This essay explores some of the challenges for the discipline of rhetoric and composition implied by the growth in undergraduate writing majors. Through six narratives from junior faculty at five different institutions, this work explores the ways in which these new faculty were, or were not, prepared for the challenges of developing and implementing new writing majors. Finally, the authors discuss ways in which those who are currently working in undergraduate degree programs can help to provide the intellectual and scholarly materials necessary for graduate programs to more thoroughly and specifically prepare future faculty for their work on undergraduate majors.

Increasingly, students come to the university with a consumer mentality, which gives students a sense that they are entitled to negotiate their student positions within the university and the classroom. This article, using Directed Self-Placement as a sort of case study, considers the role student-centered assessments and pedagogies play in perpetuating this consumer role and theorizes that we are framing them in a way that makes us complicit. The article addresses questions about what to do as education becomes more consumer driven. What is a WPA--caught between concerns about good pedagogy and pressures from the administration to recruit and retain students--to do when faced with students who want to negotiate their positions in the first-year composition curriculum? And, how do we negotiate ourselves back into a position in which assessment standards and rigor are paramount, even in a consumer world?

By rewriting a sales letter about a short story into a literary analysis, first-year composition students not only learn rhetorical principles that are sometimes lost in a literature-based composition course but also discover the metagenres linking disciplines.

What if two reviewers read and reviewed the same book and then commented on the review written by the other? And what if the book author could then respond to their entire exchange?

The attempt of writing center consultants to discourage faculty from requiring classes to visit the writing center led to research that calls this longstanding practice into question.

In a FIPSE-funded assessment project, a group of diverse institutions collaborated on developing a common, course-embedded approach to assessing student writing in our first-year writing programs. The results of this assessment project, the processes we developed to assess authentic student writing, and individual institutional perspectives are shared in this article.

The first-year writing program at Kennesaw State University has found its in-house conference (IHC) to be an important venue for faculty development. Based on the assumption that teachers actually know what they are doing, the IHC invites teachers of all ranks to propose a presentation on a selected topic and then to present those papers at conference sessions that other teachers attend. The IHC invites part-time faculty into the community, generates intellectual conversation about teaching across the lines of rank and hierarchy, allows the conversation to continue long after the conference since participants can see each other daily, and invites reflection on and modification of teaching. The success of the IHC serves as a reminder that some faculty development should be discipline-specific and local. In addition, the IHC asks teachers of writing to actually write themselves and allows them the opportunity for scholarship. The professional development that the IHC offers is not, however, limited to a writing program but can be used to stimulate intellectual engagement across the English department and, beyond that, to other departments across the university.

Rhetorically challenging literature can be made to serve the purposes of first-year composition in new ways. Excerpts from the novels of Marcel Proust that focus on the author’s characteristic scrutinizing, reflexive attention to style work successfully as models for assisting writers in acquiring the habits of reading and re-reading, and of writing, revisiting, and revising, which are essential to well-written prose.

Writing about Writing as the Heart of a Writing Studies Approach to FYC: Response to Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions” and to Libby Miles et al., “Thinking Vertically” by Barbara Bird; “Response to Miles et al.” by Douglas Downs; “Continuing the Dialogue: Follow-Up Comments on “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions”” by Elizabeth Wardle.

Dispelling historical narratives in composition and rhetoric that largely depict nineteenth-century student compositions as “vacuous” themes, this archival study examines women’s compositions at Mount Holyoke Female Seminary as complex generic hybrids, in which the composition is fused with common social and dialogic forms.

The writing I received in my first-semester composition class at Xavier University in New Orleans, Louisiana, the semester immediately following Hurricane Katrina was stunning with respect to both student commitment and narrative sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative example of this writing entitled "life During Katrina" by a student I have called "K." The student's essay developed a thesis, documented a chronology, increasingly included detail, naturally included dialogue, and reached a sensitive and sophistication. In this essay, I analyze a representative sincerely reflective conclusion. Moreover, the student (like my other students in that class) was extraordinarily committed to revision, working diligently on issues of both grammar and clarity. My own conclusion to the remarkable post-Katrina student writing I experienced is that our teaching of Freshman Composition can be much more artificial than we really desire it to be. How to make first-year writing courses more meaningful to students is an imperative that I believe we must continue to explore.

Beginning with the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the author, his students, fellow teachers, and Southeastern Louisiana, the article focuses on lessons learned about writing and teaching through the experience. The article tells the story of Katrina: In Their Own Words, an anthology of storm stories by local students and teachers that the author edited, and what he learned from this experience about the limits of academic writing and the value of voice. The final section focuses on a risky English 101 assignment on writing music that grew out of the storm, how this assignment led to a radio program and anthology, and what this assignment taught him about seizing the "teaching moment."

I am writing from the position of what Stephen North categorizes in The Making of Knowledge in Composition: Portrait of an Emerging Field as a practitioner. For practitioners, knowledge in composition is generated not only theoretically or through research-quantitative, qualitative or historical-but also (in fact, primarily) through reflective practice in the classroom. In this paper I would like to make my small contribution to the moldy, waterlogged, wind-whipped, recently erected Katrina Room in what North refers to as the Practitioner's House of Lore.

Two problems catapulted Wendy Rihner into service learning: Hurricane Katrina's destruction of Louisiana's coast and the lack of context plaguing so many college composition courses. Rihner undertook a service-learning project with an English  Composition II course in the spring of 2007 that radically changed her pedagogical philosophy. "Providing Context" discusses Rihner's desire to provide her students with a context for writing argumentative essays while raising awareness of the ecological disaster that is unique to Louisiana.

This article explains the rules for playing the “Interpretation Game” in a literature-based first-year writing class, describes the resulting class discussion, and reflects on the ways that rules and games can promote rich collaboration.

By reimagining traditional WPA work in the context of a two-year college, we can begin to identify unique challenges and opportunities for a two-year college WPA.

Abstract This essay identifies memoirs (obituaries) as the primary space women initially occupy in Methodist Magazine, the church's first successful periodical. Based on a study of 154 memoirs published in Methodist Magazine from 1818–25, this essay explores how memoirs operated as rhetorical composition intended to motivate and instruct the living as much as to elegize the dead. By exposing rhetorical strategies used in depictions of persons "dying well," specifically the roles assigned to women, this essay claims that women's memoirs transformed their deathbeds into pulpits, elevating them to ministers in death—positions they were precluded from holding in life. Notes 1I thank RR peer reviewers Vicki Tolar Burton and Jan Schuetz for their valuable feedback, and Kate Ronald, Sarah Robbins, and Connie Mick for helpful responses to drafts of this essay. 2Sarah Tomlinson's memoir was written by her sister. 3Gregory Schneider describes a dialectic of social religion with both iconic and instrumental moments (151). 4Collins's later publications appear under the name Vicki Tolar Burton. 5These calculations include those memoirs extracted from British periodicals. Going forward, I have limited my examination to memoirs written by and about American Methodists with the exception of two Canadians. In the Northeast some Methodist ministers' circuits crossed the border into Canada. 6It is important to note that authors and editors still controlled which extracts were included in memoirs; thus they could use these selections to construct individuals in certain ways. 7Methodists in good standing were invited to participate in quarterly, circuit-wide love feasts. These love feasts brought together all the congregants from the different churches on a minister's circuit to address business matters and share worship. During these gatherings members were encouraged to share their testimonies and discuss their spiritual failures and triumphs. Journals of the General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, Vol. I, 1796–1836. New York: Carlton and Phillips, 1855. Methodist Magazine, (New York), 1818–1828. From American Periodical Series Online. Ann Arbor, MI: ProQuest, 2000.

WRITING ACROSS THE CURRICULUM linkages are generally acknowledged to help students improve as writers and engage more deeply in disciplinary course content. However, the extent to which the literacy skills that are taught in general writing courses transfer to the specific writing needs of a particular discipline remains a debatable issue. Referring to first year writing courses, Amy Devitt notes that writing courses “have been attacked as not useful, in part because of a potential lack of transferability of the general writing skills learned in composition courses to the particular writing tasks students will later confront” ( ). Margaret Mansfield similarly maintains that attempts to reproduce real world writing in the classroom are “intrinsically doomed” ( ), as do many of the essays in Joseph Petraglia’s collection, Reconceiving Writing, Rethinking Writing Instruction, which question the value of what Petraglia terms GWSI (General Writing Skills Instruction). However, an important benefit of a cross curricular model, one that receives little attention in writing across the curriculum scholarship, is that linked courses not only help students improve as writers, but they can also enable students to understand that “when people learn, they don’t take on new knowledge so much as a new identity” (Lindquist ). Identity is closely linked with writing, but WAC tends to focus primarily on the actual writing, not on the role writers play in a discourse community. In this essay, we discuss a successful linkage between a writing class and a class in Health Sciences that used rhetoric, with particular emphasis on the concepts of identity, genre, and performance, to help students gain insight into the role of writing in the field of Public Health and understand what it means to be a Public Health professional. Differences in students’ responses to essays written at the beginning of the semester as

Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle’s “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning” First-Year Composition’ as “Introduction to Writing Studies’” in the June 2007 issue of CCC (volume 58.4, 552–84) has raised a good deal of debate, and I welcome more contributions from readers as we discuss the Downs-Wardle article in these pages. Joshua Kutney’s written response came in time for publication in this issue. In addition to the print copies of the journal, the original article is featured on the CCC Online Archive (www.inventio.us/ccc).

In higher education, issues of in loco parentis have been most often discussed in connection with campus administrative policies. College writing teachers need to reflect, however, on the ways they conceivably exercise parental authority in their own classrooms, through such models as the Stern Father and the Nurturing Mother.

Though Plato may have been making a metaphysical argument when he valorized orality over textuality in Phaedrus, a close reading of “Plato's Pharmacy” reveals that Jacques Derrida's response, which reversed Plato's oral/textual dissociation, was metaphorical. The difference/differénce between the metaphysical and metaphorical is itself lost in the Yale School's translation of French deconstruction into American poststructuralism. When the Yale School's metaphysical interpretation of poststructuralism, and particularly the literary notion of the author, is imported into composition, Derrida's claim that writing is “essentially democratic” is itself reversed, and the student subject is deconstructed alongside student writing.

The Impending Demise of English Zero, or Sub-Freshman English

In this article we propose, theorize, demonstrate, and report early results from a course that approaches first-year composition as introduction to Writing Studies. This pedagogy explicitly recognizes the impossibility of teaching a universal academic discourse and rejects that as a goal for first-year composition. It seeks instead to improve students’ understanding of writing, rhetoric, language, and literacy in a course that is topically oriented to reading and writing as scholarly inquiry and that encourages more realistic conceptions of writing.

While it is often ridiculed, the subject of the paranormal offers an effective means to encourage student involvement and support critical-thinking skills in first-year writing courses.

Of interest to instructors of first-year writing, this paper delineates the challenges faced by professors of first-year writing who lack formal graduate training in composition and rhetoric, and it explores the strategy that enables them to become excellent teachers despite such challenges.

Introducing Web-based literary hypertexts in an introductory writing course motivates students to ponder both the changing techniques of writing and reading and their own attitudes toward these two interrelated activities in a wholly new way. Evaluating a novice literature launches novice readers and writers on a journey to becoming “experts” at facing with confidence the many challenges that college and life will bring, including a fundamentally new approach to reading and writing.

Abstract Abstract This article reports on classroom research designed to answer questions about authority—how institutions and disciplines, broadly conceived, influence teachers' ability to abnegate authority and how students' experiences influence their perceptions of authority in a business writing and a first-year composition class. The theoretical framework is derived from research about institutional and disciplinary influences on these two areas of study. This framework and our results lead us to speculate about the ways in which our students' experience of the institution and expectations of the classes and their intentions for using the material taught in the classes may have thwarted our attempt to share authority in our classrooms. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS We gratefully acknowledge the help of our undergraduate and graduate associates, MO and JB. They not only attended every one of our classes but also conducted our interviews. This particular study would not have been possible without them. Additional informationNotes on contributorsJean LutzJean Lutz, also an associate professor of English, directs two technical communication programs at Miami University. She is coeditor of The Practice of Technical and Scientific Communication. She has published in collections and journals, including College English and Research in the Teaching of English.Mary FullerMary Fuller, associate professor of English and Director of the Ohio Writing Project, has coauthored Literature: Options for Reading and Writing and published essays in collections and journals, including National Middle School Journal, Writing Program Administrator, and National Writing Project Quarterly.

Abstract This article reports on classroom research designed to answer questions about authority—how institutions and disciplines, broadly conceived, influence teachers' ability to abnegate authority and how students' experiences influence their perceptions of authority in a business writing and a first-year composition class. The theoretical framework is derived from research about institutional and disciplinary influences on these two areas of study. This framework and our results lead us to speculate about the ways in which our students' experience of the institution and expectations of the classes and their intentions for using the material taught in the classes may have thwarted our attempt to share authority in our classrooms.

English composition instructors who use the personal interview to foster socialization among students and to generate quick and easy writing experiences may overlook the valuable learning opportunities that the personal interview can also bring to an English composition classroom if the assignment is integrated into the classroom through a structured approach.

This article offers a critical perspective on the default mode of freshman composition instruction, that is, its traditionally middle-class and white racial orientation. Although middle-classness and whiteness have been topics of critical interest among compositionists in recent years, perhaps the most effective challenge to this hegemony in the classroom is not in our textbooks or critical discourse but in what many of our students already consume, the ghettocentricity expressed in the music of rappers like Kanye West, Jay-Z, and Eminem.

In the interest of better understanding the challenges of enacting new pedagogies in the classroom, the following essay focuses on the role of genre and uptake in the relational negotiation of self-presentation. I argue that to bring our teaching practices in line with our best intentions and most progressive pedagogies we need to be aware not only that reliance on the legibility associated with familiar subject positions motivates student resistance in the composition classroom but, moreover, that our interest in securing self-presentations as teachers may motivate everyday interactions that work to maintain the status quo.

Students in college writing courses need to understand world issues, including the oppressive effects of the global economy. But their teachers need to give them a sense of agency and authority, rather than simply telling them what political positions to take. One example of a writing assignment that might engage as well as inform students involves analyzing Parade magazine’s annual list of the world’s worst dictators.

This study charts the terrain of research on writing during the 6-year period from 1999 to 2004, asking “What are current trends and foci in research on writing?” In examining a cross-section of writing research, the authors focus on four issues: (a) What are the general problems being investigated by contemporary writing researchers? Which of the various problems dominate recent writing research, and which are not as prominent? (b) What population age groups are prominent in recent writing research? (c) What is the relationship between population age groups and problems under investigation? and (d) What methodologies are being used in research on writing? Based on a body of refereed journal articles ( n = 1,502) reporting studies about writing and composition instruction that were located using three databases, the authors characterize various lines of inquiry currently undertaken. Social context and writing practices, bi- or multi-lingualism and writing, and writing instruction are the most actively studied problems during this period, whereas writing and technologies, writing assessment and evaluation, and relationships among literacy modalities are the least studied problems. Undergraduate, adult, and other postsecondary populations are the most prominently studied population age group, whereas preschool-aged children and middle and high school students are least studied. Research on instruction within the preschool through 12th grade (P-12) age group is prominent, whereas research on genre, assessment, and bi- or multilingualism is scarce within this population. The majority of articles employ interpretive methods. This indicator of current writing research should be useful to researchers, policymakers, and funding agencies, as well as to writing teachers and teacher educators.

In an ESL first-year composition classroom, cooperative learning assists English language learners in developing their ideas, voice, organization, and sense of writing conventions, while simultaneously enhancing their production and comprehension of English.

Keeping in mind the Chinese character-combination yuyan, with its multiple meanings of language, parts of language, the processes of language, and the products of those processes, the author depicts English as kept alive by many people and by many different ways of using it in a wide range of personal, social, and historical contexts. She proposes four lines of inquiry “against the grain” of English-only instruction—that living-English users weigh what English can do for them against what it has done to them; that they weigh what English can do against what it cannot do; that they understand English as being in the hands of all its users; and that they focus energy on how to tinker with the very standardized usages they are pressured to “imitate”—and discusses the implications of those lines of inquiry for composition in the United States.

Hip-hop as content in a first-year writing course offers students a powerful way to connect with their worlds. I draw on Marcel Proust as a kind of rhyme to legitimate hip-hop as a substantive expressive medium to achieve artistry in writing.

An experienced instructor finds that there is really no substitute, time and institutional constraints notwithstanding, for getting down on the page with her students and engaging with their writing where it is, where they are, and where she is.