Pedagogy

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October 2025

  1. Contributors
    Abstract

    Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-12199147

April 2025

  1. Contributors
    Abstract

    Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-11630830

April 2024

  1. Contributors
    Abstract

    Zachary C. Beare is an associate professor of English at North Carolina State University. His work, which studies how identity and emotion mediate rhetorical activity, appears in College Composition and Communication, College English, Composition Studies, the Journal of Cultural Research, Reflections, Writing on the Edge, and in edited collections.Miriam Chirico specializes in dramatic literature and comedy studies at Eastern Connecticut State University, where she is professor of English. She is the author of The Theatre of Christopher Durang (2020) and coeditor of How to Teach a Play: Essential Exercises for Popular Plays (2020). She has written articles about humor for Studies in American Humor, Text & Presentation, and Shaw: The Journal of Bernard Shaw Studies.Chris W. Gallagher is professor of English and vice provost for curriculum initiatives at Northeastern University. He has published widely on the teaching and assessment of writing and on educational innovation in K–12 and higher education. He is author or coauthor of five books, most recently College Made Whole: Integrative Learning for a Divided World (2019).Bev Hogue serves as McCoy Professor of English at Marietta College in southeastern Ohio, where she teaches courses in American literature and writing. She recently edited Teaching Comedy (2023), a collection of essays published by the Modern Language Association.Erika Luckert is a PhD candidate in composition and rhetoric at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln and holds an MFA in poetry from Columbia University. Her research focuses on writing pedagogies at the intersection of composition and creative writing, with an emphasis on social and collaborative practice. Erika's recent work includes articles in JAEPL, the Journal of Creative Writing Studies, and Writing on the Edge, as well as poems in Room Magazine, South Carolina Review, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.Nancy Mack is a professor emeritus of English at Wright State University and author of Engaging Writers with Multigenre Research Projects and two volumes about teaching grammar with poetry. She has published articles and chapters about teaching memoir, emotional labor, and working-class and first-generation students. She has won state and university teaching awards. Her community service projects include partnerships with the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, Dayton Public Television, and the Ohio Department of Education.Jessica Masterson is an assistant professor of teaching and learning at Washington State University Vancouver, where her work examines youth literacies and democratic possibilities in K–12 school settings. Her work appears in Reading Research Quarterly, Research in the Teaching of English, and Democracy and Education.Peter Wayne Moe is an associate professor of English and the director of the University Writing Program at Whitworth University. He teaches first-year writing, creative nonfiction, composition pedagogy, rhetorical theory, and a course on the sentence. He is the author of Touching This Leviathan, a Seattle Times favorite book of 2021.Shari J. Stenberg is professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln. Her most recent book is Persuasive Acts: Women's Rhetorics in the Twenty-First Century (with Charlotte Hogg). Her work appears in CCC, College English, Rhetoric Review, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Composition Studies, and in edited collections.Luke Thominet is an associate professor of writing and rhetoric in the English Department at Florida International University. His work examines rhetorics of health and medicine, user experience in video game development, and applications of design thinking to pedagogy and academic program development. His research has appeared in Patient Education and Counseling, Technical Communication Quarterly, Communication Design Quarterly, and the Journal of Technical and Business Communication, as well as in the edited collections Effective Teaching of Technical Communication, Keywords in Design Thinking, and User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-11253479

January 2024

  1. The “Knocking Heart”
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-10863019
  2. The Radical Role of Student Writing in Composition
    Abstract

    Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to

    doi:10.1215/15314200-10863071
  3. A No-Size-Fits-All Label
    Abstract

    Keene State College's fact book for 2022–23 notes that 40 percent of the student body at my institution in 2020 identified as the first generation in their family to attend college, yet it's rare that a student discloses this identity in the context of our Center for Research and Writing. It's likely that, in my day-to-day work as the assistant director of the center, I work with first-generation college students every day, but because we don't ask students to disclose this demographic information on our appointment intake form, I rarely know for certain. On the one hand, the invisibility of this identity is surprising: in our writing center we learn a lot about students—they disclose all sorts of things to tutors in their sessions, from the mundane (how much they like or dislike an assignment or their major) to the personal (their work history, hometown, mental health challenges, or linguistic identity). And yet, students’ first-generation status often remains unknown. Such status does not physically or linguistically “mark” a student in the same way as many other identity markers (e.g., race, gender, or socioeconomic status)—first-gen students can, at least sometimes, decide who knows their status. On the other hand, the fact that students don't regularly disclose this information to me, in particular, is probably no surprise at all.As a continuing-gen student myself (my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all graduated from college before I set foot on my undergraduate campus), I know that I speak and act in ways that mark me as an institutional insider and thus potentially, and very unfortunately, as someone who might unfairly judge first-gen students. (When I asked a few of our undergraduate peer tutors whether students ever disclosed their first-gen status during sessions, they reported that it did happen occasionally, most commonly after a good deal of rapport building or when the student was writing a personal narrative.) Beyond the barriers that my identities and positionality might present, however, I also wonder whether the writing center is a fraught space for disclosing a first-gen identity. Because writing centers are often—wrongly—conceived as sites of remediation, a first-generation student struggling with imposter syndrome might worry that accessing our services is an admission that they “don't belong” in our academic community. (Not true!) However, since we don't currently collect this kind of demographic information from students who use our center's services, I can't say for certain that first-gen students are avoiding (or using) our services.This not knowing about our work with first-gen students, along with the intention to design services that are welcoming and supportive to this group, prompted me to read Beyond Fitting In. As a relative newcomer to the first-gen conversation, I wasn't fully ready for the sustained interrogation of term/identity first-generation that persists across the collection. (Silly me: I thought because it is a widely recognized identity category that it was also easy to define.) While the collection is divided into three sections, with only the first dedicated to unpacking the meaning of first-generation, almost every essay it contains addresses the problem of definition. One strength of this collection, then, is that it offers an opportunity to witness scholars actively grappling with meaning while also showing, as Anne Ruggles Gere asserts in her intro/preface, that “first-gen students are a real group” (ix). First-gen student, faculty, and administrative voices resonate throughout the collection, which features qualitative research on the lived experiences and perspectives of members of this group, as well as reflections from the contributors themselves, many of whom claim a first-gen identity.Because the collection resists a unified definition of the term, my conceptualization of first-gen accordioned as I read—expanding, contracting, and expanding again. For example, Christine Alfano, Megan Formato, Jennifer Johnson, and Ashley Newby's essay, “Research-Writing Pedagogy,” shares definitions of first-gen generated by students at Stanford who self-identified this way. Although one of these students had family who attended college, she viewed herself as first-gen because she was the first in her family to enroll at an elite institution: “First-gen is no longer just a first in your family to go to college but more first to reach a new height of educational level” (256). While students can certainly be empowered by fitting this label to their personal experiences, other essays, including Beth Towle's “Finding First-Generation Students through an Intersectional Approach to Institutional and Programmatic Data,” make clear that overly broad institutionally imposed definitions may harm the most vulnerable students by “eras[ing] their unique cultural backgrounds” and making them “even less visible by institutional structures” (101).Towle self-identified as a “poor” undergraduate student but shared the institutionally imposed first-generation label with students of middle-class backgrounds, causing her to feel unseen. In turn, Towle argues, labels like “working-class, low-income, and lower socioeconomic status can serve us better than first-generation when we are talking about specific student needs and cultural experiences” (111). In the case of the Stanford student, the first-gen label seems to have helped her recognize and even embrace her particular cultural circumstances and positionality within her institution. In Towle's case, the first-gen label exacerbated feelings of otherness.While authors in the first section of this collection, “Defining First- Generation Students,” interrogate “first-gen” as an identity category, the second and third sections address questions of literacy education for first-generation students, beginning with a consideration of pedagogies at traditional sites of literacy instruction in part 2 (i.e., the first-year writing classroom, the writing center) and concluding, in part 3, with a series of essays exploring where and how literacy instruction is happening across campus—including within Bridge programs, STEM-intensive programs, and co-curricular and work activities.Part 2, “First-Generation Students in the First Year and Beyond,” includes Shurli Makmillen's essay “First Generation Students at a Historically Black University Talk about ‘Proper English,’ ” which interrogates literacy norms at a historically Black university through the voices of students whose parents immigrated to the United States. One reflects, “You know how recently there have been so many incidents where people or the police are getting mad at people for speaking a different language in public. So that resonates within me because it's almost as if that could happen to me, very easily. Or that could happen to my mom or my dad. It resonates very personally” (201). This example, among many in the collection, impressed upon me that literacy education can be a site of advocacy and empowerment for first-gen students, while at the same time literacies can mark and unfairly disadvantage these students both within and outside the classroom.One thing I appreciate about this collection is that it does not just name the curriculum as a site of advocacy but often provides illustrative examples of how that work might unfold within a classroom. My favorite example of this kind is offered in part 1, in Jenny Rice's “Integrated Regionalism and First-Generation Students: A Place-Conscious Heuristic.” This essay is a tightly woven and sometimes lyrical advocation for and illustration of the generative potential of teaching place-based literacies, focused on regional pedagogies of “teachers in the mountains” of Appalachia. These pedagogies emerge from a specific place, time, and culture, drawing together literacies of home and literacies of school.In part 3, “Writing Contexts for First-Generation Students, Teachers, and Administrators,” Courtney Adams Wooten and Jacob Babb explore how self-identified first-gen writing program administrators (WPAs) see their work as influenced by their identity and educational histories. This essay gently challenges the notion that advocacy efforts are best made at the system level, as many of the WPA participants reflected that they more often pursued “individual rather than programmatic interventions when working with first-generation students perhaps because it is in these interactions that they feel a real difference can be made” (311). It's heartening to read that one-to-one mentorship, of the kind that happens in writing centers every day, can meaningfully impact first-gen students. However, Adams Wooten and Babb's essay also underscores the challenge that WPAs like me have “in wielding their limited programmatic power to make significant changes” (312). And, for this reason, I would argue that this collection might be especially useful reading for those in administrative roles with the power to make curricular decisions or to influence institutional policy; the challenges that face first-gen students are both individual and systemic.Indeed, one of the collection's unifying themes is a call for systemic change and what the collection's editor, Kelly Ritter, calls “concrete, collective action” (2; see, more specifically, essays by Moreland on dual enrollment programs, Towle on institutional and programmatic data, and DeGenaro and MacDonald on institutional messaging). Elaine P. Maimon's afterword focuses mainly on reshaping PhD programs but makes this broader call to action: “New majority students often listen to demeaning and unhelpful internal voices that tell them they are not fit for college because they are too old, too poor, or too different. We must shift the emphasis from what's wrong with students to what's not right with our institutions” (318).Finally, upon closing the book, I found myself lingering over the definitional questions raised within its pages. As many of the essays demonstrate, first-gen status can be empowering when it is defined and claimed by individual students. As William DeGenaro and Michael T. MacDonald argue, “Ultimately, agency and transformation come not from being a first-gen student but rather from claiming an identity as one—there is power in naming oneself” (24). At the same time, institutions have used “first-gen” as a data point and often as a means of counting students served and tracking risk; as Christina Saidy notes in her essay on paired retention and first-year writing courses, “Often, the scholarship and university edicts regarding at-risk students, especially first-gen students, focus on the deficits of these students and the challenges they face in entering higher education. These deficits are tied to measurable data—test scores, high school grades, socioeconomic status, first-gen status—and are measured by attrition rates” (146). It's tempting to ask, after reading Beyond Fitting In, if we can we have one (self-identification) without the other (institutional identification and tracking).Answers to this question may be beyond my pay grade. There are many, many reasons to classify and count students, including those of equity and inclusion. And, in fact, before I started writing this review, I consulted our institutional statistics and noted, with real shock, that between 2012 and 2021 our institution retained less than 60 percent of first-gen students through their fourth year. Those numbers are abysmal and obviously demand a response—and the essays in this collection offer paths forward, ways to support first-gen students and demonstrate their belonging, for institutions willing to invest in this group.What does this discussion mean for my writing center space? I want first-gen students to know they are welcome, that they belong, but I don't want them to take our efforts at inclusion as a prejudgment of their abilities. Come to the writing center, first-gen students! We know you're out there and likely struggling! However, I am not convinced, after reading this collection, that this work should begin with tracking or data collection. Working to track first-gen students’ engagement with our center would require that we settle on a definition that very likely wouldn't accurately or adequately capture the experiences of these students. Instead, I want to continue to work to make our space one that validates the experiences and literacies of all the students who step through our door, to lift up and celebrate the accomplishments of first-gen students—and tutors—as a way to demonstrate their belonging in our space. These efforts necessitate the kind of one-on-one work, as described by Adams Wooten and Babb's WPA participants, that is the heart of writing center practice. And for me personally, it means continuing to do listening work that can fuel change, the kind of listening Christie Toth describes in her contribution to the collection, which requires paying special attention to “perspectives that challenge my assumptions about what we are building together” (174).

    doi:10.1215/15314200-10863054
  4. Teaching Palestine
    Abstract

    Abstract This article explores theories and methodologies for an activist teaching and reading of Palestinian literature, including Susan Abulhawa's novel Mornings in Jenin and Remi Kanazi's poetry. Based on student responses — empathy with individual Palestinian characters but not resistance to Israeli settler colonialism — the author suggests that empathetic identification, often perceived as a means of comprehending the other, instead blocks political and historical understandings. Building on Saidiya Hartman's and Lorenzo Veracini's arguments, the author posits the need for seeing the other through a Levinasian radical alterity (which he denied Palestinians), not through similarity. Moments when texts disturbed readerly identification were moments of activist potential.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-10862985

January 2022

  1. Contributors
    Abstract

    Heather Brook Adams is assistant professor of English at the University of North Carolina (UNC) Greensboro. Her research investigates discourses of gender, reproduction, and shame as well as decolonial/intersectional methodologies. Adams's work has appeared in journals such as Quarterly Journal of Speech, Rhetoric Review, and Women's Studies in Communication. Her monograph, Enduring Shame: A Recent History of Unwed Pregnancy and Righteous Reproduction, is forthcoming from University of South Carolina Press. Adams has been granted funds for implementing undergraduate research while teaching at the University of Alaska, Anchorage as well as at UNC Greensboro. Currently she teaches courses on contemporary rhetoric, rhetorics of health and medicine, and advocacy and argumentation.Brian Cooper Ballentine is senior vice president for strategy and senior adviser to the president at Rutgers University. His research focuses on humanistic notions of value within the context of the modern universities, student debt, and the pressures of economic valuation and market forces. He has served as chief of staff to the president at Rutgers, as the director of the university's office for undergraduate research, and as research director at a global consulting firm. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, with a focus on classical reception in the English Renaissance, from Brown University.Laura L. Behling is provost at University of Puget Sound. She edited the Resource Handbook for Academic Deans (2014) and Reading, Writing, and Research: Undergraduate Students as Scholars in Literary Studies (2010). Publications in literary studies include Gross Anatomies: Fictions of the Physical in American Literature (2008); Hospital Transports: A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862 (2005); and The Masculine Woman in America, 1890–1935 (2001). She taught at Palacky University, Czech Republic, as a Fulbright scholar and served as a Fulbright specialist at the American University of Bulgaria.Hassan Belhiah is associate professor of English and linguistics at Mohammed V University in Rabat. Previously, he held the positions of chair of the Department of English Language and Literature at Mohammed V University, associate professor of English and education studies at Alhosn University in Abu Dhabi, assistant professor at Al Akhawayn University in Morocco, and lecturer/teaching assistant at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His publications have appeared in Classroom Discourse, Journal of Pragmatics, Modern Language Journal, Language Policy, and Applied Linguistics. He has coedited a book entitled English Language Teaching in Moroccan Higher Education (2020).Andrea Bresee is a recent graduate of Utah State University with a degree in English teaching and a composite in writing. While at Utah State University, Andrea served as an undergraduate teaching fellow for three upper-level English classes, as well as an undergraduate researcher for three separate studies. She was named the English Department Undergraduate Researcher of the Year in 2019 and has presented at three undergraduate research symposiums and conferences. Andrea now teaches seventh-grade English at Space Center Intermediate School in League City, Texas.Kendra Calhoun is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her research examines the intersections of language, race, and power in face-to-face and social-media contexts. Her dissertation analyzes diversity discourse in US higher education and its effects on graduate students of color. She served as a research mentor and instructor to undergraduate students in the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program, and she recently published on Black-centered introductory linguistics curriculum in Language.Anne Charity Hudley's research and publications address the relationship between English language variation and K–16 educational practices and policies. She is the coauthor of three books: The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017), Understanding English Language Variation in U.S. Schools (2011), and We Do Language: English Language Variation in the Secondary English Classroom (2013). She is the author or coauthor of over thirty additional articles and book chapters. She has worked with K–12 educators at both public and independent schools throughout the country. Charity Hudley is a member of the Executive Committee of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).Dominic DelliCarpini is the Naylor Endowed professor of writing studies and dean of the Center for Community Engagement at York College of Pennsylvania, where he also served thirteen years as writing program administrator and five years as chief academic officer. He founded and administers the annual Naylor Workshop on Undergraduate Research and is coeditor of the Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020) as well as other articles on this topic. DelliCarpini served as president of the Council of Writing Program Administrators, secretary of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), and as a member of the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Mariah Dozé is a 2020 graduate of Emory University, where she received a BA in African American studies and sociology. While at Emory, she served as a research assistant studying racial disparities in capital punishment and a writing tutor, among many other positions. Dozé’s research exploring the intersection between rhetorical studies and social justice was awarded publication in the peer-reviewed scholarly journal Young Scholars in Writing. For this accomplishment, she was recognized as an Emory Undergraduate Research Program featured researcher. She is now a Georgetown Law 1L and intends to specialize in human rights law.Cecily A. Duffie is a PhD student in English literature at Howard University. She graduated cum laude from the University of Florida with a BA in African American studies with a concentration in journalism. Her master's thesis was on cycles of postmodernism in the work of contemporary Black women writers, particularly Terry McMillan and Toni Morrison. She has been selected as an UC/HBCU Initiative scholar, NeMLA panelist, and Howard University Research Week panelist and presenter. She has also been published by the Miami Herald. She writes Tudor-era historical fiction and southern Black gothic fiction.Jeremy Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Gevirtz Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His research examines higher-education practices and policies that impact college access and student development. His dissertation explores the relationships between Black students and the UC system in thinking about levels of support and advocacy for Black students on recruitment, retention, and postgraduation career plans. He was a co-instructor for the UCSB Engaging Humanities Initiative, was a 2019 graduate fellow of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and served as a coordinator and mentor of the UCSB-HBCU Scholars in Linguistics Program.Jenn Fishman, associate professor of English and codirector of the Ott Memorial Writing Center at Marquette University, is a widely published, award-winning scholar and teacher whose current work addresses community writing and listening, longitudinal writing research, and undergraduate research in writing studies. She has edited special issues of CCC Online, Peitho, and Community Literacy Journal, as well as The Naylor Report on Undergraduate Research in Writing Studies (2020), and contributed national professional leadership through various roles, including inaugural cochair of the CCCC Committee on Undergraduate Research and president of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.Lauren Fitzgerald is professor of English and director of the Wilf Campus Writing Center at Yeshiva University where she recently chaired the Yeshiva College English Department. With Melissa Ianetta, she edited Writing Center Journal (2008–13) and its first undergraduate research issue (2012) and wrote The Oxford Guide for Writing Tutors: Practice and Research (2015). She has also published on writing center undergraduate research in Writing Center Journal (2014) and the edited collection How to Get Started in Arts and Humanities Research with Undergraduates (2014).Hannah Franz is the Program Associate for Graduate Advisement at the Jack Kent Cooke Foundation. Her scholarship focuses on equity and inclusion in high-impact practices, such as undergraduate research and writing-intensive courses. She is coauthor of The Indispensable Guide to Undergraduate Research: Success in and beyond College (2017) and has published in Scholarship and Practice of Undergraduate Research.Collie Fulford is professor of English at North Carolina Central University. Her recent work on writing program development, writing across the curriculum, and the scholarship of teaching and learning has appeared in Pedagogy, Composition Studies, Across the Disciplines, and Journal of Effective Teaching in Higher Education.John S. Garrison is professor of English at Grinnell College, where he teaches courses on early modern literature and culture. He is coeditor of three essay collections: Sexuality and Memory in Early Modern England: Literature and the Erotics of Recollection (2015), Ovid and Masculinity in English Renaissance Literature (2020), and Making Milton (forthcoming). His books include Shakespeare at Peace (2018), Shakespeare and the Afterlife (2019), and Performing Gods in Classical Antiquity and the Age of Shakespeare (2020).Ian Golding is an assistant professor of English at the University of Cincinnati, Blue Ash. He is the editor of Queen City Review, an international journal of undergraduate research. His research addresses student agency, archival practices, and visual media.Kay Halasek is professor of English and director of the Michael V. Drake Institute for Teaching and Learning at Ohio State University. Halasek's research spans a range of topics within rhetoric and writing studies: feminist historiography, teaching writing at scale, collaborative learning, writing program administration, portfolio assessment, and basic writing. She is the author of A Pedagogy of Possibility: Bakhtinian Perspectives on Composition Studies (1999), which received the CCCC Outstanding Book award. As director of the Drake Institute, she leads enterprise initiatives in instructional support for faculty and graduate students and research on and policy development related to teaching and learning.Abigail Harrison graduated from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) in 2020. Her area of focus is English with minors in rhetoric and public advocacy and communication studies. While at UNCG, she participated in hands-on undergraduate research highlighting rhetoric in both historical and contemporary media. Her scholarship on rhetorical theory within university media centers can be found in the Communication Center Journal.Rachel Herzl-Betz (she/her) is the Writing Center Director and assistant professor of English at Nevada State College. She earned her PhD at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and began her writing center career at Carleton College. Her research focuses on intersections between disability, writing center studies, and educational access. Most recently, she has pursued projects centered on equity in Writing Center recruitment and the impact of “access negotiation moments” for disabled writing instructors. In 2017, her first novel, Hold (2016), received the Tofte/Wright Children's Literature Award from the Council for Wisconsin Writers.Katherine Hovland is an undergraduate student at Marquette University, double-majoring in writing-intensive English and data science. She was a member of a research team in the Ott Memorial Writing Center that studied the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Kristine Johnson is associate professor of English at Calvin University, where she directs the university rhetoric program and teaches courses in linguistics, composition pedagogy, and first-year writing. Her work has been published in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Rhetoric Review, WPA: Writing Program Administration, and Teaching/Writing: The Journal of Writing Teacher Education. An associate editor of Pedagogy since 2019, her research interests include writing program administration, teacher preparation, and undergraduate research.Rachael Scarborough King is associate professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (2018) and editor of After Print: Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Cultures (2020). She is also principal investigator for the Ballitore Project, a project combining archival research and digital analysis at UCSB Library's Special Research Collections.Joyce Kinkead is Distinguished Professor of English at Utah State University. In 2012, she was named a Fellow of the Council on Undergraduate Research. As associate vice president for research, overseeing undergraduate research, she instituted University Undergraduate Research Fellows, the Utah Conference on Undergraduate Research, and Research on Capitol Hill. Dr. Kinkead is a scholar of writing studies and undergraduate research; her titles on undergraduate research include the following: Researching Writing: An Introduction to Research Methods Undergraduate Research Offices and Programs (2016), Advancing Undergraduate Research: Marketing, Communications, and Fundraising (2010), Undergraduate Research in English Studies (2010), and Valuing and Supporting Undergraduate Research (2003).Danielle Knox is a Black creative writer who graduated from Howard University with a bachelor's degree in English. A prospective graduate student, her research interests include gender and sexuality across the African diaspora while noting the ways Black queer communities define and express themselves outside of a white Western context. She also desires to help challenge systemic inequalities, promote funding for public libraries, and support all forms of Black literature and art.Addison Koneval (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at The Ohio State University. Her work in rhetoric, literacy, and composition primarily focuses on culturally sustaining pedagogies. Most recently, she has been working with grammar education in first-year writing settings.Susan Lang (she/her) is director of the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing and professor of English at The Ohio State University. Lang has extensive experience in teaching online and hybrid courses in technical communication at both undergraduate and graduate levels. She and colleagues at Texas Tech also developed Raider Writer, program-management software for large writing programs. Her research examines aspects of writing program administration, writing analytics, and technical communication. Her work has been published in College English, College Composition and Communication, Writing Program Administration, and Technical Communication, among others. She is the recipient of the 2016 Kenneth Bruffee Award for Best Article in Writing Program Administration and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Writing Analytics.Bishop Lawton is a PhD student in history at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include Pan-African Intellectual History, the history of precolonial African civilizations, and twentiethth-century Black movements. In further pursuit of his interests, in June 2020, Bishop became a writer for blackpast.org, the largest online encyclopedia of African American history.Ali Leonhard is an undergraduate at Marquette University, double-majoring in forensic science and philosophy. She was a part of the Ott Memorial Writing Center's research team that looked at the accessibility of writing on Marquette's campus.Hayden McConnell is an Elon University alumna. She graduated with a major in professional writing and rhetoric as part of the English Honor Society. Her research addresses the lack of video content that addresses the topic of rhetoric in an engaging manner while also using successful rhetorical strategies. Her work has many intentions, but the overarching goal is to begin providing more visually stimulating content that discusses rhetoric and its many branches for both new and current members of the field.John Henry Merritt is a senior English major and Mellon Mays fellow at Howard University. His research interests include African American fiction, postmodernism, literary theory, and the digital humanities. Currently, he is interested in using Twitter data to develop reader-response based analyses of blockbuster movies. His senior thesis examines the function of the underground as a setting throughout African American fiction. In his free time he likes to write code and study languages. After graduation, he hopes to pursue a PhD in English literature and get a puppy.deandre miles-hercules (they/them), MA, is a doctoral student in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. They are originally from Prince George's County, Maryland, and obtained a BA in linguistics with minors in anthropology and African American studies from Emory University. Their research focuses on language as a nexus for the performance of race, gender, and sexuality in the domains of sociality and power, specifically as it pertains to Black, femme, queer, and trans communities. deandre currently holds a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship.Jessie L. Moore is director of the Center for Engaged Learning and professor of professional writing and rhetoric in the Department of English at Elon University. She is the coeditor of three books, including Excellence in Mentoring Undergraduate Research (2018). Her recent research examines transfer of writing knowledge and practices, multi-institutional research and collaborative inquiry, the writing lives of university students, and high-impact pedagogies. She served as Secretary of the CCCC, founded the CCCC Undergraduate Researcher Poster Session, and currently cochairs the CCCC's Committee on Undergraduate Research.Jamaal Muwwakkil (he/him), MA, is a PhD candidate in the department of linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Jamaal is originally from Compton, California, and transferred from Los Angeles City College to University of California, Los Angeles, where he earned a BA in linguistics. Jamaal's research focuses on political discourse, African American language and culture, and linguistic practices in educational and university contexts.Angela Myers is a professional writing and rhetoric alumna of Elon University. She was an honors fellow and a Lumen scholar, a two-year, competitive grant award earned by only fifteen Elon students each year. Her research addresses the rhetorical strategies of sexual violence prevention courses for undergraduate students.Sunaina Randhawa is a Marquette University alumna. She graduated in 2020 with a BA in English literature and minors in writing-intensive English, anthropology, and digital media. Along with a team of researchers from Marquette's Ott Memorial Writing Center, she worked in conjunction with the Office of Disability Services at Marquette. With their help, she and her team determined both the ways in which they could make writing more and the ways in which the writing center could help that Michael associate professor of English at the University of North as codirector of first-year composition and senior faculty fellow with Center for and He The Writing of (2018) and coedited Perspectives on and Writing He is currently and with undergraduate students that are on curriculum and is a of 2020 graduate of Grinnell College, with a major in English. He is a Undergraduate a research project on of by contemporary of the of the of the he has presented at and participated in a research at the University of in He to pursue a PhD in has a PhD in literary and studies from Mellon University, where she teaches courses on literature, and gender studies. Her current research explores can writing in the humanities. Her work on literature examines the ways in which and discourse the of gender as a modern of has a PhD in rhetoric and composition from Texas University. She Emory University as director of the Writing She has also been associate professor at College, associate professor and chair of English and language at University, and associate professor and chair of communication studies at King University. Her research in the intersections between literature and rhetoric as well as in teaching and She is a book on the in the She also coedited the Journal of the on Perspectives on Learning for is an undergraduate student in and in English and at Nevada State College. As an undergraduate writing and his work and code is professor of English and dean of the College of Arts at University. He taught undergraduate writing and graduate in the Rhetoric and Composition His scholarship focuses on writing program and the teaching of writing.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-9385641

October 2020

  1. Borders Crossed
    Abstract

    The article reports on a nationwide survey- and interview-based study of creative writing instructors designed to identify the extent to which the field of rhetorics and composition and key aspects of rhetorical theory have influenced the teaching of creative writing.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-8544487

January 2020

  1. From Cow Paths to Conversation
    Abstract

    This article analyzes ideologies underpinning argument-based writing assignments and considers how they may contribute to a current climate of polarization. The authors suggest that the argument-based essay may be what Kenneth Burke called an unquestioned and habituated “cow path” and conclude by considering how students may benefit from a deeper engagement with explanatory ways of knowing, writing, and relating to each other.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-7878975

January 2016

  1. Identification, Affect, and Escape
    Abstract

    Drawing from interviews and book discussions with eleven women who read popular romance fiction, in this article I examine the affective, embodied, and identificatory reading practices that constitute women's engagements with romance novels. I argue that while these women's reading practices do not resemble what typically are called critical reading practices, they nevertheless produce critical knowledges and should be examined as an alternative framework for approaching texts.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-3158669

October 2014

  1. Innovative Frameworks and Tested Lore for Teaching Creative Writing to Undergraduates in the Twenty-First Century
    Abstract

    Creative writing is divided between instructors upholding New Critical emphasis on texts and those challenging the goals of the discipline. While innovators propose reform, reconceptions put instructors at odds with one another and with students. In compromise, I propose praxes that incorporate lore-based methodology with innovations from critical and rhetorical theory.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2715796

October 2013

  1. From “Representative” To Relatable
    Abstract

    In the wake of postcolonial studies, the culture wars, and the ongoing canon debate, the task of constructing one’s own pedagogical canon as a responsible educator continues to be an arduous one. Drawing in part on the work of Robert Coles on using literature for therapeutic purposes, as well as John Guillory’s notion that representation, in the political sense, is misapplied when it comes to canon formation, this article suggests that professors rethink how they put together their own syllabi. It asks that they consider shifting their primary criteria for inclusion from the much-disputed ideal of representativeness to one of relatability, defined in this instance as a student’s potential ethical engagement with a work. The central idea is that the student’s intuitive identification with some characters and texts should actually be encouraged, not dismissed, as a means of promoting greater engagement, more active learning, and a critical analysis of the text’s and their own personal values.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2266459

January 2013

  1. Medieval Rhetoric and the Commedia
    Abstract

    Survey courses on the history of rhetoric, especially as taught in American universities, often concentrate on classical and modern rhetoric, neglecting the way in which rhetoric was understood during the Middle Ages. This essay offers the teacher of the history of rhetoric a pedagogical answer to the question of how to incorporate medieval rhetoric within courses on the history of rhetoric, by providing a close reading of three symmetrical cantos of Dante’s Commedia that are specifically concerned with the ethics of persuasive discourse.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-1814170

April 2011

  1. Mocking Discourse
    Abstract

    Students' writing of parody can provide a more persuasive vehicle than conventional academic writing to move students from their intuitive awareness of irony to critical analysis of rhetorical strategies. Combining parody writing with strong critical reflection can encourage a more complex view of language choices, audience identification, genres, and persuasion.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-1218103

January 2011

  1. You Be Othello
    Abstract

    Adopting a critical approach to identification in literature pedagogy, this article examines the dynamics of identification in the text, critical history, performance history, and teaching of Othello. The author theorizes a pedagogical approach that interrogates the play's systems of identification while foregrounding ethical responsibility.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2010-021

January 2010

  1. Disappearing Acts
    Abstract

    This article examines the disappearance of the student as a site for theoretical investigation. It considers the ramifications of this development for the disciplinary self-identification of composition studies and for a larger understanding of pedagogy as self-reflexive praxis.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2009-018

October 2008

  1. The Rhetorical Situation
    Abstract

    This article considers why, in the wake of Ernest Boyer's work, the promise of a transformation of university teaching has not been broadly realized and what that implies for faculty development projects. It discusses the assumptions that place the professional development of teaching outside of disciplinary boundaries, both literally and figuratively, and considers the consequences of that placement. It then turns to the scholarship of teaching and learning, considering what it offers to and implies about the disciplinary practices it proposes to transform. In response to this examination, the essay proposes that the Boyer Report attempted to alter teaching by arguing that teachers and the systems that support them needed to change, an argument that failed to convince college faculty to change. The article concludes with the proposal that the real exigence facing college faculty is that the way students raised in a culture saturated in electronic media learn is dramatically different than the way people learned a generation ago. That shift in learning is the exigence that requires a transformation of teaching.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2008-009
  2. Interdisciplinary Work as Professional Development
    Abstract

    This article explores, through the lens of a WAC faculty developer, how it is difficult to maintain disciplinary neutrality when developing any program; both teaching and learning can easily become codified through the lens of one person, field, or group. By using the work of, among others, Krista Ratcliffe, Mikhail Bakhtin, and David Bartholomae, I make a case for working differently with stakeholders: collaborating within a discipline and including students in faculty development plansas both learners and mentors. If we mutually examine our definitions (“teaching,” “learning,” “writing,” “students”) and engage in rhetorical and reflective listening, we can move away from a model of teaching as rules, templates, and regulations; we can begin to engage our own assumptions along with those of our students, changing together the very definitions that constrain the evolution of our own mutual development.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2008-008

January 2002

  1. Using Historical Practices to Teach Rhetorical Theory
    Abstract

    Research Article| January 01 2002 Using Historical Practices to Teach Rhetorical Theory Wade Mahon Wade Mahon Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2002) 2 (1): 61–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-61 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Wade Mahon; Using Historical Practices to Teach Rhetorical Theory. Pedagogy 1 January 2002; 2 (1): 61–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-2-1-61 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 Issue Section: Cluster on Technology You do not currently have access to this content.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-2-1-61