This study examines how and why 20 instructors (17 tenure-line and 3 nontenure-line) in introductory service courses enact their pedagogical values and address current concerns (e.g., personal branding, LinkedIn, and applicant tracking systems) when teaching résumés and cover letters. Research methods included a demographics survey, qualitative interviews, and critical discourse analysis of assignment sheets and deidentified student examples. Results provide an opportunity to renegotiate gaps between Business and Professional Communication’s research and pedagogical methods, shifting from overemphasizing formatting and checklists and toward understanding job applications as workplace genre ecologies to encourage deeper learning.

Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age of Misinformation And Disinformation (2021) joins ongoing engagement with the topics of post-truth rhetorics (Carillo, 2018; McComiskey 2017; McIntyre 2018), evolving technologies in composition (Laquintano and Vee, 2017; Craig, 2017), and literacies pedagogies for our current moment (Colton and Holmes, 2018; Vee, 2017). Stemming from renewed interest in fake news after the 2016 election, the effects of the Trump presidency and its impacts in literacy education are represented throughout. This collection of 18 essays edited by Literacy in Composition (LiCS) journal editors Tara Lockhart, Brenda Glascott, Chris Warnick, Juli Parrish, and Justin Lewis continues the work of their 2017 special issue, "Literacy, Democracy, and Fake News." By bringing together "a range of perspectives---from literacy professionals in higher education, K-12, journalism, information technology, and other fields" (p. 2), the collection models a central condition for teaching within this context: to combat misinformation and disinformation, it is necessary to take a collaborative, interdisciplinary approach that expands outside of academic settings and brings together a wide range of expertise. Supporting this goal, the collection features six interviews moderated by Tara Lockhart. Each interview engages with a professional and/or educational staff, including social media strategists/curators/editors and curriculum/program coordinators, to explore how misinformation and disinformation is affecting all of us. Thus, Literacy and Pedagogy in an Age Of Misinformation and Disinformation "creates a polyphonous interrogation" (p. 6) to open up spaces and "opportunities for different kinds of literacy workers to hear and learn from each other---a networked approach that echoes the patterns of information ecologies themselves" (p. 6). Readers are invited to engage with the collection through "four essential threats that emerge most urgently from the collection's contributions" (p. 8). These include: 1) keywords and definitions; 2) contextualized praxis and pedagogy; 3) rhetorical analysis; and 4) "citizenship and civic literacies" (p. 13) based on people's different positionalities relating to misinformation and disinformation---as students, professors, journalists, social media specialists, etc. However, as readers will find, other organic pathways emerge based on format (curricular/course design, interviews, etc.) and context (higher education, K-12, online environments, etc.). Ultimately, it is within this complex web that we find a sustained engagement with practical and tangible strategies, pedagogies, and processes to think critically about how we combat misinformation and disinformation inside and outside of the classroom.

As a component of the Community of Inquiry Framework, social presence is typically defined as students “feeling real” enough to interact with and learn from peers online. This article complicates social presence for an online writing instruction (OWI) context, differentiating between social presence, social comfort, attitudes about online learning, and social learning. The study was initially designed to examine graduate students’ perceptions of social presence as an element of online teaching and learning in two sections of an Online Composition Pedagogy course offered in Spring 2020 and Summer 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic intensified the project, since students were now learning about hybrid and online pedagogy against the backdrop of their own experiences as emergency remote students and teachers. Analysis of 21 students’ reflections written during the courses indicates that distinguishing between social presence per se and social comfort, attitudes, and learning helps to account for the individual and social contexts of course participants. Ultimately, this article argues that simply inviting students to “feel real” or positioning yourself as a “real” instructor is not sufficient for establishing the types of social interactions that composition studies values.

This study documents the author’s experience reflecting on eight semesters of informal student evaluations of teaching in the process of updating his teaching methods for second-semester composition. He finds that reflective teaching practices provide a powerful methodology for engaging with the opinions of two-year college students, which can lead to a more productive focus on writing college essays in the composition classroom.

In this essay, we offer the “investigative pivot” as a framework for teaching rhetoric researchers how to orient and withstand being re-/dis-/oriented by the research process. Investigative pivoting indexes how a researcher responds to material conditions under which they collect and analyze data. To illustrate investigative pivots, we present and analyze pivot narratives from four graduate student researchers. Drawing on the analytic power of E. Cram’s rhetoric of orientation, these pivot narratives detail how we negotiate infrastructural, ideological, and institutional influences on our research process. When adopted, the investigative pivot prompts researchers to anticipate, recognize, and respond to the material-discursive hurdles of life and learning that follow us into our research sites. Such a framework, we argue, facilitates simultaneous methodological and pedagogical opportunities for students, teachers, and researchers of rhetoric.

Hewett and Bourelle (2019) have collected a series of essays aimed to help program administrators (PAs) develop and fine-tune online training and professional development programs in technical and ...

Writing in history places high demands on students and is a skill that requires explicit instruction. Therefore, teachers need to be able to teach this in an effective way. In this study, the writing-instruction was designed by a teacher, instead of researchers, as part of a professional development program in the Netherlands. The lessons combined writing and historical reasoning instruction, based on principles of effective writing instruction, including strategy-instruction, modeling, prewriting, and peer-interaction. The effects of these lessons were investigated in a small-scale pilot study, which consisted of a pre-test post-test quasi-experimental design, in which eighty-nine 11th grade students participated (39 in the treatment condition and 50 in the comparison condition). Dependent measures included text quality, writing process measures, students' knowledge of writing and their self-efficacy. Students in the treatment condition wrote longer and higher quality texts, spent more time writing, paused more while writing and their knowledge of writing was higher at post-test than for students in the comparison condition. No effects were found for self-efficacy. Furthermore, significant correlations were found between text quality and writing process measures, but not for knowledge of writing and self-efficacy. Overall, the effectiveness of this teacher-designed intervention seemed satisfactory, as it resulted in greater knowledge of writing and better-quality writing in his history classes.

Modeling, by demonstrating and explaining the cognitive processes involved in writing, has been shown to support writing development. Less often have specific disciplinary aspects of teaching with models been investigated. We draw on research in English Language Arts and apply it in social studies inquiry contexts to propose a framework for teaching models of thinking and writing that offers teachers and researchers new perspectives on the discipline-specific work of modeling. This framework accounts for three modes of instruction – use of models (a tool or a text), demonstrating and explaining, and co-constructing model texts with students – and describes eleven instructional practices that support instruction across these modes. We analyze data from three years of social studies instruction to show how two teachers enact these practices across the three modes to highlight the disciplinary thinking and processes that support writing social studies arguments with sources, highlighting the ways students can actively participate in teaching writing with models. In addition, we consider the role of the curriculum in this work. We show how writing instruction can address disciplinary ways of thinking in social studies and illustrate the potential of the framework for guiding researchers’ and practitioners’ work on writing instruction across disciplinary contexts.

Abstract This article develops a theory of postcolonial queer pedagogy through reflections on teaching nineteenth-century literature at the National University of Singapore. Students draw on their experiences living in a culture torn between liberal and illiberal tendencies and recognize that such contradictions exist in both the Western and non-Western world.

In this book, published in the CCCC Studies in Writing and Rhetoric series, Mara Holt provides a historical overview of collaborative pedagogy in US writing classrooms. In fact, Holt argues that collaborative writing pedagogy reflects and is shaped by its historical context. The book defines collaborative learning broadly, as “a pedagogy that organizes students to work together in groups” (1). Although she focuses on collaborative writing, Holt casts a wide net to capture writing classroom practices that she sees as applications of John Dewey's philosophy of American pragmatism. Holt argues that the American pragmatism espoused by Dewey is enacted in many collaborative writing practices, allowing those pedagogies to transform classrooms into training grounds for participatory democracy.Holt, who is professor and director of composition at Ohio University, intentionally operates both as a historian and as a writing studies scholar. The book has roots in Holt's (1988) history-based dissertation, “Collaborative Learning from 1911–1986,” submitted over thirty years ago, and in what the composition theorist James Berlin (1987) calls the significance of history in writing studies. Holt identifies a social-constructivist perspective in Dewey's philosophy of pragmatism that aligns with her argument that collaborative learning practices are shaped by their temporal context. Pragmatism, Holt says, offers general principles to ground education: 1) a focus on praxis; 2) knowledge creation as social, and collaboration as potentially “authoritative” (6); 3) the importance of critical thinking; and 4) the classroom as a place to model democracy and prepare students to participate in it. While Holt admits that Dewey probably never used the term collaborative (12), she implies that his principles are enacted in the most democratic collaborative learning practices.After a chapter of introduction, the chapters of Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice each provide case studies of collaborative learning in US writing classrooms at a transformational moment in US political or pedagogical history. In the introduction, Holt asserts her underlying thesis that a historical overview of collaborative writing pedagogy is needed to help new generations of writing teachers understand that they are part of a tradition of using collaborative writing in the classroom for democratic pedagogical purposes. Holt also argues that a historical perspective is necessary for educators to fully understand and assess collaborative writing practices. Chapters 2 and 3 outline collaborative learning in writing classrooms during the Progressive Era and the Cold War; chapter 4 considers the impacts of the Civil Rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. Chapters 5 through 7 consider moments of pedagogical shift—feminist theory, the creation of writing centers, and computer-mediated collaboration. The book concludes with a chapter in which Holt reflects on the future of collaborative learning as it intersects with three current movements: globalization, posthumanism, and Black Lives Matter.In some ways, Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is a contemporary complement to Anne Ruggles Gere's (1987) Writing Groups: History, Theory, and Implications. Writing at a time when social-constructivism was coming into its own, Gere outlines a theory to explain how writing groups, the collaborative writing pedagogy that she focuses on, are evidence of writing as a socially constructed activity. Holt's book, on the other hand, takes as accepted theory that writing is socially constructed and links that social interaction to Dewey's pragmatism. As a result, Gere and Holt share the notion that collaborative writing is affected by historical context. Like Gere, Holt includes historical background for the pedagogies she discusses, but Gere begins her history in the colonial era, starting at an earlier moment in US history than Holt, who extends the time line of collaborative writing into the twenty-first century.In addition to being a thesis-based history book, Holt's Collaborative Learning as Democratic Practice is part memoir. Holt weaves over forty years of personal experience as a writing studies scholar into her narrative. In the preface, Holt notes that her “first formal interaction with collaborative learning was at Kenneth Bruffee's Brooklyn College Institute in Peer Tutor Training and Collaborative Learning in 1980” (ix). Through her affiliation with the Brooklyn Institute she met Peter Elbow, Stanley Fish, Carol Stanger, John Trimbur, Harvey Kail, and Peter Hawkes. She read texts by Lev Vygotsky, Clifford Geertz, Richard Rorty, Thomas Kuhn, John Dewey, and Paulo Freire. Her experiences at the Bruffee institute led Holt to pursue a PhD at the University of Texas at Austin, where she met James Berlin, who was a visiting professor from the University of Cincinnati. Holt's dissertation director was Lester Faigley. Holt also acknowledges Victor Villanueva as a major influence. The array of scholars that Holt was taught by, wrote with, and thought with shows the depth of her connection to the foundation of the field. Her connection and experience in the field lends credibility both to her authority to survey the history of collaborative learning within the field and to select case studies not just with an eye to proving her point, but because they were some of the most important developments of collaborative learning in the field at that moment.Sometimes, however, these personal details can distract from her argument; they add names and dates to case studies already crowded with such information. Some personal details may also distance Holt from readers when she recalls memories in a way that requires insider knowledge. For example, she references the iteration of the “CUNY Graduate School on 42nd Street,” which she attended as the “pre-Giuliani pornographic version,” which assumes knowledge of both the pre- and post-Giuliani versions of the building (5). The text also includes other unnecessary details. For example, Holt notes that 1930s progressivism affected how first-year writing programs were administered; that's interesting history about first-year writing, but it says little about collaborative learning.Overall, Holt effectively argues that collaborative learning in writing classrooms was shaped by its historical context. For example, during the labor movements and nascent socialism of the 1930s, pedagogies emerged that were based on collective, student-centered practices. Likewise, during the rise of Nazism and Fascism in World War II, when international collectivist movements were viewed as oppressive, the use of collaborative pedagogies declined. In addition, Holt demonstrates that collaborative writing practices decades apart can mimic each other, proving her point that a historical knowledge of collaborative writing might prevent reinvention. For example, under the “Oregon Plan” of the 1950s, students critiqued each other's writing before revising it to be turned in to the teacher. These examples of peer critique foreshadowed Bruffee's peer revision of the 1970s, but Holt presents no causal link between the two pedagogies. In fact, Holt stresses that, while collaborative learning practices of one era may seem similar to those of another, their purposes will vary because their proponents are responding to different historical contexts and may be rejecting rather than amplifying democratic values. In the case above, Holt says that the Oregon Plan arose in a 1950s context in which students interacted with each other's texts suspiciously, whereas in Bruffee's context, students were encouraged to depend on classmates for educational gain.In chapter 6, Holt argues that writing centers, mostly through peer tutoring programs, have been key to the development of collaborative writing pedagogy. She also outlines current historical situations to which writing centers have responded in recent decades, including increasing numbers of underprepared and international students, and the shift from alpha text to multimodal composition. In focusing on the internationalization of writing centers, Holt also notes that American English is no longer the assumed standard in US writing centers and that institutions around the world have created writing centers of their own.In chapter 6 Holt traces the advent of computer-mediated collaboration in writing pedagogy by outlining how writing centers responded to the introduction of computers. In chapter 7 she extends her analysis of computer-mediated collaboration into the twenty-first century by acknowledging that much collaborative learning in writing classrooms is now mediated by technology. The tech-mediated case studies Holt considers in chapter 7 are the Daedalus Integrated Writing Environment at the University of Texas in the 1980s and the more recent use of wikis in writing instruction. While Holt asserts that such tech-mediated pedagogies are “solidly connected to Deweyan/Bruffeean theory and practice” (109), her analysis overlooks the ideology of the infrastructure that supports tech-mediated collaboration—the technology itself. As a result, it may be that an updated version of a Deweyan/Bruffeean framework is needed to analyze collaborative learning in an increasingly tech-mediated classroom. As Holt persuasively shows, collaborative pedagogies in writing classrooms often embody democratic ideals, so a framework based on egalitarian principles is appropriate for their analysis, but perhaps that framework needs to have the capacity to analyze the infrastructure mediating the collaboration as well as the collaboration itself. Such a theoretical framework might be technofeminism, a framework concerned with issues of equity and access, but which also accounts for the ideology of the technology (Bates, Macarthy, and Warren-Riley 2018).Some readers may balk at the notion of examining collaborative writing pedagogies through any sort of theoretical framework at all. Indeed, educators from many ideological persuasions have used collaborative writing to help students improve their writing and thinking. Rather, what Holt implies is that collaborative writing almost by definition embodies elements of Dewey's democratic goals for education and that to practice collaborative writing is to enact Deweyism. Holt makes a strong case that collaborative writing pedagogies reflect the full context of their historical moment, and that many of them reflect Dewey's ideas of social reform; however, her survey also demonstrates that in an age of technology-mediated classrooms, a framework that incorporates the perspectives of colleagues who study technology through a lens of equity may be a way to productively analyze collaborative writing pedagogies in the future.

Gautam Basu Thakur is associate professor of English and director of the critical theory minor at Boise State University, where he teaches theoretical psychoanalysis, postcoloniality and globalization studies, and literature of the British Empire. His books include Postcolonial Theory and Avatar (2015), Lacan and the Nonhuman (coedited, 2018), Postcolonial Lack (2020), and Reading Lacan's Seminar VIII (coedited, 2020).Saradindu Bhattacharya teaches at the Department of English, University of Hyderabad, India. His recent publications have been in the domains of trauma studies, young adult literature, and the pedagogy of English. He has been teaching cultural studies, Renaissance literature, and new literatures in English at the postgraduate level. Additionally, he has also taught elective courses on nation, media, and popular culture and on children's literature. He particularly enjoys teaching English poetry and reading dystopian fiction.Jolie Braun is curator of modern literature and manuscripts at The Ohio State University Libraries, where she oversees the modern literature and history collections and provides special collections-based instruction. Her research interests include women publishers and booksellers, zines, and self-publishing. Her recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, American Periodicals, and Textual Cultures: Texts, Contents, and Interpretation.Craig Carey is associate professor of English at the University of Southern Mississippi. His research and teaching focus on nineteenth-century American literature, book history, media theory, and game studies. His scholarship has appeared in journals such as American Literature, American Literary History, and Arizona Quarterly, among others. He is currently working on a manuscript that explores the relationship between authors, archives, and invention in the age of realism.Moira A. Connelly is associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, TN. She has published in Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research interests include equity in collaborative writing, writing transfer, writing about writing, responding to the writing of multilingual students, community college teaching, and applying ideas from the academy to activist spaces.Jathan Day is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research explores how writing instructors’ organizational and design decisions in the Canvas LMS affect the ways their students write and learn.Cassandra Falke is professor of English literature at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where she teaches an introduction to literature, literary theory, romanticism, and contemporary fiction. She is the author of The Phenomenology of Love and Reading (2016) and Literature by the Working Class: English Autobiography, 1820–1848 (2013) as well as articles and book chapters on literary theory, phenomenology, romanticism, working-class writing, and liberal arts education. She has edited or coedited five collections and special issues.Paul Feigenbaum is associate professor in the Department of English at Florida International University and coeditor of the Community Literacy Journal. His research, teaching, and engagement interests include community literacy, public rhetoric, and the intersections between rhetoric and psychology. His scholarship has appeared in journals including College English, Reflections, and Composition Forum. His first book, Collaborative Imagination: Earning Activism through Literacy Education, was published in 2015.Dustin Friedman is associate professor in the Department of Literature at American University in Washington, DC. His fields of research and teaching are Victorian literature and culture, aestheticism and decadence, queer theory, the history and theory of aesthetics, and global nineteenth-century writing. He is the author of Before Queer Theory: Victorian Aestheticism and the Self (2019). His writings have appeared in Studies in Walter Pater and Aestheticism (2019), the Journal of Modern Literature (2015), ELH (2013), Literature Compass (2010), and Studies in Romanticism (2009).Helena Gurfinkel is professor of English at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where she teaches primarily critical theory and Victorian literature and culture. She is the author of Outlaw Fathers in Victorian and Modern British Literature: Queering Patriarchy (2014; paperback 2017) and is currently writing a book on the Soviet television and film adaptations of the works of Oscar Wilde. She has published extensively in pedagogy, literary and film studies, gender studies, and critical theory. She is editor of PLL: Papers on Language and Literature.Sarah Hughes is a PhD candidate in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, where she also teaches in the English Department Writing Program. Her research explores how women use multimodal discourse—grammatically, narratively, and visually—to navigate online gaming ecologies.Andrew Moos is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. His research focuses on how writing instructors can and are using antiracist assessment and feedback practices in writing classrooms to empower students.Julie Sievers is founding director of the Center for Teaching, Learning, and Scholarship at Southwestern University, where she also teaches. At the time of this research, she was teaching literature and writing courses at St. Edward's University, where she also directed the Center for Teaching Excellence. Previously, she taught English and composition on the tenure-track at Denison University and in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin. She has published on literature, pedagogy, and faculty development in the William and Mary Quarterly, Early American Literature, the New England Quarterly, To Improve the Academy: A Journal of Educational Development, and the Journal of Faculty Development. She is currently studying annotation pedagogy in the context of first-year seminar courses.Danielle Sutton is a PhD candidate in English studies at Illinois State University. She works at the intersections of life writing, children's literature, and memory studies and is especially interested in comics and verse memoirs of childhood. She lives in Normal, IL.Kathryn Van Zanen is a PhD student in the Joint Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan. Her research centers on ethical negotiation in writing and writing instruction, particularly among raised-evangelicals writing back to their home communities on social media.Crystal Zanders is a poet, educator, activist, and public speaker from Tennessee. As a Rackham Merit Fellow in the Joint PhD Program in English and Education at the University of Michigan, her research focuses on Black teachers’ use of African American English in pre-integration classrooms in the South.

AbstractThis article identifies in contemporary literary theory a new optimism about the power of literary texts. The medium of this power is not language, ideology, or form but readers open to being changed. Drawing on phenomenology, the article discusses methods for making literary theory students open to and aware of such change, suggesting that hope is the grounding condition for any effective teaching act as well as an effective ground for reading in an era of globalization.

Abstract Five graduate students reflect on their experiences in multiple roles to address the question, What does a good teacher do now?—during a pandemic, in a moment of reckoning with white supremacy, in the face of uncounted griefs and challenges. We contend that good teachers craft communities of care for students, colleagues, and themselves. We advance trauma, accessibility, surveillance, and labor as particular sites for that project.

AbstractSelf-publishing is a topic not typically discussed in the literature classroom, yet it can provide an opportunity to highlight voices and works from the margins, think critically about the publishing methods, and promote the study of the book as a cultural artifact. This article provides a case study on using special collections materials to teach undergraduates about self-published American literature. It includes suggestions about how to find and select materials, details about facilitating a discussion and a hands-on activity on the topic, and recommendations for adapting these ideas for other teaching contexts.

The authors present the results of a study of a three-way international collaboration project among one Hungarian class and two classes from Michigan and Washington, respectively. This multifaceted study focused on business planning, web design, and accessibility with the aim of investigating the effect of accessibility instruction on the production of business plans and websites. The distinguishing feature of this study was its emphasis to orient the three student groups on disability and accessibility issues from the perspective of the critical social model of disability advanced by disability studies theorists. The researchers collected quantitative and qualitative pre/postproject survey data from their three classes. They combined this data with the text of student emails sent among the project teams and instructor notes about their teaching to arrive at conclusions about the effectiveness of the collaboration using a mixed-methods approach. The results from the data analyses revealed significant benefit of the client–provider relationships among the three classes and the accessibility instruction provided by the Washington class to the other two classes on the business plans and websites.

Introduction: Accessibility training frequently relies upon checklist-based approaches to convey important standards and guidance. Such approaches limit scalability and acknowledgement of the user experience. About the case: A certificate program for faculty and graduate teaching assistants who are instructors of record at one university provided an opportunity to develop a learning module about dyslexia. Situating the case: Dyslexic students frequently require alterations to both teaching approaches and document design; however, studies show that some faculty do not see or feel a need to offer any accommodations for this dis/ability. Research indicates that train-the-trainer approaches to accessibility training offer improved scalability and efficacy when it comes to engaging and acknowledging the needs of dis/abled communities. Amplifying voices from the dis/abled community in training also personalizes the need to make content accessible. Approach: This article covers the module's creation and implementation via the iterative Analysis, Design, Development, Implementation, and Evaluation (ADDIE) method. In doing so, it provides a framework for creating similar modules that industry practitioners and faculty can implement within their own organizations. Results/discussion: The COVID-19 pandemic led to fewer participants in the module than anticipated; however, preliminary feedback suggests the approach's efficacy. Conclusion: A train-the-trainer approach that integrates testimonials from the dis/abled community offers a user-focused means of disseminating accessibility guidelines that organizations should consider if looking for rapid scalability for new accessibility initiatives.

The book targets two main audiences. It primarily addresses students and instructors of technical communication, and also addresses industry practitioners. The book provides practical and theoretical examples that both the primary and secondary audiences can incorporate in their pedagogy and industry practices. The author includes learning activities at the end of each chapter that teachers/instructors can emulate in the technical communication classroom. The approaches in the book make it a significant contribution for the teaching and practice of technical communication. The author admonishes students, instructors, professionals, and industry practitioners to change technical communication by paving the way for design thinking and making. He summarizes the need to adopt design thinking as a methodology in technical communication to make designs user- and human-centered, and to advocate for social justice in our approaches to teaching, learning, and practice in the field. Thus, he calls for a rethinking of technical communication pedagogy “to focus less on genres.". The author also argues that design thinking is a necessary component of technical communication and shows how it can be incorporated into technical communication practice and pedagogy. The examples and learning activities presented in the book make it a valuable guide for students, teachers, and practitioners of technical communication. Instructors of technical communication will find the learning activities presented throughout each chapter of the book particularly useful.

Introduction: This article describes our work to build an undergraduate program in user experience centered on empathy, access, and humanism. About the case: This teaching case is focused on how we situated accessibility (a11y, a numeronym) at the core of our undergraduate degree. Based on our program values, industry experience, and market need, we aimed to build a program that focused on accessibility. Situating the case: Our work is situated in the literature of technical communication, specifically on accessibility as social justice design. Focusing primarily on issues of pedagogy, we discuss the market need for this work, both inside the academy and within industry. Methods/approach: Through our experimental work applied within the program's framework, we built a foundational course, launched an intensive short program (study away), and developed opportunities for student knowledge sharing on the local, regional, and national levels. Results/discussion: Focusing on accessibility gave our students a strong foundation and broader connections with outside partners focused on user experience. Conclusions: Placing accessibility at the center of the mission, scholars and practitioners alike can address these concerns and keep their commitment to creating user experiences centered on shared values of equity, sustainability, and usability. With the rising need for accessibility specialists in the workforce and structured programs in academia, this article describes how technical communicators can develop these foundations in their own organizations.

Readers can explore 13 teaching innovations presented at the 2020 Association for Business Communication (ABC) annual international conference hosted online. Typically held in a large hotel ballroom, this year’s My Favorite Assignment sessions were adapted to an asynchronous virtual conference. These assignments are designed to teach managing complex communication, enhance cross-cultural communication, and building essential technical skills. This article is the second in a two-part series. The first appeared in the June 2021 issue. Additional teaching materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, grading rubrics, frequently asked questions, and sample student projects—are posted on the ABC website: https://www.businesscommunication.org/page/assignments .

In this teaching experience report, we describe a research experience for undergraduates (REUs) designed to cognitively support the work of two student research assistants (RAs) from a two-year college (2YC) on a funded project that involved analyzing user-generated content for an mHealth app. First, we suggest partnerships between two- and four-year institutions as a move toward REU equity because students from 2YCs are not typically afforded these opportunities. We then review the role of research in undergraduate learning and posit the importance of scaffolding to sequence cognitive leaps. Finally, we present the cognitive scaffolding we created and connect it to our hybrid card sorting-affinity diagramming content analysis method.

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This article is the first of a two-part thematic analysis of interviews reporting on the professional identity enactment of developmental literacy practitioners; we argue for intentional, explicit inclusion of developmental literacy disciplinary perspectives as essential for further expanding the two-year college English community of practice.

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In this article, we share our reflections as a teacher, students, and community organization on establishing an international community partnership course that drew United States’ Virginia Tech University students into dialogue with the Nepal-based Code for Nepal (registered as a non-profit in the US), an organization that serves rural communities by enhancing digital literacy skills of women and young girls. By reflecting on our partnership, we argue that international engagements, premised on equity as a goal and conducted digitally, will help in creating opportunities for the students as well as the communities in tackling the digital divide via writing and designing conducted in the pursuit of enhancing the digital literacy of the rural communities in need.

This article presents a trauma-informed integrative reflection framework to make a case for prioritizing reflection during learning disruptions, especially in community-engaged learning environments. I begin by describing a community-based service-learning course “TESOL: Theory & Practice” which includes a community-engaged learning partnership between a university English department and the Adult Basic Education division at a local community college. Then, I articulate two aspects of the TESOL course developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic: first, a framework for integrative reflection that supports adaptation and student learning throughout the semester, and second, the structures of trauma-informed reflective practice that I integrated throughout the course design. Finally, I highlight three takeaways of embracing disruption: adapting partnerships, disrupting routines, and keeping reflection at the center. Together, these themes point not only to the need for trauma-informed reflective pedagogy, but also the need to keep complicating how we live out this approach to teaching.

In this multimodal video dialogue, three writing center directors at small, regional, public colleges and universities discuss their experiences with remote tutoring amidst the COVID-19 crisis. Each speaker came into new writing center administrative positions during the pandemic. Speakers each discuss their recent experiences with the technological shifts they, their tutors, and their institutions have developed, and how those changes impact perceptions of collaboration and equity. In so doing, they hope to highlight the ways in which writing center administrators are thinking about technology’s influence on tutoring, instruction, and students’ daily lives, as well as highlight the challenges and opportunities this pandemic has provided them. Keywords : writing centers, peer tutoring, technology, online learning, critical pedagogy, higher education administration Click here for link to the audio/video recording for this transcript . Russell Mayo : Hello! We are three new writing center directors working at regional and local colleges and universities across the US, and we’re having a conversation together about navigating and adapting writing centers through a pandemic and justifying our work in new contexts. We’re going to introduce ourselves and talk a little bit and have a brief conversation around this work and the experiences we’ve had this semester. My name is Russell Mayo. I am an Assistant Professor of English at Purdue University Northwest (PNW) in Hammond, Indiana. I’m also the Writing Center Director there. This is my first year at PNW. My teaching and research focus is on writing, pedagogy, and environmental humanities. Currently I’m teaching First Year Writing (FYW) courses, but I will also be teaching English Education and Writing/Rhetorical Studies courses in the coming semesters. Eric Camarillo : Hi everyone. My name is Eric Camarillo. I am Director of the Learning Commons at Harrisburg Area Community College (HACC). It’s a role I started in August 2020. I oversee testing, tutoring, the library, and user support services—and of course the Writing Center is contained within the Tutoring Center there. My research focuses really on asynchronous tutoring at the moment, but in the past I’ve discussed things like anti-racism in writing centers, as well as “neutrality” in writing centers and trying to break some “best practices” there. Elise Dixon : Hi, I’m Elise Dixon. I am the Writing Center Director and an Assistant Professor of English at University of North Carolina at Pembroke (UNCP). I started that position in August. Currently I’m teaching FYW, Writing Center training courses, and currently I’m slated to teach a graduate course on activist rhetorics in the summer. My research focus is generally on queer and cultural rhetorics, and those intersections with activists making, and of course writing center studies. Russell Mayo : We are all former TPR contributors. We were all featured in the 2018 Special Issue 2.1 on Cultural Rhetorics (Choffel, Garcia, & Goodman, 2018). Eric and Elise, you have contributed to other issues as well, right? Elise Dixon : Yes. Russell Mayo : And so part of this conversation again is just to talk about our experiences in this unique semester, and especially being new administrators. So I’m going to start by talking a little bit about what I’ve been struck with in my work with FYW students and writing tutors this semester, which is this sudden shift to technologically-mediated education, and the pandemic has thrust this upon us whether we wanted it or not. And in thinking about this shift, I am reminded of the 1998 talk by cultural critic Neil Postman (2014) entitled “Five Things We Need to Know About Technological Change.” I read this first with some of my students in a FYW class a few years ago where we focused on the social impacts of technology. I think it’s really great, and I think you should check it out. It might be really useful for yourself or for your tutors as well thinking about these questions. Postman (2014) asserts the five critical points on technology and change. While it’s quite old, I still think it speaks to our current lives in schools today. I’d like to quickly summarize Postman’s (2014) five main points, and then I’ll talk through a couple of them and how they relate to tutoring at the moment. These are the five Postman (2014) says: I want to talk about the first three. So the first one, “all technological change is a trade-off.” For this, Neil Postman (2014) is pushing us to think dialectically about how moving to something like remote learning has offered many benefits but also drawbacks for writers and tutors. So I have a lot of experiences and anecdotes to share for this; I’m sure you all do. I’m thinking about how, in a positive way, how nimbley and quickly so much of our peer tutoring work was able to shift online—especially in comparison to the struggles of K-12 education, FYW classes, or many other university functions. Rhetorically speaking, that’s because writing centers operate around a logic of one-to-one dialogue, an ethos of peer-to-peer learning, and we also harness the kairotic moments of learning (Bruffee, 1984; Kail, 1984; Harris, 1992; Wood, 2017). This is all instead of the top-down curriculum, pedagogy, and assessment, happening at pre-set times and determined places that are common to other schooling arrangements. Part of what peer tutoring offers, I think, can remain in an online format, and we’ve seen that this semester, successfully (Yergeau, et al., 2008; Bell, 2006). But I think a lot is lost in the move online as well, as we want to make sure not to forget about those. I think in particular for the tutors, there’s a sense of a loss of mutuality and a shared sense of a space and a place where the tutors work together and interact together. Not during the session necessarily but before and after—those in-between times. We haven’t found a way to replicate that in any digital space. The camaraderie between tutors is not necessarily as strong. And I also think that potentially leads to some burn-out or some sense of dislocation: an unmooring for tutors. For some of them, the real joy was that in-between space of tutoring, and that also pushed them to be better, to ask questions of each other (Geller et al, 2007; Boquet, 2002). And the connections of an administrator certainly, and as somebody who teaches tutors really—a lot is lost when I don’t see them on a given day. So we’re really struggling to figure out how to train new tutors for next semester which we didn’t do this fall, given the lack of face-to-face interactions or the ability to overhear something in the writing center that you don’t quite do online. The second point that Postman made is about “the advantages and disadvantages of new technologies,” and the unevenness of that. Another way to say that is that COVID-19 has affected everyone, but not everyone is affected equally by COVID-19. This semester seems to have exacerbated the socioeconomic gap for tutors and for writers overall. The ‘haves’ seem to be doing fine. Many of them with the time, the space, the technology, the strong internet may even be thriving in an environment like this [1] . There’s wider availability of recorded lectures and teacher notes, and that level of accessibility really wasn’t a part of higher education before this point. But, on the other hand, I’m meeting with far too many tutors and writers who are taking a full load of classes and working full time. They’re calling into my class while at work. Many don’t have a reliable computer or internet access, or a quiet place to sit and learn and study, and they’re not able to do that in the way they used to on campus. This is true for the large number of our First-Gen students we have at PNW. I see a lot of people who are overworked and exhausted and just kind of going through the motions. They’re not experiencing any intellectual joy or connection that we have with in-person learning. What’s lost for them is due to no fault of their own. Many of them are going into debt for an education that is unfulfilling and unresponsive to their needs at the moment, and I think that’s something for us to think a lot about. The last point, and then I’ll end here, is that “embedded in every technology there is a powerful [but potentially hidden] idea.” I don’t really know what that is for Zoom. Is it that learning is done by lecture and presentation—a virtual TED Talk? Does Zoom reduce teaching to talking and learning to listening, what Paulo Freire (1970/2000) would call “banking education”? If so, has the pandemic-induced, video-mediated learning environment degraded the central closeness and connection we have sitting at a table together, listening to each other, looking together on a screen, and sharing and negotiation through speaking and listening in a common space that we once did and are not currently doing? These are just some of the questions that I think Postman’s (2014) work helps us to think about—as teachers, scholars, writing center administrators, and tutors—and keep me thinking about as I move forward. Eric Camarillo : Great, thank you. I think that kind of aligns with some of my own research with asynchronous writing center consultations. So I first became interested in asynchronous tutoring in Fall 2019 as part of one of my Ph.D. classes, when I realized there really was this gap in the knowledge of how we understand (1) how online tutoring works, and (2) asynchronous online tutoring and how that works. At my former institution, they had a really long track record of asynchronous tutoring. It was really part of their services, part of their suite of things they were doing. And so I never thought much about it, I just assumed others also understood how to do asynchronous writing center consultations. That turned out to not always be the case. At some places before the pandemic, they weren’t really doing any online tutoring: they didn’t have the platform, didn’t have the infrastructure. So for my own research, I draw a bit from a few different areas—really from Kathryn Denton’s (2017) “Beyond the Lore: The Case of Asynchronous Online Tutoring Research.” One of the points that she makes early on in the text, and kind of throughout, is this idea of asynchronous tutoring as being some kind of subpar alternative “step-child” of writing centers, where people don’t really want to do it. They will do it sometimes if they have to, if there’s a demand or if administration is like, “You should really be doing this.” They’ll do it if they really have to but there’s not always a lot of interest in it. By far, most centers are more interested in that face-to-face, traditional consultation, which is understandable. It’s a very rich, powerful form of tutorial, and steeped in history. It’s really where we’re getting a lot of our research and data from. There’s just decades of research—and probably more, if you want to go really, really old to tutoring generally (Van Horne, 2012; Neaderhiser & Wolfe, 2009; Breuch, 2005; Rosalia, 2013; Wolfe, & Griffin, 2012; Palmquist, 2003; Lerner, 1998; Casal & Lee, 2014). Certainly, with modern writing centers, decades of research on face-to-face consultation. The problem, I think, that many writing center administrators have with trying to implement asynchronous tutoring is that they’re trying to apply traditional writing center best practices to this model. I’ve argued elsewhere (Camarillo, 2020; 2020), where trying to just overlay best practices from a synchronous model to an asynchronous one is just not appropriate; it’s just not going to work. Because the key tenet in the best practices is this idea of “being there” with the student (Riley-Mukavetz, 2014). So a lot of that collaboration requires being there in real time with the student, especially when it comes to asking leading questions or Socratic questions, which don’t really make sense if you’re leaving feedback on a document in an asynchronous way. Because then your questions are acontextual; you have to do a lot more explaining in order to make them work. So coming from my background at University of Houston-Victoria (UHV), where they had a long history of asynchronous writing tutoring, to my current institution HACC, they had only really done drop-in tutoring for years. That was really their primary mode of tutoring. In early 2020, they started a pilot for online Zoom tutoring, and then of course by March that was all they were doing. And so it was very interesting comparing UHV’s experience to HACC’s. Because at HACC, when the pandemic started, pivoting to online appointments was really simple. We were using Upswing, which is a third-party product to help host all of our appointments and host all of our actual sessions. And so really it was just a matter of listing every tutor as an “Online” tutor. Very simple. HACC’s experience was a little bit different. Suddenly, you had to deal with Zoom links, making sure the Zoom room works, and making sure that everything was password secured, or that there was a waiting room because you didn’t want to get “Zoom Bombed,” things like that. I’m in this really interesting position of comparing, of trying to draw on one experience and comparing it to another. We’ve begun our HACC’s Online Writing Lab, which means students can submit essays to us electronically through email—but carefully tracked and assessed. To me, it’s just really exciting to be in this kind of position where everything is really new and everyone’s really open to new ideas. I’m able to bring some of my experience and my research that I’ve been advocating for about a year now, that we should really be doing more of. And so thinking about technology and asynchronous tutoring, and about how this will shift the way HACC, and probably other institutions, work in the future is also really exciting. How does that change tutoring for us? We’ve opened this door, right, and there’s probably no going back to just drop-in tutoring. I think students will always want the flexibility of doing something on Zoom so they don’t have to come to campus. Being able to submit things to an email account so they can go to work, and then in the evening, or the next day, they can come back and their essay’s there and then they can then apply that feedback. I’m at a community college, I’m working with students who work, and we’re trying to make sure that they’re able to access the services that we offer when they need to access those services. Elise Dixon: Okay, wow. You both brought up so many great points and I think I want to touch on a couple of things from what you both said. First, when I’m thinking about Postman’s “Five Things We Need to Know about Technological Change,” I’m thinking about the fourth idea, actually, that “technological change is not additive, it’s ecological.” This to me really harkens back to cultural rhetorics, ideologies of understanding that our lives are made up of these layers of interactions with each other and the stories that we’re telling each other over time (Powell et al., 2014; Bratta & Powell, 2016). And I see that quite clearly at my institution right now, in terms of what we’re doing in the writing center but also what our students are responding to to the primarily technological education that they’re getting right now over Zoom. They key point that I wanted to talk about today was: I think, for me, at my institution, the writing center now has a lot of evidence—a lot more evidence than usual—of the big gap between student understanding of what’s going on in the course and teacher understanding of what’s going on in the course. I see that evidence popping up in writing and in the way that teachers are evaluating. It’s no longer just a hand-written note, but it’s something that is on Zoom, WebEx, or Canvas, that the student can then just send right over to me as the Writing Center Director. So the metacognitive capabilities of talking about the moves that writers are supposed to make, those are difficult skills for faculty members to learn. And it takes a lot of time, and it’s especially hard if you don’t have a rhetoric and composition or English background. I see those gaps in understanding all the time. The additional complication of that is that there’s now the metacognitive conversation about the moves we’re supposed to be making technologically over Zoom, or over an online course. One example I wanted to bring up was this: for some background, my campus is very racially diverse and very unique. We’re the most racially diverse campus in the Southeast. What I’ve seen is that there’s a big gap in what our faculty members say to primarily the students of color who come into the Writing Center. One example that I can think of is: one day, I received a phone call from a student who was desperate. And she said, I have gotten a note from my professor that says that I have “markup” on my paper, and that any further papers that I turn in with “markup” will be immediately given a zero. And she said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is, and I said, “I don’t know what ‘markup’ is either! I’m not sure what your professor means.” And she indicated to me that she felt a little bit unsure of asking this professor because not only was there a gap in understanding, but there was a gap in proximity. She’d never met this man in person. She did not know how to interact with him, and all of her interactions had been either over Zoom or via email. So I volunteered to give him a call or to send him an email to ask what this meant. I think she was hoping that the Writing Center Director could tell her like, “Oh, well, this is the overarching definition of ‘markup,'” but there isn’t one. So I emailed this professor and he got right back to me and said, “Her ‘track changes’ are on in her document, and I can see all the changes that she has made. But, I don’t want a document like that.” And so really it had nothing to do with her writing. But he was giving her zeros for not turning off her track changes. Technically, the problem was that she didn’t know to accept all of her changes before she turned her paper in. Because as we might know, from our own personal experience, you can hide the “markup,” but that doesn’t mean it goes away. So when I emailed the student back and told her, she informed me that he had given her zeros on five papers because of this, and that she had not even turned in one of the papers because she knew that he was going to give her a zero, even though she had no idea what it was. The gap in communication there was just one tiny explanation that could have been fixed if there was a better system for having a conversation, if there was an understanding of how much of writing is about the correct or adequate utilization of the technology that we’re given. How do we communicate those needs to our students in a way that gives them the space to make mistakes and still learn? It taught me a lot, I hope that it taught the professor something too because I emailed him back and said that, “Your student was just confused, and I told her what to do. And I hope that you give her points on this and the other papers you gave zeroes to.” For me, in those moments, it was a realization that technology has become a part of UNCP’s ecology. And it has become a part of how students and teachers interact or don’t interact with each other, and how students can feel supported or not supported. I was not blind to the fact that this professor was a white man and that this student was a Black woman. And I was very sensitive to the understanding of all the power dynamics that exist in that situation. Especially on a campus that is very racially diverse, I think it’s really important for instructors to understand that we can’t just expect our professors to have these metacognitive understandings of the kinds of moves that we need our students to be making in writing but also the kinds of moves that they need to be making with technology. We have to be able to know how to explain it well. And the Writing Center can’t necessarily always do that explaining when we’re not really sure what something like “markup” is. So I think I’ll stop there, and then we can kind of have a conversation from there. Russell Mayo : Awesome. Yeah, let’s kind of unpack these and talk a little bit more. And we just met really today. So we’ve also been sharing a lot about our campuses and our roles and kind of what we’re learning in the process of this pandemic semester as well. So, yeah, where should we start? Eric Camarillo: Well, I’m really intrigued by this idea of technological prowess, Elise, about the instructor using one set of vocabulary, and that just not translating at all to what the student is capable of doing or, you know, connecting with the student. And I think it’s one way that we assume a lot of knowledge on the part of students, both in terms of what they’re able to do maybe with writing or what we expect them to do with writing, but also in terms of what we expect them to be able to do with technology. So often, I mean, we call our younger students especially “digital natives,” but really, it depends on the context, right? Like, we know that they’re very comfortable with TikTok or Twitter or Instagram, right? Snapchat. So they’re very savvy with mobile applications. But the more professional suite of services, or a professional suite of applications, is something that’s really foreign to them. So they may or may not know how to navigate Word, right? I’ve met plenty of students who really have no idea they’re even in track changes. They have no idea that they’ve even turned them on. They just think it looks like that. Or when they need to print out a paper, they don’t know how to leave them on there so they can show their instructor what they did. And these are all things that they need training on. We can’t just assume that they know these things, but increasingly that’s become part of things we just expect them to know or to already have knowledge of. Elise Dixon: Yes, I think something that that experience showed me too was that the Writing Center is often treated by both faculty and students as a go between of what students should know how to talk about and what faculty should know how to talk about. And in that case, I was a go-between. And really, the truth was that it wasn’t just a gap in student understanding, but also a gap, in fact, of this faculty member’s understanding of how to talk about how to use the technology. And we know, I think, as writing center administrators, we’ve seen an assignment sheet that a student brings into a session that don’t make no sense. And then realizing that the faculty member might not really fully know how to express in writing their own expectations of what writing looks like. When we have now this big gap in interpersonal experience, we can’t sit in a room with someone and say, “What do you mean by ‘markup?'” or whatever, we don’t get that chance to do the back and forth. One thing that I wanted to say in my little chunk of time, Eric was, we also are doing a lot of asynchronous tutoring this year. And it’s going very well. But I’m finding that, again, the work for me is finding ways to articulate how to access the technology, in such a way—through the technology—I have to teach people how to access the technology through the use of the technology and find ways to verbalize it, or put it in writing in a way that is most useful to students, and that it just feels sometimes like that gap in understanding is really more like a cavern, you know. It’s very, very tough. Russell Mayo: If I can just jump in and add on to that, too. We’ve been working with asynchronous tutoring, which there was a little bit of that before [at PNW]. So similar to what Eric was saying, that is sort of new to the students and to the tutors. And, like you’re saying, Elise, communicating that through the technology rather than face-to-face, somebody just saying “I want an appointment, where do I even begin?” Normally, people would say, “go to the second floor, and go to that particular space.” And now they’re just emailing into the web and hoping that somebody can help them from there. But it reminds me, I think there are some really good points here about how, essentially, these are two different forms of communication—the face-to-face and the digital asynchronous—and how they require different levels of trust, and detail, and explanation, and back and forth, and all of these things that is really new to students, and also to us and faculty or administrators too. There’s a lot of learning going on, and learning is messy and frustrating and takes us, you know, one step forward and two steps back sometimes. I like this idea that you brought up, Eric, about how the Socratic questions and the “being there” nature of face to face tutoring is both something that we always talk about as being really essential. And, I talked about that a little bit in my talk as well, but also that sort of rhetoric allows us to overlook some of the potential benefits of asynchronous tutoring, like you said, for the student who needs to drop off the paper before work, who can’t just go to a tutoring session at noon. And you know, for our campus, we have two different campus locations across [Midwestern state] that merged in 2016. We have two different writing centers, one very small at the Westville campus, and one that’s a bit larger at the Hammond campus. This semester, we were able to pool those tutors together into our writing center online platform and to offer both online and asynchronous tutoring for people across the campus. So in a way, we are more accessible, we’re more versatile, and we’re more connected than we ever have been before. There’s something about being there, which is both a benefit but also potentially a drawback. Because if you’re not there, then you can’t take advantage of being there. But the tutors are really learning a lot about what it means to communicate, like you said. One of the ways we’ve been doing it is—and this is actually something that we did in my former university as a grad student at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) is that they adapted that I think it was just brilliant—is utilizing the communication technology between the tutor and the writer. So rather than writing up the client report form as being something for us or internal or potentially something that you email to a professor, we started to formulate it as a letter to the writer. So at the end of each session, the writer gets a letter summarizing what they did, encouraging them to keep going, talking about next steps and making sure that they feel welcome to come back. And so creating those forms as a student-facing document, as the audience for those. If your professor wants proof you came, you can forward that on to them, but that’s something that you can have that agency to do. I think just sometimes changing some of these communication techniques can be really powerful in a lot of ways. And that’s something that I’ve been reminded of that is new to what we’re doing this semester, and I think has been really, really beneficial. There’s a lot more than tutor back and forth between the writer and the tutor after that session is over. Normally, it’s just sort of sealed, but now there’s a lot more of that back and forth happening because that letter is forward-facing and generative too. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, I think when it comes to, you know, face-to-face, or online or asynchronous, to me, it’s not really about, you know, “is one better than the other?” It’s that they’re different and they serve different students differently. Being able to drive half an hour to campus for an hour-long appointment, and then drive half an hour back is a privilege. Not all students can do it, especially working students who just don’t have time. And so being able to offer a variety of supports in a number of different ways, I think is a way to maximize that kind of accessibility. And I liked what you said, Russ, about a forward-facing document. UHV has something very similar, where they were essentially asked to do a couple of different things: they would leave feedback on the paper, they would write an email back to the students, and then they would write a form, just like a short note taking thing that was internal. And so the email was something that we spent a lot of time with training folks on how to do right, because one of the things made clear to me when I first came on board was the asynchronicity there where it’s the last thing that you’re writing, but it’s the first thing that the student is reading. So you have to take that into account as you’re generating it. And I think, Elise, to touch a little bit on your point too about how technology mediates this experience for students now and how we’re using writing to talk about writing. If students have to now read to understand, right, you can’t just verbalize it. So they already have to have, or try sometimes a little harder depending on who the student is, to understand what’s been written, so when working asynchronously, the student may not have as strong of a writing ability, but perhaps their reading ability could also be strengthened, right? And so there needs to be a bit more explanation, a bit more breaking down of things in that process. Which is why I wish there was more research on asynchronous tutoring practices, to be able to know what other institutions do and how they approach this kind of work. There are a variety of ways. One thing HACC is doing that I love that I never thought to do at UHV is that you as a student can submit a paper for feedback. And then they can request a Zoom follow up session about that paper, which I think is so cool. Because then you have a student and they’ve gotten this feedback and they want maybe more. They have other questions, they want to get that additional feedback. And now they can. They can just request a Zoom session through TutorTrac or sometimes a drop-in one if one is available, depending on the tutor’s availability. But I think this is one way, at least, I’m trying to maximize that flexibility that we currently have. What is for most people, a very stressful time to be anywhere but I think especially to be a student. Elise Dixon : That makes me think of, you know, when I read through various writing center scholarship about online writing centers, quite frequently in my own research, especially up until 2010, a lot of the research was about how do we replicate a face-to-face collaborative session, right (Yergeau et al., 2008; Reno, 2010)? We’ve all been there. And this pandemic has really forced us into—maybe not forced but have given us some opportunities—to think through what you were saying, Russ, about what opportunities there are in new technologies or in using technologies in a different way that look, perhaps on the surface as not collaborative, which is what we always want, to have a collaborative writing center space. And when I first came to UNCP, I had never done an asynchronous tutoring program of any kind. And we already had one going partially because of a money situation, we were using Tutor.com. And the administration had found out that our students were using Tutor.com—the writing portion of Tutor.com—and it was costing them $28 an hour, I think, to provide that service, when the writing center was already readily available and had open spots. And so our previous interim writing center director had a talk with our dean of the University College, and they both decided that it would probably be a best idea to just create an asynchronous tutoring opportunity through the writing center. So often in my meetings this semester, even though I had some reticence over how do I make this a “collaborative” experience, I was also sort of being pressured: “Are you having a lot of asynchronous appointments? We want to make sure that you’re having a lot of asynchronous appointments because it’s all about, you know, the bottom line.” But over time, what I realized is that my students were very organically doing what you both were talking about in terms of the front-facing documentation. Because writing center tutors are trained or shown through our own work that we’re peers, that we want people to progress, and want them to learn how to be good writers on their own through our guidance. My tutors started organically having those conversations with students over email and making sure that their feedback was really explicit and gave step-by-step: “Maybe you should do this? How about this? These are three options for what you might do.” We tend to have this idea, and I think sometimes it stems from really our oldest most original writing center scholarship, like Jeff Brooks’ (1991) “Minimalist Tutoring,” that tells us that in order to be collaborative, we have to be hands off, and in order to be hands off we can’t touch the paper. And it’s very hard to be hands off when you are doing an asynchronous session. But we’re never not collaborating, even if it’s asynchronous. And, gosh, if there’s anything the pandemic has taught us it’s that we’re never not collaborating when we’re online with each other because people have continued to get things done—albeit, in weird and exhausting ways. But we have continued to get things done over the internet in many different ways. Russell Mayo : To build on that point, Elise, I think it’s really good to point out to the people who are in charge of budgets, or who ask questions about things like Tutor.com or other services: There’s something the writing center offers that goes beyond the bottom line, too, right, which is that it is a professionalizing space for the students who become tutors, and it’s a learning space. They learn so much about writing and rhetoric that our courses can’t teach them through that hands-on learning. And they move in a “communities of practice” (Lave & Wenger, 1991) kind of way away from the periphery and more toward the center of what it really means to do academic writing and collaborative learning. And so it’s such an invaluable resource for the people who are tutors as well that an outsourced kind of website may be cheaper—although, as you’re saying, it’s not actually—it doesn’t offer those other benefits to the university community and the community of writers that I think we can develop at a center. Eric Camarillo : Yeah, we’re in “competition” with SmartThinking, our third-party service that we use. HACC had it when we were initially in that five-campus model that I mentioned before. Now we’re in a one-college model. In that five campus model there was—and there still is a virtual learning department, and they used SmartThinking, and it was initially only for their students. So the virtual students were students taking courses asynchronously, so they were the only ones really—I don’t want to say allowed to use it, anyone could’ve used it, but it was really for them, that’s why we subscribed to them or bought them whatever you want to call it. And now, with HACC’s Online Writing Lab, that’s one of the reasons I think we have the follow-up Zoom sessions, finding ways to differentiate us from SmartThinking tutors, not to mention the other feedback that we provide. For me, I’m also a big believer in the peer tutoring model or at least the context-oriented model, right, people who know and understand the institution. Not to discredit other types of tutors who work for these companies—they know the content, but not the context. They do not know who the instructor is, they do not know what their expectations are, and sometimes you have to know in order to give that kind of—I call it actionable feedback in my research. So this kind of, “I know this professor prefers it broken down in this way,” or “They may not think of the thesis in this one way, perhaps you can revise it to this other way.” And one point I also kind of wanted to jump on is how asynchronous tutoring really breaks from the traditional face-to-face model. So with minimalist tutoring—really great example. How do you give feedback without touching the document, you know? Without “writing” on it, you know what I mean? It’s impossible. I mean, there are other places that try and do it, and maybe they do like, just a letter and the letter will give feedback about the document, and it’ll give tips here pointing to particular sections but nothing in the paper itself. But, we know that Beth Hewett (2015) posits in her various research on online writing instruction that sometimes, and I don’t usually advocate for this, but sometimes writing within the text itself is what you should be doing, especially if you’re trying to model what a sentence could look like or what the various options are, right? So, while I’m very oriented toward just leaving the comments, there are others that definitely advocate for more what is definitely not minimalist tutoring, right? Or perhaps what it means is that you have to think about minimalism and collaboration differently in an online context. So, what does it mean to be minimalist when you’re leaving feedback? Maybe it means just leaving ten comments or something and being very selective about what that means. I think there are definitely ways to translate some of the best practices to an asynchronous paradigm, but there definitely needs to be a translation happening. Like, there won’t be a one-to-one, direct layover—or overlay—of those practices. Russell Mayo: Okay, so to wrap up, maybe each of us could go around and share out a little bit about looking forward, looking forward to next semester, next year, of continuing our work in our new institutions, in our new roles. What are we excited about? What are we concerned about? Future challenges or plans in your centers. I guess I’ll leave it open there and either one of you can jump in. Eric Camarillo: Yeah, I can start. What I’m really excited about is what new practices emerge as we better understand asynchronous tutoring. So, how do we better understand racism or antiracism, right? So, these issues that we’ve grappled with for so long with the traditional model, what does it mean now to grapple with them in the asynchronous space? So how do we achieve equity or racial justice, how do we embrace multiple languages, other types of discourses in an asynchronous context? I’m really looking forward to how writing centers continue having those conversations and what research develops. And I’m looking forward to hopefully also being able to contribute to those discussions. Those are things that are definitely interesting to me, right, learning more about how do we deal with both students who are hurting because of a pandemic that is maybe biologically related and students who are hurting from a pandemic that is more culturally related, right? Many things happened in 2020, but those two things stick out to me. A pandemic of both a virus and racism and a great reckoning of and working through—achieving antiracism. So that’s one thing I’m looking forward to, definitely, with asynchronous practices at least. And I guess my concern, really, is trying to adapt what we’re doing now in one way to, ultimately, perhaps a hybrid way, or when we go back to campus, which I believe will happen eventually. So, worrying a little bit about how we adapt our practices that have—you know, my institution has adapted really well to this context; we did a really tremendous job. What does it mean when we return to our five separate campuses? How do we divvy up resources? How do we divvy up the work? In what ways can we continue on with our online tutoring? Who will be assigned that kind of work? Elise Dixon: Eric, those are such great concerns and excitements, and they seemed to be interconnected, which I think always happens. I think similarly. I just finished teaching my tutor training course, which happens every fall, and my tutor training courses are always very social justice oriented and we had lots and lots and lots of conversations about race and racism this semester, more than ever before for obvious reasons, I’m sure you can guess why. And what I think I’m most excited about is that—in my previous work, some of which is in The Peer Review (Dixon 2017, 2019), I tend to focus on wanting us to think through the everyday moments of our writing center, and especially the uncomfortable everyday moments of our writing center that we tend to gloss over. And what I saw in a virtual form was that one story I told you today about this markup situation. It was an uncomfortable everyday moment of the new “pandemical” research—or new “pandemical” writing center. And I was pleased to see that I and my tutors were able to notice, in those uncomfortable everyday moments, issues of power and equity and inequality (Denny, 2010; Greenfield & Rowan, 2011; Greenfield, 2019; McKinney, 2013). So, for instance, as I said, the conversation between this student and her professor was raced because we all are raced, and because of that there were power issues that existed, and I was pleased to see that it wasn’t just me that noticed those things but that my tutors noticed those things even in their asynchronous sessions. And I think I look forward to finding ways to continue to have conversations about equity and equality and how we can foster that work in our writing center to create a more social justice oriented, activist writing center, and I look forward to knowing that it can be done online, asynchronously, in person, face-to-face, we can do it all. And I think that is also the great challenge that will be the great challenge of, I think, my writing center career, is finding ways to train tutors to holistically understand issues of equity so that when they are thrust into a new situation like they were this year that they have various tools to enact the activism that they can through whatever medium they have to. So, yeah, that’s my challenge and my excitement. Russell Mayo : Wonderful. I want to echo what you both mentioned, and I think it was fantastic. I, too, am looking forward to bringing in critical questions about the work we do in schools and how with that, as scholars (Grimm, 1999) said, in spite of our “best intentions,” that we can do harm unintentionally in our work and, therefore, we need to be anti-oppressive and it’s not going to happen by happenstance. It has to be deliberate, and it’s not something you do once and then it’s over. So I look forward to having these conversations with tutors and with faculty about ableism and racism and all the other aspects that are wrapped up in the human work we’re doing, really. And I look forward to doing more with those conversations. One thing I’m really excited about, and that’s an exciting opportunity to be honest with you, I’m not—I don’t think that’s a bad thing at all, I think it’s something that needs to happen and can happen more, and I think that it takes a long time for those conversations to really make a difference in a community, so I look forward to doing that. I also look forward to, so one of the ways of justification and justifying is something—one of the themes from the TPR, for this issue—one of the things that I did immediately was starting to have concerns and worry about justifying. What happens to those sessions that don’t get booked? Where we’re paying a tutor, but they don’t have a writer there? In a face-to-face or in an in-person writing center, there’s lots of work to be done in the space, but when tutors are working from home or not in the same room, what do we do with that time and how do we make it meaningful to the people who are paying their checks, really? So, we developed an ad hoc professional development research project, so the students could develop something. Some students are really taking over the social media—which they would’ve done if we’d been together—social media for the center. Some students are studying writing across the disciplines, interviewing engineering professors about what writing looks like in their courses, and some students are comparing different majors and looking at different pedagogies for engaging students and studying what it means to be a writing partner—you know, working with the same writer week after week for a whole semester, a very unique project or problem they’re engaged with. What I’m really excited about in the Spring is that our tutors are going to be presenting on those, so we’re going to have a monthly meeting, which we didn’t have this semester, to have presentations. So tutors are going to be presenting their work, their professional development, ongoing questions, and inquiry projects. And then we’re just going to have some social time together because that’s something the tutors really, really missed. So just giving them that time to connect and bring in the new tutors that we’ll be training to connect with the tutors as well, to bring in more of a social sense of space that we didn’t have before because we lacked a place together, or we’re without that place for the temporary moment. So, really looking forward to those conversations and bringing those projects to bear and to learn from the tutors and with them as well. So, I guess we should wrap up there. It’s so good to talk to you both and meet you finally, virtually. And thank you, thank you for doing this. Elise Dixon : This was very invigorating. I don’t know how you all feel—I’m very excited. Eric Camarillo : I am, yes. Russell Mayo : Thanks!

The writing center (WC) is simultaneously an educational space and a specific place co-created by the consultants and students using it. Dedicated as it is to writing, the center offers an academic location physically distinct from home and the classroom. The COVID-19 pandemic drastically altered this separation of spaces and places, collapsing many (or all) of them into the virtual realm, all to be accessed from (often) one place: home. This paper considers the theoretical discussion surrounding notions of home in the WC and recontextualizes said discussion in the wake of the WC gone virtual during a pandemic. Reflections on the authors’ experiences in this new space and the resulting sense of place are included, resulting in a framework that considers the nature of online synchronous WC work being undertaken in our home and a call for WCs to not simply seek to return to a supposed normal when our institutions call us back to campus. Keywords : space, place, virtual asynchronous tutoring, online writing centers As writing consultants working during the COVID-19 pandemic, we have become very familiar with the feeling of brewing tea in the kitchen between appointments, shushing loud housemates, and angling our computers’ cameras to frame ourselves against the one clean(er) corner of our rooms. We have long since decamped from the physical writing center (WCs), a workspace for writing consultants, for an altogether different place: home. Space is open and undifferentiated; place is known and associated (Tuan, 1977). And WCs are themselves designed to be welcoming places, to set students at ease, to evoke that which they cannot be—home (McKinney, 2005). What, then, are the impacts of moving the WC into the home? For all that they promise the capability for connections across vast distances, digital spaces are still inherently material. They are built on infrastructures of wires, cables, metals, and plastics; we connect to them through devices made of the same materials. The work that we do is mediated by the spaces and places in which we exist, something made all the more apparent by the pandemic. Digital spaces have allowed us to keep in contact with friends and family throughout the pandemic, valuable lifelines in deeply uncertain times. Such spaces have the capacity to foster new intimacies (Gallagher et al., 2020), but the prevalence of “Zoom fatigue” serves as a reminder that digital methods affect us differently. We take up the question of how a WC formed through the space of digital infrastructures, server rooms, and homes (or the various places we find ourselves and our clients videoconferencing in from) alters the sense of place that WCs evoke and the consequences of this alteration. To do so, this work pulls from a theoretical framework to inform later personal reflections on our experiences as writing consultants gone online during a pandemic. We find this to be a kairotic moment for WCs to reconsider and reform our thinking on and understanding of place, a moment wherein consultants and administration alike can and should reconsider what the space of a WC can/should aspire to be. Space and place are frequent subjects of debate—partially because of their inherent resistance to concrete definition, partially because of the terms’ prevalence in understandings of the world. Space, broadly speaking, is open, potential, abstract; place is known, (more) defined, (more) concrete (Tuan, 1977). Further, “space is unstable, uncertain because of the possibilities it contains for occupation. Space is yet-to-be written” (Dobrin, 2011, p. 41). “Home,” for example, is a place that has become so through occupation of and association with space. In Arendt’s (1958) words, “[to] live together in the world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in common, as a table is located between those who sit around it” (p. 52); Tuan (1977) argued that the presence of any other human beings (even just one) “has the effect of curtailing space and its threat of openness” (p. 59). Any discussion of solitude and openness is now (doubly) grimly ironic in light of the ongoing mental and physical effects of prolonged separation and isolation brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Tuan (1977) invited his readers to consider “the sense of an “inside” and an “outside,” of intimacy and exposure, of private life and public space” (p. 107). The home is (generally) understood to be the place in which we live our private lives, while outside in other spaces (and places) we live our public lives, occluding—even masking—elements of ourselves. The distinction between public and private life is inherently a problematic one because there is no neat separation (Arendt, 1958, p. 72). Elements of both intrude on each other in ways both tangible and intangible, but there was previously a semblance of spatial separation that allowed for the maintenance of veneers, however fragile, unreal, occluding, and deeply problematic they could be. Yet, home is not mere association with that space (i.e., the space we occupy for housing), but associated with various place-based ideals beyond faulty notions of privacy. These place-based ideals are essential to forming the notion of home. As bell hooks (2009) established, “A true home is the place—any place—where growth is nurtured, where there is constancy. As much as change is always happening whether we want it or not, there is still a need we have for constancy” (p. 203). The association of constancy with home that hooks established here is troubled further when considering the idea of being at home during a pandemic. Assuming an individual even has the necessary means and ability to conduct education and consulting work from where they live, the notion that they are taking appointments from the comfort of their own home ignores the way that bringing the many spheres of life into their lodgings disrupts the constancy that they wish for when occupying their home. Further, the physical and mental stressors of trying to do much of anything during a pandemic seep into and destabilize our sense of home. Our conceptualization of constancy often hinges on the sensory experiences that come to define our perceptions of home. Jenny Odell (2020) has written about the importance of attentiveness to one’s time, space, and place, advocating for deliberate use of the five senses. She approached this through a multi-scalar lens and a deep concern for the impact(s) of social media and the attention economy, which thrive on constant intrusion, constant interaction, and superficial engagement. These methods manifest as a constant fracturing of attention and energy; equally problematic in both public and private – although it is important to note that Odell is not uniformly negative in her view of social media. In keeping with her overall argument, she argues that it can be a positive force, but should be used and engaged with deliberately. These issues of deliberate intent, attention, and focus are also very much at play in WCs. The places in which we write and consult have become increasingly of interest to WC scholars and practitioners in recent years; however, many of these discussions focus on the practical aspects of the objects that make up a space. Despite the work that has been done by WC scholars who have taken up this mantle through their research on digital studies and multiliteracy centers (e.g. Fitzgerald and Ianetta, 2015; Del Russo et al., 2019; Balester et al., 2012; Dunn and Dunn de Mers, 2002; Hamel, 2002; Hitt, 2012; Naydan, 2013; Sheridan and Inman, 2010; Trimbur, 2016), there remains a need for WC practitioners to recognize and consider WC spaces as something we both experience and create as opposed to something we simply take in visually. Hadfield et al. (2003) explained that “the environment where interaction between and among people occurs is crucial as it affects the way people feel and, therefore, the way people interact. A well-designed writing center has an identity that speaks implicitly to its patrons” (p. 175). Echoing this idea and building upon it further in her call for a more critical examination of WC spaces, McKinney (2005) specified that “In terms of the writing center, critical geographies would not merely state what objects occupy the space. In addition, the focus would include the human experience in use of space and objects” (pp. 10-11). This need to think critically about how our WC spaces are experienced becomes all the more urgent as we pause to consider various ways that spaces shape our experiences as complex and dynamic individuals. This phenomenon is often intensified in academic spaces, especially when they are utilized for the vulnerable act of sharing one’s writing. For example, Lockett (2019) argued location “must be considered as one of the major factors that obscures the relationship between race and how students are socialized to understand graduate writing conventions.” She continued, contending that, for graduate students, learning how to write “depends on moving through clandestine places like faculty offices, selective reading groups, and brief cubicle chats among peers, as well as publicly sanctioned intimate spaces like coffee shops where graduate students may be meeting with their mentors and colleagues.” This audience awareness that Lockett spoke to extends to the question of how WCs construct a sense of place in the midst of a pandemic. Further, it points to the need to recognize that those logging into our virtual WCs may not have access to the assumed space of their living space. Factors like race, class, and residency status can greatly impact whether that is indeed possible. These are variables that need to be structurally addressed, but what can WCs do? Boquet (1999) asked whether the WC is “primarily a space , a “laundry” where work is dropped off and picked up, where students are brushed off and cleaned up? Or is it primarily a temporality, an interaction between people over time, in which the nature of the interaction is determined not by site but by method?” (p. 464, emphasis in original). Lockett (2019) argued that it is both, following her academic ghetto metaphor; “[the] kind of place a writing center is perceived to be—by its tutors, clients, director, and administrative assistants—affects what will happen there”. We agree with this assessment, with the added valences that have arisen due to the pandemic and the move to wholly online consultations. At least one of us has been managing laundry timing around scheduled appointments, and the question of time’s “realness” continues to haunt conversations, calendars, and affects as we continue to cope with the dissolution of, and attempts to reimpose, flimsy and inflexible external structures. As a result, these issues of space, when compounded with the additional variables of race, class, residency status, sexual orientation, and ability, culminate to become inextricably linked to issues of labor in the WC, a correlation that has become painfully real for many of us consulting and writing during the COVID-19 pandemic. That space relates to labor concerns is well established in considering how the planning of space can subconsciously reinforce the exploitation of laborers (Harvey, 2010). Although discussions of labor have been taking place for quite some time among WC practitioners and scholars, the COVID-19 pandemic has made these all the more salient and unignorable. Labor is a complex concept in WCs as it takes many forms—emotional, mental, and even sometimes physical (moving to a new space, rearranging furniture, cleaning at the end of the day, etc.). This labor, especially the emotional and mental labor that is so often exerted by WC consultants and administrators, is often invisible and thankless, and although the labor itself is often unseen, the symptoms of an over-exertion of labor are often all too real and visible. As Giaimo (2020) pointed out, “Labor and wellness are inextricably bound. In an ideal situation, our work would be Meaningful, Engaging, Stable, Safe, Ethical, Fairly compensated.” However, even in the most ideal WC, operating with full funding and without the chaos of a pandemic, labor is never all of these at once, and this can have substantial impacts on those of us working as consultants. Giaimo (2020) clarified that labor concerns are wellness concerns, as the precariousness of one’s labor conditions can lead to physiological problems and different manifestations of human suffering. Further, Giamo was explicit in making the connection between precarious labor and “minorities and minimum wage workers.” One of the primary casualties of the pandemic has been so-called “third spaces.” These are not instances of Soja’s notion of thirdspace (e.g., 1996, 1999), but rather a division of spaces into spheres (e.g., Sloterdijk, 2011, 2014, 2016), with home as primary, work as secondary, and then third as elsewhere, such as in coffee shops or libraries. Indeed, for a not insignificant portion of the population—including many students—the pandemic effectively collapsed many (or all) of these spaces into one physical place: home. As people distanced from each other, their senses of space and place (sometimes simultaneously) contracted, expanded, and fragmented. Digital spaces, especially virtual meeting software and social media, experienced massive surges in engagement and numbers of active users as many aspects of life shifted to be mostly online. The nature of—and divide between—social relations via digital modalities vs. physical ones is frequently presented in generational terms, with Millennials and younger generations stereotypically preferring everything digital, while older generations favor the “real” world. Regardless of the actual truthfulness of this presentation, people from all generations have had to navigate the complexities of virtual platforms, even as others have had to contend with the necessities and present dangers of being “essential” workers. Quarantine entails a curtailing and control of movement and mobility, especially as empirical reality and embodied experience. It is a (re)definition of many spaces—particularly public or communal—as hostile/dangerous. Russell (2020) has proposed envisioning this shift as a sphere eversion, a rather complex topological concept that has interesting implications for notions of exposure. Eversion is the process of turning something inside out, in this case squishing and folding a sphere. Spheres are inherently boundaries, things capable of being seen by external observers, while observers of everted spheres must, by definition, “take up a position on it” (p. 276). Within this framework, she pondered hands and elbows as “touched touchers;” hands are more likely to touch the world than elbows, but both are part(s) of the body, covered in the same skin, exposed to the same air (p. 276). We can wash our hands diligently, but what about the rest of the body, or clothing, or the air introduced to an enclosed structure or common area through doors or windows? The core idea of the commons is that of a shared public space which can become a public place through interaction and association. Since the commons is shared, it remains inherently open, able to be engaged with and left alone easily. In much the same way, digital places are inherently permeable due to the configuration of digital space. For the user, this is simultaneously a strength and a weakness, especially with the heavily increased use of video chat platforms by businesses, schools, friends, and families. Interaction through a screen is not the same as in-person interaction, even from a safe distance. It can feel awkward and impersonal at times as physical distance creates emotional distance, making it difficult to read and interpret body language. However, despite these limitations, screen-to-screen interaction has offered important opportunities for (re)connection. Indeed, digital means’ capacities for connection, what Gallagher et al. (2020) have called “new intimacies,” allow people to interact, link, and communicate across counties, states, and countries. These connections can also be extremely beneficial for students for whom the normalized physical classroom environment is difficult, including students with anxiety, disabilities, or off-campus jobs. Of course, as with any technology, digital spaces carry the capacity to reproduce some existing inequalities and introduce others. Users become dependent on connection speed and stability, compression algorithms, and server/software uptime (Burroughs and Rugg 2014). Digital access takes place over (fractions of) milliseconds, accelerating time and decoupling it from physical concerns (Barlow and Drew 2020; Chan 2020). Care and intent are key. Through our dependence and constant use of these digital spaces, the issue of Zoom fatigue has become a commonplace point of discussion in day-to-day life for the authors. Our days feel full of Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, WC Online appointments, and emails. Our homeplaces become saturated not only with work concerns, but also the digital platforms that convey them. To return to hooks’ (2009) discussion of home as constancy, labor in the home breaks up that constancy that informs our homeplaces. In a sense, it breaks into the ambient sense of calm and security that we strive for our home to be, instead saturating it with workplace concerns. This discussion of saturation connects well to Sidney Dobrin’s (2011) discussion of saturation as it “suggests a sense of overwhelming (as in saturation bombing)” (p. 183). The ambience of our homeplaces has been, essentially, saturation bombed with a different place context, thereby disrupting and recontextualizing our living rooms and bedrooms into a space of workplace activity. As mentioned in the introduction, we consider this to be a kairotic moment for reflecting on understandings of space and place in WCs. Particularly as many of us begin to transition back to hybrid (or wholly in-person) modalities, we should be deliberate and careful in just how we effect that return. To that end we offer these individual discussions both as reflections on our own experiences and as considerations of place and community in remote and hybrid WCs. For the first two months of lockdown, my scheduled writing consultations were one of the primary things I relied on to keep myself going (those, and my weekly movie nights with my roommate). I joined our WC partway through the fall 2019 semester and immediately received training in using WCOnline for consultations. I primarily consulted in-person, but I was already used to a hybrid modality so the switch to fully online was, for me at least, not a huge practical shift. It was just that it felt like everything around me shifted too; I was probably in a constant state of mild shock for the first couple weeks. In the Before Times, all of my work with clients, face to face and online, took place within the physical place of the WC. Its building was (and is) not adjacent to my department, so even if I was already on campus, I had to budget a few minutes to walk there if I was already on campus, or about 30 minutes if I was walking from home. Once I retreated into my home and lost all of that interstitial time, I fully realized how much I’d been relying on it to help physically and mentally organize my day. I was fortunate enough to live with roommates who I generally got along with, but being thrown into a situation where they were the only people I felt comfortable physically being around was a major adjustment, as was realizing the true thinness of the house’s walls and doors (accidentally dueling phone and Zoom call speaking volumes were a weekly occurrence). The time I’d spend walking was one of the primary ways I’d move myself into and out of my consulting (or more generally academic) headspace and back into a “home” mentality – one in which I was more agreeable to working with and around my roommates. I have since slowly (and, I will admit, grumpily) adjusted to this “new” situation. This has partially been a mundanely practical matter, since the pandemic is still a long way from being resolved, but it was primarily a matter of replacing old mental habits and spatial pathways with new(er), (more) specific, (intensely) local habits and pathways. I have a browser that I use almost exclusively for consultations, so that opening it signifies in some small way that I am going into “consultant mode.” I will usually make a cup of tea before my first appointment so that I have something to keep my hands occupied, which also gives me a ready-made excuse to stand up from my chair and walk to the kitchen after each appointment to make more tea and unplug for the brief window of time between consultations. And while I certainly miss the opportunity to hang out with my colleagues in the break room in between appointments, I feel that we’ve still been able to maintain a semblance of community through our weekly colloquium. It was very difficult at the beginning; I felt like I was consoling clients as much as they consoled me. In some ways it’s still difficult, just in different ways. Realistically, I barely made it to the end of the spring semester, and still don’t know how I finished papers and tests. Somehow, I did, and I kept consulting through it all. For better and for worse this fall semester seemed like an improvement, which I’ll attribute mostly to the fact that I could prepare (to a certain extent) for a fully online modality and the mental weight of the pandemic before it even started, as opposed to having to adjust in the middle of everything. The current spring semester has been overall better for me, perhaps because I’ve adjusted to conducting classes fully online – an alarming thought – and perhaps because I’ve finally started feeling the slightest bit optimistic about vaccination rates. But I’m still exhausted, still worried, just doing my best to muddle through. My fellow consultants have been integral to my persevering, as they’ve variously offered advice, support, commiseration, and openness to frank discussion. For me, the online space has felt simultaneously too lonely and too crowded. Thankfully, my graduate program had always been hybrid, allowing the flexibility for students to meet in-person and online in the same place by incorporating Zoom as a fundamental component of the course. However, I was someone who had never consulted synchronously online before, so when the COVID-19 pandemic halted life as we knew it, I was thrown into the (new to me) online place of WCOnline. And like many writing consultants (and people around the world in general) as quickly as I settled into a new rhythm of working and learning online from home, I became acutely aware of challenges posed by the online space. For one, the notion of working from a “homeplace” had become a little complicated for me. My partner had been unlucky enough to finish his graduate degree the spring semester that COVID-19 rearranged the world. After struggling with unemployment, we were forced to move days before the beginning of the fall semester to a new city with a better job market to stay afloat. This move was a culture shock to me as I had always been a small-town gal. Additionally, the pandemic made it challenging for me to get out and participate in my new community. Ultimately, I was cooped up in an unfamiliar apartment in an unfamiliar city, feeling isolated as I tried to conduct writing consultations through an unfamiliar modality in a home that did not feel like home. As I did my best to adapt to a new consulting modality, feeling a bit lonely in my new home, a feeling familiar to many these days began to creep in: Zoom fatigue. Although video conferencing had become the primary way for me to relieve my feelings of isolation by connecting with clients and colleagues, I began to feel isolated and socially overloaded at the same time. I felt I was expending much more emotional labor than I had when consulting face-to-face, checking in with students and doing my best to encourage and support them during these trying times. This became problematic for me, however, as I began expending emotional energy that I did not have. Unfortunately, at the end of the previous spring semester, the semester that everything got rearranged, life as I knew it was rocked by my mother’s death. I had finished that the spring semester and begun the subsequent fall semester in the midst of enormous grief. Consequently, I would lie down after even just one online writing consultation, emotionally exhausted. Before COVID-19, I did not consider myself as someone who was that affected by space and place. Although I was consciously aware that our spaces and places indeed have a great influence on us, I was lacking the context to really discover how these affected me personally. The pandemic made this all too clear for me. Place has immense power to shape feelings, attitudes, and even behaviors. This is true for us as students, colleagues, and writing consultants. Knowing this, WC practitioners should take care to create space for these influences, especially as we continue to contend with a pandemic. Losing the connection with clients and colleagues that many consultants experience from face-to-face consulting, we must be mindful to acknowledge and embrace feelings of isolation and burnout. Our goal as WC practitioners must not be for things to return to normal, but to normalize the oftentimes taboo yet all too familiar feelings of emotional exhaustion that academia has become increasingly hostile to. Right before lockdown began, my partner and I signed a lease in Lubbock, Texas. The plan was for me to move onsite for my doctoral program (Technical Communication & Rhetoric) that I’d be entering my second year of. While I had enjoyed being a distance student my first year of said program, I hoped that moving onsite would allow me to reduce my workload (I was working full-time as a lecturer and WC coordinator at Texas State University), increase my class load (I was taking two courses a semester, instead of three), and give me more time for projects. The reality of course was that, while my class load certainly increased, the Graduate Part-time Instructor (GPTI) and Graduate Writing Center (GWC) work I took on felt not all that different in time commitment when navigating teaching and consulting in a virtual environment. In Spring 2020, the potential of a lockdown led to me and the directors of the Texas State University Writing Center building out what the WC would look like when gone virtual. We did not have WCOnline in the WC for scheduling or synchronous online appointments, though we had started piloting Zoom for our limited synchronous appointments (that were, prior to this, held with the consultant in the WC). This experience coupled with my own use of Zoom in my doctoral studies resulted in our building the center’s plans around a common Zoom link with a main area (the virtual front desk) that could check writers in before moving them to their appointments (using the breakout rooms function). That it was all under one Zoom meeting link created a sense that we were still part of the center, even though we were video conferencing in from our home offices, bedrooms, living rooms, and backyards. That I had a small part to play in forming this system made the transition to online WC administration work smooth for me. This is not to suggest that there was not a shock to the system for me, as academia’s demand for continued productivity left me feeling even more frustrated with the world around me. I would say that it took me a while to shake it off and return to a sense of normalcy, but that would suggest that I ever have fully shook it off. Then, I started at Texas Tech University as a GWC consultant. The system was different (WC Online). There was no clicking over to someone’s breakout room when they weren’t in an appointment. We do have a weekly colloquium over Zoom which has helped get a sense of my fellow consultants, but in WC Online there is no sense of the space of the WC; there is only the sense of WC Online, the video feed of me with my mess of a kitchen behind me and the video feed of the client’s surroundings. As for those clients, those writers seeking to bounce ideas and strategies off me? I often find myself rushing through appointments, distracted by the need to later attend to household labor demands that surround me and are even at times clearly reflected in my video feed. Likewise, writers once willing to sit through the entirety of an appointment to discuss and strategize are seemingly also distracted as they have to deal with internet concerns and cooped up children. That’s assuming they can videoconference from their home, as I have had appointments where clients have been driven to whatever open space with decent internet connection they can access; cars, bars, and cafes are now normal backgrounds I spot in appointments. All of this is in the context of me feeling what some would call Zoom fatigue (let’s call it that, though it is a mix of videoconferencing platforms that I use daily). My partner and I moved to a new city in the middle of a pandemic. They still haven’t found work. We’re coming up on the deadline to renew our lease and we haven’t even seen the inside of our favorite local restaurants. Everything social we do is via videoconferencing. All my classes that I take are via videoconferencing. All my appointments are via videoconferencing. The conference I attended recently was via videoconferencing. Funerals are via videoconferencing. These are necessary precautions, but I am tired. And that tired is only heightened as academia pushes us to keep going on like this is all perfectly normal, to proverbially be the person jogging through a pandemic. In doing so, though, we are creating a damaging new normal where the homeplace can easily and readily be overtaken and replaced by the workplace. Although the three authors’ experiences discussed here are deeply personal, they reflect issues dealing with labor that many writing center workers have dealt with working from “home” during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pressure to continue to perform within the various academic, WC, and personal communities in which each of us participates has felt unbearable and unreasonable for many. Oftentimes this pressure stems from a societal desire to keep on working as if nothing is wrong because acknowledging that, in fact, so much is wrong can be incredibly painful. Much of the messaging in academic spaces encourages us that if we just log onto the home computer and smile, then class, work, happy hour, funerals, etc. can continue as usual. However, we must accept the reality that these are highly unusual circumstances, and that ignoring the painful reality of this situation only serves to compound and invalidate the mental and emotional labor being extended by WC workers. Because of the collapsing of learning, working, social, and private spaces into the homeplace due to the COVID-19 pandemic, ideas of space and place in the WC have only become more complex. As we attempt to mediate professional and personal identities through our laptops and phones, framed against the clean(er) areas our rooms, we are reminded that “[labor] is shaped/motivated by complex and unique combinations of requirements, expectations, values, perceived strengths, interests and desires, identities, and knowledge” (Caswell et al., 2016, p. 10). COVID-19 has made it impossible to ignore the way that our spaces shape and are shaped by our experiences, and we must acknowledge and address these issues in our WCs, whether in-person, online, or somewhere in between. While WC consultants and administrators struggle with increased workloads and personal stress, oftentimes in isolation, we must take steps to create WC places that are not just safer physically, but emotionally and mentally as well. As Degner et al. (2015) found years before the COVID-19 pandemic ever began, the fact is that “mental health concerns and illnesses are indeed affecting our centers… 56% of respondents said their symptoms affected their tutoring abilities (either slightly, moderately, or significantly).” The creation of safer places in the WC must involve resisting the urge for life and work to go back to “normal;” instead, it must involve normalizing and embracing the feelings that make our consultants, administrators, and clients human—in an echo of Illich’s (1973) conviviality. Simply trying to make our spaces feel like home will prove all the more problematic as many of us begin to transition back to our distinct physical spaces and have the residual exhaustion of our homeplaces being saturated by workplace activities. Giaimo (2020) has established solid moves we can make—lean on the larger WC community through online resources and organizational supports; be more flexible with technology alternatives and time off; share resources on wellness, mental health, and labor; and advocate for consultants. That said, this must be a learning opportunity for the WC community, one in which we can and should ensure that the different spheres that inform our lives as consultants and WC administrators are better protected from the threat of our workplaces saturating our homeplaces. There is certainly a need for further method-driven work to ascertain sustainable and equitable approaches toward this, work that needs much more room than the size of this piece allows. That said, we hope this will serve as a call for such work to find what is sustainable in writing centers of all types and sizes. As Claire speaks to above, our goal must not be to simply return to a supposed normal. We must work to transform our WCs to better value the placeness of our spaces and ensure that the various stakeholders of WCs (e.g., consultants, clients, and administrators) are valued as not just productive laborers and ready consumers, but also as whole people deserving of emotional, physical, and mental wellbeing.

Although infographics have been used for educational purposes, their specific use for teaching process-based writing in undergraduate writing courses is not documented in the literature. When integrating infographics into a process-based writing instructional approach, they may offer students multiple means of representation, engagement, and expression – universal design for learning principles. We examined one undergraduate writing course that integrated infographics into a process-based writing approach to understand student experiences and uses of this multimodal communication form. Results show that infographics have unique benefits and challenges to supporting student writing. Results also reveal that students used their infographics for revising, transferring, and rethinking the content of their subsequent, text-only research papers. This work has implications for college composition pedagogy.

Students face multiple challenges when transitioning from high school to college writing, with new content, audiences, genres, and task expectations. Psychometric researchers have shown that self-efficacy, competency, and affective factors can help or hinder students during this transition, but little previous research examines what students themselves say about their writing and writing experiences. This study analyses the content of 248 essays from first-year composition writers who discussed their writing identities, processes, products, and journeys. Our findings show differences between writers who view themselves positively and negatively. Instructors can use this information to design meaningful prompts, utilize process writing activities, and engage students in meaningful reflection.

This pedagogical reflection describes the interactions within, and effectiveness of, an instructional approach for writing – the teaching/learning cycle (TLC). The instruction takes place in a northwestern, midsized city of Russia in a secondary school specializing in English with a 10th grade/form group who self-selected into a strand for the sciences (i.e., students take additional courses in the sciences versus the arts). The reflection combines Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory and concept of molar activity with TLC to demonstrate how various systems influence the teacher and students in a secondary-schooling context. The TLC approach assisted the Russian-speaking students in the improvement of English persuasive writing. The molar, or propelling, interactions in the writing lessons demonstrate a fluidity of knowledge across the systems of the ecology. The study may be of use to teachers instructing writing in English and to comparative education scholars who focus on classroom interaction to inform their work on culture.

The recent focus on threshold concepts in writing studies indicates the field’s growing commitment to engaging writing-based threshold concepts in the daily work of teaching and learning to facilitate writing transfer. However, although there is growing evidence of robust scholarly work in this area, research on the pedagogical importance of these concepts to the writing development and tutoring of L2 students is still in its nascent stages. To address this gap, this paper first presents findings from a research study that aims to understand how writing centre tutors addressed the needs of L2 students in tutoring sessions and the extent to which threshold-oriented language appeared in the content of the conference summaries. After discussing the findings, the paper proposes a threshold concept-based framework for tutoring L2 writers involving two established concepts: ‘writers’ histories, processes, and identities vary’ and ‘writing is informed by prior experiences.’ In addition, a new model of the conference summary as a reflective tool to promote writing transfer is presented along with a discussion of emergent writing centre-oriented concepts that reimagine the role of the tutor as an ‘expert-outsider’ and the L2 student as ‘informed novice.’

I set out in this article to address the question of whether it is possible to be creative and agentive when the written content involves information of a factual, statistical, or empirical nature. In examining the matter of creativity and agentivity in such writing, I seek to locate my understanding of both areas in the realm of the situated, subjective, and the reflexive, and the expression of creativity as an enactment and enablement of these three qualitative dimensions through(out) the fluidity and contingency of the composing process and experience. My discussion first provides an account of my own reflexive positioning as a writing teacher. This section is followed by a review of relevant literature in the area of academic literacies and the way knowledge and disciplinarity as they are captured and naturalized in written text may be challenged for their supposed representation of static and depersonalized views of meaning. Thereafter I consider PW308 – a course in scientific project report writing – and feedback from a group of third-year chemistry students with respect to the situatedness of their individual experiences as they went about composing their project report.

In this article, I would like to provide a reappraisal of sophistic activities during the Hellenistic period. An analysis of passages in Philodemus, Posidonius, and several more fragmentary sources can show that there is a continuous and lively tradition of sophistic teaching and rhetoric from the Classical period until Imperial times. The texts give the impression that characteristic features of Hellenistic sophists point towards the generation of Gorgias and his colleagues as well as towards the star speakers of the Second Sophistic. The traditional but outworn negative image of the Hellenistic sophists and Hellenistic rhetoric in general can be explained as a result of the source situation, the decentralisation of schools and performance spaces, and a Classicistic bias of ancient and modern authors. In the end, the testimonies allow for more conclusions than generally thought. A selection of related sources is provided in an appendix.

This article describes and reflects on experiences teaching students to compose a “Writing Process Photo Essay” in the context of an upper-division college writing course that satisfies a campus-wide writing requirement. As the culmination of a quarter-long student inquiry into their own writing processes, this multimodal assignment asks students to combine text and images to help them reflect on the environments, tools, habits and routines that surround their writing activity. This assignment takes its inspiration from calls for renewed scholarly attention to material and embodied aspects of writing process. In the end, this assignment creates opportunities for students to recognize, reflect, and reimagine their own writing activity in school contexts and beyond.

This Instagram “Weekly Writing” assignment is a social-media-based, low-stakes, and longitudinal approach to teaching and experimenting with multimodal composition. Students create an account for the purposes of the class and follow each other. They post three times per week, sometimes freely and sometimes in response to a prompt or challenge. Together, we use the platform and its rich multimodal resources to consider how in-the-moment multimodal composing can spur invention, place the writer in the perpetual position of noticing, and create an archive of experience that holistically communicates beyond the author’s original intention. This article discusses the pedagogical rationale for this approach, along with the issues to consider before adopting and adapting this practice.

Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic is a public writing course that was developed in response to an institutional call for a Public Pandemic Teaching Initiative in Summer 2020, which asked faculty to consider how this moment of radical disruption might inform our teaching and deepen our understanding of the relationship between writing, resilience, and response. The course provides a set of complementary, public-facing modules that offer teachers, community partners, and writers the tools to both write about and respond to writing about trauma. The resources, writing prompts, and activities draw from activities we have used in our undergraduate and graduate writing classrooms as well as our interdisciplinary research interests. Together, they support participants in addressing trauma from three perspectives: composing personal healing narratives; framing their personal inquiries within a larger research context; and positioning themselves within the larger community response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Public writing courses, such as Writing and Responding to Trauma in a Time of Pandemic, demonstrate how interdisciplinary collaboration and accessible platforms can provide meaningful institutional responses during times of public health crises.

This assignment challenges students in an English Language Arts teacher education program to compose a proleptic autobiography—a genre of writing that transforms the customary retrospective autobiographical essay assignment as a way to encourage students to envision and create their future professional selves. The goal of the assignment is to support students’ development of realistic expectations of their imminent careers as educators and to foster a deeper appreciation of diverse learners. Composing such an imaginative narrative can help students develop stronger professional dispositions as they consider aspects of their future careers such as work/life balance, economic concerns, developing confidence, and providing support and encouragement to their students.

This study uses both qualitative and quantitative research methods in a mixed-methods approach to investigate whether the principled use of author-devised cover letters (CLs) within doctorate writing groups can result in more useful reviewer feedback comments than would be attained through the use of instructor-devised writing assessment rubrics. In this context, CLs are self-devised written documents that help the reviewers give the author useful and critical written feedback comments. Twenty participants in different discipline-specific writing groups were given explicit instruction about the importance and content of CLs during the peer feedback process. Their perceptions of a useful CL were obtained from post-course questionnaires and analysed qualitatively. In addition, their CLs at various stages of the feedback process were analysed quantitatively for genre, social presence, and evidence of teaching instruction, and compared to the CLs produced by 20 PhD students in similar writing groups who received minimal CL instruction. The study found that author-devised CLs, as opposed to instructor-devised rubrics, can allow the authors the flexibility of providing text-specific background details, requesting reviewer help on specific textual aspects, using social presence to develop a sense of writing community, and provide reflection upon their own writing.

Timed single-draft essays as summative assessment tasks have been argued to be inadequate for both teaching and assessing writing in the context of process writing. This is because single draft essays assess product rather than process. To address this concern, the authors developed, implemented, and evaluated two FL (foreign language) English writing courses that integrate various formative assessment activities for teaching writing. The course-embedded evaluation methodology included three techniques: pre-testing, collecting teacher-student conference reports, and administering a student opinion survey at the end of the semester. Pre-testing and collecting conference reports were both used as techniques for simultaneous teaching and inquiry into this teaching. The student opinion survey evaluated the course design grounded in the new teaching methodology. The findings of the study indicate that consistent use of formative assessment in the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing class increases student confidence and motivation to develop their writing skills. Results demonstrate that academic (C1 level) and college (B2 level) writing courses that integrate formative assessment into teaching process writing can be a valuable addition to an array of FL (English) language courses offered by the departments of foreign languages at European universities.

This study examines 50 business responses to negative reviews on Amazon.com in order to identify common genre moves for responding to negative online reviews. To complement the genre analysis and assess the effectiveness of these common genre moves, the author conducted a survey seeking consumers’ feedback on three typical business responses to negative online reviews. This investigation not only provides feedback on how businesses can publicly respond to negative online reviews but also presents an empirical case on how we can balance genre stability and variation and go beyond just teaching typified genre features in our genre pedagogy.

Writing requires a high level of nuanced decision-making related to language, purpose, audience, and medium. Writing teachers thus need a deep understanding of language, process, and pedagogy, and of the interface between them. This article draws on reflexivity theory to interrogate the pedagogical priorities and perspectives of 19 writing teachers in primary classrooms across Australia. Data are composed of teacher interview transcripts and nuanced time analyses of classroom observation videos. Findings show that teachers experience both enabling and constraining conditions that emerge in different ways in different contexts. Enablements include high motivations to teach writing and a reflective and collaborative approach to practice. However, constraints were evident in areas of time management, dominance of teacher talk, teachers’ scope and confidence in their knowledge and practice, and a perceived lack of professional support for writing pedagogy. The article concludes with recommendations for a reflexive approach to managing these emergences in the teaching of writing.

When teaching first-year composition, I noticed how uncomfortable students became at the prospect of talking about politics in the classroom. The science majors were vocal in proclaiming the importance of limiting the use of plastic bags, and the nursing students vehemently argued for the necessity of vaccinations. These impassioned voices, though, quieted when faced with&hellip; Continue reading Book Review: From Thought to Action: Developing a Social Justice Orientation by Amy Aldridge Sanford

Reviewed by: Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work ed. by Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey Jennifer Keohane Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey, eds. Remembering Women Differently: Refiguring Rhetorical Work. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 274 + xviii pp. ISBN: 9781611177978 Feminist rhetoricians have pursued recovery projects for many years. Seeking to demonstrate that women had multifaceted impacts on public life, they dove deep into archives to find the forgotten fragments of their public statements. In the engaging introduction to this collection, Letizia Guglielmo labels this practice “recollecting,” which she defines both as an act of bringing to mind but also as an act of “gathering or assembling again what has been scattered” (2). Indeed, this volume serves as such recollection, bringing together fourteen eclectic essays on women’s contributions to many arenas of symbolic and collective life. As with many feminist rhetorical projects, the editors—Lynée Lewis Gaillet and Helen Gaillet Bailey—insist that recovery of forgotten women is not the end goal of their volume. Instead (and inspired by work by Jessica Enoch and Jacqueline Jones Royster and Gesa Kirsch), they explore the rhetorical work required to remember women alongside how the memories of women come to be created, used, or erased in various situations (x). The editors segment the book into four different sections: new theoretical frameworks, erased collaborators, overlooked rhetors and texts, and disrupted memories. To the editors’ credit, the afterword recognizes that alternative organizational schemas could also have served to organize these diverse essays into a readable flow. Organization by chronology, methodology, or genre of text would facilitate additional insights into female reputation management and construction. The editors have selected the organizational scheme they use to “provide a structure for thinking about ways to re-collect existing narratives [and] create a heuristic for suggesting new research possibilities and venues” (257–8). As a result, however, each section contains rhetors and projects that are quite different. The collection as a whole features rhetors stretching from Byzantine historian Anna Komnene to Nigerian anticolonial activist Olufunmilayo Ransome-Kuti to oral expression teacher Anna Baright Curry. [End Page 342] The collection’s greatest contribution is in recovery. Indeed, the rhetors and rhetorical practices studied here will likely be unfamiliar to most. And, for more recognizable speakers like Crystal Eastman and Dorothy Day’ authors bring new insights and lenses to examine their rhetoric. Many of the authors in this “re-collection” answer Enoch’s call to examine rhetorical work broadly with great creativity and strength. That is, they interrogate questions of why some of these rhetors have been forgotten or have had their reputations tarnished throughout history. In the first section, “New Theoretical Frameworks,” the editors feature essays that “suggest new methodologies for reexamining the work of women” (xi). Essays by Gesa E. Kirsch and Patricia Fancher, Alice Johnston Myatt, Maria Martin, and Ellen Quandahl foreground new ways of engaging the memory of women. In one particularly interesting contribution, Myatt explores the phases involved in reclaiming women’s reputations. Using Rosalind Franklin, a largely unknown scientist integral to the discovery of DNA’s structure, she shows how and why her reputation passed through erasure, refutation, reclamation, and restoration (41–2). Other contributions look to indigenous theory and social circulation as ways to understand the struggle and successes of women as anticolonial activists, physicians, computer programmers, and historians. The second section, “Erased Collaborators,” explores how women’s work can be expunged when women collaborate with men, who are often subsequently credited for their contributions. Essays from Mariana Grohowski and Alexis Hart, Henrietta Nickels Shirk, and Suzanne Bordelon provide insights into the way these collaborations often disadvantaged women. Shirk, for instance, creatively analyzes the partnership between John James Audubon and painter Maria Martin by reading both their exchanged letters and the images on which they collaborated—he painted the birds and she the backgrounds for the famous Birds of America almanac. Yet, of course, Audubon’s fame and status far outshone Martin’s own, and her artistic skills are forgotten. In the third part, the editors call our attention to “Overlooked Rhetors and Texts” and examine activity that is not included in traditional definitions of...

Reviewed by: Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash by Richard Hidary Brandon Katzir Richard Hidary, Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric: Sophistic Education and Oratory in the Talmud and Midrash. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 344 pp. ISBN: 9781107177406 Recent scholarship on the Second Sophistic has demonstrated the extent to which that period, in the first centuries of the common era, had a profound influence on rhetoric as a cultural practice. In particular, as Timothy Whitmarsh has noted, “[Oratory] was one of the primary means that Greek culture of the period, constrained as it was by Roman rule, had to explore issues of identity, society, family and power” (5). The Second Sophistic lays the groundwork for the Byzantine tradition, which itself had an enormous influence on the European rhetorical tradition. Yet, the literary cultures inspired by Roman Hellenism were not limited to Greek speakers. Classical Jewish texts like the Mishna, the Talmud, and various midrashim were composed or redacted in the same literary culture that gave rise to Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists. Richard Hidary’s Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric argues that the Jewish culture which produced the Mishna was affected by the cultural and literary ferment of the Second Sophistic. Hidary observes that the Second Sophistic bears numerous similarities to its contemporary rabbinic movement. He notes, “the rabbis also pushed to uphold their own distinctive Jewish identity and pride in the face of Roman dominance and they too studied and taught inherited religious traditions from antiquity” (5). Like the Greek orators, the Talmudic sages “studied, codified, and lectured about their own past traditions and in a similar way used this as a strategy for upholding their culture and values” (6). The strength of Hidary’s approach lies in his nuanced examination of a range of rabbinical genres. Each of the chapters proceeds in a similar fashion: they begin by explaining the significance and structure of a particular genre of rabbinical writing followed by an explanation of how that genre intersects with rhetorical genres of the Second Sophistic. Hidary explores some rabbinical writing—such as aggadic midrashim, the Talmud Yerushalmi, the Talmud Bavli—as well as some lesser known genres, like the progymnasmata in rabbinical literature. He compares the role of lawyers in Roman and rabbinical courts, the heavenly court in rabbinical literature, and Plato’s heavenly court. Hidary offers a fresh perspective to each genre. Of particular interest is his analysis of Sabbath sermon, which, according to [End Page 340] Hidary, is the mainstay of rabbinical declamation and has its origins in the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE. Hidary argues that there is a formal connection between rabbinic homilies and the aggadic midrash. He observes that while some scholars have suggested that “works of midrash aggadah are transcripts of actual synagogue sermons,” most believe they are literary creations, even if they were perhaps sometimes read aloud. Each chapter of aggadic midrash begins with a proem which expounds upon a Biblical verse. Hidary notes that “the verse usually lacks an obvious connection to the Torah lectionary and thus raises the curiosity of the audience. The audience is kept in this state of suspense until the speaker finally manages to connect the opening verse with the first verse of the Torah lectionary, thus delivering his main point with a memorable punch line” (50). Hidary argues that the exordium is the model for the midrashic proem, pointing out that Aristotle “writes that the prooimion of epideictic speeches should begin with an unrelated subject and then transition into the main topic of the speech” (53). But Hidary emphasizes that while the rabbis’ rhetorical form may look Greek, their arguments are designed to demonstrate the superiority of the Jewish people and the Sinaitic revelation. Hidary draws a connection between the Hellenistic orators of the Second Sophistic who “turned to Attic oratory to revive Greek pride in the face of Western Roman political domination” and the rabbis who “[apply] the rhetorical technique of the Greeks to their teaching of Torah,” an application which was ultimately aimed at demonstrating “the perfection of Scripture” (77). The later chapters of Rabbis and Classical Rhetoric compare classical and rabbinic...