PDF version Abstract Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate… Continue reading Researching and Resisting: Incorporating Social Justice and Resistance in First-Year Writing Courses

PDF version Abstract VOICES is a digital, student-led publication at Morehouse College that showcases the rhetorical choices African American men in an HBCU setting make in communicating issues of importance to them. I believe that activism, like leadership, begins at home. For these Morehouse College students, activism and leadership begin at “The House,” inside the… Continue reading Language and Social Justice in First-Year Composition at Morehouse College

PDF version Abstract In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign,… Continue reading Teaching Mutual Aid in First-Year Writing

When teaching first-year composition, I noticed how uncomfortable students became at the prospect of talking about politics in the classroom. The science majors were vocal in proclaiming the importance of limiting the use of plastic bags, and the nursing students vehemently argued for the necessity of vaccinations. These impassioned voices, though, quieted when faced with… Continue reading Book Review: From Thought to Action: Developing a Social Justice Orientation by Amy Aldridge Sanford

To those outside of academia, college professors lead charmed lives. What’s not to love with the Hollywood version of twelve-hour work weeks, six figure salaries, meaningful discussions of the mind, summers off, and even paid sabbaticals for pet projects? For those who toil in the trenches, teaching mandatory freshman composition and literature classes, the grim… Continue reading Review of The Adjunct Underclass: How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission by Natalie Dorfeld

This essay explores the many benefits of adding a community-based writing component to the first year composition course. It looks closely at the self-selected projects of 25 freshmen at a large suburban university to show how service-learning creates a context in which students can gain greater control over their own literacy and learn more about self… Continue reading Surprised By Service: Creating Connections Through Community-Based Writing by Linda Cullum

The article describes the dynamics of freshman composition classes for medium-security inmates at the Saginaw Correctional Facility which were linked to parallel classes at Saginaw Valley State University, supported by SVSU student-tutors, and enhanced by collaboratively produced publications of student writing. It presents excerpts from inmates’ essays that tell their stories, explore their relationships, and… Continue reading Do You Hear What I Hear? Voices from Prison Composition Classes by Phyllis G. Hastings with Jim Morrison

This article discusses a service-learning project for an English Composition class, focusing on the theme of incarcerated women. Through class projects, which included a book drive and research for the group Prison Watch, the students and teacher learned to negotiate the tricky demands of audience and worked to develop a new model of successful service… Continue reading First Year Composition and Women in Prison: Service-based Writing and Community Action by Lisa Mastrangelo

This essay describes a series of assignments that I have used in Writing and Social Issues, a first-year writing course that features service-learning. These assignments should prove useful to those interested in the relationship between community-based writing instruction and first-year courses that focus on the student’s transition from high school to college. Link to Full… Continue reading Community-Based Writing Instruction and the First-Year Experience by Mary Vermillion

Examination of the Compass Learning Community shows that service-learning, when integrated into first-year learning communities, expands each student s ability to determine a college major in an informed manner. The combination of a first-year writing course linked with an academic course in career discovery provided students with a variety of opportunities for experiential learning about… Continue reading Helping Undeclared Majors Chart a Course Integrating Learning Community Models and Service-Learning by Gerry McNenny

The authors argue that writing-intensive service-learning courses extend the lessons of first-year composition courses by teaching students how to understand and negotiate differences between the discourses of the academy and those of community-based organizations. While first-year writing courses lead students through successive approximations of a generalized academic discourse in the relative safety of the composition… Continue reading Confronting Clashing Discourses: Writing the Space Between Classroom and Community in Service-Learning Courses by Caryn Chaden, Roger Graves, David A. Jolliffe, Peter Vandenberg

The CCCC position statement on student veterans (2015) reminds writing program administrators (WPAs) of their responsibility to prepare faculty to understand not only the challenges these returning students may face but also the assets they bring with them. This essay argues that writing programs must develop faculty education programs that go beyond solo workshops to… Continue reading Articulating Veteran-Friendly: Preparing First-Year Writing Instructors to Work with Veterans by Thomas Sura

In the process of creating portraits that document the lives and knowledge of community leaders who are engaged in food access work and urban farming in Chester, PA, students in a first year writing course at Widener University are introduced to a rhetoric of social change and the multivocality and creativity that characterizes food justice… Continue reading The Food Justice Portrait Project: First-Year Writing Curriculum to Support Community Agency and Social Justice by Ruth Cary

From 2007-2009, I designed and led an oral history project focused on gathering the stories of recent immigrants to Collin County, Texas. Students in my first year writing courses learned interviewing techniques before gathering stories from local volunteers. We built an archive of interviews that the students then used to connect the act of preserving… Continue reading Review: Conquistadora by Lisa Roy-Davis

This essay explores the pedagogical lessons of student-inmate peer reviews conducted during a prison outreach project in a first-year composition class. Collaborative writing between inmates and students reveals the positive outcomes that can result from strong mutuality in community-based learning relationships. Through a qualitative analysis of student reflection papers and prisoner oral reflections, this essay… Continue reading Prison Collaborative Writing: Building Strong Mutuality in Community-Based Learning by Grace Wetzel with a response by “Wes”

This paper reports on recent research investigating the effects of service-learning on linguistically and culturally diverse college students enrolled in a first-year composition course. Two separate studies, a pilot and main study involving native (NS) and non-native (NNS) English speaking college students, explore how students from diverse sociolinguistic backgrounds respond to and gain from service-learning.… Continue reading Composing Cultural Diversity and Civic Literacy: English Language Learners as Service Providers by Adrian Wurr

This essay supplements previous studies on effective strategies for instructing veterans in the first year writing classroom. Those studies typically focus on students who identify as veterans, but there are many veterans entering American universities who do not reveal their past military experiences. This essay explores one approach of developing a first year writing course… Continue reading Stealth Veterans and Citizenship Pedagogy in the First year Writing Classroom by Derek G. Handley