrates how we incorporated discourse-based interviews (DBIs) into a mixed-methods research study informed by the heuristics of institutional ethnography (IE). As the first stage of a longitudinal study designed to understand what, where, and how writing means across our university, our research used DBIs in a writing center to uncover peer tutors’ tacit personal knowledge about writing. In tandem with IE methodology, DBIs enabled us to understand how conceptions of writing shape peer tutors’ written work and tutoring practice in relation and/or resistance to the programmatic goals of the center. The study demonstrates how the use of DBIs within IE projects facilitates dynamic exploration of the co-constitutive and socially constructed nature of tacit writing knowledge and institutionally coordinated work processes. Our research design and methodological considerations generate strategies and approaches for incorporating variations of DBIs into mixed-methods research.

This approach article describes the structure of the new Composition and Speech Program at Delaware State University, particularly in light of the use of discourse-based interview (DBI) methodology in the development process of the program. The program includes a 4-course sequence—three 2-credit hour composition courses and one 3-credit hour speech course designed to be offered in an 8-week format. The article demonstrates how the program is planned for continuous improvement, and how authors have adapted DBI for their context in at least three different ways—1) one-to-one interviews, 2) instructor surveys, and 3) professional development sessions—to articulate implicit ideas within the institution so as to use them for the programmatic refinement.

Writing researchers have long sought to make tacit writing knowledge explicit, rendering it available for learning and critique. We advance this endeavor by describing our use of the “tool-based interview” (TBI) as a variation of Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s influential discourse-based interview (DBI). Rather than the product-focused textual disruptions of DBIs, TBIs, by altering authors’ writing tools, disrupt conventionalized writing processes, an approach useful when access to texts is limited for security, privacy, confidentiality, or proprietary reasons. We illustrate this method by describing its use in the development of Journaling , a digital tool for intelligence analysts. After describing our research context and procedures, we describe three sample disruptions from our interviews with intelligence practitioners and the knowledge elicited through these. We conclude with a comparison of the knowledge elicited by our TBIs with that from DBIs and discuss the limitations of each in light of recent work on tacit knowledge.

This paper discusses the relevance of the discourse-based interview (DBI) for holistic research and access to more layers of meaning in the study of complex phenomena. We draw on our own work in workplace discourse and relevant research from different linguistic traditions, particularly sociolinguistic inquiry. We reflect on the potential of DBI for enhancing reflexivity and enabling the researcher and participant to co-create the research problem. We reposition ‘the interview’ from a tool for collecting self-reported data to a process of negotiation which allows for multiple and alternative readings of the researcher’s findings. We close the paper with a model and set of principles that expend the current framing of DBI and we provide directions for future research.

In this article, I describe the challenges I encountered and the process I navigated in conducting discourse-based interviews (DBIs) with multilingual transnational participants in disaster recovery in the context of community-based research. Attending to the messiness and complexity of community-based research in the aftermath of human-induced climate change disasters, I created a revised form of the DBI by adding phenomenological and ecological approaches. In global contexts, transnational or language minority writers in community-based contexts often have limited rhetorical choices. By using two case studies from my larger datasets, and adapting DBI procedures with contemporary methodology in mind, I suggest how researchers can be more culturally sensitive to affective dimensions around interview situations and more ethically informed when they interview writers from marginalized communities and in post-traumatic situations.

Scholars in writing studies have positioned numerous critiques of the tacit myth of Standard English (*SE) and its use as an unquestioned communicative norm. While these critiques reflect the overlap of the field’s translingualism and anti-racist writing assessment movements, they also reveal an empirical need surrounding the writing instructors who must actually grapple with the *SE myth in their teaching and grading practices. Following Asao Inoue’s identification of the *SE myth as a slick eel that remains an assessment problem, I conducted a qualitative study using concept clarification interviews and discourse-based interviews (DBIs) at a large, diverse, four-year university in the U.S. to empirically confront the *SE myth and make the potentially tacit presence of *SE in instructors’ rubrics and grading practices explicit. Based on the results of these interviews, I advocate for a shift from seeing and critiquing *SE to performing Synergistic English Work (SEW) in the context of grading rubrics and assessment policies, making the absent presence of *SE visible, open to disruption, and more actively combatted.

In this review essay, I briefly examine Odell, Goswami, and Herrington’s discussion of tacit knowledge in The Discourse-Based Interview: A Procedure for Exploring the Tacit Knowledge of Writers in Nonacademic Settings, before discussing Collins’s expansive treatment of the concept in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge. In this monograph, Collins delineates three distinct forms of tacit knowledge: relational tacit knowledge (RTK); somatic tacit knowledge (STK); and collective tacit knowledge (CTK). I close by contextualizing Collins’s work alongside of recent research on tacit knowledge in writing studies, considering implications for future research regarding the role these forms of tacit knowledge play within epistemic and communicative activity.

This case study of students enrolled in a composition course at a large public university examines multilingual students’ application of multimodal composition practices to writing assignments that emphasize delivery and circulation. Assignments in which students remediate or translate a text in one genre or medium into another are widely used to foster transfer of writing knowledge from classrooms to public discourse. Remixing may be especially useful for multilingual writers by allowing them to draw on translingual meaning-making strategies. However, such assignments must be framed in ways that make explicit the rhetorical implications of how remediated or translated texts are taken up and circulated within larger ecologies and suggest how uptake can be measured and assessed to be useful. This article draws on Rhetorical Genre Studies and Translingualism to address this issue in Multimodal Composition by outlining a pedagogical approach that emphasizes delivery and measuring uptake.

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 reports findings from a single-bounded case study on student-athletes’ performance of what educational psychologist Yves Karlen refers to as metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) in two first-year composition assignments. This case study is focused on the following research question: how might the promotion of MSK in a FYC class support the development of student-athletes’ writing skills? Data collection includes semi-structured, in-person interviews, visual and bodily mapping exercises, and textual analysis of research participants’ academic writing. This essay offers a two-pronged argument based on the data. First, promoting the development of MSK through established composition and rhetoric writing assignments dovetails with student-athletes’ athletic literacy and supports their development as academic writers. Second, student-athletes’ prior knowledge and practice of metacognition helps instructors gain a stronger understanding of how they may use MSK to facilitate future writing assignments.

In this program profile, we detail the design and implementation phases of an interdisciplinary first-year experience curriculum for multilingual students in the Creando Raíces learning community model at Humboldt State University. Our profile describes how we worked together as a professional learning community to integrate theories of writing development and transfer with culturally sustaining pedagogies. The coursework and academic structural supports of our model, such as its writing fellows program, supported student engagement in critical work that asked them to consider what it means to transfer one’s emerging and existing knowledges about language, literacy, discourse, schooling, and identity into and out of systems, institutions, and communities. In reflecting on our work across three semesters, our profile reveals ways that instructors, administrators and students can enact a multilingual, decolonial praxis as an approach to facilitating writing knowledge transfer.

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.

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.

Students who receive instruction in discipline-specific communication perform better in introductory and upper-level STEM courses. In this study, researchers investigate how writing center intervention can aid STEM faculty in revising assignment rubrics and conveying to students the discourse conventions and expectations for writing tasks. The results suggest that the writing center, though often discussed and marketed as a student support service, can fill a gap by providing support to faculty.

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

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

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

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

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

In Carolyn Miller’s Rhetorical Community: The Cultural Basis of Genre, she revisits her assertion that genres are cultural artifacts and questions the nature of the relationship between micro-level, individual speech acts, and macro-level genres and systems. To demonstrate this relationship, I analyze meta-genre accounts of the dissertation posted on the Writing Program Administrator (WPA) listserv, a forum for Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). Within this discourse, I identify transitional threads —moments when the discussion shifts, which show the relationship between micro- and macro-level interaction on the listserv as well as constructions of the dissertation within Writing Studies. CMC highlights how micro-level speech acts aggregate and are impacted by macro-level culture, and it showcases the heterogeneity inherent in the rhetorical community of the listserv.

This program profile examines the storied and conflicted five-decade genealogy of the Stony Brook University writing program. From the points of view of former administrators of this program who were faculty members during two of its most significant transitional periods, the authors make a case for the utmost importance of faculty community and reflectiveness, discourse-empowered advocacy, and shared governance to the well-being of postsecondary writing programs. In this context, the profile maintains a particular focus on disciplinary identity formation, including its effects on curriculum, working conditions, and placement and assessment practices.

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 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.

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.