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 addresses a pervasive but undertheorized literacy practice: ghostwriting. Drawing on a five-year interview study with undergraduate students, I describe the many ghostwriting tasks that participants were asked to perform for their co-op jobs and how they perceived those tasks. Overall, students were bewildered by ghostwriting and found it very different from, and in some ways at odds with, their academic writing. Given the ubiquity of ghostwriting and the likelihood that much of it will be offloaded to artificial intelligence in coming years, I call for and begin to outline a critical pedagogical approach to ghostwriting grounded in critical language awareness.

AbstractThis article examines writing instructors’ processes for creating grading systems through the lens of liberatory design, an offshoot of the popular design thinking framework that focuses on creating equity-focused responses to complex problems. It uses a thematic analysis method to analyze seventeen interviews with writing instructors. The results indicate that instructors already use various design-based practices to create grading systems. However, the analysis also demonstrates opportunities to build stronger connections between these practices, to center student voices, and to approach the design problem more creatively. The article closes by illustrating potential liberatory design practices for creating grading systems.

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.

AbstractOn Wednesday, March 11, 2020, the author received an email that would change the course of his teaching for the following twenty-four months. The university-wide communication indicated that, due to the emerging COVID-19 crisis, all classes, activities, and university business was suspended, with the email further instructing faculty to wait at home for more details. As the author mulled over the educational shifts ahead of him, his training as a technical communicator—and more specifically his knowledge of user-experience (UX) and design thinking—kicked in, offering him a set of tools he could pull from as he sought to create courses that reflected the quickly shifting needs of his students. In this article, the author discusses how the use of design thinking expands the limited conversations about course co-creation, a practice that leads to more effective and equitable course designs. The author additionally uses his experience employing design thinking in the creation of his Shakespeare seminar course as a case study, demonstrating the value that the collaborative nature of design thinking has for pedagogy.

Abstract This article introduces a grounded theory of assessment in literary studies. Analysis of instructor interviews elucidates the cultural and dispositional influences that shape some instructors’ conscious decision not to teach or assess affective learning outcomes like empathy. The author urges literature instructors to engage critical inquiry of disciplinary assessment practices.

AbstractThis article describes an autoethnography project used in an undergraduate creative writing course and discusses its pedagogical benefits. Drawing on results from a survey and interviews with former students and a supporting librarian, the article considers how the assignment might be adapted for diverse institutional contexts.

AbstractSelf-publishing is a topic not typically discussed in the literature classroom, yet it can provide an opportunity to highlight voices and works from the margins, think critically about the publishing methods, and promote the study of the book as a cultural artifact. This article provides a case study on using special collections materials to teach undergraduates about self-published American literature. It includes suggestions about how to find and select materials, details about facilitating a discussion and a hands-on activity on the topic, and recommendations for adapting these ideas for other teaching contexts.

Abstract Graduate students must learn to read as professionals who move their reading work into spoken and written discourse. This study borrows Deborah Brandt and Katie Clinton's description of transcontextualizing moves to examine how graduate students use social annotation to develop as readers. Specifically, the study examines graduate reading practices through think-aloud protocols and archived annotations of three readers enrolled in a doctoral literacy seminar. Findings suggest that graduate readers may benefit from opportunities to reflect on how the technologies of annotation contribute to the transcontextualization of their reading across time and space.

This article observes that even as scholars increasingly attend to poetry’s cultural work, classrooms have remained a New Critical stronghold. It presents a case study in which methods of cultural studies are applied to conceptual poetry. The author argues that students would benefit from exposure to methods that bring poetry into the world, and the world into poetry.

Using a case study of a Christian college student, this article develops a framework for understanding when and why students may choose to perform neutrality. The author argues that students may choose this form of “invisible” resistance in an effort to mitigate perceived power imbalances within an educational ecology.

This article argues that the primary role of the instructor is to help students understand and work with the difficult emotional states that arise from struggling to learn. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s theorization of “ugly feelings” and using his own experience with digital humanities instruction as a case study, the author offers ways to center emotional work, especially work involving frustration and anxiety, in the classroom. Asking students to develop failed prototypes and reflect on the process, for example, can provide them with a better sense of what it might mean to succeed. Giving the same exercise twice, with artificially imposed difficulties the second time, might help them learn concrete steps for working through mounting irritation. In short, frustration and anxiety are not things that emerge from time to time—they are ever-present. The author argues that it is the job of instructors to develop ways to prepare students not for the unexpected failure but for the inevitable frustration that comes even with success.

Drawing on a semester-long qualitative study of teaching writing at a men’s medium-high security prison, this article explores the complex ways in which literacy and incarceration are configured in students’ narratives, as well as my own as their teacher.

This article contends that the pedagogical discourse of “integrative learning” fails to promote cross-disciplinary learning on university campuses, taking as a case study a recent controversy over the proposed renaming of a university dormitory named after famed anti-abolitionist Stephen Douglas.

This article examines how Dante used history and suggests approaches to incorporate his texts into undergraduate history teaching. Examples of successful assignments are offered that encourage students to compare Dante’s historical figures in a work like the Commedia with “real” history. Such exercises introduce students to some of the creative ways that Dante shaped many historical figures to meet his purposes — personal, political, or spiritual. An extended case study of Dante’s inclusion of southern Italian historical actors is used to illustrate some of the more complex ways that Dante revised or reinvented historical events. It is argued that Dante’s use of history can be a valuable tool to teach the skills of critical analysis and close reading.

This article focuses on the uses of the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database as a case study for how to introduce undergraduates to archival research. I provide four cases in which working with the digital archive has allowed my students to attend to variations in typography, spelling, capitalization, punctuation, and overall design in early modern printed texts. Working with the EEBO database challenges students to reconsider how a printed text represents a series of editorial choices; it encourages them to make persuasive claims about the differences in the appearance of an early modern lyric or dramatic text when it is situated in different contexts; it enhances the students’ ability to work independently and derive pleasure from the serendipity of the archive; and perhaps most important, it can actually help students develop a clearer and more effective practice of close reading in the twenty-first century.

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.

College students often use the campus as a venue for their course-based research activities. More often than not, however, the university is simply a locus of research, not a subject of student inquiry. In this article, I consider what can be gained when students “study up” the university as an institution. I draw on data from my undergraduate students' research process in an ethnographic methods course at Illinois State University. I argue that an institutional focus provides an especially effective approach for teaching ethnographic methods — one that differs from standard introductory textbook instruction in ethnography and that helps students avoid routine pitfalls of beginning ethnographic research. In particular, I argue that the university focus enables novice students to analyze fine-grained ethnographic data within a middle-range institutional context without macrosocial theories and frameworks that are likely beyond the scope of their semester-long projects. I also argue that an institutional focus can help students become more engaged, critical stakeholders in the university community.

This article explores the dialectic between autonomy and mutuality within postsecondary composition programs. Grounded in a case study of writing instruction at a small, unionized, public university, the article argues that while broad workplace democracy and economic security are clearly desirable for communities of college composition teachers, their efficacy is seriously compromised absent sustained commitments to intellectual restlessness, professional deliberation, and collective action.

Edith Wharton's lack of recognition as a short story writer depends on several factors, including conflicting theories about short story form and technique, her relationship to literary and cultural history, and her use in literature classrooms. Her problematic relationship to the short story form provides an important case study in critical reception and canon formation.