J. Michael Rifenburg, Jenn Mallette, and Rebecca Nowacek Abstract This methods-focused article attends to the mechanics of participant drawing as a data collection tool in qualitative research. Writing studies researchers undertaking qualitative research benefit from a wealth of handbooks on how to design methodologically sound studies. However, despite interest in visual research methods, little guidance […]

Manny Piña and Susan Wolff-Murphy Abstract This article examines the complexity with teaching for transfer (TFT) as curricular content through a qualitative study of how TFT was experienced by first-year writing (FYW) students at a regional, Hispanic-Serving public institution. Our analysis of reflective student writing supports previous studies that show that the curriculum supports the […]

Christina Saidy, Emily Robinson, and Kristin C. Bennett Abstract This qualitative study examines the experiences of first-year TAs as they conducted teacher research projects in the TA practicum. We argue that teacher research in the practicum provides a way to bridge teaching and knowledge making, foster a continual and layered learning practice, and extend the […]

This article presents students’ experiences with hybrid grading contracts through a thematic analysis of data. We specifically focused on students’ perceptions of the grading contract’s role in improving their writing skills, issues of fairness, labor, and stress. We argue that the stressful conditions of COVID-19 illuminate the benefits and drawbacks of contract grading, especially regarding fairness and equity, when used at institutions that predominantly serve working-class students. This article can serve as an example of how graduate teaching assistants can use hybrid grading contracts in writing classrooms. We conclude with recommendations for instructors on how to adapt grading contracts to meet the needs of the students and suggest a future research agenda to examine grading contracts and stress levels.

This article offers composition theorists and practitioners insight into how social media pedagogies can help support the development of distributed expertise in writing classrooms. Reporting on the findings of an IRB-approved qualitative case study, this article showcases how students learning from and alongside one another in a Slack social media learning environment can enact distributed expertise within the classroom. After reviewing the study’s findings and contributions, the article offers some “best practices” for supporting distributed expertise with social media pedagogies in composition courses. It closes by considering social justice implications for social media pedagogies, distributed expertise, and composition pedagogy.

This article explores the sources of student dispositions toward rhetorical approaches to first-year writing instruction through a case study of Lora, a particularly motivated writing student. The study traces Lora’s performance and development of her identity through the imparting of personally meaningful objectives like “standing out” and “standing up for the right things” to particular activities across her primary, secondary, and university education. Lora’s attributing of these personal objectives to certain activities but not others is the construction and maintenance of her identity and correlates with her exhibition of generative dispositions. I argue that, in Lora’s case, dispositions are attitudinal and affective expressions of how and to what extent Lora has attributed personal meaning to a social activity in the process of identity formation. I then show how Lora identified my first-year composition (FYC) course with her personally meaningful goal of standing out as a student and, consequently, exhibited generative dispositions and productive learning practices to the challenges of developing a more rhetorical approach to writing. I conclude by suggesting that continued research on writing-related transfer must situate inquiry within the broader process of each individual’s repurposing of meaningful objectives across experience.

Researchers have examined many strategies for instructor preparation, but the role of common textbooks has received little attention, despite Yancey listing them as an essential feature to consider in developing instructor preparation. This case study examines the impact of the custom common textbook on graduate and professional instructors in a First Year Writing program at a large Midwestern research university. Data were collected through a survey, focus groups, and interviews with instructors, as well as interviews with textbook authors. I found that although instructors varied widely in their use of the text, it did contribute to instructor preparation by influencing choices of content and awareness of program culture and values, especially for experienced instructors. Although additional instructional preparation measures are necessary for new instructors, common textbooks should not be ignored in research and assessment of instructor preparation strategies.

The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered. Culturally sustaining pedagogy explores, extends, and examines the experiences of students. Meaningful, experience-based, narrative writing assignments are suggested: memoir essays, ethnographic research reports, and multigenre interview projects. Analysis activities challenge students to examine a chosen experience through several scholarly lenses. By adding complex analysis to their writing, students gain a challenging new experience that considers past, present, and future influences upon their identity formation. Experience-based writing assignments make room for home language through dialogue and informal genres that include intentional code meshing and translingualing. This inclusion prompts questions about academic language conflicts and opens discussion about how language represents identity, negotiates hierarchies, and permits agency.

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.

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.

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 program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.

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.

Current paraphrasing instruction in the composition classroom may ironically promote “knowledge telling” source use, such as patchwriting. We argue for an approach to source use instruction that teaches paraphrase as a spectrum of task-dependent rhetorical skills ranging from knowledge telling to knowledge transforming. We encapsulate and test the effectiveness of this approach in a series of interactive videos. These videos present a rhetorically-grounded framework for source use instruction, including think-aloud protocols that demystify how reading processes can be used to critically engage with source content. We validate this approach with two different demographics: Non-Native English speaking graduate students and First Year Writing students. Findings suggest our approach, compared with a workshop that used ‘traditional’ fear-of-plagiarism tactics, helped NNES students better recognize knowledge transforming as a task-dependent option and understand the process of note-taking to transform source texts. In contrast, the traditional workshop promoted knowledge telling behaviors.

As the number of multilingual students increases at small campuses in rural areas that lack multilingual composition programming, there is a need to explore pedagogical and institutional strategies that help to pool limited or emerging resources to promote language justice for multilingual students. This narrative case study looks at two small regional campuses’ efforts to advocate for and facilitate supports such as instructor training and tutoring programs for a growing multilingual population in Northeast Ohio.

In expanding our minor in Professional and Public Writing (PPW), we drew on scholarship exploring tensions inherent in the field’s efforts to understand and present itself as a cohesive, yet capacious, discipline. Missing from the scholarship are the voices of students. To fill this gap, we conducted focus group interviews with PPW students at Roger Williams University. Our findings suggest that disciplinary tensions surrounding conceptions of writing are echoed in students’ perceptions of their experiences and how they understand themselves as writers. Even as they assert the importance of good writing skills in the workplace, they express an appreciation for courses in which writing for a variety of audiences is conceptualized as complex and flexible. Understanding the tension between these beliefs about writing holds significant implications for our future program development, especially with curriculum and recruitment. It can also help other programs as they expand their offerings.

In this article, we investigate a new construct for conceptualizing learning transfer with writing knowledge: Transformative Experience (TE). With origins in educational psychology, TE has been effective for promoting transfer with scientific concepts in previous research, but not yet considered in relation to writing or other presumably procedural subjects. To investigate the usefulness of TE for revealing new dimensions of writer development, we present a brief case study focused on faculty members writing for scholarly publication. We use qualitative responses to a survey about faculty members’ experiences in a formal writing group to illustrate the three dimensions of TE in the context of writer development: active use, expansion of perception, and experiential value. Although we study advanced faculty writers, findings have implications for teaching and learning writing more broadly. Specifically, we argue that using TE as a framework for interpreting what learners do with writing knowledge widens the “warming trend” in transfer research, nuancing our understanding of writing transfer by attending to perceptual and experiential aspects of learning. We propose instructional interventions to test how incorporating TE into writing pedagogy might enhance teaching and learning for transfer.

This article revisits the relationships among gender, service, and composition pedagogy through a qualitative study of active-duty military officers who teach first-year writing at the United States Air Force Academy, one of the five major U.S. national military service academies. The U.S. national military service academies are under-studied sites of writing; there is little published about the experiences of the active-duty officers who comprise a significant portion of the first-year writing teaching faculty at these institutions. Interviews with the officers about their first-year writing pedagogy are framed by an analysis of military leadership policy as well as scholarship on writing teacher development, feminist composition pedagogy theories, and critiques of the role of service in composition studies. This study describes the officers’ first-year writing pedagogy and argues that the experience of these officers, framed through the theories of military leadership and the military service ethos, introduces a new way to understand how the concept of service could operate in first-year writing pedagogy. The officers’ experiences also support arguments that service in composition classrooms is still problematically gendered: even within a military environment, female officers report that they have less freedom than their male colleagues to demonstrate an ethic of care towards their first-year writing students.

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers’ understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving conceptions of genre among thirty-three new first-year writing teachers, examining their understandings--and, occasionally, tensions--at different points in time as they encounter the concept in their teacher preparation and with their own students. Through written reflections and focus group interviews, we identify key patterns in how the teachers define genre over time and some of the influences on those dynamic conceptions. Findings from this research have implications for teacher preparation and curriculum development in the context of U.S. college composition.

Expert readers’ responses to texts offer specific, meaningful insights useful in building English language arts models (ELA) for student writers. In the case of academic peer review, previous research has demonstrated that expert reviewers have specific expectations involving readers, texts, and processes. Identifying congruence between research on expert readers and the design of ELA models, however, has proven elusive—and detrimental to the advancement of student learning. One promising integrative direction is the study of two complementary ELA models, one emphasizing the role of meta-reading and the other of cognition. To explore the capability of an ELA model for writing studies informed by expert reader practice, we present a case study that has educative implications for the teaching of writing. Specifically, the study reports the observations of six expert readers reviewing manuscripts for an academic journal in writing studies. Following completion of an online survey of their reading aims as they reviewed manuscripts for publication, colleagues participated in a 30-minute semi-structured recorded interview about their strategies. The interview responses were coded using both meta-reading and cognitive models. Based on analysis of 529 reviewer comments included in the analysis, the findings support conceptualization of integrated, multi-faceted ELA models. While limited, our study has generative research and classroom implications for the development of writing studies pedagogy.

Recently, rhetorical genre studies scholars have challenged the field to de-center the study of genre as artifact to focus on the conditions that surround, inform, and constrain how those genres get used by writers: the genre uptakes. While prior research has begun to identify many of these consequential influences, these endeavors would benefit, I argue, from an emic, writer-oriented method that follows what writers perceive has impact on genres from a longitudinal and trans-contextual perspective. To that end, I extend previous research by introducing lifeworld analysis to the study and teaching of genre uptake. Lifeworld analysis, I argue, centralizes uptake, uptakes over time, and the background life from which uptakes are formed, as salient for literacy development. To support this claim, I present a lifeworld case study of one student (Ron), an electrical engineering major and participant in local and online maker culture, who I followed over four years of his undergraduate curriculum, from general education and discipline-specific courses into an online and local community makerspace. Ron’s case reveals the interplay between maker-consciousness and encounters with engineering and general education writing, highlighting how maker culture became a core scene of uptake for his performance of school-based genres. This lifeworld analysis shows the porousness and malleability of spheres of writing activity as well as the consequences of such perceived malleability for writers. Ron’s case grounds my introduction of an uptake awareness pedagogy: an attempt to help students recognize and strategically draw from expanded and often taken-for-granted temporal, spatial, and perspectival histories of their prior genre uptakes and those uptake histories.

Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program. Our analysis identified two patterns of group conversation among students: “co-telling” and “co-constructing,” with the latter leading to more complex writing knowledge. We also used Beaufort’s domains of writing knowledge to examine how co-constructing conversations supported students in abstracting knowledge beyond a single classroom context and in negotiating local constraints. Our findings suggest that co-constructing is a valuable process that invites students to do the necessary work of remaking their knowledge for local use. Ultimately, our analysis of the role of student conversation in the construction of writing knowledge contributes to our understanding of the myriad activities that surround transfer of learning.

Recent research in writing studies has highlighted meta-awareness as valuable for student learning in courses such as first-year writing (FYW); however, meta-awareness needs to be further theorized and its components identified. In this article, I draw on a case study of six students in two FYW courses that is informed by Gregory Schraw’s model of metacognition and Anthony Giddens’s theory of practical and discursive consciousness to outline four writing/rhetorical concepts within which meta-awareness about composition is observable. These concepts include 1) process, 2) techniques, 3) rhetoric, and 4) intercomparativity, and they provide a preliminary framework for meta-awareness about composition that others might expand upon as we continue to build knowledge of how writers learn.

Foodways literacies offer composition courses a rich opportunity to enact a “sensual pedagogy” that explores affect through cross-cultural culinary encounters. In this assignment description, I present a class I developed at the University of Kentucky, Taco Literacy, as an example of such pedagogy. The class explores the languages and literacies of Mexican migration through the lens of emotionally resonant foodways.

Scholars have offered research and theory about emotional labor and the feeling of emotion in rhetoric and composition, but we have little if any such research on writing center work specifically. Drawing on data from a year-long qualitative study of writing center directors’ labor, this article examines writing center directors’ emotional labor as valuable yet undervalued, fulfilling yet fraught. Emotional labor was work our participants had to do—and often wanted to do and enjoyed doing—in order to accomplish (smoothly, swiftly, or at all) the other tasks on their to-do lists. Emotional labor included tasks such as mentoring, advising, making small talk, putting on a friendly face, resolving conflicts, making connections, delegating and following up on progress, working in teams, disciplining or redirecting employees, gaining trust, and creating a positive workplace. Ultimately, participants suggest that emotional labor is difficult not because they must devote so much time to it, but because they have not been adequately prepared to expect and negotiate it.

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 this article, I challenge the scholarly consensus that suggests students only rarely forge meaningful connections between the genres they compose in different domains of writing (Reiff and Bawashi; Yancey, Robertson, and Taczak). I argue that the genre and domain categories composition researchers have imposed through data collection and analysis account for at least some of what has been identified as students’ inability to articulate how they transfer prior knowledge. When four focus groups and ten college juniors and seniors were interviewed and prompted to compare and contrast their own writing from various contexts, they forged idiosyncratic, action-oriented metageneric connections that are not limited by domains. My data, illustrated here by close discussions of four of these students, suggests that this student-driven metagenre-invention process may have three benefits for students, teachers, and researchers: it enables students to access prior genre knowledge that they may not have otherwise considered relevant; it enables students to re-envision their goals as writers; and it offers researchers and teachers insight into ways we might foster transfer by attending to students’ idiosyncratic metageneric connections.

This article situates one possible future for rhetorical genre studies (RGS) in the translingual, multimodal composing practices of linguistically diverse composition students. Using focus group data collected with L1 (English as a first language) and L2 (English as a second language) students at two large public state universities, the researcher examines connections between students’ linguistic repertoires and their respective approaches to multimodal composition. Students at both universities took composition courses that incorporate rhetorical genre studies approaches to teaching writing in conventional print and multimodal forms. Findings suggest L2 students exhibit advanced expertise and rhetorical sensitivity when layering meaning through multimodal composition. This expertise comes in part from L2 students’ experiences combining and crossing various modes when they cannot exclusively rely on words to communicate in English. Through this evidence, the researcher argues the translingual practices of L2 students can bridge connections and help develop pedagogical applications of multimodality and RGS, primarily by helping writing instructors teach genres as fluid and socially situated. In addition, the researcher presents a methodology for analyzing the embodied practices of composition students, which can further expand how genres are theorized and taught in composition courses.

The Virtual Workplace Ethnography is a first-year composition assignment that positions students as knowledge makers by requiring them to apply a theoretical lens (“Working Knowledge”) to a video representation of a workplace. The lens provides multiple terms for analysis of workplace behaviors in context, providing a scaffolding for apprentice ethnographers that allows them to take an informed stance on their research. The “virtual” aspect addresses the complex ethical issues raised by ethnography by substituting a fictitious setting for an actual site. The essay explores the challenges of the assignment, offering examples of student texts and student metacommentaries on the work. The essay argues that this assignment addresses longstanding concerns about the challenges of making meaningful writing assignments in FYC and concludes by exploring the potential of the assignment in distance education.

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.

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.

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.

Increasingly, students come to the university with a consumer mentality, which gives students a sense that they are entitled to negotiate their student positions within the university and the classroom. This article, using Directed Self-Placement as a sort of case study, considers the role student-centered assessments and pedagogies play in perpetuating this consumer role and theorizes that we are framing them in a way that makes us complicit. The article addresses questions about what to do as education becomes more consumer driven. What is a WPA--caught between concerns about good pedagogy and pressures from the administration to recruit and retain students--to do when faced with students who want to negotiate their positions in the first-year composition curriculum? And, how do we negotiate ourselves back into a position in which assessment standards and rigor are paramount, even in a consumer world?