Given the rise in business and technical writing (BTW) courses in writing programs and English departments, there is a need to develop not only a pedagogy for BTW but one that considers BTW’s institutional context. Context is a problematic focus for pedagogy, as we have seen in recent scholarship on student writing, theory of genre, and transferability of skills to other academic disciplines. That scholarship views the uncertain and unclear contexts of academic composition courses and their genres as preventing the full student understanding of genre that is needed for students to develop transferable writing skills. The continuation of that scholarship into BTW regards the instruction of BTW, as inside academia rather than within the workplace, as suffering from similar concerns with context. Rather than viewing BTW as downstream from or supplemental to composition instruction, this article argues that we should examine the genres of BTW as unique in their contingency to the writing process and yet just as able to pursue the goals of composition instruction and liberal arts education as first-year composition (FYC) courses. By focusing on the reader of BTW genres as determinant in the contingency of the writing situation, we see BTW as less problematic than FYC in its support of key composition goals such as the creation of original arguments and effective management of supporting materials. The awareness of readership and argumentation allows for a pedagogy supportive of contingent and part-time faculty as well as full-time composition faculty regardless of their respective professional experience.

Significant research has been conducted in the past several decades on best practices in providing feedback to students’ writing. Over the past two decades, feedback methods have evolved as writing classes have transitioned from face-to-face traditional classrooms to online classrooms and as technology has advanced. Written feedback has moved from handwritten notes in the margins of a paper to typed feedback using commenting tools. Audio feedback has gone from the cassette tape to the MP3 file. One of the most recent trends in feedback to students’ writing is in video form using screencasting technology. Video feedback through screencasting is especially beneficial in the technical writing classroom, where students often need to see the problems in their document. Students often benefit from seeing why they need more white space, why their graphics are not clear, why their alignment is off, why their instructions are not precise for their audience, why their numbered steps are not developed correctly, and why a host of other design principles could be improved. Moreover, video feedback through screencasting technology is becoming more popular in the workplace. Exposing students in technical writing classes to screencasting feedback has the potential not only to improve their writing but also to enhance their readiness for the workplace.

The idea that engineers are graduating without the necessary communication skills, specifically written communication, is not new. In the past 25 years, changes have been made both in accreditation requirements and in engineering program curriculums to work to improve students’ writing skills and make their writing better align with the needs of industry, and research is emerging that considers industry standards and how those standards can be applied to the classroom. One challenge is that the characteristics of quality writing are not always the same for the industry and the classroom, which can create problems for new graduates entering the workforce. This article looks at how effective writing is defined by both academics and professional engineers. Drawing on a study by Cunningham & Stewart (2012), which researched the criteria professional engineers consider essential in effective writing, this article provides the results of a survey of instructors of introductory professional and technical writing classes. The survey was designed to determine the characteristics the instructors use when grading writing assignments. The results are then compared to the characteristics of quality writing as identified by the engineers. In addition, the article reviews assessment rubrics to identify criteria used when evaluating writing and compares these criteria to the qualities of effective writing as determined by the Analytic Writing Continuum, part of the National Writing Project. After determining gaps between industry and academics, the article considers ways to bridge those gaps, including working with professional engineers to obtain sample documents, increasing reading and evaluation of engineering documents in professional and technical writing classes, and using interdisciplinary approaches to course design and instruction.

Writing is challenging for international students, who often possess inadequate writing skills and are required to adapt to the new learning environment. Students’ approaches to learning have been shown to relate to some constructs of writing conceptions. Nevertheless, little research exists on the relationship between such conceptions and approaches to learning. This study explores writing conceptions, approaches to learning, and their interrelationship among international students. The data were collected from 162 international students at a research-intensive Finnish university using the HowULearn Questionnaire and the Writing Process Questionnaire. Data analysis included bivariate correlations, confirmatory factor analysis, t-test, latent profile analysis, and ANOVA tests. The results demonstrated how approaches to learning correlated with the writing conceptions of the participants. Three profiles were identified: deep and organised students (72.8%), deep and unorganised students (14.2%), and unreflective and unorganised students (13.0%). These profiles were statistically different in all writing conceptions, including blocks, procrastination, perfectionism, innate ability, knowledge transforming and productivity. Overall, students’ ability to reflect on their learning and organise their studying played an important role in their writing conceptions. Based on the findings, the study provides strategies for developing writing for international students and suggestions for enhancing teaching in host universities.

Designing writing assignments for pupils is a complex task. The teacher must make a lot of choices regarding what type of text to write, what the purpose of the writing should be, which audience the texts should have etc. Although formulating assignments is important for writing instruction, there has been limited insight into teachers’ choices regarding these aspects or the significance of the different school subjects when making such choices. We explore findings from a Norwegian intervention study on writing in primary school. The data includes 687 writing assignments designed by teachers for pupils in grades 3–7. Gee’s concept of semiotic domains forms the theoretical scope. Our research question is: What opportunities and challenges arise in teachers’ assignment design regarding different functional dimensions and semiotic domains? We show examples of how semiotic domains can collide, and that the combination of acts of writing, purpose, and audience can lead to assignments that are almost impossible to answer in a good way. We visualize the complexity of assignment design in a model which also is transferable to other contexts of assignment design.

National assessments yield a description of the proficiency level in a domain while accounting for differences between tasks. For instance, in writing assessments the level of proficiency is typically evaluated with a variety of topics and multiple tasks. This enables generalizations from specific tasks to a domain. In (quasi-)experimental research, however, writing skills are often evaluated with a single task. Yet, conclusions about the effectiveness of the treatment are formulated on the level of the domain, which is, euphemistically put, quite a stretch. Although conclusions drawn about the effect of the treatment are specific to the task administered, they are often generalized to the domain without any form of reservation. This raises the question whether we can use the results of national assessments about differences between tasks in the analyses of experimental studies. In this paper, we demonstrate how the information of a baseline data set can be used as a kind of control condition in the analysis of an experimental study.

In this study, we examined how the explicit instructional use of paraphrasing guidelines can help international graduate students who are non-native English speakers to paraphrase information in text sources. This case study involved 14 graduate students enrolled in an academic writing class at a university in the northwest United States. Data were collected through seven sources: a background questionnaire, video of instruction, pretest, posttest, student task documents, stimulated recall interviews, and teacher interviews, which together addressed the three research questions. The data show that the participants’ perceptions of using the guidelines were positive and that their paraphrases in the posttest had improved according to the guidelines. The study concludes that the use of the guidelines should be accompanied by meaningful support through explicit instruction and sufficient practice over time. The implications of this study include recommendations for paraphrasing instruction and future research.

Drawing on critical theories of labor and commodification, this qualitative embedded case study explores how students experience alienation and intimacy in the work of writing for an English language arts class. Analysis of fieldnotes from 30 observations, student writing products, and reflective interviews with focal students and the teacher illuminated the meaningful assemblages where conditions of intimacy permeated instruction. Two practices supported intimacy in working conditions: knowledge about writing built through a collective process of noticing, and open-ended work time characterized by “managed nonmanagement” (, p. 176), or calculated flexibility in rules and expectations. Findings illustrate how a literacy practice might contribute to students’ experience of alienation or intimacy (or both) while writing, depending on conditions of industrialization and commodification. Even as the teacher strove to deindustrialize work, commodification through grades and standardized assessments heightened alienation in the writing environment. The study provides an example of an educational context governed by an industrial system of assessment where local actors (the teacher and students) disrupted alienation by working in smaller scales and more closely with texts.

This paper highlights the perspectives of first-generation students of color in their first year of college, and the ways in which they exercised agency in their writing. Framed by definitions of agency as mediated action that creates meaning, the paper reports on qualitative data collected from a summer writing program for first-generation students and students of color, and from writing samples and follow-up interviews with six students who participated in the summer program. Findings suggest that students in their first year of college leveraged their social and discoursal identities to offer new ways of understanding an issue. They also wrote using a translingual approach, integrating different discourses and forms of knowledge, and challenging views of academic writing as monolithic. The findings also suggest the link between awareness and action, meaning that what and how students wrote were informed by their awareness of writing and awareness of themselves as writers and cultural beings. The study’s findings have implications for advancing more nuanced views of agency and academic literacies, and redesigning writing instruction at the high school and college level.

We advocate for the inclusion of Indigenous studies within first-year writing and academic English courses, particularly those taught to multilingual, international students. We argue that asking international students to learn about local and international Indigenous issues productively intersects with coursework in academic English. Our pedagogical approach emphasizes metalanguage and allows Indigenous studies and explicit language instruction to work in tandem, thereby recognizing the agency of Indigenous scholars and guiding non-Indigenous students in relation to it.

Podcasting has been used by many scholars to teach ancient and contemporary rhetorical principles. We extend this conversation by examining narrative nonfiction podcasting and its potential to work toward social change. We suggest pedagogical principles that amplify the affordances of the genre and acknowledge its constraints for achieving social change.

Drawing from a qualitative study, we share findings that demonstrate how students articulate and express emotion in reflection. As they reflect on their writing identities, processes and products, peer and instructor feedback, and assess their work, the students in our study routinely discuss their emotions. Our essay closes with pedagogical strategies for helping students reflect on their thinking and feeling about writing.

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned.

This article reports on a study of 65 randomly sampled medical crowdfunding campaigns and five interviews with campaign authors. We found that authors innovated technical and professional communication (TPC) tools to narrate their illness experiences, coordinate digital audiences, and compel action. Thus, these authors practice TPC as care seeking and caregiving. Crowdfunding platforms, however, situate authors to individualize structural problems in ways that preempt collective action. We conclude with pedagogical implications of our findings.

The study explored six ESL university students’ behavioral, cognitive, and affective engagement with e-rater feedback on local issues and examined any changes in students’ engagement over two weeks. We explored behavioral engagement through the analysis of screencasts of students’ e-rater usage and writing assignments. We measured cognitive and affective engagement by analyzing students’ comments during the think-aloud protocol and reflection surveys. The findings indicated that the students had varying levels of engagement with the feedback. Behaviorally, all students used a range of revision operations to address errors based on the provided feedback. Cognitively, some students were more engaged than others. Affectively, students experienced both positive and negative reactions toward e-rater feedback. While some students’ engagement with feedback did not change over two weeks, others’ engagement grew more negative. We conclude that e-rater feedback could positively impact students’ accuracy in local aspects of writing if students are actively engaged with the feedback.

Student self-analysis and reflective work can be useful components of the writing classroom. This article examines a student self-diagnostic tool, developed by the author, which can elicit closer attention paid to the student’s own writing, analysis, and research processes and to other desirable outcomes the teacher’s learning plan may be pursuing. This tool, the Genre Understanding Sheet or GUS, has been successfully deployed in a variety of writing courses such as introductory composition, business and professional writing, and technical communication. The article examines the GUS and its development and rationale, reviews the underlying science and theory-work which inform its design, offers advice for integrating it into the writing classroom and making productive use of student output, and concludes with a discussion of benefits and the optimal motivation for teachers who choose to deploy it in their own classes. An annotated sample GUS is included.

Creating inclusive pedagogies that serve the whole student is a goal of many writing programs and writing centers, but it's difficult to find pathways to implement this goal. Employing responsive reflection to students' writerly identity work may offer instructors and writing center directors an accessible path to both encourage writerly identity development across contexts as well as reflect on pedagogical practice for inclusivity.

This exercise guides students in first- and second-year college writing classes through the process of developing their Zero Draft into a completed essay by asking them to respond to five reflective questions. This is a metacognitive project that asks students to expand the ideas in their zero draft to transition from their brainstorm to a finished essay. It is a scaffolded writing assignment that supports students to develop a robust portable writing process that they can transfer to future writing projects.

AbstractThis essay argues that the emphasis on spoken contributions in English and other humanities courses can exclude disabled students. The COVID-19 pandemic's necessitation of online learning has forced instructors to offer students multiple entry points for conversation—not only through spoken dialogue but also text threads, anonymous polls, and communal annotation assignments. Instructors’ shifts in participation guidelines both before and at the height of the pandemic reveal faculty members’ adoption of a disability justice pedagogy that privileges flexibility. Drawing on these transformations, the author offers pragmatic suggestions for how to value course contributions beyond students’ capacity to voice their reflections aloud. The relinquishment of rigid academic expectations for participation makes space not just for students with disabilities but also for other minority populations, including women students, nonbinary students, first-generation students, and students of color who contribute their expertise in more capacious ways than the standard, discussion-based classroom allows. To conclude, the author considers how instructors might replicate accessible online tools—from Zoom chats to asynchronous platforms—in the return to face-to-face teaching. These new and primarily virtual forms of engagement reframe participation not as individual contributions to conversation, but as ongoing work intended for the purpose of community growth and collective care.

Abstract The article recounts the author's experiences designing an undergraduate business writing course that bridges the long-standing divide between the traditional liberal arts and professionally-oriented forms of education. This course, organized around the television series The Wire, helps students grapple with the interpretive complexities that shape contemporary institutional life.

Abstract This article applies critical pedagogy to creative writing courses in the context of the modern transforming university. The author incorporates discussions of varied forms of capital, histories of cultural and capital production in the academy, and transforming canons into workshops to facilitate student contextualization of their own creative work.

Abstract This piece is a reflection on spatiality as critical approach in the classroom. The article focuses on a seminar taught during spring 2019, in which cognitive mapping and thirdspace were used as tools to analyze twentieth-century American literature. Through the elaboration of thirdspace provided by Edward Soja in his seminal work Thirdspace: Journeys through Los Angeles and Other Real and Imagined Places and Fredric Jameson's definition of cognitive mapping found in Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, this study offers examples of how literary cartography can be used as a tool in the classroom to reflect on the social and historical conditions that informed specific literary narratives.

Abstract In this essay, the authors discuss how collaborative course design fundamentally reshapes power structures within the classroom, opening traditional texts and canonical authors to generative readings. Through the design of an introductory-level literature course centered around a single celebrity author, Charles Dickens, the co-teachers detail how students came to see authorship as an inherently collaborative act, and through the lens of Foucault's “author function,” how these students came to see themselves as both collaborators and authors. This course, from inception to execution, was a collaborative effort grounded in feminist pedagogy, and as demonstrated by student feedback and the project examples included in the appendix, this pedagogical approach empowered the students to recognize themselves as co-creators of knowledge within a classroom.

AbstractIn response to an urgent need for better decision making in the public sphere, this article presents a method by which literary study can cultivate wisdom, defined as the ability to respond to problems with courses of action that maximize flourishing and minimize harm for all parties, both now and in the future. Drawing on the latest evidence-based learning principles, the article explains the pedagogical strategies and practices by which four wisdom-constituting thinking skills can be developed.

The title of this book is concerned with the axis between pedagogy and theory, creating a productive interaction and synthesis of the two, and so this review also focuses on these interrelations. Of all the major figures involved in the advent of theory on the American shores, Robert Scholes was the only one who had a burning concern with connecting the new ideas with teaching. When Jonathan Culler, acclaimed for his Structuralist Poetics (1975), visited my campus shortly after his book was published, I invited him to my graduate pedagogy seminar. He was tactful and gracious in talking to the future teachers, but he made it clear that at that point theory could and should not be applied to pedagogy any more than quantum mechanics should be taught to beginning physics students. Scholes, on the other hand, is in the line of pragmatic thinking that maintains abstract ideas have existence and meaning only when applied to concrete situations, where they can be clarified, tested, and revised. His early tetralogy, Structuralism in Literature: An Introduction (1974), Semiotics and Interpretation (1982), Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (1985b), and Protocols of Reading (1989) all deal with this back and forth movement. At the end of Textual Power, Scholes writes, “My enterprise in this book has been to take the teaching situation as a theoretical position from which to look at other theories that impinge upon the study and teaching of texts. Large sections of my own text were written first to clarify things for myself, my students, and my colleagues” (166). Later he places as his inscription to Protocols this sentence of Roland Barthes: “And no doubt that is what reading is: rewriting the text of the work within the text of our lives” (1). This approach resonates with John Dewey explaining to his wife that he was creating a school for children because the classroom is to philosophy what a laboratory is to scientists. Scholes's later works further entwine critical theories with educational structures and forms: The Rise and Fall of English (1998), The Crafty Reader (2001), English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality (2011), and Text Book: An Introduction to Literary Language (1988), coedited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer.One service that Ellen Carillo has performed for us in this well-edited and conceptualized volume is to include—and this is unusual for a Festschrift—generous examples of the subject's best work, not isolating them in an appendix, but strategically placing them among the essays most relevant to Scholes's concerns in his own. In rereading Scholes's pieces in this context, I am somewhat mystified that a writer as clear and persuasive as Scholes was not able to affect any widespread practical change, especially since his own writing outshines everyone else's in the volume. Although Scholes was able to create a new department, Modern Culture and Media at his home institution, Brown University, this department remained separate from the English department, and there seemed to be little interaction or collaboration between the two entities. At the end of After the Fall (2011), Scholes wistfully admits that he does not know of a single university that has adopted his suggestions for reshaping the teaching of English (142). This is partially due to the glacial rate of change in our educational institutions, but more because so many of those in the profession either have biases against his vision or do not fully comprehend it. Put briefly, that vision is what we would now call constructivist, student- and reader-centered, and radically democratic. The last two words are rarely put together but relevant now when too many politicians and Supreme Court justices appear to find universal suffrage obsolete.Scholes's vision is based more on immediate experience and process than definitive formulations and axioms and attempts to transcend or reconcile binaries such as theory/practice, consumption/production, analysis/creativity, concepts/specifics, and writing/reading. In this sense it is wholistic in the tradition of other educational thinkers such as bell hooks, who writes in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (1994: 85), What forms of passion make us whole? To what passions may we surrender with the assurance that we will expand rather than diminish the promise of our lives? The quest of knowledge that enables us to unify theory and practice is one such passion. To the extent that professors bring this passion, which has to be fundamentally rooted in a love for ideas we are able to inspire, the classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of the academy disappears.Ironically, Scholes's own commitment to the primacy of teaching is a central reason that his works have not found wide acceptance among many traditional academics, although most of them are teachers themselves. To begin with one of the apparent dichotomies, we can take one that Carillo embeds in her title, Reading and Writing, and quotes from the introductory chapter of an early Scholes book, Semiotics and Interpretation (1982): There is a significant difference between the states of consciousness involved in receiving a text and producing one. Specifically, the text we produce is ours in a deeper and more essential way than any text we receive from the outside. When we read, we do not possess the text we read in any permanent way. But when we make an interpretation, we do add to our store of knowledge—and what we add is not the text itself but our own interpretation of it. In literary interpretation we possess only what we create. (4)Before it is written or spoken, our knowledge remains in our own subjectivity, shadowy and inert. As we shape it into words, it becomes objective, something external to scrutinize, examine, revise. This understanding of the interweaving of reading and writing echoes through Scholes's corpus, reappearing in a later book: “In all of this, I have assumed that reading is a constructive process, a kind of writing. . . . Learning to re-weave the texts we encounter in the texts of our lives is the process I have been trying to describe, and, in particular, I have tried to show how teachers may share the process with students” (2011: 14). This resembles what Dewey meant when he urged the necessity of having any intellectual proposition “reinstated into experience” to be realized.Several of the pieces in Carillo's volume seek to place Scholes's work in its place in the historical contexts of our disciplines. In the best of these, “How Scholes Helped English Departments Confront the Death of the Author, the Loss of Readers, and the Emergence of Intertextual Literacies,” Thomas P. Miller describes Scholes's career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism and his intellectual commitment to using pedagogy to validate theory in practice. The pragmatic perspective was fundamental to his integrated model of literary and literacy theories. . . . Scholes pointedly critiqued the self-validating binaries that structured the “arche-institutions of English”: the hierarchy of literature over non-literature that positioned consumption over production in ways that divorced academic inquiry from the “real world.” (171)Miller goes on to note, Scholes's engagement with the creative potentials of work with literacy is critical to understanding the distinction between his pragmatic concern with knowledge in the making and the rather disengaged stance that often has been assumed by cultural studies and literary criticism. Scholes's pragmatic engagement with the creative process of reading to write was fundamental to his efforts to reform the discipline to connect with the interactive literacies that have given rise to the maker movement and the active learning pedagogies that have become a mainstay of curricular reforms in the last decade. (175)In other words, Miller's work can lead us to view Scholes as a connecting link between a powerful but often subterranean current in our past educational history running through Transcendentalists like Emerson and Alcott, pragmatists like William James and Dewey, and the Free School movement of the 1960s and 1970s forward to current trends like reader response criticism, constructivism, and active learning strategies such as the “flipped classroom.” In his more extensive earlier study, The Evolution of College English: Literary Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (2010), Miller elaborates in more detail: The marginal standing of teaching helps to explain why the theoretical challenges of the 1970s were rarely translated into new programs of undergraduate study. One proposal for curricular reform was Scholes's Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English. Scholes acknowledged that the “apparatus” of the discipline needed to be rebuilt from the bottom up, because it was founded upon binaries that had broken down—most notably the hierarchies of literature and “non-literature,” consumption and production, and the academic and “real” worlds. According to Scholes, once the autonomy of literature was called into question, the boundaries of the study came to seem contrived. . . . For an alternative framework, Scholes developed a pedagogically engaged vision of the transactional relations of writing and reading. . . . To break out of the “institutional sedimentations that threaten to fossilize” college English, Scholes looked to the classroom as a site of collaborative inquiry, with the model being the stance of the reader as a composer of meaning. (229–30)Although Miller does not make this connection, I see this marginalization of Scholes's viewpoint as similar to what happened to Louise Rosenblatt's progressive early work of reader response criticism, Exploring Literature (1938), which was buried by the increasingly hegemonic acceptance of the New Criticism and its master textbook, Understanding Poetry by Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, published in the same year. Rosenblatt, fortunately, has come back in fashion. The MLA has now republished the fifth edition of her book and a later work of hers adopts the term transaction as the central relation between reader and text. So there are hopes for Scholes's work too, not just as a citation in the history of theory, but as a living force in restructuring our disciplines.To circle back to the first quotation from Miller, I want to underline his comment about Scholes's “career-long engagements with introductory textbooks built on his scholarly background in practical criticism,” an aspect of Scholes's work that has not been given the attention it deserves in Carillo's collection. Text Book gives us the most specific sense of how Scholes applied his vision to the daily work with students and also suggests that this kind of work is best done in collaboration with both student feedback and with colleagues: all three editions were co-edited with Nancy Comley and Gregory Ulmer. Text Book intersperses literary works with creative exercises focusing on the students’ own lives, tracing how their experiences can be transformed into narrative structures and vice-versa. The achievement is elaborated in rich detail in Robin Dizard's “Stranger than Friction: Learning and Teaching Literary Studies Using TEXT BOOK” (2010). The article's extensive use of selections and assignments from the book is supplemented by extended responses of students and Dizards's teacherly work with them in deepening and interpreting these responses. Contrasting this article with Scholes's own writing suggests one fault in the latter; Scholes rarely includes student voices either in the classroom or from their writings to further clarify and support his ideas. He does quote from students in The Crafty Reader to show that they are befuddled by New Critical expectations, but he does not demonstrate the positive reverse of real students encouraged to connect poetry to their own lives. There is some of this in Carillo's volume, but too often we hear more from the somewhat hermetic dialogues of academics conversing with each other in staking out their own positions than an attempt to speak directly to teachers, administrators, parents, and even students. I call this style “Dissertationese,” where this writing is often found, but some critics have yet to outgrow it.To unfairly choose just one example, I find particularly hard to read Kelsey McNiff “From Argument to Invitation: Promoting Empathy and Mutual Understanding in the Composition Classroom” (117–32). The essay is a sound empirical analysis of an essay assignment designed to test Scholes's ideas on using reading and writing to extend empathy. But the writing is clogged by passive constructions and the almost compulsive need to use citations from the academic literature in support of almost every assertion, such as “Like Scholes, many have argued that educators therefore should seek to cultivate students’ empathic imaginations (Von Write 2002; Fleckenstein 2007; Gerdes et al. 2011; Leake 2016; Damianidou and Phtiak 2016; English 2016; Tomlinson and Murphy 2018; Mirra 2018) and that the humanities in particular encourage this habit of mind (Nussbaum 2010; Jurecic 2011, 13–15).” This reminds me of a colleague's spouse who once said, “Howard thinks I should speak for myself.” McNiff has done a solid piece of work, but I must ask, as I do often in dissertation defenses, who is the intended reader and what kind of work is it supposed to do in the world? A good counterexample to this kind of writing is that of Alfie Kohn, whose more professional books appear in mainstream presses but are also offered as articles in the popular press or turned into shorter audio versions that can be played in the car by teachers and parents.In contrast to McNiff's article, I would like to mention Douglas D. Hesse, who wrote an “Afterword” (253–60) using a much more accessible and personal style but just as insightfully rigorous as anything else in the volume. His appreciation of another of Scholes's textbooks, The Practice of Writing (1981), coauthored with Nancy Comley, is articulate and concise: What's remarkable to me about the book is the way it invites students to exercise the full range of language with a creative mélange of texts of all sorts with experiments whimsical and serious and serious, at levels from sentences to self-contained texts. It challenged, already forty years ago, the kind of fractured model driving English departments, not only in literary but also in writing studies. In the name of specialization and expertise, literature and writing kept genres and purposes and historical periods separate, leaving students to figure out (if they wanted, and most didn't) what any of these highly defined courses might have to do with one another—or the nonacademic world beyond. Scholes challenged those divisions and wasn't afraid to use tools of serious play to engage student writers. If students learned anything canonical, it would be an indirect effect of the main enterprise: cultivating textual power through interpretation and production intertwined. (255)In this deft description of only one of Scholes's projects, Hesse suggests how he reconciled all of the dualities discussed in this review and the volume itself. Further, Hesse's penultimate paragraph provides a helpful guide to the best insights of the other contributors to this volume. In his last paragraph, Hesse sees himself tending toward pessimism, “a consequence of having been long enough in the profession to see Scholes's ideas roll in, then out, like waves on Dover Beach,” but is also able to eloquently endorse Scholes for his enabling and constant optimism: “It was an optimism born of plentitude and play, impelled by a multitude of texts to be interpreted and texts to be made, those basic yet inexhaustible activities of reading and writing” (260). It is this optimism that helped sustain Scholes through his long and varied career, elaborating a fairly constant vision through a variety of materials and perspectives.We are at an inflectional point in educational reform now where radical innovators have to face the forces of anti-intellectualism and timidity. In a book that has become “conventional wisdom”—an oxymoron to my mind—Tinkering toward Utopia, the historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) argue that teachers and parents have a basic conception of school—graded classrooms, separated subject matters, high-stakes testing, and so on. And to violate any more than a small number of these elements is to be charged with something other than “education.” I think exactly the opposite approach is called for. For one thing, the authors suppose in their use of utopia that the current system is getting incrementally better, when it is clear that the opposite is true. But more seriously, that it is a “system” and not a historically fossilized set of practices that often do not fit together. We can begin to scrutinize every aspect of what we do in terms of viability, effectiveness, and humane concern and begin to rebuild from the ruins through better thinking in constant dialogue with actual practice.

Hannah Armstrong graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2018.Anna Barattin teaches American literature, world literature, and undergraduate writing classes at Georgia State University in Atlanta. Both her teaching and her scholarship focus on geocentrism, spatial literacy, and language variation. She worked as an editing contributor for the literary journals Studies in Literary Imagination and The Eudora Welty Review.Barclay Barrios is professor of English and the associate dean of undergraduate studies for the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters. His work focuses on queer theory, writing program administration, pedagogy, and computers and composition. He is the author of the freshman composition textbooks Emerging: Contemporary Readings for Writers (2010), now in its fifth edition, and Intelligence (2021).Martin Bickman is professor of English and President's Teaching Scholar at the University of Colorado Boulder, where he teaches courses in pedagogy and American literature. His book Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (2003) won the Outstanding Book Award from the American Education Research Association. He has also edited Approaches to Teaching Melville's Moby-Dick (1985) and Uncommon Learning: Thoreau on Education (1999) and authored American Romantic Psychology (1988) and Walden: Volatile Truths (1992). Next fall he will teach a course in the new Writing and Public Sphere minor, Writing for the Real World: Transforming Education.Mark Bracher is professor of English and director of the Neurocognitive Research Program for the Advancement of the Humanities at Kent State University.Ellen C. Carillo is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014); A Writer's Guide to Mindful Reading (2017); Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018); The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021); and the MLA Guide to Digital Literacy (2019). She is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks and collections. Ellen is cofounder of the Role of Reading in Composition Studies Special Interest Group of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) and has been awarded grants from the Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA), CCCC, and the Council of Writing Program Administrators (CWPA).Owen Farney was an honors student at Central Michigan University (CMU) where he earned a BS in education with teaching credentials in English/history 6–12. During his time as an undergraduate, he worked as a CMU Writing Center consultant and served as president of the CMU affiliate of the National Council of Teachers of English. As a CMU honors student, Owen completed a senior honors capstone project addressing the current state of queer young adult literature. Owen completed his student teaching at Allendale Middle School teaching 6th grade English.Kaylee Henderson is a doctoral candidate in English at Texas Christian University, where she teaches courses in the Department of English and the Department of Women and Gender Studies. Her teaching and research interests include nineteenth-century literature, women writers, and transatlantic political movements. Her previous courses include The Victorian Novel: Crossing and Patrolling Borders with Linda K. Hughes and From Work to Werk: The Politics of Women's Writing. She is currently completing her dissertation, “Words of Mass Destruction: Verbal Militancy in Nineteenth-Century Women's Political Writing.”Andy Hines is associate director of the Aydelotte Foundation at Swarthmore College. He researches models of the university posed by Black writers and Black social movements. His book Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism and the University (2022), recounts how mid-twentieth-century Black writers defined literature and critical thought through and against the institutionalization of literary studies in predominantly white universities. His writing has appeared in American Quarterly (2020), Public Books (2018, 2015), Criticism (2017), Blind Field (2016) and other venues. Hannah Armstrong and Kassie Moore attended the University of Southern Indiana and assisted with the production of “On Being Brought In.”Sofia Prado Huggins, a PhD candidate in English literature at Texas Christian University, has taught courses such as Bestsellers and the Business of Books, Women's Writing, and a composition course, Adapting Austen, which she discusses in her essay, “Teaching POC Adaptations of Pride and Prejudice at a PWI in 2020,” in Persuasions OnLine. Sofia's research and teaching interests include late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century global anglophone literatures, periodical studies, and the geohumanities. Her dissertation, “Blank Spaces: Global Geographies of Moral Capitalism in The Anti-Slavery Reporter, 1831–1833,” historizes the geographic and conceptual centering of whiteness in liberal progressivism in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century antislavery archives. Sofia is the editor-in-chief of Teaching Transatlantacism and the transatlantic Digital Anthology.Jason Maxwell is associate professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of The Two Cultures of English: Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric (2019) and coauthor, with Claire Colebrook, of Agamben (2016). His articles and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in Cultural Critique, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, and Rhetorica.Kassie Moore graduated with a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Southern Indiana in 2019. She currently teaches English in Evansville, Indiana.Clare Mullaney is assistant professor of English at Clemson University where she teaches courses on American literature, histories of editing, and disability theory. Her current book project, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text,” argues that acknowledging texts as made objects brings into focus how turn-of-the-century authors grapple with physical and mental impairments at the level of textual form. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Literature, Arizona Quarterly, J19, Disability Studies Quarterly, and the Atlantic.Jacob Stratman is in the middle of his twenty-third year as a teacher, at both the high school and university levels. He learned under a “teacher-centered” pedagogy, and he was trained, mostly, under a “student-centered” pedagogy. But it was on an airport shuttle in Pittsburgh at the beginning of his university teaching career, after a College English Association conference, where a fellow conference goer said that he learned long ago to resist those binaries and focus more on “truth-centered” pedagogy. Those insights during that fifteen minutes on the shuttle with that teacher, whose name Stratman never knew, haunt him each semester. Whether he's lecturing or conducting a class conversation, he asks how he is demonstrating virtues that lead all of us nearer to truth, instead of further away.Amish Trivedi is the author of three books of poetry, most recently FuturePanic (2021), as well as numerous chapbooks. His poems also appear in American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Kenyon Review, and other places. His critical work on poetry and music appear in the Iowa Review and The Rumpus. Trivedi has a PhD from Illinois State University and an MFA from Brown University.Angela J. Zito is teaching faculty with the University of Wisconsin–Madison Writing Center and Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC) Programs, where she currently serves as associate director of WAC and Madison Writing Assistance. She earned her PhD in English literary studies, which continues to inform her scholarship of teaching and learning. Her recent research has investigated the teaching and learning of close reading practices in composition courses and the design of writing assignments across disciplines to assess non-writing competencies.

This intervention study aimed to test the effect of writing process feedback. Sixty-five Grade 10 students received a personal report based on keystroke logging data, including information on several writing process aspects. Participants compared their writing process to exemplar processes of equally scoring (position-setting condition) or higher-scoring students (feed-forward condition). The effect of the feedback on writing performance and process was compared to a national baseline study. Results showed that feed-forward process feedback had an effect on text quality comparable to one grade of regular schooling. The feedback had an effect on production, pausing, revision, and source use, which indicates that it supported participants in self-regulating their writing process. Additionally, we explored the students’ perception of the feedback to get an insight into its strengths and weaknesses. This study shows the potential of writing process feedback and discusses pedagogical implications and options for future research.

In science disciplines, students need sufficient and well-designed support to successfully gain writing competence along the different stages of their writing development. This study examines effective inquiry-based writing pedagogies and the contextualization of scientific writing instruction for supporting student writers in the scientific community. The researchers first systematically reviewed effective pedagogical practices that can help students gain writing competence through inquiry-based learning, then explicated how scientific writing is situated in inquiry-based writing instruction (IBWI) with respect to text structures using a genre-based approach. A systematic review of 40 empirical studies published between 2000 and 2021 was conducted. The researchers examined the pedagogies, methods, and models that effectively support IBWI and identified some emerging trends that aim to raise undergraduates’ scientific writing communicative competence. Implications for how scientific writing should be situated in IBWI were provided to help disciplinary faculty respond more precisely to science students’ writing needs in tertiary settings.

It is important to understand multilingual students’ lived experiences and sense-making in their everyday written communication before rethinking the implementation of translingual writing in college composition classrooms. Unpacking multilinguals’ written communication across social and academic contexts, this exploratory qualitative study integrates digital ethnographic and interview methods to examine the first-semester communication experiences of 10 undergraduate students. The findings indicate that while participants engaged in translingual written communication as part of their lived experiences in social contexts, they were reluctant to draw upon their home language in academic settings. Based on the findings, I discuss the pedagogical implications of supporting multilingual students in college composition classrooms. I argue that instructors must reposition themselves as co-learners together with their multilingual students to enact a translingual stance in academic settings and reimagine meaningful written communication beyond English-only. This study sheds light on rethinking the pedagogical practices around implementing translingualism in college composition.

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This webtext uses four Artifacts—annotated video excerpts of class recordings— to demonstrate how web conferencing and collaborative word processing platforms can be used to bolster interactivity, teaching presence, and social presence in synchronous online writing classes.

This article raises awareness of how “we” language in writing centers can be both helpful and oppressive. Specifically, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements.Using Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s 2011 “Two-List Heuristic” as a theoretical framework for understanding and responding to oppressive language, I analyze research on the inclusive and exclusive linguistic characteristics of plural pronouns, including “we,” “our,” and “ourselves,” as they relate to writing center work. I then propose ways in which writing center members may construct responses to “we” language that challenges their values, beliefs, and experiences. This article intends to interrogate a common linguistic feature of writing center culture that can prevent its members from “talking back” to the center. Three semesters ago, I began my position as the Associate Director of a writing center in a mid-sized, religiously-affiliated university in the Midwestern region of the United States. Like many spaces in the Midwest, my university is characterized by politeness, whiteness, and football fanaticism—qualities that have been familiar to me since childhood. Although I am 500 miles from my hometown, I am comfortable in this environment where I easily blend in with the crowd: I am a white heterosexual cis-woman of European descent in my late thirties with a Ph.D. I share this information because my background, context, and positionality have certainly shaped the following analysis. On a cold and gloomy afternoon in mid-November of 2021, I held one-on-one meetings in my office with our new writing center tutors to discuss their research paper topics. Naya (pseudonym), a historically underserved undergraduate student tutor, sat across the table from me and began to share the framework of her research interests. She had prepared a proposal to improve our writing center’s tutor training module for working with multilingual students. As a multilingual student herself, Naya’s proposal was exciting and bold: she was interested in studying multilingual tutoring theories in order to create new pedagogical practices for our writing center. I understood Naya’s concern to stem from the myopic generalization of international students by writing center staff that she witnessed during her training. Yet when I asked her about the direction in which she wanted to take her research, her sentiments surprised me. She remarked, “I just don’t know who I am; am I the international student or the tutor? It’s really confusing.” As she went on to explain, her confusion was rooted in the “we” language used by experienced tutors during the tutor training module. When experienced tutors stood at the front of the classroom describing the ways “we work with international students,” Naya felt like she had to choose an identity. As a new tutor, she was supposed to identify with the tutoring “we”: those who work with international students. Yet, she was also the international student “we”: a group external to the tutors who were, at times, problematic for the tutoring “we.” After talking to Naya, I felt certain that although the language of “we” is supposed to create a sense of community and belonging in the writing center, this plural pronoun also has the power to exclude, confuse, and silence voices. As I began to reflect on this conversation, I realized that the language of “we,” “us,” and “our” is everywhere in writing center rhetoric. Our writing center’s mission statement, appointment confirmation notices, and first-time tutor meetings invariably include descriptions of how “we” do things in the writing center. Furthermore, the word “we” is ubiquitous in writing center discourse throughout the United States; language in daily emails on the [wcenter] listserv and publications in writing center journals demonstrate the prevalence of writing center “we” language. Yet this prevalence does not indicate a corresponding predominance of exclusionary plural pronoun use. Likewise, I am not suggesting the impossible or undesirable task of avoiding plural pronoun use. Rather, I want to argue that writing center “we” language is not always comfortable, inclusive, and welcoming. Naya’s confusion over writing center “we” language suggests that the plural pronoun “we” can function as a privileging and excluding language structure in the writing center environment. Thus, practitioners in the field need to be vigilant about examining and adjusting plural pronoun use, and this article will offer ways forward for becoming more vigilant. After Naya and I conversed, she began to pursue research on multilingual tutoring theories, and I began to listen closely for “we” language in our writing center’s discourse. My listening turned into writing when the call for this special issue was announced. The Peer Review editors of this special issue asked: “as writing centers embrace liberatory political stances, and as their users become more diverse and more aware of identity…do consultants, writers, and administrators with minoritized identities have opportunities to talk candidly back to the center?” (Natarajan et al., 2022, para. 5). Naya had taken the step of “talk[ing] candidly back to the center” in proposing improvements to the pedagogy of our writing center’s training course, and she did so as an international student of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). While talking back to the center requires time, support, a dialogue partner, and disciplinary knowledge, it also fundamentally requires language. It is this linguistic dimension that may provide an obstacle for historically underserved tutors, writers, and administrators to talk back to the center. If individuals with minoritized identities want to identify as the “we” of the writing center and also as the “we” that has been othered, what language is available to the author without making the problem sound self-focused? This analysis of “we” language may provide a window into why some writing center members feel prohibited from talking back to the center. This is not the first time “we” and “them” language has been problematized in writing center scholarship. Denny (2010) describes the pervasive tendency for writing center discussions to use “we” language to subtly dehumanize groups of people by sorting individuals into subjects and objects. He writes that writing center “talks, presentations, and keynotes index Others as objects for whom practical and instrumental learning applies, not figures for whom learning is necessarily transactional and collaborative (“we” can learn from “them,” “they” from “us”)” (p. 5). When “we” language is used to describe the subjective experience of writing center members in contrast with an objective “them,” the “them” group implicitly seems lesser than the “we” group because they are not afforded the same subjectivity of the “we.” For example, if tutors present a training module on working with international students and the tutors say, “we work with them,” this language implies a power dynamic where knowledge is held by tutors and less knowledge is held by international students. However, if the tutors say, “we work together,” the power dynamic shifts to one of equal knowledge or benefit. The “we” language in the latter example does not imply a lesser-than dynamic because the subjectivity of the “we” is afforded to both tutors and international students. Yet the tendency to use “we” and “them” language is more common than shared “we” language, both in speech and in writing. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown (2011) reflect on this phenomenon in the instructional context, where students use exclusive pronouns in papers and class discussions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown note that students often assume “readers will be from ‘their culture’ when they use pronouns like ‘we,’ ‘us,’ and ‘our’” (p. 26). Such assumptions occur in writing because they are part of thought and speech patterns conditioned by social and cultural interactions. Suhr-Sytsma and Brown remark that breaking these problematic plural pronoun habits is difficult. One of the ways to make it less difficult is to understand the difference between problematic and helpful pronoun use. The use of plural pronoun language in the writing center context is not surprising given the widely discussed adaptation of “we” language to corporate and business settings over the past few decades. This phenomenon has been reviewed and discussed in articles by Forbes, Harvard Business Review, and Fast Company. Because many writing centers share characteristics in common with the business world, analyses of plural pronoun language from business management and leadership resources have value in the writing center context. For example, scholars such as Kacewicz et al. (2014) have argued that using “we” language in a collaborative working environment demonstrates an outward focus and concern for others. This research suggests that individuals whose language reflects a group-oriented rather than self-focused tendency are more likely to attain leadership roles in the group and direct their group toward successful outcomes. Further, according to a study by Anchimbe (2016), a leader who has established rapport with other members of the group can use “we” language to “encourage or reprimand … [to help] members reassert their identity, solidarity, and prowess, restate their mission and determination to achieve it, and also bemoan and caution against [an] unfortunate predicament” (p. 516). Thus, “we” language can create group uplift and positive momentum towards pre-established goals and values. In the writing center, an example of “we” language as a leadership tool would be when a tutor suggests to their peers before the start of a shift: “let’s keep our earbuds out. That way, we can make sure to welcome tutees when they walk in.” Such “we” language directs tutors toward shared values of attention and hospitality. The tutor using the “we” language demonstrates an outward-focused attitude, showing concern for the values of their writing center and for the well-being of tutees who walk in the door. Hence, “we” language can act as a communication tool for group perspective-taking in the writing center. Yet corporate and business literature also warns against the potentially coercive nature of “we” language. For example, in his critique of the Harvard Business Review’s push for “we” language, Walpole (2018) argues that “we” language is used to “manipulate reality” (Improving Communication and Community section, para. 2). Its most offensive manipulation, according to Walpole, is that “we” language creates a false sense of team. Suggesting that “we” landed a deal or “we” gave a fantastic presentation when only one person acted sets up a disingenuous sense of team where no interpersonal bonding is expected. Likewise, “we” language allows a group to take credit when the credit is really due to an individual. Such behavior hearkens back to harrowed days of group work in high school when one person completed the brunt of the work on behalf of the rest of the group. Walpole argues, “did *you* really have much to do with landing the deal? If not, trying to share in the credit isn’t so noble” (Saying “We” is a Poor Substitute section, para. 6). In the business setting, this misuse of “we” language can be used to inflate a leader’s accomplishments while diminishing the success of those under the leader’s purview. When a leader shares collective credit for the success of an individual’s work under the guise of “we” language, the leader becomes a gatekeeper for the growth and promotion of their direct reports. Similarly, in the writing center, an administrative team needs to be discerning about its use of “we” language in creating a sense of team and in acknowledging individual accomplishments. I have briefly shared the surface-level arguments about the benefits and drawbacks of “we” language in the writing center. In the rest of the article, I consider ways that “we” language has the potential to perpetuate oppression by excluding individuals from writing center “we” statements. At stake in this article’s examination of “we” language is an understanding of the potential impact of plural pronoun use on tutoring pedagogy in two sets of relationships: administrators → tutors, and tutors → tutees. The theoretical framework I use for analyzing plural pronoun language in the writing center is guided by four principles from Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s (2011) “Two-List Heuristic for Addressing Everyday Language of Oppression” (p. 22). While “we” language is not necessarily always oppressive, Suhr-Sytsma and Brown contend that “an individual’s uses of oppressive language are often both unintentional and inseparable from broader discourses that reinforce oppression” (p. 14). As I discovered in conversation with Naya, the “we” language used during our writing center’s training module was unintentionally oppressive and nearly invisible because it was so ingrained in the regular discourse of the writing center. In light of this focus on commonplace discourse, I find four of the eighteen items in Suhr-Sytsma and Brown’s two-list heuristic particularly relevant for analyzing “we” language. To assist in clarity during analysis, I have added (a) and (b) notations after the original numbers in the two lists so that when the heuristic numbers are indicated later in this article, it will be easier to remember from which list the item came. Thus, this article will examine “we” language in relation to the following elements of the heuristic:

Multilingual learners whose dominant language is not English are often disadvantaged when their writing proficiency is judged against the Eurocentric standard English norm. Such deficiency models and deficit thinking devalue racially minoritized learners’ languages, leading to linguistic racism. A liberatory anti-racist, anti-oppressive, culturally responsive writing pedagogy was implemented at the Center for Teaching and Learning at a major university in Ontario, Canada. Eleven learners were analyzed in this one-month study. A mixed-method approach was used to analyze the impact of the implemented pedagogy based on several data sources, including learners’ reflective journal entries, transactional posts, and instructor feedback. The study shows the benefits of the writing pedagogy in helping learners improve their writing skills, agency, autonomy, voice, and critical thinking skills, as well as empowering them for emancipation and transformation. The study also reinforces the importance of practitioners’ shift from the provision of prescriptive and remedial feedback to personalized, learner-centered support by regarding learners’ languages and cultures as resources. Furthermore, de-emphasizing grammar while prioritizing critical thinking contributes toward dismantling the dominant monolith norm of standard English. Internationalization, immigration, and massification have increased cultural, linguistic, and socioeconomic diversity of learners in higher education. Learners are disadvantaged if their dominant languages are not English and if they are culturally unfamiliar with the knowledge system valued in higher education that privileges Eurocentric, White, middle-class habitus (Sinclair, 2018). These learners are oppressed by a system that values standard English; their low proficiency in English positions them at a cognitive, affective, and sociocultural distance that is far from the White racial habitus. The prevalent thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds views their challenges to be the result of endogenous deficits in the learners because of who they are when the learners enter higher education. The burden of supporting these learners has been borne by writing centers. This paper advocates that educators start to recognize that supporting our diverse learner body necessitates a collective awareness of how the pervasiveness of deficit thinking about learners from diverse backgrounds is intertwined with racism. This racism is “so deeply and invisibly enmeshed into thinking, interactions, systems, practices, and institutions, that disparities between Whites and people of colour are assumed part of a natural and inevitable order” (Anya, 2021, p. 1056). Acknowledging the seeming invisibility of the enmeshed racism in higher education, it is important to establish a risk-free, friendly, collaborative, cooperative, and inclusive space for racially minoritized learners to experience equal learning opportunities in higher education. This article advocates increasing writing center’s support with a proactive liberatory pedagogy that enables learners to expand their English linguistic repertoire. This latter support enables learners to develop competence and confidence in communicating ideas in the ways that allow them to be their authentic selves.  Hence, they are in better positions cognitively, affectively, and socioculturally to work on their assignments. This article presents how adding culturally responsive pedagogy as a nuanced overlay on the liberatory learner-driven and instructor-facilitated pedagogy supported learners with extremely low English language proficiency in developing their writing skills during a one-month timeframe.

Recent translingual, CLA, and sociocognitive scholarship call for increased attention to language and show enduring interest in language in composition. This article suggests these calls persist but don’t succeed because of composition’s limiting habitus: the norms and inertia propelled by U.S. linguistic miseducation and the field’s uneven attention to language. To date, composition has emphasized language ideologies or language itself, but not both together. To change habitus, we need consciousness-raising as well as alternative approaches in encounters with language. This article historicizes attention to language in composition in three traditions, then categorizes the main challenges to attention to language in the field, then offers two pedagogical interventions: (1) developing course language acknowledgements, and (2) analyzing diverse linguistic patterns. The article closes with conceptual shifts important for connecting social and linguistic knowledge.

Universities across the globe have begun to invest in transdisciplinary research: a complex form of collaboration that places divergent disciplinary specialists and community members in participatory research aimed at addressing an applied research question. For a collaboration to succeed in this knowledge work, participants must engage in radical boundary crossing among disciplinary and community knowledge cultures wherein language is the substance of these boundaries and crossings. Effective collaboration, communication, and writing are essential to the success of transdisciplinary research, but composition research on collaborative writing has yet to address what collaboration looks like in transdisciplinary settings. This article offers a theoretical synthesis that brings transdisciplinary research theory into conversation with composition theory and pedagogy by providing an overview of the core principles of transdisciplinary research, offering an activity systems interpretation of transdisciplinary research, and outlining a framework for incorporating transdisciplinary collaboration into university composition programs.

This article explores the sources of student dispositions toward rhetorical approaches to first-year writing instruction through a case study of Lora, a particularly motivated writing student. The study traces Lora’s performance and development of her identity through the imparting of personally meaningful objectives like “standing out” and “standing up for the right things” to particular activities across her primary, secondary, and university education. Lora’s attributing of these personal objectives to certain activities but not others is the construction and maintenance of her identity and correlates with her exhibition of generative dispositions. I argue that, in Lora’s case, dispositions are attitudinal and affective expressions of how and to what extent Lora has attributed personal meaning to a social activity in the process of identity formation. I then show how Lora identified my first-year composition (FYC) course with her personally meaningful goal of standing out as a student and, consequently, exhibited generative dispositions and productive learning practices to the challenges of developing a more rhetorical approach to writing. I conclude by suggesting that continued research on writing-related transfer must situate inquiry within the broader process of each individual’s repurposing of meaningful objectives across experience.

This program profile describes the establishment and development of the English Language Learner Writing Center (ELLWC) at Miami University. The Center’s mission is to help multilingual (ML) students whose first language (L1) is other than English build writing skills while improving their academic English proficiency. The ELLWC’s profile details peer consultants’ professional training for supporting ML writers’ academic literacy development. Finally, the profile shares ELLWC assistance for faculty members who are interested in making their pedagogy more accessible and inclusive for linguistically and culturally diverse students.