This article describes and reflects on a place-based pedagogical approach to public engagement that uses multimodal composition to insert new discourses into ongoing local debates over university expansion. The public-forming potential of multimodal texts encourages students to imagine new ways of being public and opportunities for adopting community-oriented subjectivities that engage with the issues, people, and spaces in neighborhoods adjacent to campus.

Interdisciplinary collaborations to help students compose for discipline-specific contexts draw on multiple expertise. Science, technology, education, and mathematics (STEM) programs particularly rely on their writing colleagues because 1) their academic expertise is often not writing and 2) teaching writing often necessitates a redesigning of existing instructional materials. While many writing studies scholars have the expertise to assist their STEM colleagues with such tasks, how to do so—and, more fundamentally, how to begin such efforts—is not commonly focused on in the literature stemming from these collaborations. Our article addresses this gap by detailing an interdisciplinary Writing in the Disciplines (WID) collaboration at a large, public R1 university between STEM and writing experts to redesign the university’s introductory biology writing curriculum. The collaborative curriculum design process detailed here is presented through the lens of wayfinding, which concerns orientation, trailblazing, and moving through uncertain landscapes according to cues. Within this account, a critical focus on language—what we talk about when we talk about writing—emerges, driving both the collaboration itself and resultant curricular revisions. Our work reveals how collaborators can wayfind through interdisciplinary partnerships and writing curriculum development by transforming differences in discipline-specific expertise into a new path forward.

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This article examines student experiences of studying Shakespeare’s first tetralogy through viewing and writing about Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2017 Bring Down the House, a successful two-part adaptation of Henry VI parts 1, 2, and 3 directed by Rosa Joshi and the upstart crow collective, a Seattle theater company dedicated to producing classical works with diverse all-female and nonbinary casts for contemporary audiences. Through reflection on students’ responses to the adaptation’s all-female cast, as well as the analytical work they produced for an upper-level course titled Shakespeare: Context and Theory, this article articulates the pedagogical value of students’ experiences of representation in live theater performances of Shakespeare. The author argues for both the ethical imperative of introducing students to radical, inclusively cast productions and the enlivened learning that emerges in the literature classroom from students’ creative and analytical engagements with the diverse voices of modern all-female and cross-gender cast Shakespearean performance.

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.

This article reports on a revised move analysis of a video abstract (VA) repository curated by Cell Press. The analysis reveals that the VA displays several distinct core moves, optional moves, and move units. The analysis suggests that albeit evidence being inconclusive due to the sample size, the VA is in effect an emerging genre whose implications for further research and practice are worth discussing. The article also questions the assumed analytic pertinence of move analysis to researching multimodal genres and cautions against the uncritical use of the VAs curated by leading academic publishers and journals in professional training.

Apocalypticism is a powerful brew of eschatological belief and political imagination that is extremely persuasive. This article addresses the intersections between apocalyptic rhetoric and the technical communication of risk, disease outbreak, and disaster preparedness by analyzing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s zombie apocalypse preparedness campaign. Specifically, I argue that the framing of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s campaign relies on and extends problematic iterations of apocalypticism and undermines the educational objectives of disaster preparedness and response. I conclude with suggestions for how technical communicators designing public awareness and outreach campaigns can use existential risk rhetoric for engagement without succumbing to the pernicious side effects of apocalypticism.

As people today use information products in contexts with distractions, we need to design for people’s attention. User experience design routinely relies on behavioral design to engage distracted users and nudge them toward specific behavior. Although practiced in user experience design, behavioral design is less known in technical communication. In this article, we use the CHOICES (Context, Habits, Other people, Incentives, Congruence, Emotions, and Salience) framework developed by McKinsey’s Behavioral Lab to introduce students to learn about behavioral design principles that make use of cognitive biases to influence people. We maintain that behavioral design is useful for technical communicators because they create digital assets that are part of the user experience.

This article reports on the second stage of a 7-year community-based research project involving service-learning students in technical and professional communication courses and nonprofit organizations in Baltimore City. The article explains how students and community members overcame failure to collaborate on literacy and employment workshops. To assess collaboration, researchers integrated usability testing on workshop resources with 15 ( N = 15) participants, postworkshop questionnaires with 34 ( N = 34) participants, and interviews with 2 ( N = 2) community partners. Participants responded positively, and 47% of workshop attendees found jobs. The article argues that community-based research should use participatory and iterative models and resilience theory.

This study examines the effects of inductively versus deductively organized product descriptions on Chinese and Western readers. It uses a 2 × 3 experimental design with text structure (inductive versus deductive) and cultural background (Chinese living in China, Chinese living in the Netherlands, and Westerners) as independent variables and recall, reading time, and readers’ opinions as dependent variables. Participants read a product description that explained two refrigerator types and then recommended which one to purchase. The results showed that Chinese readers rated readability and persuasiveness higher when the text was structured inductively whereas Western readers rated these aspects equally high for the inductively and deductively structured text. The results suggest that culturally preferred organizing principles do not affect readers’ ability to read and understand texts but that these principles might affect their opinions about the texts.

The multiple conceptualizations of design thinking make it difficult to implement and teach in TPC, especially given classroom constraints. We propose a framework (mind-set and process) that balances knowing with the thinking/doing of design thinking. This framework is effectively implemented through game design. We demonstrate that game design increases students’ ability to iterate and solve macro- and micro-level problems along with their ability to approach unfamiliar or ill-structured tasks while facing such wicked problems.

Providing contextualized, effective writing instruction for engineering students is an important and challenging objective. This article presents a needs analysis conducted in a large engineering college and introduces the faculty development program that was created based on that analysis. The authors advocate for sustained interdisciplinary collaboration to promote contextualized adoption and adaptation of best practices and testing of scalable strategies.

This article builds upon the exigence highlighted in recent scholarship on preparing technical and professional communication (TPC) graduate students for collaborative research and professionalization. Using collaborative autoethnography as a self-study methodology, the authors offer authentic graduate research and mentorship experiences in a collaborative research incubator, the Wearables Research Collaboratory, at a midwestern research university.

This article describes a case study of an inclusive Summer Lunch Program, focused on nutrition, community engagement, and literacy programming. The Summer Food Service Program is a federally-funded, state-administered program designed to meet the needs of children from lowincome families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. Link to PDF

This article shares findings from a CCCC-funded grant that focuses on a dual enrollment program in Washington State called Running Start. This model invites high schoolers to take college courses on a college campus. Instructors are frequently advised to treat Running Start participants “as if they were any other college students,” yet as our large-scale survey suggests, these students have complex hybrid identities that warrant greater consideration. Without diluting academic rigor, we call for an enhanced understanding of the “funds of knowledge” (González, Moll, and Amanti) that high schoolers bring to First-Year Composition in the spirit of congruous inclusivity.

First-year composition faculty have historically cast a skeptical eye on high-school-based dual enrollment FYC. However, when secondary and post-secondary faculty are allowed to build their program together, trusting each other’s expertise and engaging in mutual professional development, enormous value is generated for both sets of faculty and the DE students. This article presents findings, materials, and recommendations from a long-standing successful DE program built on the assumption that college faculty have just as much to learn from their high school colleagues as high school teachers have to learn about teaching college-level writing.

This article describes the experience of three professors teaching dual enrollment BTECH Early College High School students at Queensborough Community College, and our incorporation of departmental and campus-wide collaborative learning experiences as an intervention for student success and engagement. We present our collaborative approach to course design, culminating in the Upstanders Project, a multimodal research-based writing assignment incorporating on-campus cultural and learning resources. We argue that this approach led to an immersive learning experience for dual enrollment students that strengthened their ties to the college community.

Abstract The Memex is an icon in the history of computer technology. It was first presented to the public in a 1945 Life Magazine article as “a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility.” The Memex itself was never built, but the image of what machines like it could do captured the imagination of a generation of computer engineers. The Memex was designed by an engineer and science administrator named Vannevar Bush, but he had actually designed the Memex to address inter-war America: the Memex article was written during the tumult of the late 1930s and largely untouched during World War II. This article examines the Memex within this interwar context, paying particular attention to how Bush used the design of a technological prototype to imagine how machines could help humans navigate the modern world. I argue that this effort was an act of rhetorical invention and show that the design of the Memex was a vehicle for Bush to endorse technocratic authority over American life.

Drawing from an interpretive decolonial framework that understands multimodal writing as the act of creatingco-composedknowledge, this article analyzes Chicanx murals as multimodal compositions that exemplify the continuation of the Aztectlacuilolitztlipractice of writing with images. This work also invites rhetoric and composition scholars to reexamine Western understandings of history, particularly the history of writing.

Rhetorical studies scholars in both communication and writing and rhetorical studies (WRS) are currently investing in momentous discussions about social justice with the promise of material, consti...

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Megan Faver Hartline: I am the director of community learning at Trinity College, a small liberal arts college in Hartford, Connecticut, where I work to create and strengthen institutional structures for community engagement by designing opportunities for students, faculty, and community partners to build relationships and work together. This work builds on my research examining&hellip; Continue reading Early Career Scholars’ Encounters, Transitions, and Futures: A Conversation on Community Engagement by Jessica Pauszek, Charles Lesh, Megan Faver Hartline, &#038; Vani Kannan

With increased interest in communityengaged course design, instructors across the United States are looking for ways to encourage their students to become more connected with their local contexts and the larger communities surrounding their university’s walls. Moving beyond a “feel good” approach to making college courses more meaningful, I think it is crucial that educators&hellip; Continue reading Community-Based Writing with Latinx Rhetorics in Milwaukee by Rachel Bloom-Pojar, Julia Anderson, &#038; Storm Pilloff

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile&hellip; Continue reading Editors’ Introduction by Laurie Grobman &#038; Deborah Mutnick

As we prepare to publish our second issue as coeditors of Reflections, we find ourselves pondering the semantics of names, the power of design, and the importance of circulatory reach. We began our term as editors with several questions: whether the title of the journal accurately expressed its evolving mission, whether the website was agile&hellip; Continue reading Introducing Reflections 18.2

This article shares first-hand experiences and reflections of individuals who participated in a community writing project between university students and women incarcerated and participating in a therapeutic community (TC) in Washington state. Together, the students and women explored the causes, impacts, and treatment of addiction and designed an online platform to share their writing, artwork,&hellip; Continue reading Breaking Free While Locked Up: Rewriting Narratives of Authority, Addiction, and Recovery via University-Community Partnership by Taryn Collis, Felice Davis, &#038; Jennifer Smith

Mass incarceration in the United States is deeply entrenched into the political and economic makeup of modern America. In a time of political upheaval and radical change, prison and criminal justice reform activists are turning the public’s attention towards the problem of America’s prisons and shining a light on the forgotten voices of the incarcerated.&hellip; Continue reading Review: The Named and the Nameless: 2018 PEN Prison Writing Awards Anthology by Jenny Albright, Kalyn Bonn, Matt Getty, Zach Marburger, Brooks Mitchell, Jake Quinter, &#038; Shivon Pontious

This profile examines “Writing for Advocacy,” a pair of Spring 2018 courses designed around community engagement and project-based learning. Supported by a grant from Conexión Américas and the Tennessee Educational Equity Coalition (TEEC), Christian Brothers University (CBU), a regional leader for educating undocumented students, provided a fertile space for a course that leveraged student voices&hellip; Continue reading Writing for Advocacy: DREAMers, Agency, and Meaningful Community Engaged Writing (Course Profile) by Jeffrey Gross &#038; Alison A. Lukowski

Higher education research has demonstrated the positive effects of service-learning on students, with particular attention to the increased attainment of institutional outcomes such as retention and graduation. However, traditional assessment models, focused on measuring outcomes, offer few strategies for developing a holistic understanding of service learning environments. In response, this article outlines the process of&hellip; Continue reading Heuristic Tracing and Habits for Learning: Developing Generative Strategies for Understanding Service Learning by Laurie A. Pinkert &#038; Kendall Leon

“Tapping the Potential of Service-Learning: Guiding Principles for Redesigning Our Composition Courses” | Cheryl Hofstetter Duffy“In the Eye of the Beholder: Contrasting Views of Community Service Writing” | Teresa M. Redd “Service-Learning Outcomes in English Composition Courses: An Application of the Campus Compact Assessment Protocol” | J. Richard Kendrick, Jr. &amp; John Suarez “Keep it&hellip; Continue reading Volume 3, Number 1, Winter 2003

Our patterns of connection shape how we think, write, read and relate. In response, scholars have begun to understand and teach literacy as a networked phenomenon. This essay contributes to that effort. I argue that in an age of media convergence, to think networked literacy is to think everyday digital media literacy habits, particularly as they relate to the design and maintenance of information ecosystems. Combining new materialist writing studies scholarship with design thinking and media theory, I propose and model a materialist approach to literacy analysis that respects both the human and non-human elements in such systems. I then discuss how this approach might inform writing pedagogy.

The critical lenses provided by the author’s framing of the domains of charity, civic engagement and social action highlight the assumptions and implications of different service-learning models. Classroom practices and writing assignments are interrogated for their affinity with each of the domains and their inherent power to shape students’ reading of the world. Link to&hellip; Continue reading Reading and Writing the World: Charity, Civic Engagement and Social Action in Service-Learning by Betty Smith Franklin

Sequential rhetoric can serve as a framework to instruct UX practice (through user story maps) to new learners because it is both approachable and affordable. Sequential rhetoric consists of five main facets that incorporate planning elements (core visual writing and envisaging) and composing elements (interanimation, juxtaquencing, and gestalt closure), which this essay both defines and relates to convergent scholarship. We argue that sequential rhetoric transfers beyond the technical classroom and into the profession itself.

To date, research into dynamic descriptions of text has focused mainly on the spoken mode; and while writing process research has examined language structures, it has largely ignored the functionality (meaning) inherent in them. Therefore, drawing on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) and keystroke logging software, this article takes a further step toward an interdisciplinary dialogue by outlining a new schematic for coding and analyzing revisions. More specifically, we show how revision activity can be tracked within functional components, across functional components, and across clauses in terms of forward and backward movements. By exploring three digitally constructed texts, which were produced and observed unobtrusively in a natural setting, we have attempted to illustrate how one writer’s revising process can be operationalized in terms of (a) chronological movement (sequence) and (b) spatial movement (location). Findings showed how activity was relatively consistent across datasets with regard to session management, revision frequency, and distribution of revision types. Moreover, results also showed how most revision activity occurred at, or ahead of, the point of inscription, particularly with regard to revising the end of clauses. However, findings also indicated that revising the start of clauses was equally important when considering the size of functional components.

Infrastructures support and shape our social world, but they do so in often invisible ways. In few cases is that truer than with various documents that serve infrastructural functions. This article takes one type of those documents—technical standards—and uses analysis of one specific standard to develop theory related to the infrastructural function of writing. The author specifically analyzes one of the major infrastructures of the Internet of Things—the 126-page Tag Data Standard (TDS)—to show how rethinking writing as infrastructure can be valuable for multiple conversations occurring with writing studies, including research on material rhetoric, research that expands the scope of what should be studied as writing, and research in writing studies that links with emerging fields. The author concludes by developing a model for future research on the infrastructural functions of writing.

This article reflects upon four years of exploring Augusto Boal’s Image and Forum Theatre techniques in prisons for youth in upstate New York with young men aged 14-20. These practices work for prisoners by respecting the “literacy” of survival inside prison and by putting prisoners in control of making meaning with their bodies. Examples show&hellip; Continue reading Rhythm of the Machine: Theater, Prison Community, and Social Change by Martin Mitchell

In 1983 my associations with prisons began. Since then, I have seen many role models go in and out of the system. My earliest memories are of my real father, James W. Gray. He was incarcerated in the Montana State Prison system. It was at that institution that I had the first birthday I can&hellip; Continue reading Prison: A Way of Life by Derek E. Gray

Who will watch the watchmen? Plato posed the question, but it is just as important today as it was 2,400 years ago. Power has to be kept in check, as the founders of our country knew when they designed a system of checks and balances in the United States Constitution. An agency that has the&hellip; Continue reading Who Will Watch the Watchmen? A Response to the Patriot Act by Robert Brown

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&hellip; Continue reading First Year Composition and Women in Prison: Service-based Writing and Community Action by Lisa Mastrangelo

ABSTRACT The names “COVID-19” and “Sars-CoV-2” signify an impoverished Symbolic Order attempting to come to terms with “a great disorder in the Real.” Our contemporary defense against the Real has proceeded by way of the insistence of the Imaginary, and at the same time, the Symbolic has become enslaved to this very same Imaginary. The article ends with a plea for a revitalized mode of signification—a correspondence—between the Real and the Symbolic.

This article traces the development of a sophomore composition service-learning course, using data gathered from a formal qualitative study as well as subsequent teacher reflection. Course redesign has been guided by the need to balance the initial emphasis on and measurement of academic outcomes with exploration of the ethics of service. The author shares her&hellip; Continue reading Ethics and Expectations: Developing a Workable Balance Between Academic Goals and Ethical Behavior by Catherine Gabor

This article chronicles changes in the author’s service-learning pedagogy, concentrating on his recent attention to genre and its consequences for course design. The cumulative influences of rhetoric, discourse community theory, collaborative assignments, and genre theory are traced. The core claim, however, is that instructors should help students grasp the concept of genre as social action.&hellip; Continue reading Genre Analysis and the Community Writing Course by Thomas Deans

The Measure of Service Learning offers a compilation of psychometric scales that, while not all designed specifically for service-learning, should provide useful ways to measure different aspects of students’ experience with and attitudes toward community-engaged learning. The authors group these scales under six headings: motives and values, moral development, self and self-concept, student development, attitudes,&hellip; Continue reading Review of The Measure of Service Learning Research Scales to Assess Student Experience, eds. Robert G. Bringle, Mindy A. Phillips, and Michael Hudson reviewed by Billie Hara and Matthew Levy

Insights from activity theory—specifically, David Russell’s synthesis of activity theory with genre theory—suggest ways to understand and ease problems of clashing expectations encountered in professional writing classes that use a client-based assignment model for service-learning. Link to PDF

In the last ten years, projects designated as “service-learning” experiences have become enormously popular. Unfortunately, that popularity has also led to a certain amount of confusion about what service-learning is. Service-learning is different from “community service.” At its core, it involves linking the subject of a class with work in a nonprofit community organization and&hellip; Continue reading Service-Learning at a Glance by Linda Adler-Kassner

In the past few years, many English departments have welcomed the burgeoning area of service-learning into their curriculums, a development which Adler-Kassner, Cooks and Watters consider a “microrevolution” in the area of college-level composition (1). While compositionists have become increasingly thoughtful about different models for community-based writing – in Tom Deans’ schema, writing for, about&hellip; Continue reading Broadening the Community: Service-Learning Connections to the Writing Classroom by Risa P. Gorelick,

The CITYbuild Consortium of Schools is a consortium of design and planning schools based at the Tulane City Center in New Orleans, Louisiana. This group came together after Katrina through common interests in grass roots neighborhood recovery support. The article looks at the context in which such a consortium came to be, some of the&hellip; Continue reading CITYbuild Consortium of Schools: From Disaster Response to a Collaborative Model for Community Design and Planning by Sarah Gamble and Dan Etheridge