By Molly Ryan. Mentorship in the field of writing studies is broadly understood to be an essential facet of disciplinary matriculation, but its features are sometimes slippery to define. Indeed, mentorship is difficult to concisely describe and more challenging still to enact in practice. When it does take root, however, both mentor and mentee are aware of the power and benefits of this sometimes-elusive dynamic. In my own experiences both in my MA and PhD programs, my exceptional mentors entered my life through what sometimes felt like serendipitous chance, as in, I was (luckily) in the right place at the right time to meet them. I know too well how lucky I am to have them as my guides, colleagues, and sometimes even friends, but even as a grateful recipient of the best-case scenario for mentorship, so to speak, I find myself continuing to reflect on how we as a field might better scaffold the dynamic of mentor/mentee.

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.

Gitte Frandsen Kiernan, Julia, Alanna Frost, and Suzanne Blum Malley. Translingual Pedagogical Perspectives: Engaging Domestic and International Students in the Composition Classroom. Utah State University Press, 2021. My first encounter with the concept of translingualism was in a graduate seminar where Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur’s Language Difference in Writing: […]

Raffaella Negretti, Hans Malmström, and Jonathan Weidow Abstract In this program profile, we describe the development of an integrated, genre-based writing curriculum in first-year engineering physics at a technical university in Sweden. The curriculum aimed at supporting undergraduate students develop disciplinary literacy and an understanding of the exigencies that different scientific genres fulfill, with a […]

Kristina Quynn Abstract CSU Writes supports researchers as writers across their career span at Colorado State University. The program emerged in an already rich writing ecosystem that includes a Writing Center and the WAC Clearinghouse. Since 2015, CSU Writes has helped thousands of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students write more regularly, skillfully, and with […]

Caitlin Martin and Mandy Olejnik Abstract Composition, rhetoric, and writing studies (CRWS) as a field has historically recognized the importance of mentoring for graduate students, but there can be a disconnect between learning theory and how mentoring occurs in practice. In this article, we argue for a more systematic approach to graduate student mentoring that […]