By Natalie Shellenberger. This bibliographic essay explores the use of Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence in the fields of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies since his definition of the principle in 1980. After a brief overview of the concept of interest convergence and its implications to the fields of rhetoric and writing/composition studies, the main focus of this essay will turn to how it is currently taken up within the discipline: pedagogical development, writing administration, and academic scholarship and where to go from here.

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.

Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]

Walter Lucken IV An adequate summation of Professor Ian Barnard’s career in and out of rhetoric and composition studies would require much more than the space allotted. Suffice it to say that from the early 1990s to the present, Barnard, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Chapman University, has steadfastly explored […]

Megan Von Bergen, Kelly Sauskojus, Amber Kent-Johnson, and Lisa King Abstract The article addresses the process of making significant programmatic changes to the PhD exams in the Rhetoric, Writing, and Linguistics division in the Department of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Drawing from the various experiences and positionalities of the authors, the article […]

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 […]

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 […]

Emily Barrow DeJeu Abstract While templates for academic writing, like those offered in the popular textbook They Say/I Say, have been embraced by some, others still question the extent to which an emphasis on form comes at the expense of substance. But ancient rhetoricians offer a theory of rhetoric that unites style and substance, and […]

Daniel Libertz Abstract Over the past decade, more attention to data, quantitative, and critical data literacies in writing studies has led to a variety of approaches for getting students to experiment with data in their writing projects. This article explores an approach combining “data feminism” and “quantitative rhetoric” that asks students to consider data literacy […]

This course design integrates the use of contemplative practices, specifically applied improvisational theater, into writing pedagogies to foster mindfulness and critical engagement. It explores the theoretical, neuroscientific, and practical rationale for incorporating contemplative pedagogies in writing classrooms, arguing that applied improv offers a unique framework for examining sociocultural and political contexts in writing instruction. Drawing on research in neuroscience, it demonstrates how applied improv promotes affective well-being, interpersonal skills, and rhetorical listening. By embracing uncertainty and cultivating resilience, students engage in contemplative practices and presence, challenging dominant discourses and power dynamics. The course design emphasizes the potential of applied improv to disrupt conventional teaching paradigms and empower students in their literacy learning. Through reflective analysis and student feedback, it evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of this approach in facilitating mindful engagement with writing and dismantling inequitable structures in education.

This essay explores contemplative pedagogies in the writing center, a space the authors believe allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways, as writing center pedagogy focuses on the importance of the relational, flattening hierarchies, and a focus on the conversation between writer and tutor (or between writers). With a focus on the whole person, the writing center advocates for the type of contemplative pedagogy Mathieu and others have called for: “To see any problem as an opportunity to make ourselves more aware of the way we perpetuate pain and suffering in the world” (Minnix). Grounding this essay in bell hooks’ framework of community, we will explore two important pedagogies to our center: intentional kindness (Boquet) and rhetoric of respect (Rousculp), and ways in which they have fostered contemplative pedagogy in the writing center during difficult and tenuous times in the current political climate.

The United States is undergoing unprecedented religious change, including an increasing diversity of religious tradition, rapid disaffiliation from conventional religious institutions, and a rise in syncretic and sometimes corporatized spiritualties. Given the speed and scope of these changes, all of which affect our students, rhetoric and writing studies (RWS) must undertake the study of spirituality. Insofar as RWS seeks to prepare students for democratic citizenship, it should engage in public discussion and study of the practices that appear to be replacing traditional religious observance. RWS has a special claim on spirituality studies, which have often undertaken scholarly work on writing, reading, and speaking practices. In fact, RWS has already begun to pursue this kind of scholarship, even if it does not always go by the name “spirituality.” This essay will therefore discern the ways in which RWS is engaged in this work, and it will offer reasons why we must engage it further.

Despite a rapid growth in student interest, the Rhetoric and Composition minor at the College of the Holy Cross faces staffing challenges due to its placement in an interdisciplinary center but reliance on faculty lines in English. In an attempt to address these challenges, we sought to develop a new gateway course to the minor that was deeply situated within our unique Jesuit small liberal arts context. This profile explains our development of such a course, focusing on the Jesuit rhetorical concept of eloquentia perfecta , or writing and speaking for the common good. Ultimately, we suggest that mission alignment is an important strategy for writing programs at small liberal arts colleges as we work to articulate our value to the institution and draw needed resources to the program.

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.

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.

Although enlivened by its recent recontextualization as a feminist rhetorical practice, listening in rhetoric scholarship is often equated with silence and its metaphorical and material dimensions rendered indistinct, even as instructors require better tools to interpret students’ classroom behaviors. This article fills a gap in the ability to interpret moment-to-moment listening behaviors by developing the term “gestural listening,” referring to listening’s embodied manifestations. Analyzing instances of gestural listening and applying interpretive frameworks drawn from rhetoric, gesture studies, and pedagogy, this article shows how gestural listening exerts pressure upon communicative situations inside and outside of the classroom, and how expectations for gestural listening must acknowledge how it is inflected by aspects of identity such as race, gender, neurodiversity, and ability. Ultimately, this essay argues that gestural listening should be understood as a palpable rhetorical force that shapes discursive conditions.

This article explores ways that the field of rhetoric and writing studies can benefit from intentional engagement with work-integrated learning (WIL) research and pedagogy in the context of transfer research. Specifically, the article discusses: (1) redesigning writing internship pedagogies to align with WIL learning and curriculum theories and practices; (2) revisiting threshold concepts of writing by accounting for knowledge, theories, and practices that are central to epistemological participation in a variety of professional writing careers; (3) reconsidering notions of vocation to emphasize the ways writers’ personal epistemologies and social trajectories interact with the purposes, aims, and values of academic and workplace contexts; and (4) reconceptualizing writing major curricula in relation to the conceptual knowledge, procedural knowledge, and dispositions of expert writers in a range of professional contexts. In short, we argue that intentional engagement with WIL can enrich work on writing transfer and the field of rhetoric and writing studies as a whole. In addition to our theoretical discussion of the value of engaging with WIL frameworks in writing studies, we introduce our multi-institutional, transnational study of how WIL affects diverse populations of undergraduate students’ recursive transfer of writing knowledge and practices as an example of the kind of generative research on writing transfer and WIL that we are encouraging writing transfer researchers to take up.

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 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 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.

This main argument this article makes is that the field of Rhetoric and Composition must expand our current multimodal framework to account for a sixth mode: the multilingual mode. Understood as the purposeful combination of multiple languages within a single composition, the multilingual mode has two distinct benefits: it allows us to more fully support multilingual students’ rhetorical abilities, and it also supports the work of antiracism in the college writing classroom by challenging the racism embedded in our current five-mode framework. To show potential enactments of the multilingual mode, this article spotlights three student projects along with student reflections on their work.

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.

As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty assigned nor which writing skills they hoped students could apply to their assignments. We also wanted to understand how they crafted writing assignment prompts and how they perceived students’ abilities to meet their expectations. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 10 faculty members from a range of disciplines about their writing assignments in courses in the major. We found that faculty (1) want or even expect students to take on certain disciplinary roles as writers in their assignments; (2) but they are not routinely making these expectations clear to students in their writing assignment prompts. To address these impediments to transfer, we present a three-part rhetorical framework for faculty that relies on genre to clarify expectations and allows for cuing to promote transfer for students in disciplinary writing contexts.

In this interview, Victor Villanueva and Tabitha Espina discuss, through a review of Villanueva’s publications, how the teaching of Composition has changed throughout the years to consider the needs and exigencies of the times. Using rhetorical analysis, particularly of purpose and audience, and application of some of Villanueva’s most influential texts, Villanueva and Espina discuss the field’s critical responses to the racial reckoning of this historical moment through translingualism, decolonial pedagogies, agonism, and pluriversality. While Villanueva observes much progress in the field in approaching what he has called “cultural multiplicity,” he interrogates the complexities and politics of Otheredness and critiques the disproportionate burden on academics of color. Villanueva and Espina affirm the significance of memoria as a conceptual framework that, not just includes, but essentially functions rhetorically as the means by which ideas and knowledge are experienced and communicated.

We report on a survey of students and alumni, examining their “rhetorical training”—their writing knowledge and experiences across multiple courses, campus employment, and workplace contexts. The survey asked participants to identify their most often written genres and their most valued type of writing, the rhetorical situations in which they compose their most valued genre, and the writing processes they have developed. We examined the multiple sources of rhetorical training that participants believe prepared them to write their most valued genre. Multiple rhetorical training experiences prepare writers for the writing they value, and both students and alumni describe robust writing processes and appreciate feedback from others. Yet alumni continue to express challenges adapting writing for new audiences and genres.

The writing process has helped define students as autonomous writers within the composition classroom. Yet, our writing identities are not stable and shift throughout the writing process. I argue that composition instructors should enhance students’ awareness to their own dynamic, writing subjectivities through a more expansive view of rhetorical invention, using posthumanism as a lens for composition pedagogy. This article presents a pedagogical practice utilizing concept maps and reflective prompts that help students recognize their ecological, writing landscapes. By tracking the human and non-human elements in their writer’s network, students can learn that writers operate within fluid, writing situations that continuously impact their writerly identities.

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 this article argues, a systematic approach to WAC/WID work that conceptualizes interdisciplinary interaction as a deliberative argument (rather than a benign collaboration) benefits all aspects of a WAC/WID program, in particular projects involving writing and other disciplinary faculty. Our approach builds from scholarship that highlights the distinction between “adversarial” and “collaborative” deliberation, in particular the work of Patricia Roberts-Miller and the foundational rhetoric theories of Chaïm Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. After laying out the contours of our approach, the article details a recent not-quite-successful attempt at interdisciplinary collaboration. In documenting this example, we illustrate that a systematic focus on combining adversarial and collaborative deliberation can prevent common pitfalls of writing scholars working with other disciplinary faculty, including the problems that arise when writing is considered ancillary to disciplinary “content.” In this sense, our example highlights the deliberative missteps that our approach is precisely designed to prevent.

In this interview, on the eve of his retirement in spring 2020, I speak with Dr. Lad Tobin about his career and work in composition and rhetoric, his commitment to the teaching of writing, including and especially personal or expressive writing, and his arguments about the continued relevance of creative-nonfiction to composition.

This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional (Crenshaw; Martinez) and interdependent (Jung; Wheeler) approaches that put language diversity and disability in conversation (Cioè-Peña). Each of us shares two pedagogical examples that consider language diversity/difference and embodied diversity/difference as unified concepts. Our pedagogical examples include projects related to multimodal and digital rhetoric, multilingual/multimodal community engagement, reflecting on communication differences, and analyzing multimodal/multilingual communication in practice. Through what we call intersectional, interdependent approaches to accessibility in writing classrooms, students and teachers can honor the multitude of valuable communication practices that students engage in within and beyond the English writing classroom.

This program profile describes a restructure of the PhD exam intended to enhance graduate-level instruction and advisement within the Rhetoric and Composition program at Georgia State University. We explain how a mix of institutional constraints and mentorship opportunities drove revisions to our doctoral exams and processes of doctoral advisement. Shifting away from a gatekeeping model to a heuristic-based approach, the revised exam is intended to decrease time-to-degree and to better support students’ job preparedness. Our reflections on these programmatic changes speak to the necessity of graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition to not simply replicate the models of doctoral studies through which we were educated and to instead imagine new possibilities.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

Positioned within our field’s work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that helped me identify a key problem in my inquiry-based first-year composition classroom: while students were comfortable asking questions, they were not asking the kinds of questions that would help them move across assigned genres most successfully. I explain how this finding led me to develop a rhetorical reflection assignment and explore the rhetorical reflections of two students in my fall 2016 FYC course to identify and describe what happens when these knowledge domains are explicitly emphasized in reflective tasks and to consider questions for future study of this kind of reflective writing.

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.

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape— presence , persistence , permeability , promiscuity, and power —describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.

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 interview, Shirley Wilson Logan reflects on her major roles as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. She describes her journey as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, only one of a few black women to do so. Logan is also credited with launching the study of African American women’s rhetoric as a field, writing one of the early books on African American women rhetors. Logan discusses her motivations for writing this book, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women , and makes connections between her scholarly focus and her work as both a teacher and an administrator.