This is a time of extreme change. While we know that the world and our lives are defined by constant flux, it is hard to attribute the changes we see every day to the natural ebb and flow of the universe. Even so, it is how we acknowledge and, ultimately, address these changes that will determine how we continue to make our own change in the world.

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.

By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Megan McIntyre Abstract In response to a growing awareness of the oppressive foundations of educational institutions, literacy educators have turned to antiracist, culturally responsive (Alim and Paris; Paris), and equitable teaching and assessment practices to combat the inequities (colonialism, racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, etc.) on which our institutions are built. According to scholars including Geneva […]

Christian Weisser, Jackie Hoermann-Elliot, Gavin P. Johnson, and Daniel Ernst Readers of Composition Forum may have noticed a pause in our regular volumes; we postponed a Fall 2024 release while we were making some modifications to the journal. First and foremost, we have upgraded the design and functionality of the CF website by implementing a […]

The most recent issue of Composition Forum can be accessed here: Table of Contents From the Editors

In response to the increasing alienation from nature exacerbated by digital living, this course design presents an advanced composition “rewilding” course. Combining natural history writing, nature therapy research, and mindfulness activities, the course aims to reconnect students with the natural world. Inspired by Micah Mortali’s concept of rewilding and Barry Lopez’s exploration of inner and outer landscapes, the course emphasizes experiential learning. Through natural history writing, students develop attentiveness to the environment, fostering a sense of wonder and connection. By centering on our innate relationship with nature, rewilding becomes a transformative practice, preparing students for ecological literacy and meaningful engagement with the world.

Recent translingual, CLA, and sociocognitive scholarship call for increased attention to language and show enduring interest in language in composition. This article suggests these calls persist but don’t succeed because of composition’s limiting habitus: the norms and inertia propelled by U.S. linguistic miseducation and the field’s uneven attention to language. To date, composition has emphasized language ideologies or language itself, but not both together. To change habitus, we need consciousness-raising as well as alternative approaches in encounters with language. This article historicizes attention to language in composition in three traditions, then categorizes the main challenges to attention to language in the field, then offers two pedagogical interventions: (1) developing course language acknowledgements, and (2) analyzing diverse linguistic patterns. The article closes with conceptual shifts important for connecting social and linguistic knowledge.

In a recent survey completed by 84 graduates of rhetoric and composition PhD programs at various phases of their career, a majority of respondents reported that their graduate programs provided excellent guidance when it came to teaching but insufficient guidance toward scholarly publication. An analysis of survey responses suggests that scholarly publication is troublesome because it marks the transition from student to scholar and because prior knowledge of “school genres” can impede learning of scholarly genres. Furthermore, the liminality novice scholars experience in transitioning from student to scholar evokes anxiety and feelings of impostor syndrome for many. This suggests that mentorship should help emerging scholars develop strategies for recontextualizing genre knowledge in response to diverse rhetorical situations in order to navigate the emotional strain that accompanies the recontextualization process in high-stakes situations.

In this article, I present the results of a national study of response to student writing and argue for an approach to response I call Responding for Transfer (RFT). My corpus includes peer and teacher responses to 1,054 rough and final drafts of student writing from across the curriculum as well as 128 student self-reflection essays from ePortfolios at seventy institutions of higher education across the U.S. I present evidence from this corpus to support my argument for an RFT approach that emphasizes student self-assessment, focuses teacher response on student metacognition rather than the products of drafts, and takes response into consideration in the design of vertical transfer curriculum.

This program profile describes how teachers and administrators have collaborated in the design and implementation of a number of linguistic, cultural, and transmodal pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Strategies that writing teachers can implement to best meet the needs of multilingual students across a range of institutional contexts are discussed via a social justice lens. A focused examination of our First-Year Writing program’s layered response to increased international multilingual student enrolment as well as a brief discussion of campus-wide responses are offered to showcase how translingual, transcultural, and transmodal approaches to First-Year Writing can empower students, inviting them to learn from their existing linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

This program profile describes an initiative to meet the college reading and writing requirement for undergraduate students in a premedical program at St. George’s University (SGU) in Grenada, West Indies. Two courses were developed in response to concerns that the existing curriculum was not meeting the specific needs of premedical students. The existing courses were literature-based and provided minimal feedback or other opportunities for development. Additional concerns involved a varied range of abilities among students that was not being addressed, large class sizes, and lack of investment on the part of premedical students. Solutions include the incorporation of a task-based curriculum focused on the medical profession in order to increase engagement, division of students into small cohorts with small teacher/student ratios, integration of skill building into all activities, and implementation of process writing to allow for intensive feedback and student development.

This profile presents New Jersey City University’s Writing Assessment Program from its creation in 2002 to its elimination in 2017. The program arose as an attempt to raise the writing skills of the diverse, first-generation teacher certification candidates in the College of Education. Despite political missteps, the program gained greater administrative support in 2009, and in this second stage, the program capitalized on greater institutional support to use data-driven analysis to inform policy. In 2014, however, New Jersey moved to require the Praxis CORE, and the Writing Assessment Program became obsolete. This profile discusses the many ways in which a locally developed, student-centered, and instruction-driven assessment program can raise student skills and the losses involved in a shift from local to national assessment.

As Brian Huot and Ellen E. Schendel assert, when assessment has more than validation in mind, it “can become a means for proactive change” (208). In response to this idea of assessment as an optimistic and opportunistic enterprise, this article describes how the structural design of our “equal opportunity” writing program and our faculty-led assessment process work symbiotically to sustain, enhance and “revision” the curriculum and pedagogy of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, first-year writing program. Our writing program strives to offer all students at the college a consistent and equivalent writing experience, regardless of what semester or in what section they enroll, as well as a coherent trajectory, where students encounter similar learning processes and literacy tasks throughout the course sequence. To ensure this consistency and coherence, our programmatic stakeholders designed program assessment to have direct impact on classroom learning by following multiple formative and summative assessments in an inquiry-based practice driven by local curricular contexts. In profiling the quid pro quo between writing program design and its accompanying assessment efforts, we demonstrate how program structure enables useful, progressive assessment, and, conversely, how assessment continuously informs and improves the infrastructures of pedagogy and curriculum in the writing classroom.

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