This article describes the use of problem forums in undergraduate professional writing courses as a technique for facilitating and sustaining learning from increasingly complex, messy, and wicked problems that are characteristic of 21st-century work. Problem forums are designed to scaffold project team discussions of rhetorical, technical, or collaborative difficulties that have unexpectedly slowed or halted their work. Problem forums are thus intended to facilitate and sustain continual learning on project teams.

In the previous issue of Business and Professional Communication, we focused on flipped classrooms and discovery learning. We continue that broad stream of research with our articles in this issue, most of which engage students in projects designed to facilitate learning in business and professional communication. Implementing projectbased learning can be challenging, and case studies can reveal issues that may be unanticipated in textbooks. Our lead article reports on the role of a commissioned research project in bridging the gap between theory and practice. At the authors’ research site, organizations representing different sectors of the corporate and nonprofit workplace commission teams of students in business and professional communication to act as their communication experts. The specific case discussed in this article is based on a study carried out by a team of five master’s-level students to promote corporate social responsibility in a professional association of a pharmaceutical industry. The authors analyze the student researchers’ perspectives, as well as the practitioners’ view of the collaboration, and the pitfalls involved in helping put theory into practice in a real-world situation. Our second article presents the results of an actual employee program evaluation as a case study of soft skills training at a large hospital. The authors posit four hypotheses, that greater reported willingness to learn will result in both a higher degree of course comprehension and a higher degree of behavioral change and that the method of delivery will affect trainees’ degree of comprehension and degree of behavioral change. The authors conclude that face-to-face or blended instruction is likely to be more effective than a purely online format. The authors of our third article examine the factors needed for success in group assignments. In a study of cooperativeness, assertiveness, group satisfaction, leader grade, and leadership negotiation, the authors find that group satisfaction is positively related to both leader assertiveness and leader cooperativeness. This research emphasizes the importance of the leader’s role to group outcomes and suggests that assertiveness is a critical component to success. 651428 BCQXXX10.1177/2329490616651428Business and Professional Communication QuarterlyKnight editorial2016

This article explores textual curation as a conceptualization of authorship and composition within large information structures that is heavily based on the canon of arrangement. This work is often undertaken through distributed collaboration, thus complicating traditional conceptions of authorial attribution and agency. Central curatorial processes include critical recomposition of prior texts along with the development of small and often invisible textual elements such as architecture, metadata, and strategic links. I offer a grounded definition of textual curation that draws from traditional curatorial fields such as Museum Studies and Library Science as well as Writing Studies’ own subfield of Technical Communication, which focuses heavily on recomposed, collaboratively produced texts. Selected Wikipedia articles serve as case studies for examining live curatorial work in open, collaborative environments.

Geocomposition engages students in writing on the move in order to explore how such writing composes the multiple layers of public places. This article describes a collaborative, location-based composition project designed for students to rhetorically engage a responsive public through locative media: media that work in and through specific sites. View a brief video abstract: Geocomposition in Public Rhetoric and Writing Pedagogy

Writing in a second language, especially using new technologies, is fraught with difficulties for most students. There are two main challenges, firstly, how can students move from their understanding of the mechanical aspects of texts (good sentence structure and appropriate lexis) to deal with issues of how to construct texts that go beyond the basics, for instance drawing upon multiple modes of expression, and secondly, how can students use their knowledge about new technologies to help them create texts? This paper examines the collaborative processes English for Science students go through when constructing a scientific text for a popular audience, here, a digital video scientific documentary. Undergraduate students had to work in groups to write the text for a digital story based on an experiment they had undertaken. As part of the process these students had to prepare a script which was then recorded, either speaking directly to the camera, or as a voice over onto the video to complement their video images. Based on examples from the students’ generated data: Facebook, WhatsApp posts and scripts, we see that the end product was rich and informative. It is maintained that a collaborative approach using new technologies to writing such popular scientific texts engages the students with their work and that, when given the opportunity, they learn from each other as much as from their teacher.

When I first learned of Dave Tell’s project, I expected his book to be dominated by religious exegesis. I suspect I am hardly alone in this assumption. Nowhere is confession a more preeminent and slavish requirement than in religious practice, specifically in the Judeo-Christian idioms that dominate the American psyche, and our blind(ing) faith in religion’s standard of confession affects the public’s consumption of media. Consider American Crime Story (FX) portraying the O.J. Simpson trial, Confirmation (HBO) about the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings, Making a Murderer (Netflix), a documentary series on the trials of Steven Avery, or Serial, a podcast series—the fastest to garner 5 million downloads—covering the murder of Hae Min Lee for which Adnan Syed was convicted. The popularity of these shows manifests the ubiquity of what Tell calls “confessional hermeneutics,” the “collaborative but always contested activity of deciding which texts do, and which texts do not, qualify as confessions” (3). In Confessional Crises and Cultural Politics in Twentieth-Century America, Tell outlines various forms of confessional hermeneutics to foreground the cultural significance of confession.The point Tell drives home repeatedly is that confession matters; it is a critical cog in the machinery of American social life. In the twentieth-century, Tell finds that confessional hermeneutics “concretely shaped the public understanding of six intractable issues: sexuality, class, race, violence, religion, and democracy” (4). Understanding confession’s role relative to these six crucial cultural topoi requires “those of us invested in public discourse to understand the confession, not as a stable, ahistorical form, but as a practice informed by competing traditions” (144). Failing to do so risks ignoring the “genre politics” (183) that make confession “a powerful but volatile political resource” (187), an “important, if often overlooked form of cultural intervention” (184). To support this argument, Confessional Crises rehearses six key confessional crises spanning the twentieth-century: Bernarr Macfadden’s 1919 launch and subsequent transformation of True Story; William Huie’s 1956 publication of the confessions of Emmett Till’s murderers; the publication in 1967 of William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner; and the confession controversies sparked by Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton. For Tell, cultural politics trump generic constraints: each case illustrates that “the rhetorical function of a confession is determined more by the political needs of the confessant than by the formal features of the text” (124).Take, for example, chapter one on the subjective sexual moralism in Macfadden’s launch of True Story magazine. As Tell recounts, Macfadden reasoned that the best way to inoculate the public against sexual malaise was by presenting them with the unvarnished truth about sex. For Americans to avoid the sexual pitfalls Macfadden adduced to ignorance and scripted silences around the body, “the American people needed a moral reeducation” on matters of sexuality and “just as insistently that they needed a rhetorical reeducation” (28). Why the rhetorical reeducation? Because Macfadden needed real-life stories to advance his moral-political agenda. Through sidebars and editorials, Macfadden coached readers on how to read the stories he published as authentic accounts of ordinary people. The arrangement was straightforward: the “unvarnished prose guarantee[d] the authenticity of the tales, and the authenticity of the tales guarantee[d] the propagation of moral virtue” (41). Frank testimony about bodily fantasies and functions was Macfadden’s antidote to ignorance about sexual matters.In the 1930s, Tell finds that Macfadden pivoted from sexual politics to class politics, changing the import of confession. This is the story of chapter two. As millions battled the scourge of the depression, True Story began to foreground “a well-remunerated working class, the desires of which True Story perfectly expressed” (47). Why would as staunch a moralist as Macfadden engage in such a mendacity? Herein lies the re-conscription, Tell holds, of confession, except this time with capitalism not moralism as the telos. Macfadden needed to transform his readership into a consumer class so he could sell access to advertisers. Just as he had instructed the public in the appreciation of plain speech, Macfadden directed his rhetorical pedagogy at America’s captains of industry: “he told executives that if they squinted just right, if they learned to read True Story properly, they could see between the lines of his true stories millions of affluent, docile and eager, consumers” (55). Using Macfadden’s example, Tell articulates confession to both sexual and class politics.Or take the controversies about William Styron’s Confessions of Nat Turner, the subject of chapter four, which Tell uses to connect confession to the politics of violence. Two arguments about the reception of Styron’s Confessions form the vectors of this connection. First is that whether one deemed Styron’s book an expression of Turner’s admission turned less on the fidelity of Styron’s content to Turner than it did on the politics of the different respondents. At stake was how one understood the nature of slavery and the status of the African-American within it: “was the American slave a ‘Sambo,’ a happy-go-lucky, bumbling fool, given to petty thievery but fundamentally docile” owing either to racial inferiority (as Ulrich Phillips believed) or to slavery’s brutality (as Stanley Elkins and Styron held), “or was the slave a seething embodiment of resentment, incensed by the brutality of the ruling class and prone to rebellion” as Herbert Aptheker argued? (99). Differences of opinion on these matters framed the contested reception of Confessions. Second is that differences of opinion between White defenders of Styron and his Black critics were based in competing ideologies about “the legibility of violence” (112). For many White reviewers of Confessions, violence was simply beyond understanding. They wondered, “what could have prompted someone to lead a rebellion so violent?” (106). Enter confession: “only confession—an insider’s account—could possibly redress so profound a mystery” (106). “For Styron’s black critics,” however, “Turner’s rebellion was perfectly legible” (112). The formerly colonized and enslaved required no special erudition, no fancy literary conceit, to understand the rebellion. Confessions, to these critics, read instead as Styron’s confession to imbibing “the fantasies of the southern tradition” (115) that sanitized the violence of slavery while exaggerating that of slaves like Turner. Confessional Crises thus associates confession, through a postcolonial hermeneutic, to violence.Readers of AHR will appreciate the theoretical history Tell brings to bear in his analyses of Jimmy Swaggart and Bill Clinton, the subjects of chapters five and six. Yes, argues Tell, Swaggart fashioned, with the aid of the leadership of the Assemblies of God, a confession he and his allies presented as a Christian confession. The imbroglio he found himself in demanded that. Yet despite appearances, Swaggart’s, Tell insists, was no Christian confession. Instead, Swaggart’s apology bore the blueprint of a distinctly modern secular confession. Specifically, “his emphasis on the inadequacy of speech, his devaluation of grammatical sensibilities and logical coherence, and his emphasis on his humanity” (136) constituted Swaggart’s rhetoric as a modern secular confession. To prove this point, Tell contrasts the genealogies of classical-Christian confession (123-4; 129-30) and modern secular confession (130-36). By retracing to Periclean Athens those tenets of classical confession that were eventually appropriated by Christianity, this discussion carefully historicizes confession in religion and politics. But this retracing also exposes the Athenian-Augustinian model of confession Tell endorses to criticisms first raised by feminist and critical race scholars. If Augustine’s Roman Empire and contemporary America attest that confession can function as “a means of reversing the political currents of pridefulness” (130), both societies also evince the limits of that power. What confession, whose confession, could have challenged the pride that drove slavery and genocide in the Roman Empire, or “shock-and-awe,” the “New Jim Crow,” and the FISA court in the American?In chapter six, which focuses on the crisis ignited by the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky scandal, Tell isolates confession’s function in democracy. Re-contextualizing Clinton’s rhetorical performances of 1998 in light of statements Clinton made during the Gennifer Flowers controversy in 1991-92, Tell credits the president with showcasing the ideal of democratic public confession, a “belief that public confession must hold in equipoise the competing needs of contrition and legal argument” (162). Prosecutor Kenneth Star and the many critics of Clinton’s vexatious semantics upheld an established tradition of confession, one in which, “only an unlimited admission of guilt counted as a confession” (162). Confession, the reader learns, influences how the public understands politics.By the end of Confessional Crises, the reader has gathered an expansive vocabulary for understanding the power of confessional practices. But how to assess a project so expansive, so revisionist, and transdisciplinary? Let me end by returning to the beginning. The introduction of Confessional Crises advertises the book as “the first reception history of confession,” (6) acknowledging the influence of Steven Mailloux. This hat-tip points us to Mailloux’s ambitious project for criteria by which to judge Confessional Crises. Since Mailloux explains that “Reception history is rhetorical hermeneutics” (ix), readers can thus pose Mailloux’s famous definition of rhetorical hermeneutics as a question of Confessional Crises: does it use “rhetoric to practice theory by doing history” (ix)? Anyone who reads Confessional Crises will find that in it, Tell fulfills this tripartite obligation elegantly. He relies on discourse, develops fresh ideas about confession, and generates a record of the past.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

This article merges feminist methods with cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) in order to present a systems-theory method that can account for power and difference. After an explication of Feminist CHAT, the article applies the method to the archives of three women’s clubs in order to analyze their collaborations, theorize collaboration, and illustrate the use of Feminist CHAT. By weaving the stories of these three clubs together with Feminist CHAT, this article mediates two often conflicting contemporary approaches to English studies: those that emphasize objects of discourse and those that emphasize bodies and difference.

This article describes a sequence of assignments to guide students through an informed effort at making contributions to Wikipedia that persist, and suggests ways this set of exercises in social informatics may also serve a number of common goals in a variety of writing, literature, and other courses: analyzing and writing for explicit editorial guidelines (“standards” in information science, “house style” in editorial practice); understanding, conforming to, and even negotiating conventions of genres and subgenres; collaborating online; writing for an audience that not only is real but also talks back; and developing deep understanding of revision and the writing, editorial, and publication processes. Students first learn Wikipedia policies and practices and analyze the historical development of articles before they make contributions. The pedagogical opportunities arguably outweigh the concerns of those who doubt the credibility of an open-authored encyclopedia.

This article describes how a special kind of academe–industry collaboration—based on a joint appointment agreement between a university and an industry site—was set up, promoted, and experienced by a professor of technical communication and his student interns. To illustrate the nature and value of this kind of collaboration, the article discusses several of the professor’s research projects, and the teaching scenario connected with this collaboration, as well as the experience of the student interns. The keys to success for such an exchange are to (a) create a clearly structured agreement that is easy for both parties to implement within their respective institutions, (b) promote the agreement to administrators and employees at both institutions, and (c) launch into the exchange with enthusiasm for learning, networking, and finding research projects.

This article argues for a flipped learning approach to business and professional communication composing processes. Flipped learning sequences can scaffold more robust engagement with prewriting activities and support opportunities for in-class collaborative and facilitated drafting exercises. These types of learning experiences offer numerous pedagogical benefits, including more conscious control of messaging strategies and the development of more creative, rhetorically informed communication products. The effectiveness of this approach is explored through a case study of a flipped learning sequence and collaborative drafting workshop designed for an employment communication and résumé-writing assignment.

This article examines the 2014 Sino-American University Student Digital Micro Film Competition, a collaboration developed and administered between the University of Central Florida in the United States and Shanghai University in the People's Republic of China (PRC). By using qualitative text analysis and visual content analysis to review key materials and events from this case, the researchers studied information design and cross-cultural communication practices of various aspects of the partnership. The resulting analysis reveals unique information design challenges associated with cultural differences in communication practices, visual design, and administrative style. The summary of the case and the results of the related research presented here also provide readers with information design strategies that can facilitate design practices---and the associated coordination of event planning---across different cultural groups.

Globalization, most sociologists agree, is not a new phenomenon.Its phase in the late 20 th century and early 21 st century, however, is recognized now as one of the more transformative periods in human history-what Anthony Giddens (2011) has characterized as a "runaway world."In the last few decades, there has scarcely been a domain of human activity untouched by these forces-economic systems, mass media and communication, cultural flows, the movement of people.A global site as intensive as any has of course been our universities; indeed, it is these "runaway" forces that have been responsible for so many of the changes witnessed on our campuses in recent decades.They are evident, for example, in the considerably more diverse student cohorts who now participate in university education, along with the rich variety of languages and cultures they bring to their studies.Dramatic changes have also been seen in what is taught on programs, including the push within many disciplines to systematically "internationalize curricula."Along with new content are radically new ways of delivering programs, as digital communications become more and more sophisticated at replicating-and also reconfiguring-the learning experiences of the traditional classroom.Finally, these forces have also brought about new types of collegial relationships as institutions and academics reach out across borders to connect and collaborate on a great variety of educational and research enterprises.Versions of these changes have been experienced in many parts of the world.In my home country, Australia, for example, such has been the scale of these developments that international education has emerged in recent times as one the nation's largest export industries.But while global forces have reshaped university education in all sorts of interesting and dynamic ways, it is not to say that there are not issues and challenges associated with these developments.Frederic Jameson (2000) has suggested that globalization is in many respects a euphemism for "anglocization."The dominance of the anglosphere, according to this view, has meant that global capital-whether this be of an economic, cultural or educational kind-is unavoidably spread in highly uneven ways.Within higher education, this raises issues of power, privilege and potential inequity in the ways that different cultural groups engage with their studies, and in the rewards and successes they get to enjoy.Arguably, nowhere is this more evident than on the less-thanlevel playing field where first and second language students must compete in the assessment and evaluation of their academic abilities.So, while global forces have provided students with unprecedented access to what were once largely exclusive and culturally homogenous institutions, the view of many is that considerable work still needs to be done to address these "asymmetries" and to truly value the diversity that is now such a part of our institutions (Rizvi, 2000).A related critique is the view that globalization, in tandem with its ideological bedfellow neo-liberalism, has led sadly to an increasing commodification of higher education, so that students, especially our

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model.

A pilot program of a co-requisite Learning Support writing course (ENGL 0999)  adapts features of Studio and Accelerated Learning programs to a two-semester sequence of First Year Writing. The program was designed to cultivate critical reflection, writing knowledge transfer, and student-led discussion. Narratives from the program director (Mendenhall) and a lead instructor (Brockland-Nease) discuss challenges in developing the pedagogical and programmatic support necessary to engage students and communicate with other writing instructors in the co-requisite format. The authors argue that ongoing, collaborative program design plays a critical role in supporting pedagogy for courses that, by design, serve as adjuncts to core writing classes

This program profile describes recent changes to the process for preparing graduate teaching instructors (GTAs) in North Carolina State University’s first-year writing program. The authors—one a non-tenure-track faculty member and the other a tenure-track faculty member—describe the philosophical, ethical, and practical concerns in scaling teacher preparation to accommodate rapidly growing cohorts of MA and MFA GTAs. By providing an example of cross-tier collaboration, the authors propose an approach to GTA preparation that takes into account that many of these novice teachers will begin their teaching careers as contingent faculty colleagues.

In this interview, James Porter talks about his professional career and what he sees as the contemporary challenges for the field of rhetoric and composition/writing studies. Throughout the exchange, Porter discusses his administrative concerns with the state of rhetoric in the field, the ongoing struggles with graduate education, the complexities of online writing instruction, and the potentials of programmatic collaboration. The interview concludes on a personal note about Porter’s scholarly trajectory, his collaborations, the fruits of his labor, and his advice for emergent scholars in the field.

Research problem: Our study focuses on how students collaborate online to produce specific written genres, using particular collaborative technologies to work together productively, and how instructor feedback and student perspectives on collaborative work influence those activities in online classrooms. Research questions: When composing using collaborative web-based writing applications, do students focus primarily on the interface or the text space? What kinds of expectations about collaborative writing do students bring to the interface and text space? To what extent can we characterize students' acknowledgement of a third space, what we have identified as “communicative interaction?” Literature review: Workplace collaboration is important because organizations increasingly demand effective collaborators, team members, and team leaders, and technologies for sharing, cobuilding, and feedback are readily available to support these activities. Student preparation for workplace collaboration is important because students struggle when they are asked to write together, particularly when the collaborative process involves new technologies, and yet knowledge of collaborative writing strategies and experience with collaborative technologies, such as Google Docs, are the very competencies that organizations expect of them. Methodology: Thirteen groups of 3 to 4 technical writing students and science communication students enrolled in online professional writing courses at a major research university wrote feature specifications and reports on the globalization of the sciences, respectively, using Google Docs within Google Drive. Sixteen of 37 students responded to a set of questions asking them to reflect on their experiences working collaboratively, learning new genres, using the collaborative environment, and revising with instructor feedback. Results and conclusions: We found that students struggled most with adapting their already established collaborative strategies grounded in face-to-face learning situations to an online learning environment, where they felt their means of communication and expression were limited. The results suggest that effective collaborative experiences, properly executed, represent a repertoire of competencies that go well beyond only technical considerations, such as being able to effectively assign roles, set milestones, and navigate the numerous tasks and processes of writing as a team. The small number of students and the single instructor with her own particular feedback style limit the study. Future research includes looking at how different feedback styles influence student collaborative writing.

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This article considers how professional writing courses can prepare students in various disciplines for the workforce. Specifically, I argue for Writing in the Disciplines (WID) internships where students learn to write documents relevant for their careers while participating in practical work experiences. In the WID internships I describe, instructors collaborate with coordinators across campus to establish writing-intensive internships that focus on the needs of students and the community partner. This article illustrates the collaborative endeavors of three internships, highlighting the challenges and lessons learned from WID internships.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

Conducted through a collaboration between the Council of Writing Program Administrators(CWPA) and the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE), this study identified andtested new variables for examining writing’s relationship to learning and development. EightyCWPA members helped to establish a consensus model of 27 effective writing practices. EightyUS baccalaureate institutions appended questions to the NSSE instrument based on these 27practices, yielding responses from 29,634 first-year students and 41,802 seniors. Confirmatoryfactor analysis identified three constructs: Interactive Writing Processes, Meaning-Making WritingTasks, and Clear Writing Expectations. Regression analyses indicated that the constructs werepositively associated with two sets of established constructs in the regular NSSE instrument “DeepApproaches to Learning (Higher-Order Learning, Integrative Learning, and Reflective Learning)and Perceived Gains in Learning and Development as defined by the institution’s contributionsto growth in Practical Competence, Personal and Social Development, and General EducationLearning” with effect sizes that were consistently greater than those for the number of pageswritten. These were net results after controlling for institutional and student characteristics, aswell as other factors that might contribute to enhanced learning. The study adds three empiricallyestablished constructs to research on writing and learning. It extends the positive impact of writing beyond learning course material to include Personal and Social Development. Although correlational, it can provide guidance to instructors, institutions, accreditors, and other stakeholders because of the nature of the questions associated with the effective writing constructs.

This article links language requirements in rhetoric and composition graduate programs to a dominant monolingualist ideology in composition studies. It argues that future faculty can be best prepared to conduct disciplinary work in the context of linguistic heterogeneity through a variety of collaborative pedagogical practices that reflect and advance a “translingual” language ideology.

The aim of the present study was to improve learning from texts via strategies that train students how to process synthesis texts. Processing such texts requires goal-oriented interaction between reading and writing activities. The participants were 62 sixth-grade students, 33 in the experimental and 29 in the control group. In a pretest-posttest design –with a control group- the effects of an experimental programme were tested on (a) the level of learning achieved, (b) the quality of the written texts produced, and (c) the synthesis text-processing activities (in a sub-sample of 32 participants). The experimental group was trained in the processes involved in writing a synthesis using two expository texts about history via a strategy-oriented programme, while the control group worked on the same content using the more conventional tasks in their regular text book. Findings show that the experimental group outperformed the control group on a deep-learning content measure, wrote better texts, and exhibited more sophisticated text-processing activities.

I address how participating as a parent in the Individualized Education Program (IEP) process has helped to transform my own approach to teaching by reinforcing how important it is to endorse a pedagogy that recognizes and values the individuality of my students. Universal Design for Instruction (UDI) has served as the best model I have found to help me move closer to my ideal classroom, and the course that most reflects this ideal classroom is my upper-level Disability and Literature course. The course's greatest strength lies in the extent to which its format and delivery are inextricably tied to its subject matter through an ethic of care(taking), especially through the incorporation of a number of UDI features into this course. What is more, while the traditional class meetings remain a privileged site of collaborative engagement and learning, the course blog is an equally crucial component to such collaboration, as the students create nearly all of its content. Indeed, the blog space serves not only as a place for students to record their responses to the assigned readings and in-class discussions but also as a student-driven supplement to the instructor-supplied focus points, a supplement that truly expands the range of possibilities implicitly represented in my choice of readings. I now understand such a pedagogical orientation not simply as a generic model for “good teaching” but as a reflection of a disability-inflected pedagogy of care.

This article discusses a collaborative course at Davidson College titled Representations of HIV/AIDS. With students, the authors look at the over thirty-year-old history of HIV/AIDS and the interwoven scientific and artistic responses to it. Not simply analyzing representations of HIV/AIDS from their disciplinary perspectives, however, they each interrogate the other's knowledge from their own position, both informing and learning as coteachers and fellow students. Their strategies also include organizing the course by issues salient to HIV/AIDS rather than major scientific/historical landmark events as might be traditionally defined; continually interrogating the historiography of HIV/AIDS; emphasizing the diverse identities and lived experiences of HIV/AIDS; exploring how stigma can thwart science and oppress others and how that has been answered by the arts; discussing concepts (such as patient zero) that, while useful for the scientist or artist, can still be problematic; and understanding how economics impacts both the art and science of HIV/AIDS. In the course students take on a prominent role as active critical thinkers, and their critical explorations of HIV/AIDS always occur at the intersection of art and science. This course imparts to students vital lessons in a world where complex global problems will increasingly demand interdisciplinary, collaborative solutions.

Background: When an organization decides to adopt a technology, such as a content-management system (CMS), the choice affects writing styles and processes, and conversely, writing styles affect the implementation of the technology. This case study compares and contrasts the experiences of writers in organizations that implemented different types of CMSs: a web CMS (WCMS) and a component CMS (CCMS), with a focus on the different types of training given to each group to facilitate the implementations. Research questions: (1) What are the dependencies between technology choices and the corollary editorial constraints that writers must consider in order to realize the benefits that the technology can bring? (2) What types of training are needed to ensure that writers become fully productive in a collaborative, structured-authoring environment? Situating the case: When adopting structured information technologies, such as CMS, organizations seek to reduce costs and improve efficiencies through the reuse and better management of content components, such as text and images, which can significantly reduce the costs of translation, reproduction, and maintenance of publications. Structured information technologies, such as a CMS, Extensible Markup Language (XML), and Darwin Information Technology Architecture (DITA) affect technical communicators by changing writing styles to a more structured, topic-based approach, by introducing new tools and concepts for authoring and publishing, and by requiring more involvement in the selection, use, and maintenance of the technologies. Previous efforts to address these issues through training include works by Critchlow, who addressed the use of database systems to address challenges in developing documentation in collaborative environments; Edgell, who related how technical communicators proposed a CMS-based documentation solution to a software firm; and Lanier, who described how one organization overcame the resistance to new structured information technologies by writers. Methodology: The case was studied as an experience report by one of this article's authors (Bailie), in which the organizations engaged a consultant during their CMS implementation projects. The observations are qualitative and reflect consulting engagements with two teams over a period of almost three years. About the case: A common problem in implementing CMSs is interdependencies between content structures, on which the technology depends, and the editorial changes required to ensure that the content is best structured to take full advantage of the capabilities of the technology chosen. This case describes a four-phase training process provided to two clients: one with several contributors to the content-management effort in a single location; the other with more than a dozen contributors in several locations. Each client received four phase of training: (1) theoretical training-understanding pertinent theories behind good content development; (2) application of theory-how to apply the theories to their workplace; (3) software training-learning the new software to produce the content; (4) production-support immediately following training, during implementation. The results of the training were to increase the skill levels of the writers to understand how to leverage content in powerful ways using sophisticated technology. Conclusions: Determine the production needed for the content when choosing a class of CMS to address those production needs. Afterwards, match the training of the writers to the complexity of the system. Content strategists, project managers, technical communicators, and others involved in implementing a CMS need to allow sufficient time and training for writers to adjust their skills to the new technology and the new processes and techniques required to effectively use them.

Research problem: The widespread adoption of component content management in organizations calls for a comprehensive summary of the territory of this phenomenon. A summary provides stakeholders in component content management with a sense of how the practice has evolved and its implications to research, theory, and future practice. The last such review was published in 2003. This integrative literature review is intended to fill the gap in the literature by describing the current state of component content management as presented in the current publications. Research questions: How is “content” currently defined, described, and approached in the component content-management literature? What processes and tools are organizations adopting to achieve the goals of component content management? Literature review: The theoretical orientation of this review is Rhetorical Genre theory, which allows for classifying individual components as a genre characterized by granularity, reusability, and potentiality. Component content management gained recognition in the mid-1990s when early adopter organizations were looking for more efficient and effective approaches to reusing information between similar products or versions of the same product. Developments in the 2000s include a surge of publications focused on defining and describing component content management; new best practices for implementing a component content-management initiative; evolving processes and technologies for creating highly engineered, modular content that can automatically adjust to specific user requests and device capabilities; and collaborative efforts to integrate content creation and management strategies across organizational units. Scholarly and trade publications increasingly explore different concerns; whereas scholarly publications tend to offer critical perspectives on component content management, trade publications tend to describe processes and technologies and articulate best practices. Both focus on the goals of component content management, such as single sourcing, content reuse, multichannel publishing, and the structured content components required to achieve these goals. Methodology: To answer the research questions, we reviewed the body of literature on component content management. To do so, we searched library databases, Google, and Amazon.com for articles and books in both the scholarly and trade literature; we also sought out publications by well-known voices in component content management who direct successful consultant and/or research organizations. We then classified selected publications in relation to research questions and identified themes within each research question. The review did not explore other types of content management. Results and conclusions: Current component content-management literature suggests that component content management has evolved from a practice focused on single sourcing and reuse strategies for product documentation to a mature discipline concerned with designing pre-sales and post-sales information products for a multitude of devices and delivery channels. In recent years, trade publications have led the way to standardizing the discipline's core concepts, methodologies, processes, and technologies, such as structured content, structured authoring, single sourcing, component-based content strategy, Extensible Markup Language authoring tools, and component-content-management systems. Scholarly publications, however, have had comparatively little impact on advancing the discipline of component content management because only a handful of publications have focused on the topic and almost no crosstalk exists between these publications and the trade literature. Several questions about the practices of component content management still need to be answered, particularly in the areas of multilingual communication and content quality and usability. Based on the results of the literature review, we call for a coherent, robust, and ambitious component content-management research agenda that addresses topics such as content quality and usability, the diffusion of content-management systems, and global content management and that leads to studies that both advance scholarship and improve component content-management practice.

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For writing instructors and technical support staff, our informal collaborative experiment suggests the potential value of stepping outside one’s comfort zone—one’s domain—to forge institutional relationships that either don’t exist or that lack dialogue and depth. For writing program administrators, our experience might serve as a reminder that innovation often happens at the margins.

Quad charts are a genre frequently used in scientific and technical environments, yet little prior work has evaluated their potential for reinforcing technical communication fundamentals. This article provides background information about quad charts and notes the benefits of implementing quad charts in the classroom. In particular, introducing engineering students to this genre appeals to their tendency to outline information and incorporate visuals in the planning stages of the composing process. The authors share their approach for integrating quad charts within a collaborative project in a fluid dynamics course and note the ways in which the genre facilitated effective project planning and communication within student teams.

In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy—specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant adolescent Muslims, leaving African American girls out of scholarly conversations. Employing methods of intertextual analysis grounded within a qualitative study, the researcher examined two questions: (a) What social issues do African American Muslim girls choose to write within broadside poetry? (b) How do these self-selected social issues relate to their identities? Findings show girls most frequently wrote about issues related to (a) war and violence and (b) the abuse, violence, and mistreatment of women and girls. Writing was a means to make sense of and critically shape their multiple identities, including who they are as Muslims, their community, and ethnic and gendered identities.

This paper argues that online communication products should employ item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms to equip readers with the best potential sets of information that fits their specific contexts. Many online resources are utilizing item-to-item collaborative filtering algorithms which harness the decisions of users to affect their experience. Examples include the recommendation engine used by Amazon.com to help steer customers to products they might enjoy, the "Music Genome Project" used by the internet radio platform, Pandora, and various user interfaces that quickly determine the best user experience to present each individual user.

Students’ limited information literacy skills raise concerns among writing instructors and librarians alike. In order to improve students’ information literacy skills, a librarian and writing instructors at a two-year open-access college collaborated to design information literacy instruction and collected student work to evaluate its effectiveness with regard to students’ ability to find and evaluate sources. Our experience from our collaborative approach indicates that by using specifically designed instructional activities such as concept maps and research logs, students’ ability to think critically about their information literacy skills can be improved.

Background: Virtual teams collaborate across distances using information communication technologies (ICTs). A distinctive set of communication skills is needed by people who work successfully in virtual teams, and few universities or companies provide structured education and training in virtual teamwork. At a midsized southeastern Masters Comprehensive University, professors from the Colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, and Education came together to explore how they might use cross-disciplinary student teams (groups comprised of students with different backgrounds and educational goals) to teach concepts in their own disciplines while providing students with the opportunity to become more proficient in virtual team communication. Research questions: (1) Can cross-disciplinary student team projects successfully support learning in virtual team communication as well as address the learning objectives of specific courses? (2) What can faculty learn from a cross-disciplinary teaching model that can be applied to virtual teams? Situating the case: Experiential learning is based on performing real tasks and reflecting on that process; it benefits learners by engaging them in complex, authentic situations. Virtual teams are significant because they support a great deal of the work currently taking place in our global economy; they are significant in higher education because students need to develop skills in international virtual communication before they are introduced to high-stakes work environments. In previous cases, students have collaborated across national cultures to develop project deliverables, such as websites, reports, and usability studies and present them in virtual environments using such tools as WebEx, Skype, and live streaming. How this case was studied: The findings from this case are based on individual student reflections, which were used to create a data matrix for each project, and instructor observation and evaluation. About the case: In Spring 2013, six faculty from the same university worked together to incorporate virtual teams into their classrooms. These six faculty members were divided into two groups of three with each group representing three colleges mentioned earlier. The faculty developed two interdisciplinary projects (one on infographics and another on social media) that enabled rich and diverse student collaboration. In both groups, the three faculty leaders worked together to define a project scope that students could achieve and that would relate to learning goals in each discipline. Conclusions: The lessons learned from this experience are that: (1) technical challenges will occur; (2) students from all disciplines must receive the same information; (3) instructors must balance respect for their colleagues and support for their students; (4) team assignments need to be consistent and fair; (5) instructors need to establish appropriate and fair assessment measurements for their own students; and (6) projects need to be realistic in order to show the students the value of virtual work.

Most professional education tracks combine school learning with practical workplace training. Although in theory alternating between these two settings is a great opportunity for learning, vocational education students encounter difficulties in integrating the formal explicit knowledge imparted in school with the informal tacit knowledge acquired in the workplace. This design study explores the potential of writing and peer collaboration as mediating tools to facilitate the articulation of conceptual and experiential knowledge. In the context of a school for social and health care assistants, 40 first- and second-year students wrote about critical situations encountered in the workplace, shared them with their classmates, and engaged in written and oral discussions with colleagues and the teacher. A web-based collaborative writing tool (wiki) was used for writing and facilitating participants’ interactions. The results showed significant gains in self-efficacy beliefs and performance on a case-based competence test for the first-year students, but not for those in the second-year. In addition, all students reported a high level of satisfaction with the instructional scenario and particularly its collaborative dimension. The discussion raises some issues and recommendations regarding the design of learning activities involving writing and peer feedback to support students in articulating conceptual and experiential knowledge

This study investigated students' practice of philosophical thinking through collaborative writing in secondary education. A philosophy course was developed following the rationale of the learning communities in which writing was used as an epistemic tool. 45 students organized into 13 teams participated in the course. In this study, a subsample of six students working in 2 teams during one collaborative argumentative writing activity were analyzed. These groups were selected on the basis of their output (high and medium quality) and because both followed an integrating construction strategy for collaborative writing. Data collected included audio, video and computer screen recordings of both groups' discourse and writing activity during collaborative writing (using Camtasia and Atlas-ti software). Analysis focused on collaborative writing interaction (types of talk; evidence of philosophical competences - problematization, argumentation and conceptualization; regulation of the collaborative writing activity and group dynamics) and the quality of individual and collaborative texts.Results indicate that quality of the interaction was related to text quality. Collaborative writing helped the students: 1) to transform abstract ideas into more concrete and appropriate philosophical concepts using examples related to their experiences, 2) to use these philosophical concepts in their own discourse and 3) to problematize their own ideas and provide arguments to support them. From these results, the importance of a structured context of learning to promote critical thinking through writing is discussed as well as the need to train students to develop efficient peer discussion for learning through collaborative writing.

Research on writing to learn is conceptually rich and pedagogically important. This special issue contributes to our growing knowledge about the variables that mediate and moderate the effects of writing on learning. One group of studies addresses individual writing; it adds to the growing evidence for the effects of several moderators, including cognitive, metacognitive, and personal utility prompts in journal writing (Wäschle et al.); and discipline-specific prompts for argument writing (Van Drie et al.). The individual-level studies also suggest moderator roles for discipline-general strategies of argumentation (Smirnova); and open-ended informational writing assignments (Wilcox et al.). Additionally, the Wäschle et al. study provides the strongest evidence for a specific sequence of mediation: Prompted journal writing to comprehension to interest to critical reflection. The second set of articles focusses on collaborative writing (Corcelles & Castelló; Ortoleva and Bétrancourt). It suggests moderating roles for discipline-specific analytic strategies, and peer interaction; and suggests mediating roles for exploratory discourse and group regulation. Further experimental research on collaborative writing is needed to conclusively test hypotheses about specific mediator and moderator variables. The studies in this special issue, like many recent studies, are incommensurable with some influential theories of writing to learn. Rather, individual and collaborative studies converge to suggest that writing to learn may be conceptualized as a guided process of cognition and self-regulation.

After reviewing some of the manuscripts for this issue, we, as editors, thought it would be appropriate to interview Steve Parks’ regarding his perspectives on graduate students and community projects. Steve has worked with graduate students for many years, including Jessica Pauszek, our Assistant Editor. He was also the past editor of this journal for a number of years, and we have benefitted through his guidance. As he says at the end of the interview, the interview format cannot capture the spirit of “collaborative discussion” that comes from this work. However, given our close relationship with Steve over the years, the questions we did develop come out of our conversations with him and thus is a product of previous listening and dialoguing. An interview with a friend, mentor, and colleague is a different type of interview—one grounded in the familiar.

This co-authored article describes a community literacy oral history project involving 14 undergraduate students. It is intellectually situated at the intersection of writing studies, oral history, and African American rhetoric and distinguished by two features: 1) we were a combined team of 20 collaborators, and 2) our narrator, Frank Gilyard, the founder and former director of the Central Pennsylvania African American Museum (CPAAM), was deceased. Because oral history is narrator-driven, Gilyard’s death required us to remain especially attentive to the epistemic value of his voice.

This essay, focusing on Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes’s 1930 play and infamous literary collaboration, explores the possibilities of combining new digital tools with traditional scholarly approaches to better understand how the multilayered racial discourse of African American literature in the early twentieth century informs this signal collaboration. Moreover, Christian outlines the benefits of including African American literature in digital humanities projects.

With the widespread popularity of distance learning, there is a need to investigate elements of online courses that continue to pose significant challenges for educators. One of the challenges relates to creating and managing group projects. This study investigated business students’ perceptions of group work in online classes. The constructs of learning and social interaction, process satisfaction, product satisfaction, and use of technology in the virtual learning environment were investigated. The use of social media networks by group participants was also examined. Recommendations are provided for business educators looking to develop or enhance teamwork in virtual learning environments.

Currently, African American girls are being depicted as overly sexual, violent, or confrontational, are judged by physical features, or are invisible across mainstream media and within school classrooms. Few investigations have explored how they respond to and interpret such imposed representations. Nor, for the most part, have studies examined how girls represent themselves among a society of others pathologizing and defining who they are. This inquiry investigated self-representations in the writings of eight African American adolescent girls ages 12–17 who participated in a historically grounded literacy collaborative. Coupling sociohistorical and critical sociocultural theories, I organized and analyzed their writings through open, axial, and selective coding. Findings show that the girls wrote across platforms similar to those African American women have addressed historically, which included writing to represent self, writing to resist or counter ascribed representations, and writing toward social change. The girls wrote multiple and complex representations, which included ethnic, gender, intellectual, kinship,—sexual, individual, and community representations. These findings suggest their writings served as hybrid spaces for the girls to explore, make sense of, resist, and express different manifestations of self. The representations the girls created in their writings did not fall into static notions of culture or identity. Instead, their self-representations were socially constructed and were responsive to their lives. This study extends the extant research by offering wider views of representations from the girls’ voices, as well as a broadened historical lens to view their reading and writing with implications for how English language arts educators can reconceptualize the roles of writing in classrooms.

Faculty and writing center tutors bring expertise to writing as practice and process. Yet at many institutions, the two groups work in relative isolation, missing opportunities to learn from each other. In this article, I describe a faculty development initiative in a multidisciplinary writing program that brings together new faculty and experienced undergraduate tutors to workshop instructors’ comments on first-year writing. The purpose of these workshops is to assist faculty in crafting inquiry-driven written responses that pave the way for collaborative faculty-student conferences. By bringing together scholarly conversations on tutor expertise and the role of faculty comments in student learning, I argue for the value of extending partnerships between writing centers and programs. Such accounts are important to the field for challenging what Grutsch McKinney (2013) calls the “writing center grand narrative,” which limits the scope of writing center work by imagining centers primarily as “comfortable, iconoclastic places where all students go to get one-to-one tutoring on their writing” to the exclusion of lived realities (p. 3). In this case, I describe a writing center where tutors bring their expertise outside the center and into the faculty office, consulting in small groups with faculty with the aim of enriching the quality of instructor feedback in first-year seminars.

Research has shown that in order to facilitate the development of students’ writing, teachers need to cultivate principles of effective feedback. However, revision is a joint process, and for the maximum effectiveness of this process, there should be more than just a giver-receiver relationship with the teacher giving the information and the student receiving it. Instead, students should be actively involved in the revision process by reflecting on and analyzing their own writing and meaningfully responding to teacher feedback. This teaching article describes a technique—Letter to the Reviewer—that facilitates collaboration between the teacher and the student. A Letter to the Reviewer is a memo that students attach to each draft, in which they provide a short reflective note to their reviewer by identifying the strengths and weaknesses of their draft and ask for specific feedback on certain elements of the draft. The technique was implemented in two first-year composition classes for multilingual writers in a large university in the Midwest. Teacher observations of student work and students’ self-reports on this technique demonstrated that the letters helped students approach their own writing more analytically, ask the teacher and peers for focused feedback, engage in the collaborative revision process, provide more specific feedback on their classmates’ writing, prepare for writing conferences, and recognize the connection between classroom instruction and their own writing.

Almost by definition, resisting the insidious convenience of the mainstream food supply requires persistence. This is especially true for food projects requiring fermentation—projects that unfold over days or weeks and require day-to-day science in kitchens where variables can be hard to control and where some degree of periodic failure is almost inevitable. In this article, a team of writers—scholars and community members—dramatizes a joint inquiry from which emerged a composite portrait of what we have come to call mindful persistence—an existential yet collaborative engine that drives our food literacies. Dialogic text features highlight the situated insights of individual writers, indicating that while this team shares an interest in fermentation, this interest does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. Instead, what is shared is a mindful persistence that scaffolds reflective action in this dynamic problem space.

Almost by definition, resisting the insidious convenience of the mainstream food supply requires persistence. This is especially true for food projects requiring fermentation—projects that unfold over days or weeks and require day-to-day science in kitchens where variables can be hard to control and where some degree of periodic failure is almost inevitable. In this article, a team of writers—scholars and community members—dramatizes a joint inquiry from which emerged a composite portrait of what we have come to call mindful persistence—an existential yet collaborative engine that drives our food literacies. Dialogic text features highlight the situated insights of individual writers, indicating that while this team shares an interest in fermentation, this interest does not require or assume identical understandings of the science of fermentation or similar positions in the probiotic debate surrounding contemporary fermentation practices. Instead, what is shared is a mindful persistence that scaffolds reflective action in this dynamic problem space.