For faculty seeking to engage students in inquiry-based, emergent, and primary research in first-year composition courses, Google Documents provides both an efficient and effective means.

College and high school writing teachers participated in an online assessment activity to build common understanding of standards.

This essay illustrates why compositionists should conceive of multimodal writing assignments as having wide-ranging and forward-thinking parameters, in order to invite the greatest possible range of student responses; it also suggests the directions we should take when evaluating such work.

This article presents a consideration of how students’ existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools.

Instead of penalizing students for using Wikipedia as their go-to research source, writing faculty should encourage students to critically analyze this online encyclopedia in order to teach them how to think critically about all texts, online and in print.

First-year composition students engage with visual rhetoric via interpretation and analysis through a trip to a local art museum for the first essay assignment and through an exploration of photography for the second essay assignment.

Kip Strasma Responds to “Gender and Peer Response” by Elizabeth Tomlinson, and Tomlinson responds to Strasma’s “Spotlighting.”

The essay discusses a thematic approach to teaching the first half of the American literature survey, focusing on race, whiteness, and class.

This article establishes reasons for teaching metaphorical thinking and then goes on to argue that Angela Carter’s short fiction is uniquely suited for such an endeavor.

This case study examines written peer response materials generated by small groups with varying gender compositions. Based on those observations, I offer several pedagogical implications.

This article describes a pilot study that suggests writing-faculty workload may affect the pedagogical focus and rhetorical effectiveness of written response to students’ essays.

Kinsey McKinney responds to “The messy Teaching Conversation.”

Reviewed are: Academic Cultures: Professional Preparation and the Teaching Life Edited by Sean P. Murphy, Reviewed by Lois Birky Genre Theory: Teaching, Writing, and Being by Deborah Dean, Reviewed by Meredith DeCosta Ideas That Work in College Teaching, Edited by Robert L. Badger, Reviewed by Raymond Bergeron Inside the Community College Writing Center: Ten Guiding Principles by Ellen G. Mohr, Reviewed by Deborah Bertsch Essential Literary Terms: A Brief Norton Guide with Exercises by Sharon Hamilton, Reviewed by John Benson

Editor’s introduction: In this latest in a series of commentaries from former chairs of the national Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), Sharon Mitchler, TYCA chair (2004–6) and the 2009 winner of the Nell Ann Pickett Service Award, shares her views on becoming involved in local, regional, and national professional activities.

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Peer-response remains a central process in first-year composition; faculty can make it effective and efficient by “spotlighting”—designing the process as digital, emergent, and distributive.

This essay argues that only by sharing our mistakes and uncertainty can we fully reflect on our own process as teachers, only by understanding our process can we begin to identify the many factors that contribute to classroom messes in the first place, and only by acknowledging the perpetual messiness of our practice can we fully engage in the scholarship of teaching and learning.

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An assessment project aimed at examining transfer of learning from English 101 to a subsequent psychology course provided insight on transfer and on student metacognition and also created a rich opportunity to exchange scholarship and ideas between disciplines.

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This essay explores the diverse uses, misperceptions, and passionate convictions about African American Vernacular among college students, revealing its complicated relevance to our culture.

A happy coincidence exists between the elements needed to analyze, understand, and produce strong arguments and their analog properties entailed in the map metaphor that we use as prototype in our teaching.

This article draws data from a participant-observation study that considers fourteen-and fifteen-year-old-dual enrollment students and gauges the impact of their attendance in a section of first-year composition on them, on other students, and on curricular rigor.

This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success.

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Relations, Locations, Positions: Composition Theory for Writing Teachers, Edited by Peter Vandenberg, Sue Hum, and Jennifer Clary-Lemon, reviewed by Jeffrey Klausman Writing-Intensive: Becoming W-Faculty in a New Writing Curriculum, by Wendy Strachan, reviewed by Abigail L. Montgomery Writing Myths: Applying Second Language Research to Classroom Teaching, Edited by Joy Reid, reviewed by Todd Ruecker

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Reviewed are: A Counter-History of Composition: Toward Methodologies of Complexity, by Byron Hawk, Reviewed by Brian Ray Community; College Faculty: At Work in the New Economy, by John S. Levine, Susan Kalter, and Richard L. Wagoner, Reviewed by Keith Kroll; Designing Writing Assignments, by Traci Gardner; Teaching English by Design: How to Create and Carry Out Instructional Units, by Peter Smagorinsky, Reviewed by Nancy Lawson Remler; Doing Emotion: Rhetoric, Writing, Teaching, by Laura R. Micciche, Reviewed by Tim N. Taylor

An assignment for teaching English in a time of war.

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This article explores the impact of a memoir about the Iraq War, written by a student in a creative writing class, on a teacher and students.

This article focuses on audio-recording our thoughts while responding to student writing as a form of reflection-in-action.

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This essay describes a week-long thematic overview of poetry, essays, and stories and recommends a variety of proven discussion questions and paper assignments.

Classroom ideas.

Reflecting on teaching in a time of war, I realize that all of my education, all of my teaching, indeed, all of my life has been “in a time of war” and that I have been constantly influenced by war, rumors of war, fears of war.

This article considers the emotional and psychological complexities of responding to personal narratives when the focus is war.