• Generative AI can help multilingual communicators in professional writing. • Generative AI supports email/report writing and meeting summary. • Practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. • Students’ AI use at workplace informs academic writing teaching and learning. Because multilingual students’ languaging practices are not limited to academic settings, it is important to explore their lived experiences communicating in real-world situations to shed light on how to prepare them in college classrooms in the era of generative AI. Drawing upon writing samples, artifacts and interview data, this case study brings attention to the potential and challenges a multilingual international student face in implementing generative AI-assisted written communication during her 5-month internship in the workplace. The findings indicate that generative AI tools, especially ChatGPT, have the potential to help multilingual communicators meet their written linguistic demands in professional contexts, especially in email writing, report drafting and meeting summary. Generative AI-assisted writing tools could assist multilingual students with idea expression and boost their confidence and agency in communication. Yet, despite its many advantages, practical, ethical and legal concerns remain. This study contributes to the scarce yet budding literature exploring multilingual international students’ AI engagement in professional settings and offers concrete pedagogical implications and directions for future research.

Video games are forms of multimodal technical communication, conveying complicated information about game goals, mechanics, game physics, and more, to the player in a way that usually feels integrated into the game itself. This article highlights ways that games use interaction to convey information to players, classifying the communicative elements in several popular games into C.S. Pierce's classes of sign (decoratives, indicatives, and informatives). This paper asserts that technical communicators can take cues from video games to design technical communication products that better meet contemporary users’ expectations of agency and interaction—allowing them to explore and discover on their own.

This study revisits Sam Dragga’s research on ethical decision-making in document design, updating it to reflect contemporary concerns. Our findings indicate that participants today perceive the document design scenarios as significantly more unethical than those in Dragga's original study, with heightened attention to accessibility, cultural sensitivity, and social justice. While Dragga's study emphasized concerns over the consequences of document design choices, our results suggest a shift in focus toward the writer's intent. Participants frequently judged deliberate manipulation as unethical, even in cases where no direct harm was evident. These findings highlight the evolving ethical priorities in technical communication and underscore the need for practitioners and educators to reassess and revise the field's guiding principles to align with contemporary values of inclusivity and social responsibility.

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping technical communication, necessitating strategies to assess its impact. This article introduces a framework combining human-in-the-loop automation with a task-based approach for communication roles. Effective AI integration requires identifying and organizing key writing tasks to fit into automated workflows. The framework underscores the value of writing expertise and offers practical guidance for practitioners, scholars, and educators. By aligning AI tools with technical communication tasks, professionals can produce accurate and complex communication products. This approach highlights the essential role of human expertise in effective, AI-assisted writing.

Community health practitioners face a common challenge of communicating the value of their work because it is intentionally designed to prevent health issues from happening. This case study examines how impact storytelling—a four-question framework developed by a community health manager at a nonprofit health system—mediates between technical expertise and executive's understanding. Through interviews with four Community Health practitioners, this research explains how the framework addresses specific technical communication challenges. This research brings together theory with practice by offering both a transferable framework for nonprofit organizations as well as theoretical insights into how workplace communication tools emerge from workplace practices.

Despite extensive research on metadiscourse, methodology descriptions in research articles provide limited guidance on how to identify, classify, and, particularly in cases of clustered items, quantify metadiscourse markers. This article discusses the methodological challenges of analysing metadiscoursal adjectives, using the example of novice academic writers’ use of adjectival interactional metadiscourse markers. Our exploratory analysis of the corpus (654,925 tokens) revealed that, in a non-negligible number of cases (13.5%), metadiscoursal adjectives co-occurred with other linguistic items that were performing different metadiscoursal functions, thus putting a different interpretation on the initial observation. The phenomenon whereby both the adjective and its co-occurring item exercise a prominent metadiscoursal function—which we labelled superimposition —has been observed in previous studies but has not been adequately explored and has led to divergent, and often incomparable approaches, to metadiscourse quantification. We argue that metadiscoursal superimposition as a methodological approach can help bridge the gap between the individual marker analysis and their use in academic writing discourse, thus providing a structured, quantifiable, and functionally richer framework. We discuss the benefits, possible pitfalls, and implications of our proposal that superimposition be included and quantified as a supplementary step in metadiscourse quantification analyses.

• Postgraduates engaged behaviorally, affectively, and cognitively with GenAI feedback. • Postgraduates dealt with ChatGPT primarily as a tool for refining their proposals, not for generating content. • Postgraduates demonstrated agency by actively questioning, annotating, and negotiating feedback. • Postgraduates engaged in diverse affective responses, ranging from appreciation to frustration. As Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools such as ChatGPT are becoming increasingly integrated into English as a Foreign Language (EFL) academic writing context, learners’ engagement with AI-generated feedback remains insufficiently examined. This case study investigated how four Chinese EFL postgraduates joining a course in a Malaysian university engaged with ChatGPT feedback while revising their academic research proposals. The study triangulated screen recordings, pre- and post-revision drafts, and stimulated recall interviews. Participants displayed a range of behavioural strategies, including accepting, questioning, rejecting suggestions, annotating visually, and seeking external validation. Affective responses ranged from appreciation and curiosity to doubt and frustration, particularly when feedback appeared conflicting or imprecise. Cognitively, learners applied various strategies such as evaluating, comparing, negotiating feedback, and regulating its use. Yet, they showed differing levels of engagement, shaped by individual perceptions and writing intentions. Importantly, participants regarded ChatGPT as a tool for linguistic refinement rather than content generation. Overall, the findings revealed that learners did not passively receive feedback but interacted with it in agentive and critical ways. The study highlights the interplay among these three dimensions of engagement and the importance of individual differences when evaluating the pedagogical potential of GenAI-generated feedback in academic writing.

This study investigated how reading medium (print vs. digital) and communicative purpose (informative vs. persuasive) shape writing processes and outcomes in integrative academic tasks. Eighty-one university students read three source texts in print or digitally and, after random assignment, produced either an informative or persuasive synthesis within a 2×2 between-subjects design. Keystroke logging recorded pausing across three writing stages, indexing planning, translation, and revision. Text quality was scored with holistic rubrics capturing discourse features and integration of sources. Reading medium significantly influenced pausing: students who read in print paused longer during writing, yet medium had no effect on overall text quality. Task purpose mattered: persuasive tasks yielded higher-quality formal writing, whereas scores reflecting level of source integration did not differ. No interaction between reading medium and task purpose emerged. When controlling for reading comprehension, working memory, and planning ability, the main effects of medium and task purpose remained, but period-specific pausing effects were no longer significant. Findings highlight distinct roles for reading medium and task purpose in shaping writing behavior and performance. The results support cautious causal interpretations and suggest that incorporating digital reading and varying task types may enhance academic writing in higher education, informing curriculum design and assessment.

This article presents findings from a content analysis of 707 articles appearing between 2011 and 2020 in five journals issued by the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), a major teaching and research organization in North America. We examined topics and theoretical frameworks, finding that while core topics such as academic writing, curriculum, cultural studies, literacy, and teacher development remained stable, the latter part of the previous decade (2016–2020) showed increased attention to labor, diversity, social justice, and writing program administration, alongside declines in work focused on history, educational policy, ESL, and community writing. Many articles lacked explicit theoretical grounding, often using broad labels like “critical theory,” though use of specified frameworks (e.g., feminist and postcolonial theory) has grown. We identify differences among the journals and discuss the implications of these findings for NCTE, for content analysis as a method and for scholars’ efforts to navigate a complex and expanding field.

The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is the U.K. government’s means of allocating funding to universities based on assessments of the research they produce. Conducted every five years, this exercise now includes not only the ‘quality’ of research but also its real-world ‘impact’. This helps determine the £7.16 billion distributed annually to universities and influences the reputations of institutions and academics. Writers are therefore keen to make the most persuasive argument for their work they can in these submissions through the narrative case studies that the submission requires. In this article, we examine all 6,361 case studies from the last exercise in 2021 to explore the rhetorical presentation of impact through an analysis of authorial stance. We found considerable use of self-mention, hedges, and boosters, with the hard science fields containing statistically significantly more markers and applied disciplines being particularly strong users. The study contributes to our understanding of stance in academic writing and the role of rhetorical persuasion in high-stakes assessment genres.

The hegemony of English, or at least a particular form of English, has been robustly critiqued, yet is far from having been abandoned in teaching.[1] In addition, dominant discourse deems Native American languages “extinct” or otherwise incapable of speaking to academic topics. However, Indigenous peoples develop language for various subject areas, and languages are used in ways that represent the cultural perspectives of their users.[2] Such perspectives are part of the heart of Indigenous peoples’ sovereignty, and the right to use Indigenous languages supports, quite simply, Indigenous peoples’ right to speak and think.[3] Declining to accept assignments in an Indigenous or any heritage language (or requiring translations) conveys the message that English is needed in academic contexts, and is therefore communicatively superior. I argue that writing courses should support student refusals of translation, creating a situation where an instructor may not know what the content of a student submission even is, and that this inability “to know” serves the aims of decolonization.   [1] Alim & Smitherman 2012 [2] See: Kimura & Counceller 2009, McCarty & Nicholas 2014, Wilson & Kamanā 2011, Reyhner 2010, McIvor & McCarty 2017 [3] These rights are a main tenet of how Leonard (2008, 2011, 2021) theorizes language reclamation

Deborah Brandt’s concept of literacy sponsorship remains foundational in writing studies but, as Brandt herself noted in 2015, its sharper insights into power, ideology, and asymmetry have often been softened in application. Building on this framework, Kara Poe Alexander has shown how reciprocal forms of sponsorship emerge in service-learning contexts where students act as both recipients and providers of literacy support. Inspired by this expanded model, this symposium essay returns to the original concept of sponsorship not to dispute its fundamentals but to continue extending it toward a more networked, mutual vision that better reflects the conditions of AI-mediated, experiential learning. Drawing on my own institutional example, this essay traces how literacy sponsorship moves bidirectionally across instructional, technological, and community spaces. It invites further dialogue about the future of literacy sponsorship in an age of distributed expertise and asks how our field might adapt its theories to better account for the tangled, mutual economies of literacy unfolding around us.

For many transnational students in North America, digital literacies entail precarious participation—the adaptive engagement in digital literacy practices under conditions of systemic vulnerability and instability. This multiple case study examines how Chinese international students at a Canadian university perceive and navigate the precarity of their digital literacy practices across national and cultural boundaries. Findings reveal that the four participants exhibit tacit sensitivity to transnational digital precarity, employ strategic adaptation, and engage in measured resistance that cautiously transgresses digital norms. These insights contribute to broader discussions on digital literacies, transnational literacies, and digital precarity, extending and complicating existing frameworks in writing studies, literacy studies, and media studies.

This Research Brief presents an overview of current research in community-engaged writing, particularly foregrounding the importance of praxis-oriented and collaborative approaches. Here, we articulate collaboration, reciprocity, and accountability as some of the main tenets of community-engaged writing, and we showcase the variety of projects that such work can include (from local food writing to prison literacy work to transnational social justice movements and beyond). Then, we explore some of the methods and methodologies that are central in this scholarship, drawing on examples that engage storytelling, oral history and interview methods, archival methods, ethnographic research, and even public performances and workshops. We conclude with a discussion of future possibilities for research, teaching, and the imperative to see community-engaged work as part of scholarly work in tenure, promotion, and review.

US higher education faces mounting political pressure and censorship, resulting in threats to our institutional missions and challenges to academic freedom. In this article, we trace two moments in disciplinary history that examine (mis)understandings of how censorship functions: efforts to roll back the Guidelines for Nonsexist Use of Language in NCTE Publications (now Statement on Gender and Language ) and Students’ Right to Their Own Language , both approved by NCTE in the mid-1970s. We draw from the feminist theories of Kate Manne and bell hooks to analyze materials from the NCTE and CCCC archives, documenting the rhetorical and logistical moves employed in these rollback efforts. In doing so, we identify how the exploitation of organizational apparatuses contributed to the subversion of a larger and necessary priority: establishing credible disciplinary boundaries to serve as a bulwark against political encroachment into literacy education. In sorting through these case studies, we offer examination of how misguided censorship accusations can threaten our discipline when actual censorship efforts are enacted by governmental entities.

This article proposes a sensemaking methodology to enhance human-in-the-loop technical and professional communication (TPC) practices when working with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) output, which is often ambiguous and not always accurate. Sensemaking describes actions and cognitive strategies humans use to make sense of new/ambiguous information. We argue that sensemaking can help TPC students navigate making sense of GenAI output for better judgment in evaluating AI output. Particularly, we leverage sensemaking's Situation-Gap-Bridge-Outcome framework as a heuristic to identify situational contexts outside of GenAI, gaps in knowledge, create bridges for those gaps, and evaluate outcomes and connect this to extant TPC literature and discuss its implications.

Abstract This article argues that care — especially care grounded in Black feminist traditions — is not an affective supplement to teaching but rather the radical foundation of liberatory pedagogy. Amid rising attacks on critical education and the austerity logics of the neoliberal university, the authors theorize care as infrastructure, method, and resistance. Drawing from the work of bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Patricia Hill Collins, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, they offer a framework for care-centered teaching that foregrounds mutuality, trust, and collective accountability. Through vignettes, student reflections, and practices such as trauma-informed design, mutual aid, and collaborative assessment, the article demonstrates how care fosters relational transformation and deep intellectual engagement. It also interrogates the structural devaluation of care labor, particularly for women and faculty of color, and challenges dominant educational paradigms that equate rigor with detachment. As one student reflected, “You believed me when I said I needed more time, without asking for proof. That made me want to do the work even more.” Drawing from their institutional experiences, the authors position teaching as a form of organizing — an insurgent, relational practice that refuses extractive academic norms while building collective conditions for educational and institutional transformation.

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

Abstract This article describes a project taught in a British literature survey course, in which students navigate digital archives like Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) to find a “companion piece” to a literary text. The essay shares the goals of the research project, the assignment design, and specific successes and challenges students encounter. The piece additionally offers reflections about teaching the conventional British literature survey course for undergraduate English majors, particularly considering the ways in which digital archives and historicist methodologies can expand students’ understanding of literary canons and the interrelationship between literature and history.

International professional writers must consider cultural and linguistic differences in their rhetorical choices. Yet limited studies have explored the practice of international and multilingual professional communication. This article reports on a corpus-based contrastive study of wine-tasting notes (TNs) produced in North America and Spain. The findings reveal that the Spanish TNs focus on sensory attributes whereas the North American TNs focus on narrative elements about wineries and food pairing. The authors conclude by positing the importance of a context-centered rather than a language-centered approach to international professional communication.

This article builds a heuristic that raises the artificial intelligence (AI) literacy of Latine students. Nefarious people are exploiting marginalized Latine communities by using AI in creative partnerships, similar to those described in technical communication research, to build social profiles of Latines. These people are rhetorically using AI in passive-income and voice-over scams that target Latines who are insecure about their financial and citizenship situations. The heuristic offered here guides instructors on how to increase Latine students’ AI literacy by making these students aware of the rhetorical relationships between nefarious individuals and AI.

This State of the Inquiry (SotI) critically investigates the implications of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) for interdisciplinary research and scholarly communication within the global English-medium knowledge economy (GEMKE). Anchored in three guiding questions, the article interrogates (1) the extent to which GAI facilitates genuine interdisciplinary knowledge production versus reinforcing entrenched disciplinary silos; (2) how GAI’s dependence on established academic infrastructures influences the visibility and legitimacy of particular interdisciplinary fields; and (3) the impact of automated cross-disciplinary synthesis on the epistemic agency and intellectual labor of human scholars. While GAI holds potential to enhance research efficiency and foster new forms of interdisciplinarity, the outcomes of its integration depend largely on how scholars employ these tools; without critical and contextually informed use, it may contribute to epistemic homogenization and the marginalization of nondominant knowledge systems. The SotI advocates for a critically reflexive and contextually informed approach to the integration of GAI in academic practice, while also recognizing the capacity of scholars—particularly those on the (semi)periphery—to actively shape, adapt, and resist these tools in ways that foster inclusive and transformative interdisciplinary scholarship.

Using multilevel modeling, the current study examined student-level predictors of compositional quality and productivity in Grade 2 Australian children ( N = 544), including handwriting automaticity, literacy skills, executive functioning, writing attitudes, and gender; and classroom-level ( n = 47) variables predicting students’ writing outcomes, including the amount of time for writing practices and the explicit teaching of foundational (handwriting, spelling, grammar) and process writing skills (planning and revision strategies). Multilevel analyses revealed that student-level factors, including gender, general attitudes, and transcription skills (handwriting automaticity and spelling), were key predictors of writing outcomes. Interaction analyses showed that spelling and word reading influenced writing outcomes, with effects varying by gender. At the classroom-level, time spent on planning had a positive effect on students’ compositional quality, and time spent on spelling instruction had a negative effect on students’ compositional productivity. Implications for research and education are discussed.

This article seeks to present a model of critical factors that influence writing transfer by exploring and extending conversations happening in the field. The article identifies five critical and interconnected factors that support writing transfer: connection, perception, reflection, disposition, and fortification. These factors emerge from an integration of writing transfer scholarship and data from a longitudinal study of student writers. In that study, six participants were followed for seven years (from first-year composition past graduation and into the workforce) and asked to explain their experiences and perceptions of writing. I offer these five factors to spark a broader conversation about how multiple overlapping influences contribute to writing transfer and to encourage further research into how these factors interact and reinforce one another.

Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

This paper examines the civic and literacy practices that emerged through virtual feminista pláticas between Adri, a first-year college student and graduate of a “newcomers” high school, and her former teacher. Amidst a context in which transnational and immigrant youth often struggle to find a sense of belonging in educational and civic spaces, this article reveals the importance of relationships and spaces built on trust, care, and the co-construction of knowledge in which multilingual recently arrived youth can elevate their voices. I draw from transcripts of over seven hours of translingual virtual feminista pláticas. I draw on the concepts of border thinking (Anzaldúa, 2012, 2015; Mignolo, 2000) and futurity literacies from the margins (Cervantes-Soon, 2024) to deepen our understandings of speculative civic literacies (Mirra & Garcia, 2022). Findings reveal how Adri drew upon her border thinking to critically interrogate a deeply unjust global context and to imagine alternative futures for herself and her communities. This work highlights the epistemic ingenuity of transnational youth like Adri and the civic and literacy practices that can emerge through methodologies and pedagogies that recognize that ingenuity.

This article reports the findings of a long-term qualitative study that examines the experiences and perspectives of Native youth re-learning their tribal community’s language. Situated within notions of Indigenous relationality, “identity resources” from the learning sciences, and Indigenous futurisms, findings reveal that, through learning their ancestral language, Native youth: (a) develop a deeper sense of their cultural identity, (b) imagine new linguistic futures and possibilities for their tribal community, and (c) recognize ways they, themselves, can become contributors to the cultural continuance of their tribal community. Set against the backdrop of structural settler colonialism and ongoing apocalypse within what is currently known as the “United States,” this research demonstrates the ways language revitalization operates as an anti-colonial act of rupture to settler colonialism’s ongoing attack on Indigenous Peoples, as well as an Indigenous-centric act of healing and self-determination .

Drawing from theories of youth speculative civic literacies and freedom dreaming, this article explores how youth imagine the future of education and what roles schools and teachers play in fostering students’ dreaming. In this research study, the three co-authors—a literacy professor, an undergraduate English major, and a graduating high school student/future teacher—engage in intergenerational qualitative data analysis to discover how youth cultivate the capacities and imagination to engage in speculative educational dreaming. Through analysis of student interviews and youth counternarratives, we found that the types of interactions students have with their teachers as well as the availability of authentic opportunities for youth to engage in civic thought and action in schools are instrumental in the shaping of youth imagination and agency. For many students, school is something that is happening to them rather than for them. However, when their ideas and voices are heard within schools, it compels students to think about the world outside of school and their place in it. Conceptualizing student dreaming as acts of discovering and moving toward one’s purpose, we posit that engagement in critical civic praxis and relational encounters in learning environments are instrumental factors in the cultivation of youth agency and capacities for freedom dreaming.

By Andrea A. Lunsford. I’m grateful to the editors of Composition Forum, Aja Y. Martinez, and the authors of this symposium for the opportunity to read and reflect on the essays included here, since doing so led me to do some very memorable time traveling. And specifically to the mid 1980s and my first encounter with what would become known as Critical Race Theory (CRT)—in the work of Patricia Williams, particularly her “Alchemical Notes: Reconstructing Ideals from Deconstructed Rights.” In those years, Lisa Ede and I were studying (and practicing) collaborative writing, with its implicit challenge to traditional notions of singular authorship as the only valid and valuable form of academic publication. We were attuned to scholars who were resisting such values, rejecting the unwritten but powerful rules against anything other than single authorship, and who were pushing the boundaries of traditional academic discourse in other ways as well.

By Natalie Shellenberger. This bibliographic essay explores the use of Derrick Bell’s concept of interest convergence in the fields of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies since his definition of the principle in 1980. After a brief overview of the concept of interest convergence and its implications to the fields of rhetoric and writing/composition studies, the main focus of this essay will turn to how it is currently taken up within the discipline: pedagogical development, writing administration, and academic scholarship and where to go from here.

Storytelling is a key component of user experience (UX) design practice. However, while storytelling is universally acknowledged as important, what exactly is meant by storytelling is elastic. This elasticity makes it hard to explain and teach to emerging practitioners. In this research paper, we propose a data-derived definition to bring more understanding to the concept of storytelling in UX. The contribution of this work is a multifaceted definition of storytelling in UX that can be used as a heuristic to help make it more meaningful and understandable to students and early career professionals. We conclude by providing strategies to incorporate the storytelling heuristic into UX pedagogy.

By Molly Ryan. Mentorship in the field of writing studies is broadly understood to be an essential facet of disciplinary matriculation, but its features are sometimes slippery to define. Indeed, mentorship is difficult to concisely describe and more challenging still to enact in practice. When it does take root, however, both mentor and mentee are aware of the power and benefits of this sometimes-elusive dynamic. In my own experiences both in my MA and PhD programs, my exceptional mentors entered my life through what sometimes felt like serendipitous chance, as in, I was (luckily) in the right place at the right time to meet them. I know too well how lucky I am to have them as my guides, colleagues, and sometimes even friends, but even as a grateful recipient of the best-case scenario for mentorship, so to speak, I find myself continuing to reflect on how we as a field might better scaffold the dynamic of mentor/mentee.

By Taylor J. Wyatt. Any discussion about multimodal composition inevitably invites the question: “What counts as writing?” This question of what “counts” often reveals an underlying assumption that multimodality lacks adequate academic rigor. “What counts as writing” leads to further considerations, such as identifying pedagogical strategies to help students expand their knowledge in new writing contexts and genres. In their 2016 edited collection, Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore define transfer “as the ability to repurpose or transform prior knowledge for a new context” (370). As they offer their definition of transfer, Anson and Moore note the complexity of the term and write, “for many scholars transfer functions as an umbrella term, encompassing an array of theories about the phenomenon” (370). Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lilian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd’s edited collection Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer considers writing transfer and what counts as writing within a multimodal context.

By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Gitte Frandsen Kiernan, Julia, Alanna Frost, and Suzanne Blum Malley. Translingual Pedagogical Perspectives: Engaging Domestic and International Students in the Composition Classroom. Utah State University Press, 2021. My first encounter with the concept of translingualism was in a graduate seminar where Bruce Horner, Min-Zhan Lu, Jacqueline Jones Royster, and John Trimbur’s Language Difference in Writing: […]

Joseph Forte Abstract This article argues that writing studies should perform something it terms “construct-focused RAD research,” or quantitative RAD research involving psychometric measurements, to study cognitive constructs that pertain to student writing. Construct-focused RAD research, which today is rare in the field, can provide a clearer sense of what writing pedagogy can accomplish. In […]

J. Michael Rifenburg, Jenn Mallette, and Rebecca Nowacek Abstract This methods-focused article attends to the mechanics of participant drawing as a data collection tool in qualitative research. Writing studies researchers undertaking qualitative research benefit from a wealth of handbooks on how to design methodologically sound studies. However, despite interest in visual research methods, little guidance […]

Paige V. Banaji and Kathryn Comer Abstract The habits of mind (HOM) in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing offer a useful bridge between high school and college writing instruction. As the field evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of the HOM, we would be well served to listen to students’ perspectives. This article presents […]

Kathleen Lyons Abstract This article explores the role writing teachers play as access-makers. Invoking theories of embodiment, relationality, disability, social justice, and making, the article offers a technē of access as rhetorical framework for developing and implementing accessible writing pedagogies. Technē is often associated with processes of making and knowing; meanwhile, access is a rhetorical […]