Abstract Students in first-year composition are often asked to read multiple texts quickly and independently during the process of researching and writing research essays, yet reading is rarely an explicit pedagogical focus. Researchers in metacognition and readerly expertise agree that expert reading is purposeful, defined in part by agility in engaging with a text, its context and its embeddedness within larger conversations and with one's own intentions beyond or within such conversations. Drawing from these concepts of readerly purpose and source use, we propose a theory of mining reading — a way of reading for conversation. Mining reading is when readers mine a text to understand the text's message within a broader topic or disciplinary conversation and make a text mine by identifying its use for the reader's rhetorical purpose. We describe ways to scaffold mining reading from our writing classes and share findings from student reflections, gathered with IRB approval, about the affordances and constraints of this approach. We ultimately situate mining reading as one way to help students understand reading as an active meaning making process and develop a flexible sense of purpose and agency in their research essays.

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Abstract Upon arrival at college, students often experience difficulty integrating themselves into the new space of a university classroom. They may wonder how their previous skills connect to present use or they may feel linguistic, social, gendered, racial-ethnic, or class-related barriers to inclusion — barriers that are all too frequently invisible to faculty members. Classroom Community Agreements (CCAs) can ameliorate these situations by helping students to express their needs to their classmates and to faculty. CCAs operate on principles of antiauthoritarian teaching embraced by bell hooks; they embody Krista Ratcliffe's “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship's “rhetorical empathy,” both of which offer strategies for orienting instructors’ and students’ awareness to others’ needs within a classroom environment. This article studies the processes and effects of CCAs in a first-year writing program at a large university. Five faculty members from the Expository Writing Program at New York University narrate their practices of creating CCAs, which they initiated both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives illuminate the ways CCAs build trust, clarify course values and expectations, and enhance experiences of presence and agency. Collectively, our findings demonstrate the potential that CCAs have to foster student belonging and learning in virtual and physical classroom spaces in first-year writing and other disciplines.

Abstract Drawing from new and foundational scholarship in the field and from our experiences as teachers at a range of institutions, the authors consider how multimodal learning can support antiracist classrooms. This article emphasizes the value of cross-institutional collaboration, as the authors make a collective case for remixing the essay in first-year composition. This term denotes a method for building on the traditional college essay through activities and assignments that allow students to reevaluate and repurpose this well-established genre. The authors offer four case studies for remixing the essay—“Multimodal Translation: Playing with Post-Its” (Borough of Manhattan Community College /City University of New York), “Remixing Activism: The Essay as Personal and Political Playlist” (St. Francis College), “NYC Graffiti Autoethnography” (Fordham University), and “‘Vernacularity and Translation Activity” (Yale University). All four narratives present practices that support critical agency and linguistic justice by addressing the conventions of college writing assignments. Together, the authors offer a useful practice for composition instructors seeking to implement antiracist and multimodal instruction as well as a generative concept for administrators developing new writing curricula.

Abstract This article proposes the value hip-hop based education can add to the first-year composition classroom. It provides a framework for using hip-hop based education to scaffold traditional writing assignments, including rhetorical analysis assignments and argumentative essays using concepts like zines, cyphers, and song analysis. Drawing from culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistic justice, and Black feminist pedagogy, this article offers the genre of hip-hop to define and solidify its usefulness in composition studies and its relevance to the Black community, asserting that centering pedagogy relevant to Black students is beneficial for all students. Based on culturally relevant pedagogy's tenets, this article highlights ways culturally relevant materials can be implemented to recognize and value students’ diverse cultures and lived experiences to increase student engagement, agency, and academic success. The concepts presented here promote antiracism and multimodal learning in the classroom contributing to pedagogical research and praxis looking to disrupt hegemonic teaching and learning.

Abstract This article proposes a revision to the traditional research essay taught in many first-year writing courses to include a methods section. By explaining their research methods, students have the opportunity to think robustly and systematically about their research questions, their research practices, and their study outcomes. Such a practice holds students and instructors accountable for a rigorous research process. As they write their methods, students learn to articulate the process of field research while they increase their knowledge of both conventions and rhetoric. Importantly, this practice pursues social justice outcomes as students reflect on their identities as researchers and consider how positionality intersects with research questions, research practices, data interpretation, and analysis.

Abstract If writing studies today is engaged in a project to remake composition pedagogy apart from modern language ideologies, then medieval writing reminds us that such ideologies were not always dominant. This essay asks how medieval texts, written before monolingualism became normative, might help student writers to imagine possibilities for composing beyond monolingualism. What happens when students are invited to read Dante Alighieri's defense of his Italian vernacular in book 1 of the Convivio alongside contemporary defenses of linguistic diversity more commonly taught in the first-year writing classroom? As this experiment suggests, assigning medieval texts in composition courses offers at least two advantages to student writers in support of linguistic justice and critical language awareness learning goals. For one, contradicting a modern view of translingualism as deviation from a monolingual norm, students learn that writers have had to assume language difference, rather than homogeneity, as a condition of composition for most of history. Second, the juxtaposition of medieval and contemporary, far from flattening historical difference, prompts students to think even more specifically and critically about the conditions for and consequences of translingual practices in particular times and places.

Abstract This article offers a theory of action model for grading in first-year writing classes, as enacted at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. First, it analyzes labor-based contract grading and specifications grading through this model, examining how these popular grading methods have manifested in unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students. Then, it proposes a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students. The sociocognitive model was iteratively built on feminist standpoint theory, intersectional learning sciences, multilingual writing pedagogy, and disability studies. Thus far, student course-level success has improved, along with their learning in four domains of a robust writing construct: intrapersonal, interpersonal, cognitive, and health. While it does not prescribe specific patterns of response, this model nevertheless establishes an overall referential frame that holds the potential to incorporate empirically based best response practices.

Abstract This article explores the impact of labor-based grading contracts on student attitudes and perceptions within multilingual First-Year Composition (FYC) sections at an R1 university. Data collected qualitatively and quantitatively examined correlations between labor-based grading contracts and shifts in student attitudes toward writing and overall learning experiences. Findings revealed that some students found labor-based grading contracts motivating, leading to improved attitudes toward writing, while others found themselves demotivated or stressed by the absence of traditional grades. The concept of fairness emerged as a key concern, challenging the assumption that labor-based grading contracts universally benefit students. This article underscores the need for nuanced implementation of labor-based grading contracts and encourages a student-centered approach to foster equitable and antiracist writing assessment practices. It acknowledges the potential benefits of labor-based contract grading, but also its associated challenges, and calls for a critical examination of grading contracts within local contexts to ensure they genuinely advance opportunities for underrepresented students.

AbstractThis article argues that the oral performance of personal monologues in first-year composition courses allows students to identify meaningfully with one another across difference at a time when the American political climate too often forecloses such opportunities. The author considers the opportunity personal monologue provides for parrhesia that recontextualizes the space in which deliberative discourse occurs. Drawing on a case study of the author's food-based composition course, this article provides supporting evidence for the power of performed personal monologue to encourage mutual identification among students that creates a new foundation for subsequent discourse.

AbstractDrawing on object-oriented approaches to rhetoric and the scholarship of museum education, the author describes her development of a first-year composition experience that puts observation at the center of first-year writing—observation of an art object and its context of display, as well as self-observation of a writer interacting with that object. The experience uses these object-oriented encounters to broaden students’ understanding of the role that close observation plays in effective writing while acting as a case study for how first-year composition instructors can draw on object and museum theories to design experiences and assignments conducted outside of traditional classroom spaces.

AbstractRecent advocates of postcritique urge scholars not to read texts suspiciously but instead to regard texts as capable of saying what they mean and, accordingly, to take those meanings seriously. While a suspicious disposition underlies much of introductory composition pedagogy, especially the teaching of argument, postcritique has made little entry into discourses of undergraduate instruction. Attending to the New Sincerity movement in American literature, film, and music after 1980, this essay examines how teaching texts that emphasize their own sincerity (and the difficulty of achieving sincere expression) can encourage students to regard argument and interpretation not as suspicious practices but as means for a generous mode of description that does not sacrifice the complexity of a given text.

AbstractThis article describes an antiracist first-year writing curriculum, formulated in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Classroom participants examined the racialized and class-based nature of “Standard English,” then each student informed their instructor of how they wished to be graded. Student coauthors reflect on their educational experience.

AbstractThis article explores some pedagogical challenges and opportunities introduced by higher education's increased reliance on private learning management systems (LMS) during the COVID-19 pandemic. It theorizes LMS as an expression of neoliberalism and argues that critical literacy, as a method, should be done to (rather than simply through) LMS. Specifically, it examines two case studies of student interactions with the LMS during an asynchronous first-year writing course.

Abstract Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have increased feelings of isolation and lack of support among faculty. Grounded in collaborative curriculum and professional development, the Core Books at CUNY project offers faculty the opportunity to work together to incorporate texts from Columbia University's core curriculum into first-year writing (FYW) courses. The project invites faculty to collaboratively develop, implement, and reflect on the shared curriculum. As an Open Educational Resource (OER), the resulting curriculum was well positioned to become part of CUNY's Model Course Initiative that makes consistent curriculum easily shareable on the college's OpenLab, an open platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration. This curriculum provides the agility necessary for post-pandemic teaching as it builds a sustained community among participating contingent and full-time faculty and across community-building initiatives. It provides support on multiple levels, is flexible and adaptable for new situations—pandemic or otherwise—and ameliorates the isolation of teaching. Community through shared curriculum is therefore a way forward and a model for English departments in the post-pandemic future.

AbstractThis article uses narrative inquiry to examine one instructor's experiences teaching two first-year writing classes, each one marked by different pedagogical choices. Themed with the topic of place and foregrounding the recurring example of Appalachia, the classes were nonetheless taught outside the region usually called Appalachia and to college students coming from, and identifying with, places other than Appalachia. This resulting data lends support for easing non-Appalachian-identified students into studying Appalachia as a rhetorical case and for encouraging students to explore various ways that textual representations of Appalachia reveal social and economic patterns noticeable in some form elsewhere.

Abstract Any attempt to control the content and conversations of first-year composition classrooms has become increasingly complicated by social media and technology. Building on the types of textual difficulty explored by scholars like Mariolina Rizzi Salvatori and Patricia Donahue, Jeffrey Berman, and Alan Purves, this article considers the challenges presented to contemporary college-level readers by affectively difficult texts such as David Lynch's 1986 film Blue Velvet. The article also explores the potential responses students express to difficult texts and encourages flexibility in the assumptions made about these reactions. By working through the importance of these questions, the author ultimately examines the potential benefits and best strategies of using difficult fictional texts in the writing classroom to help students investigate the nuances of verbal and written conversations such as those created by the #MeToo movement.

Abstract This article discusses how the concept of undergraduate research has evolved from an artificial academic exercise, typically introduced in first-year composition courses, to an authentic activity that engages students in primary research. Through these authentic experiences, students have opportunities to learn why research is valued in colleges and universities, to see themselves as makers of knowledge, and often to contribute to their communities.

Through classroom observations and semi-structured, text-based interviews, this study analyzes the impact of a service-learning first-year composition course on students’ rhetorical knowledge. Students’ own words are used to describe their transformative experiences related to academic writing and community service. As a result of what these students called their “investment” in community organizations, they began to see writing itself as advocacy. This article explains how this commitment to writing as advocacy motivated students to develop transferrable writing knowledge.

This article explored a community-engaged, first-year writing course that partnered students with student activist groups on campus at Northeastern University in Boston. Their placement with peers connected them with the campus network and illuminated the ways that they could advocate for social justice in their new community. Students wrote in multiple genres as they attended the meetings and events of different groups involved with environmentalism, food justice, adjunct rights, and more. As students connected their social-change work to the classroom, they learned more about different genres of writing, from scholarly inquiries to multi-modal “deliverables” supporting their student groups. These final “deliverables” included posters, videos, prezis, banners, and even original music to be played at meetings or events. The fact that student worked with peers alleviated some common challenges of community-engaged learning, such as a sense of saviorhood. Instead, students felt a sense of civic investment and developed rhetorical flexibility that they implemented in the classroom and with their groups. Students found the course meaningful and valued the opportunity to get involved with campus activism. As they developed as activists and writers, students felt that the classroom and community spheres overlapped and informed each other.

In many ways, the transformative character of developing critical consciousness reflects the dynamics of acquiring threshold concepts. Drawing from research into threshold concept acquisition, the author argues that critical first-year composition instruction can more effectively scaffold students into critical perspectives by linking critical pedagogy more closely with efforts to develop students’ rhetorical meta-awareness of writing.

This article emphasizes time’s effects on student resistance. Drawing on kairos and chronos, the authors argue that when teachers perform ideological neutrality is at least as significant as whether or how they do so. They explore their own temporal approaches to two pedagogical ecologies: first-year composition and an upper-level feminist rhetorics course.

This article describes the rationale, development, and implementation of a digital archival curriculum within the first-year composition program at Oklahoma State University. Such a curriculum helps students engage genuine inquiry to discover arguments rather than defend their existing beliefs. Analytic complexity and hidden information are offered as potential sources of uncertainty.

Recent interest in reflective writing in the classroom is tied to the suggested links among reflection, metacognition, and learning transfer. There is still a limited understanding, however, about the distinguishing features of reflective writing and how teachers might identify and use these features to teach effective reflective practices and to interact with student reflective writing. This study uses Gorzelsky et al.’s (2016) taxonomy of metacognitive behaviors to examine the end-of-semester reflective essays of undergraduate students enrolled in a first-year writing course at a large midwestern university. The authors identify and describe a feature of student reflective writing involving the use of emotional language and, working from their findings, suggest a teaching strategy and set of classroom activities aimed at leveraging students’ emotive expressions in ways that foster metacognitive awareness.

This article makes a case for introducing the young archive (combining children’s and young-adult literature) into the writing classroom, primarily in the form of school story, to rouse students to rethink and, if necessary, rehabilitate expectations concerning their reading, writing, and intellectual development.

Students in freshman composition classes often assume that the goal of college writing is to sound like someone else, so they struggle to frame their own questions in response to the world around them. This article analyzes the potential for student-driven learning to redress this problem. It focuses on a team-taught freshman composition course that asked students to collaborate in designing a section of their curriculum. The article argues that control over the curriculum inspired many students to push themselves intellectually and adopt the roles of teachers. On the other hand, increased autonomy sometimes disempowered students who had not yet acquired skills to assess their own strengths and weaknesses and who thus reverted to oversimplified ideas or avoided actively taking on responsibilities. If agency constitutes the power to carry out effective action, this course illustrated the capacity of autonomy both to foster and to subvert student agency.

This article offers an innovative pedagogical technique for teaching students to think critically and analytically about race, especially for student populations most accurately characterized as white and middle class. I illustrate this technique by relating my experiences designing and teaching a first-year writing course called the Monstrous and the Human at the University of Delaware. The concept of monstrousness and the problem of race may at first appear unrelated, yet this is precisely the strength of the course, which relies on a method of defamiliarization. Course readings begin by exploring monstrousness in Victorian science fiction novels, such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and then shift to a study of how conventions of these novels recur in novels that examine race in American society, such as Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. In combination with class discussion and course writing assignments, this reading progression invites students to see race from a new perspective. In this article I share my reasons for creating this course, detail its assignments, and show how the course can help students expand their understanding of race in American society. I argue that by teaching race through defamiliarization, we encourage students to arrive at their own understanding of race and racism without inculcating our own beliefs.

This article argues for the importance of teaching reading in first-year composition courses within a metacognitive framework called mindful reading. Crucial for developing more comprehensive literacy practices that students can transfer into other courses and contexts, this framework encourages students to actively reflect on a range of reading practices in order to become more knowledgeable and deliberate about how they read. This work is intended to prepare students to successfully engage with the range of complex texts they will encounter throughout their postsecondary academic careers and beyond.

The renewed interest in personal essays in composition complicates the contested, tricky personal identity negotiations for students and faculty in first-year writing, particularly in manifestations and representations of the body in both the classroom and writing spaces. This is especially complex for minority subjects, including queer students and faculty. Such collections as The Teacher’s Body (edited by Freedman and Holmes) and Professions of Desire (edited by Haggerty and Zimmerman) explore the pedagogical underpinnings of the body, and Ellis Hanson’s essay in the Gay Shame collection (2009) further complicates and interrogates the ways queer bodies are represented and problematized in the classroom. This article explores our own experiences in first-year writing: as students within a mind/body binary exploring through the scaffolding of composition, and as faculty who are increasingly exposed through our body projections in the classroom and depictions of our body and sexuality in an increasingly savvy media in which Google, Facebook, and social networking sites create matrices of identifications and disidentifications that inform our classroom experiences. The article traces the ways our bodies are aligned with cultural norms, and the ways that first-year writing complicates, contests, reifies, or disrupts these norms—for both students and faculty.

Educational theorists emphasize the importance of creating a classroom environment that encourages positive or productive student resistance to dominant social discourse. This article revisits work in critical pedagogy, feminism, and composition by focusing on the challenges of teaching a first-year writing course on the theme of masculinity. The gender imbalance of this class, with a majority of male students, combined with the course theme, contributed to an environment that raised unanticipated questions, which prompted the reconsideration of the intersections of critical, feminist, and composition pedagogies. In this class, the dynamics worked against a process of critical inquiry and reflection and instead often reified dominant view-points and social positions, specifically with respect to gender. This article concludes with evidence of how practices in composition studies, especially student-instructor conferences, helped to redirect some of the reactive resistance encountered in the classroom.

Teaching nontraditional themes in first-year writing courses sometimes confuses students and frustrates instructors. This article shows how using a transformative, critical-thinking pedagogy challenges the content and purpose of “English” courses—making such themes more accessible while improving students’ use of rhetorical inquiry to both analyze and compose texts.

This article details a newspaper-based composition exercise focused on examining coverage of a trio of local political sex scandals. The exercise encouraged first-year composition students to analyze how the rhetorical strategies that the New York Post used in covering these three similar scandals—which involved former New York governor Eliot Spitzer, then-current New York governor David Paterson, and former New Jersey governor Jim McGreevey—differed markedly depending on the Post’s then-relationship to each political figure. In the exercise, students chose several articles at random from a selection of newspaper clippings about these scandals and wrote any interesting headlines, epithets, or descriptions of cartoons they had found on the section of the board dedicated to each governor; students then used the evidence gathered in each section to generate and support thesis statements about the Post’s differing coverage of the three governors’ scandals. This examination through close reading of the Post’s rhetorical strategies in covering parallel sex scandals inspired thoughtful discourse among my composition students, including an increased appreciation of and interest in the news media, an improved understanding of the strategies that scholars use when they gather and interpret textual evidence, and intelligent discussions about the implications of rhetorical strategies utilizing Otherness.

This article argues that prevailing approaches to research instruction in introductory composition courses, as represented in print and digital instructional materials, reflect outdated theoretical views and may damage students’ researcher identity. Teaching research as a closed, linear, universal process prevents students from leaving the liminal space of the composition classroom.

This article examines the applicability of controversial course themes in the first-year writing classroom. It narrates examples of student resistance to readings and discussions that led to intellectual and personal discomfort, and then assesses the benefits (improved critical thinking skills, opportunities for lessons in rhetoric and audience awareness) and drawbacks (self-imposed silence, fear of writing beyond clichéd responses to difficult questions) that controversial material can bring to the writing seminar. After comparing the results of student writing in two course themes built on varied degrees of explicitly ideological content, Sponenberg concludes that a less politicized theme allows students more room to explore controversial subjects on their own terms because they feel less anxiety about “saying the wrong thing” than they experienced when responding to overt political arguments.

This article argues that popular sports media (such as websites, TV shows, and tweets) can be used in the freshman composition classroom to introduce students to academic argument and to encourage them to reimagine their own writing styles. Because sportswriters, broadcasters, and analysts frequently try to persuade someone of something, the intellectual operations that take place in many types of sports writing make them vibrant examples of academic argument. Asking students to read—and ultimately learn—from sports writing, which is often written in a personal, humorous, and experimental style, inspires students to revisit their own writing style and can teach them about the relationship between form and content. Specifically, Gubernatis Dannen uses David Foster Wallace’s essay “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” to demonstrate relationships between content and prose style strategies. For many students, thinking about sports and sports writing opens up larger possibilities of thinking and writing in college.

In response to the need for additional teacher-research on African American students, this article offers a case study of how one African American student-writer successfully produces expository writing in an Afrocentric first-year writing course at Michigan State University, a large land-grant midwestern research institution.

Upon entering college composition courses, students often report a dislike for writing. Because researchers report that writing anxiety may be linked to high-stakes writing exams, a study of graduates of New York high schools was conducted to investigate whether the state's Regents Comprehensive Examination in English shapes attitudes or assumptions about writing. For this study, first-year writing students responded to a prompt that asked them to reconstruct an essay they wrote for the exam, as well as their feelings before, during, and after writing the essay. Evidence suggests that most students strongly dislike taking the exam. Preparing for and responding to it may impart lessons contradictory to objectives of many first-year writing programs. Most students report critical engagement with the test question but suppress critical commentary in their official responses so as to please the imagined graders, whom most students conflate with the specific audience posited by the question. The study indicates that open-form, experimental writing about standardized writing exams at the outset of the semester may help students transform resistance to writing from a general feeling to an attitude associated with a particular memory and, thus, may help clear the air for the work of college-level writing.

Although Orwell's essays—particularly “Shooting an Elephant”—are used in freshman composition classes as stylistic models of clarity for student to imitate, this practice is pedagogically unsound because Orwell's essays are examples of the contemplative essay, whose aims are very different from those of the expository prose students learn to write in composition classes.

This essay describes a project in a first-year writing course in which students created video Public Service Announcements. The project resulted from a university-sponsored contest to prevent the spread of the H1N1 virus on campus. Illustrating the process of creating such video compositions allows an examination of the potential for multimedia projects in writing courses, especially projects that respond to a public call or exigence. This project pushes students not only technologically but also rhetorically.

The Roanoke College Writing Initiative Grant (WIG) program provides a two-thousand-dollar stipend for non-English Department faculty to teach in the first-year writing program. Faculty is expected to teach three iterations of their proposed course and receive a year of training prior to entering the classroom. Hanstedt's introduction discusses the theoretical justifications for the program, as well as its historical roots and positive outcomes. The faculty development training of Roanoke's WIG program is described, as is how this member of the chemistry department put the lessons learned into action as he taught freshman writing for the first time. Rachelle Ankney taught an introductory writing course as a break from teaching many sections of introductory college math. She enjoyed learning a whole new approach to writing and had fun in the first-year writing course. But she was most surprised to find that teaching writing well makes teaching math better, too. She went from advocating “required writing across the curriculum” to being a firm supporter of “teaching writing across the curriculum.” This paper reflects on an experiment in using a writing course to teach critical thinking skills and vice versa, with special emphasis on helping students to get beyond their aversion to and distrust of argument. The course assigned short argument analyses, an exercise in literary interpretation, and a research paper in for students to gain more familiarity with argument and to appreciate its varied uses. One unforeseen result was the amount of time that had to be devoted to clarification of the terms of argument. Because clarification requires using inference, however, it is recommended that descriptive writing would be a helpful vehicle to start students addresstheir problems involving argument. This paper recounts a music professor's experience designing and teaching his first writing course, Music into Words. Research on the conceptualization of music argues that our ability to communicate musical understanding relies heavily on phenomenological and metaphorical description; the opportunity to teach writing about music to the general student offered the musician a laboratory for testing this hypothesis. However, the instructor discovered that, not surprisingly, narrative (story-telling) functioned as his students' primary mode of communicating meaning and significance in music. In the end, while reading and writing these stories, the students and the music professor learn important lessons about the role of music in human experience.

Entering college students often struggle with their professors' expectations for “analysis” since those expectations are often ingrained in disciplinary assumptions that scholars rarely need to articulate. In this essay, I argue that we need to teach analysis explicitly in first-year writing courses and that we need to help students transfer those lessons across the curriculum. By asking students to read “with” and “against” the grain of texts, I give them tangible ways to rough up and pull apart the sources we read together. Students find this language useful in helping them engage directly with sources and ideas, rather than sliding into description or summary. Reminding them that this particular approach originates in the discipline of literary studies, I then have students themselves draw conclusions about what “analysis” looks like -- and what it does -- in other disciplines by examining samples of scholarly writing.

The first-year writing program at Kennesaw State University has found its in-house conference (IHC) to be an important venue for faculty development. Based on the assumption that teachers actually know what they are doing, the IHC invites teachers of all ranks to propose a presentation on a selected topic and then to present those papers at conference sessions that other teachers attend. The IHC invites part-time faculty into the community, generates intellectual conversation about teaching across the lines of rank and hierarchy, allows the conversation to continue long after the conference since participants can see each other daily, and invites reflection on and modification of teaching. The success of the IHC serves as a reminder that some faculty development should be discipline-specific and local. In addition, the IHC asks teachers of writing to actually write themselves and allows them the opportunity for scholarship. The professional development that the IHC offers is not, however, limited to a writing program but can be used to stimulate intellectual engagement across the English department and, beyond that, to other departments across the university.

Research Article| January 01 2006 Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition Charles Tryon Charles Tryon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (1): 128–132. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-128 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Charles Tryon; Writing and Citizenship: Using Blogs to Teach First-Year Composition. Pedagogy 1 January 2006; 6 (1): 128–132. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-128 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: From the Classroom You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| January 01 2004 Starting Somewhere Better: Revisiting Multiculturalism in First-Year Composition E. Shelley Reid E. Shelley Reid Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2004) 4 (1): 65–92. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-1-65 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation E. Shelley Reid; Starting Somewhere Better: Revisiting Multiculturalism in First-Year Composition. Pedagogy 1 January 2004; 4 (1): 65–92. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-4-1-65 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2004 Duke University Press2004 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Research Article| October 01 2002 Critical Work in First-Year Composition: Computers, Pedagogy, and Research Barbara B. Duffelmeyer Barbara B. Duffelmeyer Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (3): 357–374. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-357 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Barbara B. Duffelmeyer; Critical Work in First-Year Composition: Computers, Pedagogy, and Research. Pedagogy 1 October 2002; 2 (3): 357–374. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-3-357 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2002 Duke University Press2002 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.