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The term resistance has been an evolving concept in literacy and composition studies. While much has been studied in terms of student resistance in high schools, first-year composition classrooms, and in university writing centers, little is known about how resistance occurs in afterschool tutoring programs between volunteer writing tutors and their tutees. Using an ethnographic case study approach, this paper examines how three adult volunteer writing tutors made sense of resistance in working with their adolescent tutees in an urban tutoring program. The findings showed that tutor attitudes, values, and reactions shaped their experience of resistance in a variety of ways including a) misreading tutee signals of engagement; b) masking expectations of cultural and linguistic compliance within a discourse of resistance; and c) embracing resistance as a bridge to tutor growth. The author uses these findings to inform current conceptions of student resistance and compliance and to provide implication for volunteer tutor training.

Two and a half million adolescent girls have experienced some form of sexual violence in India; significantly, they make up a quarter of all rape cases, despite being a small percentage of the population (Raj and McDougal, 2014). Parents and girls’ fears about safety contributes to their high dropout rates within Indian education, but thus far there has been little research on this topic. Focusing on underprivileged adolescent girls at an afterschool site in Mumbai, India, this qualitative study investigates how within this landscape of sexual violence, writing serves as a medium to name, resist, and transform it. Specifically, we scrutinize the articulation of resistance which attempts to contest social norms, cultural conventions, and other forms of everyday hegemony. We examine data extracts from essays written by three adolescent girls participating in the afterschool program as part of a pilot study that took place in December 2016. The analysis of these extracts illuminates how the girls, through their writing, articulate their vulnerabilities about their own and others’ personal safety. Furthermore, it reveals how it is connected to their ability to access education. Moreover, it highlights the ways in which the girls resist parental and other socio-cultural pressures. Finally, the analysis sheds light on the complex and powerful ways in which the girls assert their independence, demand autonomy over their lives, and exercise agency. Ultimately, this investigation offers a path forward for Indian educators to reimagine girls’ education in light of girls’ safety issues, using writing as a space to articulate a literacy of resistance and hope.

Based on a workplace ethnography of an organization referred to as the “Metro Data Cooperative,” this article unpacks the multiple approaches to “storytelling with data” held by research subjects. The research suggests that “storytelling” is more than a discursive form that writers break into. Instead, because there are always multiple statistically supportable stories available, researchers and practitioners should understand storytelling as a malleable activity taking place with regard to multiple organizational and technical influences.

Considering recent returns to pre-Aristotelian understandings of ethos as the creation of dwelling spaces, this article argues that dwelling in algorithmically mediated spaces such as Facebook is intrinsically connected to ethos. The 2016 Dueling Protests in Houston, Texas serve as a case study of how Facebook’s platform functioned as a crucial tool for the Russian Internet Agency’s (IRA) disinformation campaigns. Examining interactions in these ethe ecologies reveals how algorithms shape community perceptions and constructions of ethos.

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 low-income families who qualify for free and reduced lunches during the school year. The most tangible outcome of the program is the food and the literacy programming provided to students during the summer months. Secondary outcomes include the development of new social skills, preparation for new educational experiences, less “screen time” for children, and learning about the community and the people in it.

This article presents a case study of the Smarter Crowdsourcing project the International Development Bank and Governance Lab cohosted to cope with the emerging Zika outbreaks in Latin America countries. Using the lenses of intercultural communication methodologies, user-centered design, and global cultural flow, I examine the exclusion of at-risk populations as marginalized end users of the project. I also examine the impacts of this oversight on the effectiveness of the technocratic solutions. I then conclude by discussing the implications this case has for international health intervention, global technical communication, and community-based research.

People communicate through language as well as visual embodied actions like gestures, yet audio remains the default recording technology in interview-based writing research. Given that texts and writing processes are understood to involve semiotic resources beyond language, interview talk should receive similar treatment. In this article, I synthesize research that examines how visual embodied actions reveal and construct embodied knowledge and stance, and I apply these lenses to my own study, showing how visual embodied actions are essential to understanding three writers’ experiences with particular writing styles. I conclude by discussing the benefits of videorecording for writing research, offering guidance on how video can help researchers explore the interview as a social practice, and suggesting ways to design the consent process with transparency and democratic practice in mind. Ultimately, this article serves as a guide for writing researchers who wish to challenge the audio default when conducting interviews.

At a multinational company, daily written communication between staff, supervisors, customers, and suppliers is frequently conducted using digital tools (e.g., emails, smartphones, and texting applications) often across multiple nationally, linguistically, and conceptually defined borders. Determining digital tools’ impact on intercultural encounters in professional environments like these is difficult but important given the sheer volume of digital contact in technical and professional environments and the ongoing global struggle to broker peace and productivity amid communities’ many perceived differences. Using examples drawn from a case study of binational manufacturing sister companies, I build on recent work in professional, networked written communication to analyze two WhatsApp exchanges, one between a central study participant and his customer, another between the participant and an employee. This study shows how asynchronous digital communication tools created complex “silences” in writing between participants. In these silences (e.g., a lack of or delayed response to a text) individuals try to explain others’ actions for themselves. Drawing on a combination of third-generation activity theory and Latourian actor-network theory, I show that while explaining others’ actions in writing with whatever cultural shorthand is available may remain a common part of everyday life and research, it can be a poor guide for explaining others’ actions, especially in digital writing. My study shows how research of, and instruction in, digital tool use in intercultural writing contexts requires attention to the material conditions and objectives potentially shaping one’s own as well as others’ composition choices.

Communication using popular digital media involves understanding multimodal systems of appraisal for expressing attitude, which traditionally deals with emotions, ethics, and aesthetics in language. The formulation and teaching of multimodal grammars for attitudinal meanings in popular texts and culture is currently underresearched. This article reports findings from multisite qualitative research that developed students’ ability to use semiotic resources for communicating attitude multimodally. The research participants were 68 students (ages 9–11 years) from two elementary schools. Students learned how to use attitudinal language—affect, judgment, and appreciation—and applied this knowledge to multimodal design. The findings advance a leading system of appraisal for discourse by adapting the system to the multimodal communication of attitude in digital comic making in schooling. The research is significant because it demonstrates the potentials for augmenting students’ linguistic and visual semiotic resources to convey multimodal attitudinal meanings in contemporary communication.

About the case: Female entrepreneurs play a significant role in new business creation, yet women's entrepreneurship stories remain largely absent in professional communication research. Therefore, a need exists to “give voice” to female entrepreneurship stories, and this exploratory case examines the unique identities that three female entrepreneurs express in their narratives. This case asks how three female entrepreneurs reconciled the discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture to construct a unique entrepreneurial identity in their reflective narratives. Situating the case: Professional communication has only recently begun to explore entrepreneurship communication, and little of that literature explicitly investigates women's experiences. This case, by comparison, uses three conceptual categories-entrepreneurial identity, gender identity, and cultural identity-to explore how three women negotiated their workplace identities. Methods: We recruited three women who self-identified as technology company entrepreneurs, each from a different culture, and recorded their oral narratives about their entrepreneurial journeys. Three raters independently coded data drawing on dimensions extracted from prior literature to build “identity curves” for each narrative. Results: Analysis suggests that each participant negotiated discourses of entrepreneurship, gender, and culture differently, with the greatest divergence appearing on cultural codes, and the least divergence appearing on gender codes. Conclusions: Based on these results, we suggest that future research should begin with the assumption that no single “entrepreneurial identity” exists for female entrepreneurs, and more broadly that professional communication research should foreground differences among individuals rather than attempt to aggregate individual experiences into homogenous characterizations.

Book Reviews 227 compelling theoretically, the case study did not fully examine the implications of the project's reliance on homonormativity. Bessette concludes with two provocations for the future of queer retroactivism. First, she argues that a near-future task may be to challenge the centrality of corporations in digital media production. And second, she follows Carla Freccero in noting that the hauntological past must be heard, on its own terms. Bessette's work with a variety of grassroots lesbian archives is an engaging read and offers a useful approach to historical scholarship. But I felt that she did not spend enough time parsing out the affordances and limitations of grassroots archives in relation to their institutional counterparts. Fittingly, Bessette's most important insight is her notion of retroactivism, a concept that can hopefully open up more space for reconsidering archival identification, queer or otherwise, into the future. Morgan DiCesare University of Iowa Peter A. O'Connell, The Rhetoric of Seeing in Attic Forensic Oratory. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017, 282 pp. ISBN 9781477311684 The close connections between rhetorical and theatrical performance as two of the major types of civic spectacle in Classical Athens are well esta­ blished, but we are hampered by the fact that our knowledge of courtroom practice is largely dependent on the surviving texts of the speeches. Unlike their Roman counterparts, the surviving fourth-century Greek treatises have little to say about delivery or about the type of spectacular effects alluded to in Attic comedy and in the speeches themselves, which creates a challenge to the modem researcher. Peter O'Connell's book, based on his PhD disser­ tation, is one of several recent studies to take up that challenge1 and is dis­ tinguished by its focus on sight and visual effects in Athenian trials. O'Connell's book stands out for its focus on the role of vision, both physical and mental, and metaphors of sight in forensic oratory (with a brief foray into the funeral oration). It makes an important contribution to the study of vivid language and visual effects as an integral part of the process of persuasion and underlines the continuing importance of these tools through modem comparisons. The author's solution to the lack of theoretical discussions contemporary with the speeches is to draw principally on an impressively wide range of ancient speeches, giving close readings of ^ee, for example, N. Villaceque, Spectateurs de Paroles: Deliberation democratique et theatre a Athenes a Vepoque classique (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2013) and A. Serafim, Attic Oratory and Performance (London : Routledge, 2017). 228 RHETORICA selected passages (summaries of all the speeches discussed are given in an invaluable appendix). The astute close readings of these passages are supple­ mented by appeals - made with all due caution — to the critical and theoreti­ cal discussions of the Hellenistic and Roman periods. The result sheds a new light on the functioning of judicial oratory as a multi-sensory persuasive per­ formance, though the nature of the material inevitably raises some questions. All the major passages are quoted in the Greek and in the author's own English versions. The choice of a very literal translation style serves to clarify the sense of the words discussed but at the occasional cost of fluidity. The first of the book's three parts asks what was visible to the jury within the courtroom, analysing passages that comment on the impact of the presence and physical appearance of the various parties to the case in the courtroom and of material evidence. Against the background of the close association of vision and knowledge in the Greek language, the second section analyses the importance of vision and of metaphors of vision in Athenian law, forensic oratory, and, beyond the courts, in classical Greek philosophical and medical texts. It is here that O'Connell, through citations from Sophists such as Protagoras, Antiphon, and Gorgias, raises the vital epis­ temological question of how juries could decide upon events they had not themselves witnessed. This is backed up by an illuminating analysis of the lan­ guage of visibility in Antiphon and in Gorgias' Defense of Palamedes, which explores the challenge of proving the non-existence...

Mentoring of graduate students is essential to the professional development of business and professional communication (BPC) scholars; it also helps advance the field of BPC and its disciplinary identity. In this article, a professor and graduate student use a case-study approach incorporating historical/archival data collection and grounded in critical reflection to describe and characterize their own long-term, cross-institutional mentoring relationship. They analyze artifacts from their mentoring experience; discuss benefits and challenges to mentoring in BPC; offer implications for mentees, mentors, and academic programs in creating formal mentoring plans; and suggest topics for further research.

This qualitative study reviewed student application of self-regulated learning (SRL) processes in self-paced graduate business communication courses. It was preceded by a quantitative analysis of the same courses. In both studies, researchers sought to understand student experience in a self-paced learning environment, and how this experience demonstrated SRL and increased student performance. Neither study established a clear connection between a self-paced learning environment, SRL, and student performance. However, both studies confirmed the importance of student predisposition for the cyclical phases of preparation, performance, and appraisal and highlighted the critical role of support in readying students for learning strategy changes.

This study examined how three successful entrepreneurs/investors assessed the visual rhetoric of actual pitch decks from novice entrepreneurs. We compare their evaluations to the result of a heuristic for assessing visual rhetoric, Color CRAYONTIP. While the pitch deck is recognized as a key artifact in entrepreneurship, no studies have specifically addressed the visual design of the deck nor the key design skills novice entrepreneurs should implement to effectively persuade potential investors of the idea's promise. This preliminary and exploratory case study begins a dialogue on this topic by performing a visual analysis of seven novice decks which were deemed successful by experienced angel investors. The analysis revealed five key skills that appear to account for the success of these decks with the reviewers: rhetorical awareness, typography, color, photography, and contrast.

The phrase “It’s just a cycle” is commonly articulated in coastal resilience efforts and it also shapes broader public debates about climate change. Identifying the structure of arguments around cycles is a useful starting point for defining differences in perspective, but there is more to competing claims about cycles. It is this more that this essay aims to explore, starting with an opening example from an engaged rhetorical ethnographic project with Maine’s clam fishery. The example helps set up a methodological orientation to working with cycles within resilience-focused collaborations that draws from aesthetics and poetics. This approach aims to show how cycles shape world making and how attending to cycles as a trope can create a space for critical disruptions of colonial patterns. This is a space of intimate connection that allows cyclical rhythms, like those of tides, to help reveal a passageway to resilience.

This article examines how sensation and affect make different kinds of resilience meaningful to communities. Through a case study, we analyze public deliberation about a proposal to expand interstates in Tampa, Florida. We describe how evidence introduced by opposing sides foregrounded conflicting sensory experiences. The resulting sensoriums upheld different aspects of the city’s identity as worth maintaining. Drawing from recent scholarship defining resilience as something that can always be done otherwise, we suggest that resilience is better understood as entangled with public affect. We argue that a key point for rhetorical intervention in city planning is considering which futures and visions of resilience are being imagined for publics.

This study examines the visual representation of Chinese immigrants in the U.S. Statistical Atlases from 1874 to1925. Compilers of the Atlases used a variety of visual strategies to facilitate rhetorical inclusion and exclusion, and by creating particular visual emphasis, constructed Chinese immigrants as being alienated, racialized, and low in the ethnic hierarchy. The visual constructs of the Chinese population reflected and reshaped the state’s policy of immigration restriction in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, this article describes an attempt to enact a Black Feminist pedagogy in an undergraduate business writing course. Discussing both benefits and challenges to this pedagogical approach, I advocate for an increase in decolonial methodologies and pedagogies in teaching technical and professional communication and argue for their potential to intervene for equity and justice in both the classroom and the workplace.

This article examines Reddit-users’ (“redditors”) responses to a story concerning proposed legislation that would require parents considering not vaccinating their children to participate in a public-health delivered education session on the science of immunization. In theorizing Reddit as a “peripheral public” venue and attending to its use of algorithms to sort content and commentary, this case study uses a mixed qualitative and quantitative approach to explore the rhetorical strategies employed by redditors as they discuss the proposed legislation and the scientific controversy behind it—suggesting new strategies for investigating participatory media, as well as insights for key stakeholders in the vaccine controversy.

This article examines data from an ethnographic study of an online Mormon women’s discussion board to argue that enclaves can be places for important critical and civic work. These women’s common religious identity and shared experiences of intolerance on a public board led them to adopt discursive conventions that included intimate literacy. These discursive conventions allowed for disruption of ideological feedback loops and development of responsible rhetorical agency. This article argues that an enclave’s capacity for generating openness to difference depends on the strength of the ideologies espoused and on the values and discursive conventions that guide the enclave.

As activists from historically marginalized communities advocate for themselves when confronted with increasing environmental and social injustices, students and scholars are uniquely poised to collect examples of, learn from, and amplify activists’ rhetorical efforts at intervention. This article argues for activist archival work in which researchers collect examples of activist interventions as a critical form of community engagement. The case study presented here, which focuses on local activist writing (broadly conceived) in response to the Flint water crisis, illustrates one possibility for how activist archival research might be undertaken. Specifically, it highlights the tactics of black and working-class community members who joined together to make apparent how water contamination was affecting their own bodies, families, and communities through complex, multimodal interventions online and in the Flint community. Furthermore, this article emphasizes why such research is necessary and important, particularly when the embodied, scientific, and cultural knowledges of marginalized community members are represented little, if at all, in mainstream media coverage and normative rhetorics of risk.

Review of Field Rhetoric: Ethnography, Ecology, and Engagement in the Places of Persuasion By Candice Rai & Caroline Gottschalk Druschke.

Writers’ groups, in virtual or physical forms, can create communities of practice, which have been shown to offer emotional support to writers during vulnerable times. Noticing that the Covid-19 pandemic exacerbated emotional vulnerability in our undergraduates who were writing 10,000-word reports, we initiated an online writers’ group using the Zoom electronic platform. A focus group held at the closing of the semester revealed that students valued most the feelings of safety nurtured by the group. An examination of the interaction in the sessions, via video recordings, revealed that it was precisely this safety that stimulated critical reflection among participants, which helped them manage their writing processes.

Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

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 essay identifies and explicates a key rhetorical form—“redemptive exclusion”—underlying former United States Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley’s efforts to defend barring Syrian refugees from American soil. Through a reliance on ethotic prolepsis, the rhetorical form of redemptive exclusion enables the creation of a transcendent perspective that reconciles seemingly opposite contemporary cultural and political rhetorics: xenophobic discourses of exclusion become coarticulated with the mythic promise of an America open to all. We show how Haley’s rhetoric combines antithetical gestures of inclusion and exclusion by interweaving synecdochic narratives of her own immigrant history; hyperbolic narratives of American benevolence toward immigrants; and stereotypical narratives of terrorist identity that preempt the acceptance of Syrian refugees as even potentially American. We argue that Haley converts the rejection of Syrian refugees from American soil into an opportunity for constraining and qualifying the mythic ideal of the United States as an historical beacon for immigrants around the globe. In the conclusion, we suggest that a close study of how redemptive exclusion takes life in Haley’s discourse offers more general lessons about the rhetorical and ideological character of controversies over U.S. immigration policy.

While writing center scholarship acknowledges tutoring is an emotional endeavor, there has been little attention given to how tutors respond to the stressful facets of their role. In this study, peer writing tutors were surveyed about their engagement in emotional labor and work-related stress in three areas: (a) perceived reasons for emotionally laborious sessions; (b) emotions felt; and (c) strategies employed for emotion regulation and coping with stress. Thematic analysis of responses indicated the perceived reasons included issues in (a) session expectations, (b) tutor-writer dynamics, and (c) emotion regulation. Tutors generally reported more negative emotions than positive ones. However, a majority of tutors reported engaging in adaptive active and internal coping strategies to manage their work-related stressors. A select few tutors reported engaging in maladaptive coping strategies alongside adaptive ones. While results reflect a positive outlook for tutors' abilities to manage their stress, results indicate engagement in emotional labor is a regular task for tutors. Writing centers may benefit from considering stress management as a part of their tutor-training programs to maintain and promote well-being. Practical implications and possible avenues for stress interventions are given.

This program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.

This article reports findings from a single-bounded case study on student-athletes’ performance of what educational psychologist Yves Karlen refers to as metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) in two first-year composition assignments. This case study is focused on the following research question: how might the promotion of MSK in a FYC class support the development of student-athletes’ writing skills? Data collection includes semi-structured, in-person interviews, visual and bodily mapping exercises, and textual analysis of research participants’ academic writing. This essay offers a two-pronged argument based on the data. First, promoting the development of MSK through established composition and rhetoric writing assignments dovetails with student-athletes’ athletic literacy and supports their development as academic writers. Second, student-athletes’ prior knowledge and practice of metacognition helps instructors gain a stronger understanding of how they may use MSK to facilitate future writing assignments.

Current paraphrasing instruction in the composition classroom may ironically promote “knowledge telling” source use, such as patchwriting. We argue for an approach to source use instruction that teaches paraphrase as a spectrum of task-dependent rhetorical skills ranging from knowledge telling to knowledge transforming. We encapsulate and test the effectiveness of this approach in a series of interactive videos. These videos present a rhetorically-grounded framework for source use instruction, including think-aloud protocols that demystify how reading processes can be used to critically engage with source content. We validate this approach with two different demographics: Non-Native English speaking graduate students and First Year Writing students. Findings suggest our approach, compared with a workshop that used ‘traditional’ fear-of-plagiarism tactics, helped NNES students better recognize knowledge transforming as a task-dependent option and understand the process of note-taking to transform source texts. In contrast, the traditional workshop promoted knowledge telling behaviors.

As the number of multilingual students increases at small campuses in rural areas that lack multilingual composition programming, there is a need to explore pedagogical and institutional strategies that help to pool limited or emerging resources to promote language justice for multilingual students. This narrative case study looks at two small regional campuses’ efforts to advocate for and facilitate supports such as instructor training and tutoring programs for a growing multilingual population in Northeast Ohio.

In expanding our minor in Professional and Public Writing (PPW), we drew on scholarship exploring tensions inherent in the field’s efforts to understand and present itself as a cohesive, yet capacious, discipline. Missing from the scholarship are the voices of students. To fill this gap, we conducted focus group interviews with PPW students at Roger Williams University. Our findings suggest that disciplinary tensions surrounding conceptions of writing are echoed in students’ perceptions of their experiences and how they understand themselves as writers. Even as they assert the importance of good writing skills in the workplace, they express an appreciation for courses in which writing for a variety of audiences is conceptualized as complex and flexible. Understanding the tension between these beliefs about writing holds significant implications for our future program development, especially with curriculum and recruitment. It can also help other programs as they expand their offerings.

In 2018 Mickey Mouse, an iconic brand hero of Disney, celebrated the 90th birthday anniversary in the National Film Archive – Audio-Visual Institute (Pol. FINA) in Warsaw, Poland. By this occasion, the global corporation positioned itself in the local public domain as a social agent through cooperation with the mentioned national institution. The glocalisation strategy has been reflected in the PR activities and has found its visual form in specific PR tools. The paper aims to analyse this case study as the exemplification of a successful implementation of organisational aesthetics in the public realm. The paper analyses the global organization’s visual communication practice in the local framework.

This study examines how African American adults attending a code bootcamp continue to learn coding literacy despite life challenges associated with racial oppression. Eleven out of twelve study participants drew maps of their support and discussed in one-on-one interviews how the people, objects, and animals in their drawings assisted their approaching learning computer programming. Applying ego network analysis, these interviews and drawings suggest that participants use various clusters of support in their network to provide the personal resources coders need to code and what is hard to come by in situations of racial injustice. These resources may have helped participants manage the risks of losing access to coding literacy. Instead of a universal approach to accessing technology, different kinds of networks and resources can lead to continuous access. This study furthers research on racially marginalized adults’ digital literacies and demonstrates how ego network analysis maybe useful for qualitative research on theories of ecological writing.

Employers provide their interpretation of the meaning of communication skills in this qualitative study of 22 managers. Employers understand written communication to be types of documents, a way to write, and a mode of communication. Oral communication skills mean a style of interacting, presenting, and conducting meetings. Visual communication skills were understood to be data visualization or nonverbal communication. Electronic communication was interpreted as email. The findings contribute to closing-the-gap research by highlighting areas where meaning converges for employers and instructors. Faculty members in communication disciplines can incorporate these findings into their course design and learning outcome discussions.

This study examined the perceptions and expressions of learning of 18 undergraduate students who participated in case study competitions through qualitative inquiry. The participants articulated learning outcomes based on their participation in a case competition, including enhanced communication, critical thinking, and analytical skills; viewing diversity as an educational benefit; and gaining a deeper understanding of business fields such as consulting. These findings suggest case study competitions are a viable tool for business educators to aid students in preparing for competitive work environments.

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

In this paper, we investigated a model of academic development based upon a recurring residential academic writing retreat combining individual writing times, workshops, work-in-progress groups and one-on-one consultations with shared meals and informal gatherings in a natural environment. Using a case study research approach, we analysed data accumulated from seven annual residential writing retreats for education scholars. Participants included 39 academics, administrative staff, senior doctoral students and community partners from multiple institutions. We found evidence that the retreats enhanced participants’ knowledge of writing and publishing processes, advanced their academic careers, built scholarly capacity at their institutions and strengthened writing pedagogy. The data indicated that the presence of writing and writers at the residential academic writing retreats generated presents (i.e., gifts) for the participants. The presence of writing time, writing goals and writing activities in the company of other writers were key to the retreat pedagogy. Participants appreciated gifts of time and physical space and described giving and receiving peer feedback and emotional support as forms of gift exchange within the community. The resulting writing strategies, competencies and identities provided the gift of sustainability. The analysis confirmed that this ongoing, immersive, cross-institutional, cross-rank, institutionally funded model of academic development was effective and responsive to the needs of individual scholars.

Writing about environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity, especially in lower-division writing courses. Yet, for teachers and writing program administrators, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in first-year composition affect students’ writing outcomes? This article discusses a two-year, case study at a comprehensive research university of an experimental course-design model involving 1,421 students and 63 teachers. Students engaged with the university’s sustainability theme in Composition I, as well as other courses. This article includes a description of Composition I’s framework and its assessment practices, and raters measure the writing outcomes for the class’s major essay, a literature review. Overall, teachers utilizing ecocomposition practices presented students with a cohesive, relevant curriculum and assisted them in developing and organizing the literature review; writing and thinking about diverse spaces related to their experiences, majors, and futures; and forging and documenting campus and local ties, including through community-based learning. The study’s results have implications for teaching ecocomposition and sustainability themes in first-year composition.

Phase 1 cancer clinical trial consultations are fraught with ethical and rhetorical issues. Phase 1 trials are designed to test the toxicity, and not the efficacy, of therapeutic agents. Fewer than 5% of patients benefit from their participation in a Phase 1 trial, and over 75% of experimental drugs do not become approved cancer medicines. Bioethicists have long debated the ethics of recruitment consultations for Phase 1 trials solely in terms of the need for patients to make a rational decision based upon enough information to avoid what are called therapeutic misconceptions and/or unrealistic optimism as motivations to participate in Phase 1 trials. We argue here, however, that the ethical challenges in Phase 1 consultations go beyond providing information about the (unknown) risks and (unanticipated) benefits of a Phase 1 clinical trial. In this article, we present a rhetorically oriented case study of a Phase 1 consultation, followed by a rhetorically informed critique of the rationality of bioethics. We use Lauren Berlant’s (2011) concept of “cruel optimism” to develop a more complete account of the rhetorical and ethical nexus of patient motivations in Phase 1 consultations by creating a discursive space to explore the concerns, hopes, and motivations of cancer patients considering participation in the earliest phase of clinical research in cancer medicine. The goal of our study is to propose a framework aimed at achieving Lisa Keränen’s (2007) concept of relational integrity applied to Phase 1 consultations.

A Playable Case Study (PCS) is a hybrid learning experience where students (1) participate in a fictional narrative that unfolds through an immersive, simulated environment and (2) engage in classroom activities and lessons that provide educational scaffolding and promote metacognition through in-game and out-of-game experiences. We present the Microcore PCS to illustrate the potential of this new type of experiential simulation that incorporates aspects of Alternate Reality Games (ARGs) to increase immersion and teach workplace literacies in the technical communication classroom. We explore results from a pilot test of Microcore with an undergraduate technical communication course, identifying design strategies that worked well and others that led to improvements that are currently being incorporated. We also provide questions to prompt future research of playable case studies and discuss our findings in a broader context of technical communication pedagogy.

This article presents the racial politics of circulation as a critical concept for elucidating how whiteness, nationhood, and doxa intertwine to reinforce and amplify white supremacy within a context of white nationalist postracialism. As a case study, the authors investigate how two popular slogans associated with Donald Trump drive the production and circulation of digital doxicons called Trumpicons and how such Trumpicons, in turn, feed back into a socio-political loop of white supremacist logics. In studying how Trumpicons become embroiled in such racial politics of circulation, the authors disclose how new media images contribute to an affective economy of whiteness in contemporary American culture.

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of first-year composition instructors (n=3) and students (n=8) about the goals of peer review. The three instructor interviewees each described a specific and distinct goal for peer review: constructing quality feedback, identifying effective writing, and developing peer trust. However, when asked about the purpose of peer review, all eight of the students focused on one goal: improving draft quality. This article recommends increased attention to naming and differentiating among specific goals of peer review, as well as more discussion of ways to deliberately articulate those goals to students.

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.

This article examines how normative assumptions about disability, family, and care perpetuate barriers to social services in cross-cultural contexts. It reports on an 8-month case study of how a county-sponsored, person-centered disability grant targeted but failed to meet the needs of Somali applicants. I identify four impasses that alienated applicants and demonstrated the grant's process relied on culture norms, including medical definitions of disability, institutional expertise, and normalization of self-sufficiency. I develop three recommendations for future technical communication and policy interventions. This study offers insights into how person-centered initiatives can engage the contexts and expertise of diverse users within institutional structures.