What do tutors think they teach in a given writing center session? What do the writers they work with claim they learned? This IRB-approved study looks at responses from 74 pairs of surveys completed by tutors and writers about what they taught and learned in particular writing center tutorials. Drawing on the distinctions variation theory makes between intended and lived objects of learning, this study analyzes the general response trends evident across these surveys by coordinating tutors’ and writers’ separate perceptions. The results suggest that writers identify learning as having taken place much more frequently and across a wider range of writing-related topics than tutors claim to have taught. While short-answer responses reveal occasional overlap between writer’s perceived learning and tutor’s intended teaching, the marked discrepancy between the two suggests that a teaching/learning causality does not accurately represent much of the instructive effort and outcome occurring through writing center tutorials. Knowing that writers claim to be learning even when the tutors they meet with don’t think they are teaching informs how tutors can perceive their effectiveness and how writing centers  can position themselves as alternative educational spaces.

In a recent survey completed by 84 graduates of rhetoric and composition PhD programs at various phases of their career, a majority of respondents reported that their graduate programs provided excellent guidance when it came to teaching but insufficient guidance toward scholarly publication. An analysis of survey responses suggests that scholarly publication is troublesome because it marks the transition from student to scholar and because prior knowledge of “school genres” can impede learning of scholarly genres. Furthermore, the liminality novice scholars experience in transitioning from student to scholar evokes anxiety and feelings of impostor syndrome for many. This suggests that mentorship should help emerging scholars develop strategies for recontextualizing genre knowledge in response to diverse rhetorical situations in order to navigate the emotional strain that accompanies the recontextualization process in high-stakes situations.

Research on writing pedagogy education (WPE) emphasizes the importance of engaging graduate student instructors (GSIs) in mindful reflection about their own practices and about composition theory. Little research, however, has explored what we learn from a systematic, empirical investigation of GSIs’ reflective writing. In this article, we describe a writing assignment we created for a graduate composition theory course that required GSIs to connect their own beliefs and experiences with the theory they read. We analyzed 60 essays to learn how new writing teachers understand and use composition theory. Our analysis shows that GSIs rely on three discursive patterns to write about theory (we call these cite-comment , cite-apply , cite-engage ) and adopt three orientations towards theory (using theory to explain prior beliefs and maintain a teacherly identity , to solve classroom problems and shore up a teacherly identity , and to accept uncertainty and become a reflective teacher ). We discuss connections between GSIs’ discursive strategies and their theoretical orientations. We conclude by sharing how we have revised both this assignment and our training program to help GSIs better engage theory as they reflect on their own experiences. Finally, we explore the implications of what we learned for WPE broadly.

Language expresses our values and identities, but in educational spaces, multidialectical and multilingual students’ voices are often silenced in favor of Standard English (Lockett, 2019). As writing tutors and future language arts educators, we have developed a research-based inclusive grammar curriculum and classroom-based resources to expand the conversation surrounding linguistic inclusion. Guided by the principle that all students should be offered the opportunity to learn the conventions of Standard English, we advocate for inclusive teaching of Standard English grammar in K–12 classrooms and writing centers (Godley et al, 2015). Using previous research on multilingual students, linguistic inclusivity, and dialectical diversity, we created a website for K–12 classroom teachers that provides easily accessible, developmentally appropriate resources to normalize the idea that there is no single way to correctly write or speak English. These resources better prepare K–12 students to utilize writing center services, as both writers and tutors, once they reach higher education. Our lesson plans, worksheets, resource guides, and supplemental materials are designed to provide teachers with resources to have a conversation with students about the power and complexity of language and to anticipate the values of writing center work to support every writer to confidently use their own voice.

This article is adapted from a keynote address at the July 2022 European Writing Centers Association (EWCA) conference, sponsored by the University of Graz in Austria, whose theme focused on writing centers as spaces of empowerment. Designed for peer tutors as well as writing center faculty, this talk first celebrates some examples of writing centers empowering student writers and tutors. It then attempts to articulate what scientific spectacles allow us to see when we look deeper into these examples of empowerment: some of the big ideas, the abstract principles, the constellation of expertise and commitments that underlie our contemporary writing center work. That expertise and those commitments range from what’s familiar in our field (writing expertise, care for writers and tutors, multilingualism, dialogic interaction) to what’s less familiar (the power of interdisciplinary teams and generalists, connectivism). The talk concludes by urging writing centers to use their expertise and commitments to forge partnerships and engage in some activism—in order to empower more writers, make centers and writing more inclusive, and influence teaching and learning at their schools and universities more broadly.

This essay explores writing center theories and collaborative praxis from the perspective of an individual who has experienced long-term isolation and incarceration. This writer reflects on how participation in his college-in- prison community, including his service as a writing tutor and teaching fellow, has led to his immersion in prosocial healing behaviors that come with liberative and collaborative pedagogical processes.

AI-based natural language production systems are currently able to produce unique text with minimal human intervention. Because such systems are improving at a very fast pace, teachers who expect students to produce their own writing—engaging in the complex processes of generating and organizing ideas, researching topics, drafting coherent prose, and using feedback to make principled revisions that both improve the quality of the text and help them to develop as writers—will confront the prospect that students can use the systems to produce human-looking text without engaging in these processes. In this article, we first describe the nature and capabilities of AI-based natural language production systems such as GPT-3, then offer some suggestions for how instructors might meet the challenges of the increasing improvement of the systems and their availability to students.

Literacy support in an EMI university in Central Asia (CA) helps students with the challenging linguistic demands of tertiary study in a second (foreign) language (L2). As Kazakhstan's post-Soviet education system (Yassukova, 2020) lacks significant first-language (L1) reading-to-write education (Keck, 2014; Friedman, 2019), English L2-literacy development has become even more difficult when compared to other regions of the world. Students’ literacy capabilities need to be investigated by L2-literacy tutors in order to scaffold learning better. Questions emerge as to whether it would help that the tutor had developed her L1 literacy through the same (but chronologically-earlier) system. To unpack this question, research can draw on perspectives in language socialisation (LS) (Duff, 2012), which sees learning environments as dynamic socially/culturally situated processes. To this end, this study looks at one L2-English literacy tutor's (author 2) experiences in a tertiary Foundation writing course. The goal was to see how the tutor’s interpretations of classroom literacy problems could inform the teaching of low L1-literacy students’ writing and metalanguage. For this purpose, we studied the reflective journaling (Burton, 2005) of the tutor who wrote reflective journals during a semester-long course in early 2020. The findings indicate that reflexivity can help a tutor find solutions, and that a similarity of background seems to help a local literacy tutor understand, and respond to, many of their students’ needs.

This study is an investigation into the perceived ESP writing needs of students of architecture and civil engineering in two European Universities where English has become the language to promote internationalization, namely, the University of Pavia and Brno University of Technology. The research presented is done in the framework of an EU-funded project – Becoming A Digital Global Engineer, BADGE, aimed at improving the quality of language and communication skills of engineering students in Europe. It is also done with reference to the Global Engineers Language Skills Framework, GELS, an adapted version of CEFR language proficiency levels for engineers. Results contributed information about written genres and the digital technology used by students for writing, pointing to preferred genres in the engineering/architecture fields and the impact of digital tools on students’ writing habits. The results are discussed as an opportunity to reflect on the students’ needs, both specific to the individual teaching contexts and across them, and make suggestions for ESP writing pedagogy.

One of the challenges for writing tutors during the pandemic has been trying to find ways to replicate on-campus contact and support for students. In response, this teaching practice-focused paper looks at ways to provide social support to students online with the aim of increasing engagement and enjoyment in the writing process. The paper is based on a workshop session given at the EATAW Conference, in which eight different strategies for engaging remote student writers were presented, discussed, and evaluated. These strategies are: establishing networks of peer support, providing a weekly social meeting, organising writing events, encouraging blog writing, helping students with planning and providing check-in points, helping with time management, sharing recommendations for other kinds of writing, and sharing recommendations for ways to enjoy writing. All of these strategies were developed by the author at a post-1992 teaching-focused university in the south of England during the pandemic. The paper examines the needs for these strategies and how academic writing tutors may use them in practice to engage remote writers, drawing on the conference workshop discussion. The paper concludes with some recommendations for EATAW to further support writing in remote contexts.

This teaching practice paper discusses the implementation of writing support into subject courses at an early stage of university students’ studies, with a particular focus on the courses’ digital transformation during the Covid-19 pandemic. The paper presents a pilot project in which the original concept of the German writing fellow-program was adapted to a digital introductory lecture series in winter term 2020/21. 12 subject teachers received support for developing writing tasks for the lecture session they taught asynchronously. Six peer tutors were trained to support the 60 freshmen through text feedback and video consultations. The learning platform Moodle was used to provide all project participants with materials and information. The project results show a reduction of anonymity in this large online course, leading to less loneliness felt among first-year students. Additionally, the lecturers’ workload was reduced, the freshmen felt more secure in mastering their first writing task that took place off-campus and the writing fellows gained expertise for online consultations including respective tools and procedures. Consequently, this paper argues that it is worth implementing writing fellow support not only in smaller groups of advanced learners but also in introductory subject courses.

Assigning grades is conventionally the exclusive, lonely terrain of the instructor, even as other aspects of teaching and responding to student writing are collaborative. As an alternative that promotes student engagement and agency, labor-based contract grading is used in a growing number of writing classrooms. This article strives to add to these conversations by describing evidence-based, student-led grading as an option that engages students as well as a broad construct of writing. This approach foregrounds students’ own response to their writing, in the form of evidence-based interpretation and use arguments for their grades. It engages students in the process of assessment, in this case, in responding not only their labor but also to their writing process and writing they produce. First, the article briefly describes themes and challenges in conventional grading and in contract-based grading. Then, the article offers context and example material for evidence-based student interpretation and use arguments for summative grades. The article closes with limitations and ongoing considerations.

AbstractIn this article I aim to use the 1948 Russell-Copleston debate to highlight some recent problems I have experienced teaching argument analysis in my philosophy courses. First, I will use argument diagramming to represent the arguments in the debate while reflecting on the use of this approach use to teach argument analysis skills. Then, I will discuss the tools and methods scholars have proposed to represent debates, rather than just individual arguments. Finally, I will argue that there is not, but needs to be, a good way to represent argumentative debates in a way that neither obscures the essential details of the exchange nor becomes too unwieldy to extract a sense of the overall debate.

Although several studies have demonstrated the importance of listening skills in the classroom and in the workplace, business administration college programs seldom include teaching listening as part of their curriculum because of content saturation and credit hours constraints. In this pilot study, we describe how integrating simple listening activities in the classroom, without making major modifications to the curriculum, improves students’ comprehension and test performance. The study demonstrates how exercising critical listening skills while taking a test has a positive effect on students’ retention of information and test scores.

Using social media communication (SMC) for personal and professional use represents two different skill sets. Though students often use SMC on a personal basis for fun and connecting with friends, they often fail to understand how SMC can be used effectively as a professional organizational/corporate communication tool. A service-learning project was conceptualized in a business and professional communication (BPC) course, where students ( n = 93) used professional SMC skills to design social media campaigns for fulfilling nongovernmental organizations’ needs of manpower, material, and/or money. Students’ attitudes and efficacy toward SMC were recorded using a survey questionnaire. The need and obstacles in including SMC in BPC are also discussed in the article.

Antiracist education practices have gained increasing attention. Oftentimes, however, descriptions of this work fail to explicate the role of reading skills in students’ critical engagement with diverse texts. I explore the potential of metacognitive reading strategy instruction as a form of foundational literacy skills development for engaging in antiracist reading. Drawing from my experiences as a female of color and a coordinator and instructor of integrated reading and writing, I expand upon the concept of raciolinguistically just reading instruction, describing how students can document their application of multiple foundational reading strategies through the meta-strategy of annotation and other metacognitive practices. In particular, I focus on how students’ annotations can reflect their work in making text-based connections. Such annotation practice enacts a culturally sustaining pedagogy that amplifies student voices and their role as knowledge producers. I conclude by considering the larger role of decentering the instructor to foster students’ antiracist reading.

This article synthesizes the literature on writing transfer and findings from several key studies of reading in two-year colleges to outline a set of pedagogical practices that instructors can use to promote reading transfer through explicit attention to “strategic reading.”

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Pamela VanHaitsma's Queering Romantic Engagement in the Postal Age: A Rhetorical Education offers an insightful queer historiography of romantic epistolary rhetoric that opens the reader to queer possibilities in the rhetorical practice of nineteenth-century American letter writing. The author's stated intention is to queer the binary distinctions between public and private life that often push queer stories to the margins in histories of rhetorical education (4). With the genre of letter writing, VanHaitsma not only transcends queer recovery in American letter writing but also effectively reconsiders queer engagement, practice, and pedagogy within the rhetorical process of romantic epistolary.The introduction begins by citing the rhetorical and queer foundations of scholars like Charles E. Morris and Karma Chavez (6–7), previewing the methodological queering of rhetorical education. VanHaitsma first defines the key terms for consideration, including romantic epistolary and rhetorical education, and then situates epistolary rhetoric as a cis-heteronormative genre. Although the teaching and learning of romantic letter writing during this time exclusively privileged opposite-sex romantic discourse, VanHaitsma makes the case that the genre allows for queer openings. For example, queer possibilities existed in same-sex friendship correspondence; and queer invention emerged through a dialogue of the personal as political given race, gender, and sexuality were imbedded within romantic letter writing. VanHaitsma's archival research examines “complete letter writing manuals” (44) and romantic correspondence archived at the Connecticut Historical Society and Yale University Library's Manuscripts and Archive. As the author navigates romantic correspondence, VanHaitsma makes thoughtful choices that focus less on the sexual identity of the subjects and more on the “queer rhetorical practices” (11–12) of Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus in chapter two and Albert Dodd in chapter three.The first chapter frames letter writing manuals as rhetorical (26) and then situates teaching manuals like the “complete letter writer” as inherently a heteronormative genre. The author considers the manuals as a launching point for analysis because of their ubiquity and circulation in the United States during the mid-nineteenth-century postal age. Complete letter writing manuals, according to VanHaitsma, were organized similarly by genre and served as a “model” for letter writing with respect to rhetor, audience, and purpose (25). For example, chapters are labeled as “on friendship,” “on business,” or “on love, marriage, and courtship.” By situating complete letter guides as rhetorical education, the author suggests that the teaching and learning guided by the manuals uses “language from the heart” to connect romantic epistolary to social inquiry, including class, education, and family; these matters of course were touchpoints in “appropriate” heteronormative correspondence. VanHaitsma advances three dimensions of heteronormativity encouraged by the manuals: (1) normative gendered romantic coupling; (2) normative pacing in romantic exchange; and (3) letter writing as practice toward the normative conventions of marriage. For example, manuals marked a letter as “masculine or feminine” via salutation like “From a Gentleman to a Lady.” Pacing was marked by dating the letters, and a normative convention of time, especially in romantic exchanges, would proceed slowly, cautiously, and without “passionate outbreaks” (34). Finally, the goal of romantic exchange was achieved only through its “heteronormative telos and generic end” (35), which was marriage between a man and woman. The paradox advanced by VanHaitsma is that the same three rigid cis-heteronormative constraints of letter writing manuals are also the dimensions that offer queer openings. The author suggests two “strategies for queer invention” (37); first, through “queer failure,” that informs a critical and queer “re-imagination” (46) of letter writing outside the genre. Second, VanHaitsma argues convincingly that if manuals are constructed as a resource for invention so that a letter writer may “write from their heart,” those generic conventions are already susceptible to queer challenge.Chapters two and three operationalize the call for a critically queer re-examination of American letter writing toward “queer effect,” first through the everyday romantic correspondence between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, then a more formal civic training through the letters, diaries, and manuals of Albert Dodd. Chapter two begins with a call for more perspectives on epistolary same-sex correspondence beyond the discourses of public and political figures. To this end, VanHaitsma examines the romantic exchange between Addie Brown and Rebecca Primus, “two freeborn African American women” (51-52) who corresponded during and after the American Civil War. In this chapter, the author is interested in how letter writers learn to participate in romantic exchange when formal training is perhaps inaccessible. As the author notes, even with access to manuals, there was no same-sex romantic correspondence modeled in the complete letter writers, so VanHaitsma considers what the rhetorical practices of these letters tell us broadly about queering romantic epistolary. The author studied the correspondence of Brown and Primus not only through a same-sex lens but also cross-class as Primus was a schoolteacher born to a “prominent African American community in Hartford Connecticut,” while Brown was uneducated in formal schooling and “worked primarily as a domestic” (51). VanHaitsma finds that Brown and Primus learned and used the generic conventions taught by complete letter writers, including salutation strategies and dating each correspondence for pacing. What differs, of course, is the queering of salutations which range in tone from a familial connection like sisters, to friendship, and even romance (55). The pacing of the correspondence reflects an urgency and intensity outside heteronormative convention with quick replies, often within a week (57). The correspondence also defied a marriage telos given the societal constraint that marriage to each other was an impossibility; as a result, the romantic exchange was never scaffolded around that particular generic convention. Finally, the author illustrates how Primus and Brown queered the rhetorical parameters of the manuals by incorporating political discussions alongside romantic exchange (61). Chapter two concludes by describing how the romantic exchange between Brown and Primus borrowed from poetry to compose and queer language of the heart. The most compelling take-away from this analysis is how the correspondence from two everyday, same-sex, cross-class, African American women adopted the generic conventions of inaccessible manuals and then crafted queer inventions to challenge generic norms.Chapter three examines the letter writing and training of Albert Dodd. Where Brown and Primus lacked access to formal rhetorical education, Dodd—an upper-class white cis-man—studied rhetoric as civic engagement at Trinity College and Yale, where he wrote a poetry album and a “commonplace book turned diary” (75). What interests VanHaitsma about Dodd is how he used classical training to repurpose rhetorical and civic education toward a romantic end, which became a multi-genre and genre-queer epistolary practice. Through his formal training, Dodd possessed a rhetorical awareness of generic letter writing conventions that allowed him to negotiate public and private binaries. VanHaitsma illustrates how Dodd's training developed into a queer rhetorical practice by broadening the genre of letter writing through an introduction of epistle verse, letters, poetry, and same-sex erotic correspondence (92). VanHaitsma connects Dodd's formal training to Brown and Primus through a “queer art as failure” (98) where the correspondence of all three defied normative training when the generic conventions could not be met; instead, the rhetors re-purposed the generic strategies for their own queer effect. Building from this connection, the author's concluding chapter is a pedagogical gesture toward “queer failure” (104) in rhetorical studies. As a challenge to the status-quo orientation and cis-heteronormative expectations of rhetorical education, VanHaitsma turns to queer movement studies and implores scholars in the histories of rhetoric and sexuality studies to stay vigilant to the “failures” of queer pasts.Pamela VanHaitsma's compact book is poignant and an important contribution to rhetorical studies, particularly in realizing queer possibilities in spaces dominated by normative histories. Exploring American traditions of letter writing, the author makes a sophisticated and accessible critique of the hegemonic democratic practices of civic engagement, public and private spheres of citizenship, race, gender, and sexuality in the histories of rhetorical education. As a reader, the text was not only enjoyable, but the pages also evoked everyday queer curiosities missing and undiscovered in white Western rhetorical studies. As the author notes, queer romantic engagement has always existed but with limited scholarly attention. The case made throughout these chapters advocates for a critical break and crucially, an intentional movement toward “non-normative historiographic ways of knowing” (101). VanHaitsma's attention to diverse learners, queer ways of being rhetorical, and queer stories of everyday people through epistolary romantic engagement is exemplary.

Focusing on the rich biographies of five influential figures of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, Paul Stob's Intellectual Populism argues for renewed attention to a distinctive kind of populist rhetoric. In times of widespread corruption and social upheaval that he argues parallel our own, Stob identifies the “Great Agnostic” lecturer Robert Ingersoll, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, philosopher Thomas Davidson, educator and reformer Booker T. Washington, and writer, speaker, and activist Zitkála-Šá as salient examples of a “mode of inquiry” focused on connecting ordinary people around anti-establishment sentiments with intellectual, rather than anti-intellectual, appeals (xv). Stob shows how each of these figures used their available means of persuasion to claim a voice among unfriendly and unlikely audiences. This, he argues, could be an approach for contemporary academics as we advocate for higher education in an age when our work is dismissed as, at best, irrelevant due to the Internet and new technologies and, at worst, the destructive and out-of-touch machinations of liberal elitism.Intellectual populism, Stob claims, is a means by which “populism and intellectualism can work together to enhance our knowledge of the world” (xv). While populism is often characterized as anti-intellectual, Stob argues that there are parameters in populist thought, taken up by intellectuals in the past, that have been constructive to democratic processes and engaged diverse audiences, inspiring them to think critically about how together they might change the established order. It is this coming together as a “new intellectual movement” that Stob hopes to enliven with a populist model of education incorporating broad notions of teaching and learning among those currently excluded from, or hostile to, higher education (227). However, it is important to note that it is the “fight,” not the “complete victory,” of the intellectual populist figure that Stob wants to highlight (208). As the concept itself elicits, intellectual populist rhetorical strategies engage a certain degree of irony and impossibility in their undertaking.As a case in point, Robert Ingersoll, the first figure profiled in the book, uses perspective by incongruity to call into question religious authorities and affirm agnostic beliefs. Described as a speaker able to make even the police sent to arrest him for blasphemy laugh and praise him, Ingersoll ultimately affirms religious ideals by turning them on their head. This is what Stob characterizes as the core of intellectual populism, “criticizing the established order to strengthen that which the order is trying to serve” (16). Even as Ingersoll attacks religion, the crowds that he drew found that he “enlivened religious inquiry. He brought religious questions into the marketplace of ideas, which strengthened religion by showing what was real in it” (34). Ingersoll appealed widely to audiences that shared various religious beliefs and would agree with him that their own renewal of these values was worthy of investigation. At the same time, Stob points out that “Ingersoll battled a religious establishment that not only survived the assault of free-thought advocates but also created a fundamentalist power structure that continues to this day,” thus showing how even the most successful rhetorical strategies are constrained by situation (208). However, Stob suggests, this could still be an adept strategy for academics: by affirming critiques that the university is out of touch with “the people,” academics could join critics in order to energize a “new intellectual movement” that would ultimately forward the mission of higher learning by broadening its reach, not overthrowing its aims (227).The next figure analyzed in Intellectual Populism is Mary Baker Eddy, the controversial founder of Christian Science. At its height, Christian Science lectures brought together large audiences of converts, interested listeners, and a wide swath of critics. Eddy's lecturers made the case to the public that Christian Science works because it is a science wherein personal experiences of healing prove that believers do not need medicine or the church. However, to Stob's surprise, Christian Science orators did not provide evidence of healing in their lectures, creating a void to be filled with ordinary people's personal testimonies. Stob asserts that this method of unsound syllogistic reasoning instead sought to empower listeners to reclaim their own agency and expertise, previously the domain of experts in religious and medical fields. Stob characterizes this on one hand as a dangerous rhetorical strategy, “duping lecture-goers into believing that Christian Science could accomplish something it never could accomplish” (73). By framing an individual listener's personal experience as “unimpeachably scientific” it makes personal truth “truer, fuller, more absolute than any deductive proof, any rationalist logic . . . any counter argument,” thus denigrating scientific evidence that would allow one to question or change those beliefs (71). This intellectual populist argument strategy therefore either fails with “listeners with an ear for scientific argumentation” (68) or makes receptive individuals resistant to scientific evidence based in logic and expertise that could “enhance our knowledge of the world” to shape a more democratic society (xv). This critique finds renewed importance in our current era of anti-vax movements that draw upon similar argument structures. However, instead of tossing out Eddy's arguments wholesale, Stob constructively points out that the vast power of religious inquiry continues to serve as touchstone of American public discourse. Instead of dismissing religion and personal experience as antithetical to intellectual thought, Stob suggests we think of these are “potent symbolic resources” to start, instead of stop, public conversations about science and expertise (226).The next figure Stob focuses on is Thomas Davidson, a savant Scottish philosopher who spent most of his life building intellectual communities for refined society. However, in his later years, Davidson created the Breadwinner's College, a “People's University” where he taught philosophy to Jewish factory workers from the Lower Eastside of New York City. Davidson initially undertook a series of public lectures in the neighborhood, where he framed philosophical inquiry as a form of labor that factory workers were apt to pursue. This “fell on deaf ears” and angered the workers, who argued that there was nowhere for them to study in their tenement houses, and thus the idea for the Breadwinner's College was formed (106). Davidson envisioned it as the first in a branch of many spaces where workers could gather and engage in Socratic exchange on curriculum that would give those without educational opportunities a “‘bird's-eye view of the scene and course of human evolution’” (109). Stob states that “Davidson's fundamental contribution to intellectual populism was his reconfiguration of speech and space—his grasp of the way words and ideas relate to the geography in which they emerge and through which they move” (118). However, “the irony was that Davidson wrote [much of this intellectual populist mission] . . . from Glenmore [his retreat center in the Adirondacks] . . . [where] Davidson's intellectual populism came from a position physically removed from the community he worked to empower” (117). This irony, Stob concludes, demonstrates that “Empowering the people needed to happen in the spaces that defined their lives;” Davidson in many ways failed to do this (118).In contrast, Stob's chapter on Booker T. Washington illustrates how he successfully provided educational opportunities for poor African Americans in the rural South. In his career as a public lecturer and educator, Washington argued that work itself was a rhetorical process that “communicated, influenced, and persuaded as effectively as words” (121). Washington used various success stories of Black Americans to show how dignified labor “did the suasory work that words and pages tried to do, and it was far more successful than any oration could be” (144). Stob describes this as ironic considering that Washington delivered this message through the medium of oratory and made a career of such words and arguments. However, Stob spends much of the chapter analyzing Washington's many accomplishments as the first President of the Tuskegee Institute, exemplifying through alumni letters how Washington's legacy was to “elevat[e] . . . labor to an intellectual practice” and help students “use their labor to control their lives” (160). While largely an appreciative read of Washington's legacy, Stob also points to ironies within Washington's approach which schooled students in “the politics of respectability . . . [that] emphasized moral reform and reconfiguration of self” and may have “eschewed the demand for structural change” needed by African Americans (150). Both the Davidson and Washington models for populist education support Stob's argument that spaces of higher learning must adapt to the communities they seek to reach by being more reflexive about modes and spaces of engagement. Furthermore, as Stob argues in the conclusion of the book, both rhetors exemplify the importance of education as a “maker's movement,” where students are the co-creators of ideas and communities. Instead of simply transmitting specialized knowledge, we must rethink how higher education might contribute to “putting people in a position to think and inquire for themselves” (223).The final figure featured in Intellectual Populism is Zitkála-Šá, an Indigenous American writer, speaker and activist. The least documented of the figures, Stob characterizes the limited archive of Zitkála-Šá’s speeches as strategically ironic, working to secure what influence she could within the constraints of a white man's world. Zitkála-Šá was critiqued in her time for accommodating or even affirming white stereotypes of Indigenous communities. Throughout her career she wore stereotypical costumes, opted not to correct inaccurate assumptions about her identity, and espoused the overwrought metaphor of the “national teepee” as a unifying vision for the pan-Indian movement. However, Stob notes that these strategies helped Zitkála-Šá in gaining legitimacy for the pan-Indian movement and attention from various white and Indigenous American audiences that had previously dismissed her vision for civil rights. Through an appreciative read of her rhetorical strategies, Stob beautifully captures how Zitkála-Šá’s “performances invited other American Indians to identify their grievances with hers to join her in a strong, broad coalition that could secure Native lives in the twentieth century” (166). Distinguishing Zitkála-Šá’s work from a wider constellation of her Indigenous contemporaries, the chapter demonstrates the importance of exploring the ways that disenfranchised people's intellectual movements can upend the status quo. In her speeches, Zitkála-Šá repurposed white stereotypes about Indigenous Americans through Americanisms such as “God, freedom, peace, and equality” that she showed were more astutely demonstrated by the first Americans—Indigenous Americans—than by white settlers (188). While just one example of Zitkála-Šá’s rhetorical brilliance, this final chapter distills the numerous ways that intellectual populist rhetoric can encompass “the people” far beyond the narrow confides of “the people” often evoked in populist rhetoric in the United States today.Overall, Stob illuminates five different historic figures who, through intellectual populist rhetorical strategies, made compelling critiques of powerful establishments to divided audiences in their time. While looking to achieve different goals, Stob convincingly argues that it is unfair to measure these rhetors’ contributions only by their unrealized visions to change the establishments they attacked. Stob instead contours these complex characters as sometimes flawed, sometimes successful, rhetorical actors whose work forms a broad lineage of American thinkers who attempted to give “ordinary individuals a sense of agency in the pursuit of knowledge” (229). This, Stob argues, “can make a difference, even if it doesn't change the world” (229). Intellectual Populism concludes with a set of lessons intended for academics to enliven debate around the state of higher learning institutions. At the top of Stob's list of lessons is a call for academics to build broader coalitions with communities in “physical spaces” and “face-to-face assemblages,” urging us not to “stay isolated on the carefully manicured lawns of college campuses” (222). Stob's words, ironically published mere weeks into the first COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020, continue to serve as an important reminder to all of us, and our institutions, that our siloed intellectual communities must continue to adapt, diversify, and expand in order to serve the many and not just the few.

This essay defines “benevolent gaslighting”: a technology of whiteness in which racisms are repurposed as benevolent misunderstandings. In reading disciplinary trends and cultural examples, we show how it (re)centers whiteness and prompts BIPOC to question their histories, memories, and realities by situating racial trauma as “progressive” teaching moments.

he first class I ever took as an undergrad with Dr. Mara Holt was titled "Women's Rhetorics. " I barely knew what rhetorics were (testing out of first-year composition via the AP exam was a mixed blessing for someone who became an English major), and I certainly didn't know what the word "pedagogy" meant. The first readings in Dr. Holt's course-Nancy Schniedewind's "Teaching Feminist Process" and Carolyn Shrewsbury's "What Is Feminist Pedagogy"-left me a little blindsided. Not only did both address concepts that felt above my understanding, but what I could make out focused on teachingsomething that seemed, from my inadequate understanding, as distinct from the focus of the class. (The teacher might be interested in articles like these, I thought, but why would the students be?) This reaction is the almost textbook response of a student who had, until then, been inculcated in the traditional power dynamics of a teacher-focused educational system. Only gradually would I come to understand how different, and important, it was that Dr. Holt was making clear her own pedagogical influences and opening these up for discussion.

This article reports findings from a qualitative study in a third-grade classroom in the Southwest in the wake of Donald Trump’s campaign and inauguration. In response to students’ concerns about Trump’s rhetoric around immigration and border-wall construction, the teacher provided curricular space for students to study immigration policy and write letters to their congressional representative expressing their positions. Drawing on field notes, interviews, and student writing, this study asks, (a) What sources of knowledge did students draw on in their talk and writing? and (b) How did students respond to such curricular design? Analysis suggests that students drew on border thinking () and politicized funds of knowledge (), positioned themselves as change agents, and developed and displayed knowledge of academic genres and conventions.

An equitable education for linguistically minoritized and racialized-Othered youth fosters their biliteracy and critical consciousness about racial ideologies. Yet little is known about how or whether secondary-level dual-language bilingual-education programs and teachers seek to enhance students’ critical consciousness—especially as a means of grappling with racist ideologies. Drawing together literacy and race studies in education, I theorize a continuum of racial literacies, then employ it to examine dual-language curriculum and instruction practices. I use interview and classroom-observation data to reveal that a racially diverse dual-language program offered more racial-literacy practices on the hegemonic end of the continuum than the counterhegemonic end. Using teachers’ practices as an index of their program’s stance on racial literacy, I argue that the program provided a whitestream bilingual education: it offered biliteracy schooling through hegemonic racial-literacy practices that perpetuate white supremacy. The teachers’ successes and challenges speak to the need for structural attention to resources, training, and program-wide support for critical-racial-literacy practices. I conclude the article by joining calls for bilingual education to enhance youths’ critical-racial consciousness, adding racial to signal the need to be intentional in teaching about and countering racism, colonialism, and imperialism.

The policing of Black Language is inextricably tied to the policing of Black people and is entrenched in a long history of white Western European colonization. The legacies of white supremacy pervade schooling in its earliest years, yet Black teachers have consistently mounted a counterforce in battling white hegemony. In this article, I feature one such teacher, Raniya, who licensed Black Language in her preK classroom. Based on three months of classroom observations and interviews, this ethnographic case study explores the institutional architecture that affords white supremacist language assessments, particularly through an epistemology of language as an abstracted entity and through its process of curricularization. A raciolinguistic perspective illuminated how the white teachers at Raniya’s school insisted on broadly dehumanizing students of color through a schoolwide policy based on white monolingual standards. Drawing on notion of “vernacular insurrections,” I juxtapose white teachers’ raciolinguistic ideologies with Raniya’s practices. She claimed her classroom as a critical vernacular site through her approach of student language as a practice, and by subverting the normalcy of white hegemony within the schoolwide assessment process. This article calls for a shift in thinking about skills-based, decontextualized approaches as inherently white supremacist, and excavates how such a language approach supports white supremacy to thrive. I discuss the significance of centering the fight against white supremacy in our analysis of literary practices, which elucidates the potency of even small amounts of white dominance in institutional mechanisms as detrimental for Black students. As a field, the stagnation of Black student equity and commitment to white hegemony by white educators and administrators across preK through higher education persists. Though some white educators diverge from hegemonic practices, we must consider who benefits and what is sustained when exceptions are used to overlook and not interrogate the norm. This work contributes to the mounting rationales for racial diversification in the teacher workforce.

Literacy learning is an ideological proposition, one that privileges certain forms of language and those who speak them above others. This qualitative study utilizes critical metaphor analysis () to examine the literacy ideologies at work in a secondary remedial reading class. By analyzing the speech of Mr. Baker, a seasoned remedial reading teacher, and his ninth-grade student Angelica, three dominant metaphors in the corpus are explored: READING CLASS IS A RACE, LEARNING TO READ is a journey, and STUDENTS ARE MACHINES. Findings suggest both the limitations of the metaphors employed by participants as well as the utility of critical metaphor analysis in uncovering the ideological underpinnings of school-based literacy practices.

Master’s thesis writing is a challenging endeavor, requiring students to engage in deeper learning processes and apply several academic competences. This study investigates the associations between students’ approaches to master’s thesis writing, the perceptions of the thesis as a teaching-learning environment, self-efficacy for thesis writing, and thesis grade. The data consist of engineering students’ answers (N=283) to a survey and their thesis grade, gathered from the study register of a Finnish university. The findings indicate a positive association between the thesis grade, deep and organized approach to thesis writing, self-efficacy as well as levels of interest and relevance for thesis writing. This study identified three groups of thesis writers who differed from each other in their approaches to thesis writing: 1) Students applying a dissonant approach; 2) Students applying a deep and organized approach; 3) Students applying an unorganized approach. Students applying a deep and organized approach to thesis writing differed significantly from the other two groups as they scored higher in their experiences of the elements of the thesis as a learning environment, self-efficacy for thesis writing and thesis grade. This study highlights its results in conjunction with previous research and offers practical implications for master’s thesis writing support. 

The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Writing is a collection of research papers edited by Rosa M. Manchón and Charlene Polio. They aim to create a compendium that serves to contextualize and synthesize the development and research practices of the connection between second language (L2) writing and second language acquisition (SLA). The chapters of the collection feature theoretical perspectives and current empirical development on how and why L2 writing can be a meaningful site for language learning. Three reasons are formulated to articulate the significance of the volume concerning SLA-informed L2 writing studies: (1) research outcomes in this research domain are theoretically and empirically fruitful; (2) the theoretical contributions to the SLA knowledge are newly achieved; (3) L2 writing plays an indispensable role in instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) settings. By taking into account the socially situated nature of L2 writing teaching and learning, Manchón and Cerezo (2018) highlighted the substantial value of integrating L2 writing with SLA theories and research for both boosting the L2 learning process and advancing present and prospective SLA research agendas. Such an academic viewpoint appears to be predominant and invaluable in this collection with its theoretical advancements and practical insights contributed by authors from diverse educational settings.

Twictée, a portmanteau of Twitter and dictée (French for dictation), is a collaborative method for teaching spelling that promotes the metacognitive reasoning needed to understand and assimilate the morphosyntactic features of French spelling. The present study evaluated Twictée’s impact on spelling performance in 40 classes of 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-grade students (N = 893 students). Mixed-model analyses showed a significant improvement in global spelling performance over time, but the impacts of the interaction between time and condition reached significance for only four specific aspects of spelling performance. Nevertheless, further analyses showed that Twictée’s overall impact on spelling performance was significantly greater in schools in disadvantaged urban areas and in large classes. We discuss these results in the light of previous qualitative analyses carried out on this corpus

Jaclyn Carter is an educational development consultant at the University of Calgary and coeditor of Women and War from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (2020).Michael Tavel Clarke is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of These Days of Large Things: The Culture of Size in America (2007) and coeditor with David Wittenberg of Scale in Literature and Culture (2017). He coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Faye Halpern.Maura D'Amore is professor of English at St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vermont. She is the author of Suburban Plots: Men at Home in Nineteenth-Century American Print Culture (2014).Faye Halpern is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is the author, most recently, of an article in Narrative called “Charles Chesnutt, Rhetorical Passing, and the Flesh-and-Blood Author: A Case for Considering Authorial Intention.” She coedits the journal ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature with Michael Tavel Clarke.Derritt Mason is associate professor of English at the University of Calgary. He is the author of Queer Anxieties of Young Adult Literature and Culture (2021) and the coeditor, with Kenneth B. Kidd, of Queer as Camp: Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality (2019).Rachel McCabe is an assistant professor and director of writing at La Salle University. Her research focuses on the affective experience and its importance to the reading and viewing of texts and how doing so impacts the student writing process. She also considers how positions of power and privilege influence the interpretation process. Her scholarship has been published in Composition Studies, Studies in Documentary Film, and Compass.Jessica Nicol is an educational developer at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) and author of the recent chapbook Can I Ask You a Question? (2020).Zack Shaw is a fourth-year PhD candidate in the Department of English at the University of Florida, where he studies rhetoric and composition, film and media studies, and animation. He has taught upper- and lower-division courses, covering diverse topics such as film analysis, argumentative writing, technical writing, first-year composition, and media composing. He designs each of his courses with the ultimate goal of creating a multimodal, inclusive, and accessible educational experience for all students. He holds a Master of Arts degree in English from Northeastern University, and his work has previously appeared in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies.Anne Shea is associate professor and chair of the Writing and Literature Program at California College of the Arts. Her fields of teaching and research include twentieth- and twenty-first-century North American literature and composition. She has published essays in College Literature, Contemporary Literature, MELUS, and Women's Studies, among others.Nathan Shepley is associate professor of English at the University of Houston, where he teaches rhetoric and composition courses at all levels. The author of Placing the History of College Writing: Stories from the Incomplete Archive (2016) and articles in journals including Reflections and Composition Studies, he studies interactions among place, history, and college student writing. He remains active in creating pedagogical resources for and otherwise assisting his fellow instructors at the UH Department of English.William Stroup is professor of English at Keene State College, New Hampshire's public liberal arts college. He teaches courses on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and on environmental literatures in many traditions. He has presented on Jane Austen and pedagogy at MLA and his essays have appeared in The Wordsworth Circle, ISLE, volumes on Wordsworth and the Green Romantics, and elsewhere. He is currently editing an unpublished play by the poet Amy Clampitt about Dorothy and William Wordsworth and serving as a Thayer trustee of the Keene Public Library.Morgan Vanek is assistant professor of English at the University of Calgary. She is currently at work on a book titled “The Politics of the Weather, 1700–1775.” Research related to this project has recently appeared in Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature canadienne, Eighteenth-Century Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Fiction.Paul Walker is a professor of English at Murray State University, where he teaches rhetoric, writing, and literature. His published work has primarily focused on composition, assessment, environmental rhetoric, and archival research. He is the founder and editor of Intraspection: A Journal of Rhetoric, Culture, and Style, and is currently working on a monograph about the rhetoric of ordinary heroism.

Though only two names appear as authors of this volume, it would take a crowded eighteenth-century-style title page to include everyone whose work is included. The content as well as the format of this volume are collaborative, in the best senses of the term, making it of great value to teachers in the humanities with specialties well beyond the long eighteenth century. Bridget Draxler, of St. Olaf College in Minnesota, and Danielle Spratt, of California State University, Northridge, take on crucial questions of engaging a wider audience with the scholarly dynamics of cultural history, and add to the rhetorical strategies of defending the humanities along the way. Their resolve to show both successful assignments and those that went wrong, and to prominently include the voices of imaginative and supportive administrators (thank you, John C. Keller at University of Iowa), inclusive museum and library directors such as Gillian Dow at Chawton House, and especially students and community collaborators, provides a reflective model for other educators. Austen scholar Devoney Looser's reflection that she had to “reinvent [her]self” to be “an engaging ambassador for the past” (52) speaks to the spirit of the volume: seeking participation without sacrificing attention, urging students and faculty to work beyond campus without condescension.Draxler and Spratt use a six-part structure to organize the volume: “The Street” takes on what Spratt calls “the savior complex” in service-learning projects, discussed in greater detail below. “The Library” and “The Museum” are differentiated based on the structure of student projects from “The Archives,” “The Digital Archives and the Database,” and “The Eighteenth Century Novel, Online.” Their theorizing of the connections between what service learning can look like in the humanities with the promises and limits of digital humanities strengthens the book. Some examples involve institutional support in terms of available collections and opportunities for enhancing the meaning of study-abroad programs, while others approach digitization strategies for institutions and students without access to such resources. “In the face of an expert-scoffing, diversity-averse, post-truth society that rejects care for language as mere political correctness it has never been more critical to teach the past with a public purpose” (8), the editors write in their introduction. From this, the examples of accountability and self-reflection to avoid a “savior complex” in connecting publicly engaged learning with literary studies, including undergraduate seminars on Austen, develops into an argument that expands from Austen into other examples.Austen's prominence in the title (and on the paperback cover) functions like Austen's name in lights in programming announcements and course titles: it brings in an audience who may have been exposed to Anya Taylor-Joy's expressive eyes in the most recent Emma or Ciaran Hinds's life-giving sideburns in the 1995 Persuasion and signed up for the books themselves. Once in, the connection to other cultural productions of the long eighteenth century besides Austen can ensue. The opening two chapters engage the most with Austen, while teachers in other historical fields might benefit the most from reading the later sections on digital archives. Emma is the most-cited novel, finding among its merits a fine object-lesson in a sort of “savior” complex: Emma's condescending visits to the cottages of the local poor, whose dingy interiors have been briefly illuminated by her visits. Spratt's opening chapter “The Street” augments recent Emma studies in a way that would make any reader want to enroll in her class, as she is able to use Emma Woodhouse's visits to the local poor as an object lesson to understand the class dynamics to be aware of in service learning. Two examples of complex moments in teaching Emma in the undergraduate classroom are used for extended examples. Both are helpfully presented, and one changed my mind in a way that parallels Spratt's account.From Emma the painful scene of Mrs. Elton, newly arrived in Highbury from Bristol, seeking to arrange Jane Fairfax's expected need for a position as governess has been one of the most famous in Austen studies at least since Edward Said (1993) centered the discussion of Bristol's role in the Atlantic slave trade in Culture and Imperialism. Spratt theorizes her approach to teaching this scene in ways that have become widely shared, but concludes that Emma's silence during a scene of discussing both “the sale of human flesh” and what Jane Fairfax calls “the sale of human intellect” and the suffering attached to unprotected governesses at the time demonstrates Emma's indifference to these topics. Certainly, Emma Woodhouse is no antiracist activist, any more than Austen was a Wollstonecraft, yet it is still possible to read her silence here as a shocked response to the arrogant, domineering, presumptive behavior of the newcomer. More convincing is Draxler's discussion of how student investment in their projects—especially preparing to lead discussions of each Austen novel at the local public library—changed her long-established feelings about the character of Henry Tilney in Northanger Abbey. If the received reading of his famous harangue of Catherine endorses the novel's critique of Gothic fantasy, her students’ engaged response to Henry's “Remember that we are English, and that we are Christians” (qtd. on 92) positions him not as an ideal but as “his father's son”: “A few months before the #metoo movement started, my students taught me that it's not just the General Tilneys and Harvey Weinsteins and Donald Trumps of the world who disempower women through villainous abuses of power; it is also, importantly and heartbreakingly, the Al Frankens and the Henry Tilneys, with their uncouth jokes and thoughtless entitlement” (92). At the time as such references may seem to risk a limited shelf life, this volume also includes one of the most thoughtful and useful definitions of “presentism” and its dangers that I know of, as it moves from a shared definition to a memorable, useful phrase many teachers will use: “Presentism occurs when we interpret historical phenomena according to the concepts, vocabulary, values, problems, or opinions endemic to our own time period, leading us to misapprehend the actual nature of our historical object of inquiry. Presentism interprets things as we are, not as they are” (emphasis added, 214). To write, and to teach, with the pull toward contemporaneity modified by this historical imagination comes close to my definition of the liberal arts, and that last sentence will show up in my class notes soon.The discussions of Austen's textual history, of the editing of primary sources from the long eighteenth century (with an extended example from the writings of Sarah Fielding), and of the undergraduate (and, in one chapter, graduate) productions that emerge from these sources would look quite different (the pandemic notwithstanding) at large institutions with substantial print-based library resources. For this reviewer, and for most of the teachers for whom their work is intended, the focus on digital access and shared resources for students at a range of schools other than Research 1 institutions are welcome and helpful, and even for those of us with commitment to printed texts and joyful unplugged reading, profoundly democratic and portable. Amy Weldon's contribution describing the guided tours she's led for her Luther College students to key Romantic-period author sites (which she presented brilliantly at a recent conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment) also shows the need to theorize and complicate our historical experiences. Throughout the latter chapters the emphasis on making the work of editors and scholars understandable to students functions as another beyond-Austen structural example. This volume goes far to explain and contextualize for students the role and function of editors, which for the contexts of open-source and user-modified materials retain a special importance. Spratt's example from a graduate classroom of creating a digital edition of Sarah Fielding's 1759 novel The History of the Countess of Delwyn functions as a useful case study in this area. To the question of why digitization in itself cannot be the answer to every need, the inevitable challenge of the medial s remains instructive for teachers at every level: that is, from a high school history class encountering what looks like “Congrefs” in images of American Revolutionary documents, to the “Boatfwain” bellowed to in the opening dialogue of the First Folio: these cannot be scanned without intelligent, contextualized preparation of a reading text, even without the question of where and when to annotate. Austen's texts are among the first to transition away from the medial s in printed English, but even there such non-digitizable artifacts as paper quality (the acidic near-newsprint of the unknown author's first 1811 printing of Sense and Sensibility vis-à-vis the pleasantly heavy paper and generous margins of John Murray's 1816 first edition of Emma) provide useful reminders of humility for even the most passionate advocates of the digital humanities. Still, this volume features insightful analysis of how the implications of collaborative digital approaches challenge the philological precedents of what became the expected practices of modern literary scholarship. As part of a pattern of quoting students in this work, Draxler cites Alison Byerly from a Newberry Library seminar on a point that extends the interest of the book beyond the long eighteenth century to any “data-driven” “inherently collaborative” approach: “At some level, this requires us to abandon the notion that meaning can be generated only through the power of the individual mind. A different kind of meaning is exposed when technology uncovers patterns or information that would otherwise remain invisible. Coming to terms with that meaning requires a different way of thinking” (154). As much as this is in keeping with other theoretical approaches shaped by poststructuralist linguistics, the figure of “uncovering” the process of both editing and the selection of texts for attention provides a dynamic approach to a period of historical literature that won't keep still.Is 2018 already long ago? For teachers at most institutions, it certainly feels that way. The Enlightenment, and its spirited critique by many of the Romantic generations, created many institutions: the museums, libraries, schools that many current educators are working to make more accessible and inclusive. As remote learning, live-streamed events, and other virtual programming have become essential with the ongoing pandemic, the collaborators in this book are well positioned to help scholars in related fields with meaningful transitions. Though even the mention of sharing pizza at a class where students edit Wikipedia entries for eighteenth-century women writers, or of friendly talk and laughter among undergraduates and local senior citizens at Austen-related book discussions held off-campus take on a moving resonance of the power of in-person events, this reminder of the need for contact and synchronous discovery provides valuable inspiration as we move forward.

AbstractInstructors of writing-intensive disciplines infrequently integrate cinematic media in composition curricula. Furthermore, when instructors use films in composition courses, they often treat films merely as supplemental texts tangentially relevant to course topics and prioritize teaching content rather than media or filmmaking. This pedagogical approach overlooks an opportunity to ask students to consider how the audiovisual rhetorical efforts can meaningfully harmonize or create dissonance with the content. In this research study, the author argues that students are active media consumers engaging frequently with media as a form of composition. He navigates the limitations of Gregory Ulmer and Lev Manovitch, whose early work stressing the primacy of media literacies in composition classrooms is nonetheless seminal to the author's larger claims of film's educational import. The author relates the results of the IRB-approved research of his composition students, who offer feedback about the use of film in the class. The author calls for greater attention to film instruction and curricula development for collegiate composition classrooms, urging educators to move beyond film's supplemental use and toward more educationally fruitful practices, including teaching active watching and basic film analysis. Film is a critical form of cultural communication and media, and the author contends that it is a pivotal part of the landscape of twenty-first century literacy engagements.

Abstract This essay maps the logistics and advantages of reading and teaching texts in their original installments as a means of theorizing seriality in the undergraduate literature classroom.

AbstractThe activity of close reading lies at the heart of literary studies, a “signature pedagogy” that distinguishes English from other disciplines. Despite its centrality to the discipline, however, close reading has been curiously resistant to analysis. This lesson study aimed to determine where students encounter challenges in close reading. Contrary to dominant narratives in the discipline, the university students in this study were adept at formal analysis. They were challenged, on the other hand, by invitations to make intertextual and personal connections to the text. Analyzing features of successful close reading, the essay proposes that intertextual thinking and personal connection are important components. The essay recommends assessing student skills in the initial stages of teaching close reading and, when warranted, integrating instruction in intertextual thinking and making personal connections alongside formal analysis. It also suggests group discussion may help leverage these neglected components of close reading.

AbstractThis article uses narrative inquiry to examine one instructor's experiences teaching two first-year writing classes, each one marked by different pedagogical choices. Themed with the topic of place and foregrounding the recurring example of Appalachia, the classes were nonetheless taught outside the region usually called Appalachia and to college students coming from, and identifying with, places other than Appalachia. This resulting data lends support for easing non-Appalachian-identified students into studying Appalachia as a rhetorical case and for encouraging students to explore various ways that textual representations of Appalachia reveal social and economic patterns noticeable in some form elsewhere.

The role of public memory in a digital information age beckons us to explore how information is stored, managed, and circulated throughout various networks. Engaging with questions of public memory allows us to meditate on how we and future generations have developed processes and methods of information management that shape how knowledge emerges today. In order to understand how public memory interacts with networks of information, we must look at the systems and technologies that store, manage, and make publicly accessible this information. Nathan R. Johnson’s Architects of Memory: Information and Rhetoric in a Networked Archival Age serves as an important contribution to this task by historicizing the formation of these information infrastructures. Johnson contends that the convergence between the labor of memory infrastructure and the development of mnemonic technê directly drives circulation of knowledge—and the history of this convergence undergirds the way networked archives take shape in our digital present.Architects of Memory carefully stitches together the history of memory with a detailed account of information science’s development in building infrastructures of memory in library schools and military intelligence agencies. In doing so, Johnson uses two key frameworks—memory infrastructure and mnemonic technê—to forge connections between memory as a commonplace in rhetorical history and in a digital age. By definition, memory infrastructure, per Johnson, refers to “the backgrounds that expose particular modes of memory” and elucidates a society’s typical patterns for exchanging and remembering information (6). Mnemonic technê denotes the technological resources used to collect, organize, and archive information that became crucial to the development of information science in the mid-twentieth century. While chapters 1 to 6 trace how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê interanimated one another throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Johnson’s “intermezzo” chapters provide specific examples that narrow in on the development of mnemonic technê. For example, the emergence of the Dewey Decimal Classification, punch-card coding systems, and library book trucks represent how mnemonic technê formed to systematize the processes of accessing information, which ultimately created networked memory infrastructures that produce patterns of memory management. Johnson shows that these technologies are issues of public memory because the systems that store information are the means by which future generations will come to access this information, meaning that these technologies mediate the information that publics will engage with and remember in the future.Chapter 1 of Architects of Memory is devoted to exploring the utility of an infrastructural model for understanding the rhetorical nature of memory. Johnson stresses that memory infrastructures both bridge the gap between what is remembered and what is forgotten and intervene in the process of remembering and forgetting (15). Johnson’s lengthy explanation of these phenomena is important in demonstrating how this infrastructural model stands far apart from how memory has been typically thought of in the field of rhetoric; without this long and at times repetitive explanation, the reader may struggle to understand that mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures bear a symbiotic relationship and collaborate in managing modes of public memory. Johnson discusses how artificial mnemonic devices give our future selves tools to remember the past, which, for Johnson, exemplifies how memory acts as a mode of exchange—an exchange of information regulated by the practices we use to store and access this information. Juno Moneta’s symbol on the Roman coin, as a marker of citizenship and economic participation, provides a metaphor for memory in that the networked exchange of coins crystalized the image of Juno Moneta as an important figurehead in Roman culture. Johnson’s detour into the figures of Simonides and Juno Moneta distracts from his theoretical hedging in this initial chapter because the book largely covers the twentieth-century development of information science, and yet this sets the foundation for the rest of the book by offering a helpful illustration of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê that aids in navigating the following chapters.One of Johnson’s main contributions in this book is his thesis that the symbiotic relationship between memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê would not exist without the human labor forces that built these connections. Johnson dedicates chapter 2 to describing how the post–World War II panic over information security galvanized Western militaries to develop more sophisticated systems for scientific research and communication. The geopolitical impetus for protecting government information in the Cold War era intensified the development of more memory systems for the purposes of distributing and evaluating scientific research. Ushered in by the second industrial revolution (1870–1930), this new age of memory innovation gave rise to developments such as Paul Otlet’s Universal Decimal Classification (UDC). Further, the rise of “operations research,” championed by scientists like John Desmond Bernal, gave way to a new type of documentation that gathered data for the purposes of mathematical analysis (37). As an example, Bernal’s National Distributing Authorities (NDA) created a centralized system whereby those who work in science fields could be granted direct access to scientific research apart from the genre of academic journals. Johnson notes that while Bernal’s NDA forwarded a centralized system that ultimately failed, Bernal’s efforts mark an important milestone in the systemization of information distribution. The concept of centralized memory technologies—such as punch-card systems and microfilm—that were accessible for workers across a variety of fields took traction, which, as Johnson argues, speaks to the power of mnemonic technê to construct fields of public memory.Johnson explains in the first intermezzo chapter why information science and librarianship historically held a distant relationship. Librarianship, as a field characterized as “service-oriented” and mostly employing women, was largely disrespected, and the advent of information science could be characterized as a move to “exorcise the library spirit” (47). Thus, Johnson details in chapter 3 how information science upturned the structure of the library from the inside out. Because scientists often depended on libraries for accessing information, the postwar exigence for enhancing scientific communication and research trickled into the library sphere, ultimately reshaping library education to center around networks of information exchange. Johnson oscillates between exploring the Cold War panic over defending science research and the flourishing of professional librarian schools—a move that solidifies the causal relationship between postwar operations research and the revolutionizing of memory technologies in everyday libraries. Specifically, government grants given to Georgia Tech libraries allowed for Dorothy Crosland, the lead librarian at Georgia Tech from 1953 to 1971, to train librarians to be specialists in science and technical information—which led to the creation of a graduate program in information science. This institutional reform put a scientific sheen on the process of locating, storing, and accessing information, which created professional distinctions between the “information scientist” and the more bookish “librarian.” Information science, moreover, developed new systems for the retrieval of source information—such as Calvin Mooers’s Zatocoding system, the subject of Architects of Memory’s second intermezzo chapter. Johnson encourages the reader to see that the advent of information science, in part, stands to masculinize the field of librarianship in a way that glosses over the feminine history of library work. But instead of teasing out the ramifications of this conflict, Johnson turns at the end of chapter 3 to criticize the field of rhetoric’s indifference to memory during the mid-twentieth century. Denouncing Edward Corbett’s claim that memory is “a dead canon,” Johnson shows how the development of information science and new librarian graduate programs at Georgia Tech reveal that memory was far from a dead canon at the time. This switch to discussing rhetorical studies’ thoughts on memory at the time distracts from Johnson’s larger project of tracing the relationship between librarianship and information science, but at the same time it underlines Johnson’s work in restoring what memory can offer—and has offered—rhetorical studies.Chapter 4 clarifies that while government funding allowed for information science to blossom under the postwar frenzy for securing scientific communication, the practice of organizing and processing information in an accessible way was—and had always been—the librarian’s game. Specifically, Robert S. Taylor’s The Making of a Library (1972) outlined the transition from book-centered library services to making the library an “information institution” (91). Johnson upholds Taylor’s book as a key signifier of how this transition reflected both Cold War anxieties and a pivotal turning point in information access. Taylor was quite nervous about the possibilities bestowed by the library’s reformation as an “information institution,” and yet it was written to guide librarians and information scientists into the future of the profession. Even though Taylor remained loyal to his librarian roots, his career at the School of Library Science at Syracuse unearthed the tradition of “librarianship” and redirected library training to center around the new technologies and newer demands for accessing information. Whereas “the older course taught bibliography and literature and included sessions detailing particular academic subjects, . . . the newer informational course taught students the structure, channels, and systems of a universal scientific community” (103). This shift shows that the methods for cataloging and organizing data depend on structures of communication built both by librarians and by users over time, which indicates that library labor is less about organizing information and more about facilitating the process users undergo to locate information—effectively propping up what Johnson terms a “library economy” (105). Johnson calls us to see that teaching memory requires one to focus on how people use, access, and store modes of memory—not just the existence of memory practices themselves. Much like Crosland’s book trucks that haul books about the library for circulation (the subject of the third intermezzo chapter), the technologies one uses to access information do not lose relevance—these technologies might be picked up, dusted off, and restored for a new set of users with new demands.Johnson’s work in tracing the midcentury transformation of memory practices illustrates the symbiotic relationship between mnemonic technê and memory infrastructure. The ways people use both the mnemonic technê and memory infrastructures reveal how each take shape. In chapter 5, Johnson explains that the user’s motivations for accessing and storing data directly influence how memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê take shape. Chapter 5 pivots from the arc of the book’s predominant twentieth-century focus, as Johnson aims to rethink the tradition of memory in rhetoric’s history. He argues that memory operates as a coin, in that practices of memory center on the values and patterns of exchange that are characteristic of a community. This economic metaphor draws attention to how memory, much like currency, passes along from person to person in an established network that regulates its movement. To construct this metaphor, Johnson retells the myth of Simonides of Ceos and zeroes in on Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces. By drawing on evidence from both Quintilian and Cicero’s telling of Simonides’s story, Johnson makes a compelling case that Simonides was motivated by economic reasons to remember where each person sat at Scopas’s table. In Johnson’s retelling, Simonides felt bitter about Scopas’s critique of his poem but still wanted to be paid, so when the temple fell on Scopas and his guests, Simonides sought to remember where each of them sat so that he could collect money from their families for writing their eulogies. In the same way that Simonides’s motivation for creating his memory palaces centered on money, so too can the importance of Juno Moneta to the Roman people be explained by the demands of economic exchange. While this comparison between Simonides and Juno Moneta is a bit anachronistic and far-fetched (as Johnson himself admits), this analogy suggests that memory practices can be better understood by locating users’ motivations for remembering. As the concluding chapter asserts, Johnson’s framework of memory-as-coinage illustrates that remembering and forgetting oscillate on the values and intentions of those who engage with memory practices. Chapter 6 briefly touches on the implications of Johnson’s infrastructural perspective for search engines. While he does not fully extrapolate on search engines and the algorithmic indexing that generates targeted information for users, he does imply that these memory infrastructures will play a significant role in the construction of public memory in the future. Johnson is careful to note that the construction of memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê will always be dependent on the human labor that works to make public memory possible. Just as Dorothy Crosland’s book trucks and Robert S. Taylor’s pedagogical reform changed the way library and information science work was done, so too does the future of memory technology depend on innovative labor.Johnson’s book contributes to rhetorical theory not only by calling our attention to the various technologies and systems developed over the years to accessibly store information, but also in calling attention to the rhetorical work these technologies do in shaping our interactions with information. In other words, memory infrastructures and mnemonic technê rhetorically guide our encounters with information across time and space. Though Architects of Memory applies a more historical focus and does not fully consider how memory practices will take shape in the twenty-first century, we as readers can deduce that the everyday encounters we have with search engine algorithms and targeted advertisements work on their own networked infrastructure, emerging from the tradition of data collection in information science that Architects of Memory describes. As Architects of Memory concludes, “The work of twenty-first-century mnemonists is to identify and locate memory’s commonplace so they can be reassessed continually” (155). Johnson words this as a call for rhetoricians to apply their nuanced insight into the commonplaces of networked memory infrastructures and their impact on public memory—but moreover, it is a call to the public as well to be mindful of how our commonplaces of memory will impact future generations. For rhetoricians and the public alike, Architects of Memory encourages us not just to draw on rhetorical theories of memory into our everyday encounters with information, but to take an intentional approach to exploring how the infrastructural networks of memory undergird our everyday moments of digital information access. Memory, in this sense, takes a direct role in the creation and circulation of rhetorical practices that we explore in the past, present, and future.

Initiating and continuing rhetorical invention is an important practice for teams seeking to innovate. Workplace professionals demonstrate one potential model of rhetorical innovation by instantiating four rhetorical moves that make up a broader practice of difference-driven inquiry (DDI). But it remains unknown how DDI, as a model of innovative rhetoric, can be taught in the technical and professional communication classroom. Over the course of two studies, the author investigated a pedagogy attempting to teach practices for innovation rhetoric. The results show that the pedagogy can be effective but that more scaffolding is needed.

In this essay I bring together two spaces—street needle exchange and the university classroom—to explore harm reduction as an epistemological model that can be adapted pedagogically in our rhetoric, communications, and composition classes. I first identify capitalism in the classroom as an insistence on mastery and the relentless call to know, acquire, and achieve. I then offer harm reduction, a public health practice that rejects these iterations of capitalism, to instead ask how we might meet students where they are and how we might forego the rewards of telos for the discomfort of process and mess. I’ll argue in this piece that reducing the harms of capitalist-based writing and knowledge requires considered attention to the ways we are lured toward production (what we might even call “deliverables”). I explore the epistemological nodes of harm reduction—its emphasis on temporality and its privileging of process—as methods for teaching writing, rhetoric, and communications while also offering a pedagogical case study along the way.

In view of the limited research attention so far given to the developing cognition of novice L2 writing teachers, this qualitative study examines the extent to which L2 writing teacher cognition can be enhanced by the experience of tutoring. By adopting the theory of experiential learning, the study considered the role that the experience of tutoring could play in the development of novice L2 writing teachers’ conceptualizations of learners’ needs and their view of themselves as developing L2 writing teachers. The results of this study point to the participants as having all made realizations that served as catalysts for continued growth after the original tutoring experiences. These findings indicate that the practice of tutoring changed their perceptions of teaching L2 writing by seeing clearly the benefits of dialogic interaction with L2 writers and also learning the value of holistically viewing the writer.

This reflection focuses on teaching writing online for the first-year students in the Academic English course at the Westminster International University in Tashkent (WIUT), Uzbekistan. Academic English is a core course for all incoming first-year students and aims to develop students’ proficiency in listening, reading, and writing skills. A great emphasis is placed on the development of writing skills, and students are required to write at least four summaries, two essays, and one reflection during the twelve weeks of the first semester. A new challenging component in the autumn 2020 semester was teaching writing online, due to the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The classroom writing processes were examined through the lens of the Self- and Socially-Regulated Multilingual Writing model (Akhmedjanova, 2020), which revealed prevalence of socially-regulated rather than self-regulated writing practices. Also, teachers instructed students to use revision strategies more than planning and formulating writing strategies. A cursory examination of students’ reflections suggested that many students struggled with the environment and time management skills. Future revisions to the Academic English course should include explicit teaching of planning and formulating writing strategies along with planning and time management skills.

Teaching and Learning Writing in ESL/EFL. Rachael Ruegg. Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing (2021). × + 177 Pp., ¥28.00, ISBN: 978-7-5213-2455-6 (pbk)

This article explores illuminative evaluation as a method to reflectively assess a pilot implementation of an intercultural-competence-focused first-year writing curriculum at a US large public university. The goal of this curriculum is to promote integration of diverse student populations on our university campus, while developing all students’ intercultural competence and writing skills. In this article, we present practitioner reflections on classroom experiences and collaborative design of our approach to data analysis. These reflections show how an illuminative, context-rich approach to an early phase of a writing pedagogy research project shapes a holistic curricular evaluation. Illuminative evaluation drew our attention to the interaction between teaching and curriculum evaluation as well as to how this approach promotes an invitational and exploratory approach to teacher research.

This paper presents, discusses, and evaluates research-based materials for English for Research Publication Purposes (ERPP) teaching, based on a study conducted with exiled academics supported by CARA (Council for At-Risk Academics) and their UK-based co-authors who provided textual interventions on their texts. Using data from interviews with exiled academics and their UK-based co-authors/mentors as well as their article drafts and textual interventions, we present teaching materials for ERPP workshops aimed at raising the participants’ awareness of issues that may arise in co-authorship involving asymmetrical power relations, such as those between exiled academics and their UK-based co-authors/mentors. The materials take the shape of data-based scenarios which ask workshop attendees to consider experiential co-authorship narratives involving (i) the issue of ‘parochialism’, i.e., failure to indicate the relevance of one’s research to a larger audience, (ii) issues with the type and amount of feedback regarding writer development and text production, (iii) blurred lines of co-authorship roles, and (iv) authority issues in interdisciplinary collaborative writing. Each scenario is followed by a research-informed discussion. We argue that scenario-based awareness-raising activities can sensitize all parties in asymmetrical co-authorship pairs/groups to common challenges that arise in such collaborations, help them navigate collaborative writing successfully, and encourage them to reflect on their own co-authorship practices. We conclude by discussing the merits of the scenario-based approach to developing materials for ERPP teaching.

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This assignment, designed for a graduate certificate program in rhetoric and composition, asks students to create a writing prompt for an audience of their choice and to accompany it with a reflective letter written to a stakeholder of their choice. To prepare, students first read scholarship on college writing assignments: what kinds students perceive as meaningful, what kinds are most typical, and what kinds are encouraged in a writing-across-the-curriculum approach. They then consider what elements of this research they can bring into their own context, both in terms of teaching (via the prompt) and in terms of sharing their learning with a relevant stakeholder (via the reflective letter, usually written to an administrator, a colleague, or a student). By allowing students to expressly connect course content to their own contexts in two genres, this assignment enacts features of the scholarship students read. While personalizing learning is valuable in any context, it is especially so in a graduate certificate program, because this increasingly common site of instruction serves students with diverse educational and professional histories and future goals.