AbstractAn important step in teaching critical reading for online civic reasoning is building teachers’ own acceptance of and comfort with screen literacies, understanding them not as alternative to gold-standard book literacies but as normative. To do so, teachers must better understand how web-based texts, and the reading of them, differ from the “classical” critical reading most teachers are used to. This article examines the “quantum” nature of web-based texts—their fundamental instability, their reader constructedness, and their nature as processes rather than objects—and relates these features to hyper-reading and other reading strategies that research shows allow engaged readers to screen-read critically.

AbstractThis article examines the role of critical reading in a racial literacy-focused composition curriculum. The author draws on student-produced data to demonstrate how the racial literacy curriculum prepares students to explore the situatedness of language, how individual positionalities influence the construction and interpretation of text, and how sociocultural ideologies are represented and disseminated through seemingly innocuous or objective reporting. Broadly, this article offers strategies for teaching critical reading to help teachers of writing improve students’ rhetorical awareness and engage them more fully as participants in a textually mediated society.

While social work educators have explored strategies to improve literacy development among their students, many educators continue to strive for a better integration of effective reading and writing skills. This article presents the findings of a survey that used qualitative research methods to assess the outcomes of a doctorate in social work program that employed a specialist in composition. Doctorate in social work students reported on the skill of ‘close reading’ as it related to their own writing, practice, university teaching, and field supervision. Data analysis reveals that these students had not previously learned the close reading skills necessary for strong writing skills. This article extends support for a full integration of close reading as a way to improve writing, clinical mental health practice, and critical thinking skills.

Drawing upon cognitive writing process theory and research, this study investigates the influence of language of writing, foreign language (FL) proficiency and gender on the revision processes of 77 undergraduate students studying at an English-medium college in Oman. Their first language (L1) was Arabic and their FL was English. The participants produced two argumentative authentic texts, one in L1 and one in FL. Their proficiency in English was assessed using the Oxford Placement Test (OPT). Participants’ revisions were recorded and analysed, according to the measures amount, location and type, via keystroke logging. The results showed that the vast majority of revisions in both languages were immediate, i.e. at the point of inscription, and focused on language rather than content. In addition, there was consistent evidence that participants made more revisions in the FL than they did in L1. For ‘total amount of revision’ and ‘immediate revisions’, there was a consistent interaction between gender and FL proficiency. The pattern of the interaction indicated two conflicting tendencies: (a) female participants appeared in general to be more motivated to make revisions in both languages than males, and (b) the less proficient they were in FL the more revisions they made. By contrast, the number of revisions made by the male participants did not depend on their FL proficiency. For ‘distant’, i.e. already written text, and ‘end’, i.e. after producing the first draft, revisions the amount of revision depended solely on the language of writing and gender. Furthermore, the results revealed that when writing in the FL, students with greater FL proficiency attended to content revision more than language revision. Findings are discussed in light of process-oriented writing research and implications for writing research and teaching are suggested.

This action research study began with classroom observations of a learning cycle informed English as a Foreign Language writing class (referred to as the first learning context) for the purposes of creating a general how-to guide for implementing a learning cycle within a writing course. The guide was then implemented in a writing skills class in a different educational context (referred to as the second learning context). A learning cycle was introduced to help learners become more accustomed to peer-editing, giving peer feedback, performing self-assessments and being more critical of their own work. It was found that the learning cycle functioned very differently in the second learning context and not entirely as intended, despite modifications that were made to account for differences between the two learning contexts. Teacher reflections revealed that differences between the reasons for using a learning cycle, assumptions about the similarities between learning contexts (the two courses and their content), decisions regarding changes to the second contexts’ learning materials, differences in student population and other unforeseen differences affected how the learning cycle operated. Critical interactions with sample performance writing texts, the provision or collaborative development of assessment criteria and feedback prompts for peer-editing, materials which support reflection on each task and at the end of the course, and additional class time spent on reflective discussion are all identified as key components of a learning cycle when used in an EFL writing class. The reflections also revealed that learning cycles can have utility when applied to contexts vastly different to those from where they were developed. Recommendations and suggested supporting resources for teachers interested in implementing learning cycles within their own contexts are provided.

This paper shows the development of an innovative teaching project conducted with students of two different degrees: Hispanic studies and modern languages and translation, at the University of Alcalá. This interdisciplinary experience sought to connect students taking their initial steps into poetry writing with translators approaching poetic translation for the first time. With this in mind, the creation of a bilingual collection of poems was proposed. Firstly, students in Hispanic studies would create some poems that could be translated, or rather recreated by the translation students. The main objectives of this interdisciplinary project were to promote creative writing, encourage group work, and increase students’ motivation – as well as to reinforce both the use of English as a foreign language and the practice of literary translation by crafting and subsequently translating original texts created by the students themselves. Moreover, the project is also beneficial for the enrichment and refinement of the education process in general and of poetry translation teaching practices in particular.

This qualitative study examines academic support practices and students’ experiences and perspectives in a graduate nursing education program that has, for many years, emphasized research and writing by requiring aspiring nurse practitioners to pursue publication in peer-reviewed clinical research journals. In collaboration with faculty, practitioner researchers from the university’s postsecondary learning center developed and facilitated group workshops and provided students with individual consultations on research processes and manuscript development. The researchers wrote field notes and researcher memos, administered workshop evaluations, and interviewed seven participants to better understand students’ writer identities and whether writing for the discipline of nursing with the support of peers, faculty, and learning instructors led to any changes in both their individual and collective sense of disciplinary identity. More broadly, this study interrogated the role of a postsecondary learning center employing an academic literacies pedagogical approach (Lea and Street, 1998; Lillis and Scott, 2007) in working with faculty to support students’ writing for a specific discipline. Findings suggest that graduate nursing students felt anxiety and uncertainty about claiming disciplinary expertise and competence as writers. This affective experience made it difficult for students to align their understandings of nursing as a discipline, rooted in their field experiences as professionals, with a more academic conceptualization that they believed to be represented by the research and writing practices required for the assignment. By engaging with the learning center as a third space (Gutiérrez, 2008), the students explored these challenges and experimented with writing practices, directions for their research, and the conceptualization of their profession as they modified their understanding of what was possible for scholarly writing and research in nursing as a discipline and what they could contribute individually as emerging scholars. This study has implications for teaching academic writing practices in nursing contexts, as well as other academic disciplines and for forming generative collaborations between postsecondary learning centers and subject experts.

Most textbooks and trade press books on engineering communication are genre based, proscription based, or some are a combination of the two. Henderson takes a different approach to teaching the rules of English grammar and how to apply those rules to craft effective sentences. His approach is mathematics based, presenting the rules of English grammar as sentence equations. This approach makes the book particularly intriguing as a resource for teaching students of engineering and science. Henderson's "A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers: Sentence Algebra & Document Algorithms" presents a distinctive approach and methodology for clear engineering communication, particularly suited to its specific audience. Henderson's methodology, grounded in the "universal language" of mathematics, is unique and refreshing. The book is a welcome addition to available resources for these students and their instructors.

This book offers a welcome teaching and learning resource in Creating Intelligent Content with Lightweight Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). The author is a Professor and Director ofThe Transdisciplinary Initiatives with the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. The author takes the reader through the history, design, and implementation of a relatively new variation of DITA, known as Lightweight DITA. Lightweight DITA was developed and is maintained by OASIS, the same standards body responsible for DITA, and differs from DITA in two particularly distinctive ways.

Introduction: Online learning and work are commonplace in both engineering and professional communication. To be effective online, even experienced face-to-face teachers require new skills. About the case: This case reports on the design and delivery of faculty training on teaching online at a Norwegian university during the COVID-19 pandemic. Two questions are examined: 1. What topics and training designs are suitable for beginning online teachers with little time to implement the results of the training? 2. In this emergency context, how do local conditions impact the design and delivery of such training? The training focused on building interactive online courses, providing formative feedback for students, and choosing between synchronous and asynchronous teaching. Situating the case: The literature suggests that teachers often undergo a shift in their teaching philosophies and methods when transitioning to online environments. Methods/approach: Pretraining and post-training reflection were used as informal data sources to develop the training sessions and to holistically discuss the themes that emerged from the training. Results/discussion: Two online and one face-to-face 2-hour training sessions were delivered to three groups of faculty. Three main themes emerged from the training: active learning, synchronous/asynchronous teaching, and providing formative feedback to students. Conclusions: Challenges included convincing participants to shift from the lecture as the main method of instruction to more interactive and active techniques, as well as reconciling the standardized course study plans with individual teachers' instructional needs. Larger studies of training programs and more formal methods of data analysis are suggested.

The reviewer concludes that, overall, Hanganu-Bresch and Flaherty’s "Effective Scientific Communication: The Other Half of Science" is an excellent introduction to scientific communication. Genre move analysis blended with step-by-step guidance and genre examples make this book a valuable guide for helping students in STEM fields acquire basic scientific communication skills. The book also provides food for thought for ESP teachers to foster research and encourage better-informed teaching practices.

Reviewed by: Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work by Jessica Enoch Kate Rich Jessica Enoch, Domestic Occupations: Spatial Rhetorics and Women’s Work, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2019. 260 pp. ISBN: 9780809337163 Some interventions are long overdue, and Jessica Enoch knows how to make valuable interventions in the overlooked localities of gendered ideas. In Domestic Occupations, she attunes rhetorical studies to a historiography of where women work. Across the humanities, the spatial turn to recognize the politics of place considers race, gender, and sex.1 Yet, we still lack a lexicon for how places might transform the labor of marginalized people over time. Enoch approaches this task with rhetorical theory to examine how the domestic duties within private spaces, like a home, were rhetorically extended to less traditionally feminine tasks in public spaces. [End Page 240] The book begins with a rich variety of scholarly work in rhetoric, geography, and gender studies to make the case for the gendered and rhetorical history of spaces. For Enoch, “There is no arhetorical space” (9). Throughout the book, her archival work attends “to the material, ideological, pictorial, emotive, discursive, and embodied site of the home and the ways this site’s spatial rhetorics constrained and made possible women’s work outside the domestic arena” (171). These texts are representative of dominant discourses that centered white middle-class women and excluded what she calls other women. She cleverly guides readers through the spatio-rhetorical transformations of the schoolhouse, the laboratory, and the child-care center, making a notable claim in each case. Her first transformation is centered around New England schoolhouses in the nineteenth century. The notable claim that arises in this chapter is the idea that spaces perform gender like humans do. Aligning herself with Judith Butler, she argues, “when a space takes on new gendered meanings, the bodies expected to inhabit it and the identities constructed within it also change” (33). Initially, the home was imagined as offering a feminized place of stability and comfort while the classroom was likened to a masculinist prison wherein students were harshly disciplined. When the harshness of the schoolroom was critiqued and remodeled, the classroom gradually became a space for women once it was reconfigured to be more like the feminine home. The subsequent entry of women into the teaching profession resulted in class mobility for some women while also devaluing the teaching profession as a whole, due to its perception as a form of feminized labor. Domestic scientists towards the end of the nineteenth century serve as the second transformative case study. The notable claim here is that ethos can be revised through spatial rhetoric. Domestic scientists, Enoch argues, revised the home into a site of scientific complexity. While these women, often conservative and white, frequently distanced themselves from the women’s rights movement, Enoch insightfully points out that their cautious rhetorical reconfiguration of the home allowed many women to pursue science education. Through domestic advice manuals and public kitchen demonstrations, homemaking was transformed into a practice that required a laboratory. Enoch acknowledges that this transformation was very white and relied on some normative conceptions of femininity, but it raises an intriguing set of implications. Of all the chapters in the book, this is perhaps the richest in scholarly opportunities. Those invested in how white women engage in rhetorical strategies of whiteness may find this chapter useful. Additionally, scholars in the rhetoric of science, medicine, and technology might see potential to approach their objects of study with spatio-rhetorical analysis. The final case study is devoted to how the wartime child care center was transformed into an acceptable place to offset domestic labor and how it reverted back to an undesirable place at the end of World War II. In this chapter, Enoch makes the notable claim that spatial rhetorics are capable of being emotive. The maternal qualities of the home had to be rhetorically [End Page 241] transferred to the wartime childcare center to get women working during the war. Enoch skillfully asserts that visual rhetorics and the enargeia of childcare employees cuddling with children communicated that the center could operate as a secondary home To convince women to return to...

This article explicates the operationalization of a theoretically robust framework in the teaching of business communication at an institute of higher learning. This article reimagines the design of a business communication course that focuses on the coalescence of both decoding and encoding processes of messages as a unified pedagogical approach in teaching business communication. This approach is in contrast with more conventional approaches in designing communication courses, which tend to prioritize one process over the other. Participants in the study acknowledged the instrumentality in the course design in promoting communicative values with real-world impact.

Expressing thanks in the workplace involves thoughtfulness and skill. Based on a gratitude journaling exercise over the course of a month by 58 American professionals (Study 1) and a survey of over 1,200 American professionals (Study 2), this research demonstrates the many written and spoken ways in which professionals value receiving thanks in low-effort, high-effort, minor-accomplishment, and major-accomplishment situations. The research suggests gratitude expressions can be interpreted through media synchronicity theory and social comparison theory. A variety of training and teaching approaches are offered.

As the field of technical and professional communication (TPC) has moved toward more inclusive perspectives, the use of decolonial frameworks has increased rapidly. However, TPC scholarship designed using decolonial frameworks lacks a clear, centralized definition and may overgeneralize and/or marginalize Indigenous concerns. Using a corpus analysis of TPC texts, we assess the ways that the field uses "decolonial" and propose a centralized definition of "decolonial" that focuses on rematriation of Indigenous land and knowledges. Further, we offer a heuristic that aids scholars in communication design appropriate for decolonial research and teaching strategies.

In fall 2019, the Two-Year College English Association distributed a survey to two-year college English faculty across the United States through professional listservs, regional distribution lists, and social media platforms. This report summarizes the key data derived from 1,062 responses to close-ended questions about workload related to teaching, service, leadership, and professional development. The report discusses the demographic profile, employment status, and contractual obligations in course assignments of the two-year college English faculty who responded. It also summarizes Information about respondents’ overload teaching, their autonomy within their teaching responsibilities, and the kinds of service and professional development activities in which they engaged.

Preview this article: Review: Sixteen Teachers Teaching: Two-Year College Perspectives, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/48/3/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege31206-1.gif

There is a particular urgency in this political moment to understand children’s experiences with current events. Drawing from data generated following the 2016 presidential election, this paper focuses on three racially and linguistically diverse children’s persuasive compositions. Within a critical literacies writing unit focused on (im)migrant experiences, children called on legislators to act on the Republican administration’s policies. Building on the understanding that all literacies are political and that teaching and learning are value-laden tasks, the author engaged a cultural rhetorics orientation—grounded in the understanding of texts, bodies, materials, and ideas as interconnected aspects of communication—for data generation and analysis. The findings highlight how children strategically employed rhetoric to persuade. They used logos, pathos, and ethos, as well as story, a central tool for meaning-making and building practices in the world. Ultimately, this study demonstrates how children, when properly supported, can agentively participate in critical literacies and act on real-world politics. Through the stories of young children, this study emphasizes what children have to tell adults and what a cultural rhetorics orientation, through its emphasis on story, enables literacies researchers and educators to understand about children’s composing.

Since 2003, RTE has published the annual “Annotated Bibliography of Research in the Teaching of English,” and we are proud to share these curated and annotated citations once again. The goal of the annual bibliography is to offer a synthesis of the research published in the area of English language arts within the past year that may be of interest to RTE readers. Abstracted citations and those featured in the “Other Related Research” sections were published, either in print or online, between June 2019 and June 2020. The bibliography is divided into nine subject area sections. A three-person team of scholars with diverse research interests and background experiences in preK–16 educational settings reviewed and selected the manuscripts for each section using library databases and leading empirical journals. Each team abstracted significant contributions to the body of peer-reviewed studies that addressed the current research questions and concerns in their topic area.

The prevalence of high-stakes testing, scripted curricula, and accountability measures in schools discourages experimentation with curriculum. This article encourages curriculum design experimentation in teacher education by proposing playful practices, game-like activities for designing curriculum that draws on students’ out-of-school literacies. We explore the benefits and challenges of game-based curriculum design with preservice teachers (PSTs; N = 19) in two public university secondary English education courses and trace one PST’s take-up of the curriculum design moves through incorporation of these playful practices into her classroom. Data collection occurred across one academic year and included field and observation notes, written reflections, interview data, and artifacts. Findings show the potential for game-based curriculum design in literacy teacher education to (1) create an imaginative space between teacher and student, (2) encourage collaborative production, (3) connect PST university coursework to classroom practice, (4) support students’ creative language production, and (5) create playful social contexts for participatory learning. Challenges highlight the importance of attending to power dynamics in game play and design. Implications include how game-based pedagogical invitations in teacher education can help PSTs imagine new ways to organize classroom structures and literacy learning experiences that value an interplay of youth cultures and classroom curriculum.

Book review

In U.S. secondary schools there is an overriding emphasis on formulaic approaches to argumentative writing instruction in English language arts that tends to trivialize disciplinary norms of argument and evidence because of institutional pressure to bolster students’ test performances.  This paper seeks to provide an ethnographically-informed framework for understanding for whom, how, when, and to what extent it is possible for students to participate, through writing, in the study of literature as the central disciplinary content of English language arts. The corpus of data used in this study of an 11th grade International Baccalaureate (IB) classroom (26 students) consisted of classroom instruction (video-recordings and field notes) that occurred across an initial instructional unit (September 8th to November 3rd). Of particular importance is a summative writing assignment, teacher interviews and collaborative data analysis (with video clips), student interviews about instruction and their writing, samples of student writing, and related documents. We also analyzed two essays written by the two case study students in response to a writing assignment that the teacher, described as an IB “literary commentary with an unspecified topic” that she reframed as a literary argument. Discourse analysis of a series of events within instructional conversations revealed that rather than prescribed forms, the teacher offered “possible” writerly moves for her students’ arguing to learn. Consequently, her students enacted their writerly moves in a variety of patterns suggestive of disciplinary ways of knowing in English language arts rather than in a pre-set formula that they had learned in previous grades. In order to trace how the students enacted modes of participation (procedural display and deep participation) in disciplinary activity (literary argumentation) as writing practices and shifting writer identities  we also conducted a multi-phased and multi-layered ana

This article discusses the successes and vulnerabilities associated with combining the pedagogical methods of Theater, Composition, and Community Literacy in the Composition classroom. It examines how the ideas of Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed and Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed can be combined to support an innovative approach to Composition teaching, one that additionally employs engaged scholarship and service learning. The essay describes how methods and cycles of story gathering, playwriting, and rhetorical analysis have been used with various community partners, including an adult day care for dementia patients, an HIV/AIDs clinic, and Public Health outreach programs that address Health Disparities. The article explains how the ready audience of community-written plays and the inherent characteristics of theatrical production enable finite and clearly definable communication moments and products—especially in the autobiography-fantasy fused genre I have termed magical memoir—while engaging and empowering the voices of students, teachers, community partners, and audience members alike. All human beings are actors (they act!) and spectators (they observe!) They are spect-actors. … Theatre is a form of knowledge; it should and can also be a means of transforming society. Theatre can help us build our future, instead of just waiting for it. –Augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors

This essay argues that while fostering individual and collaborative literacy can indeed promote self-awareness, confidence, and political awareness, the threat of emotional and material retribution is ever-present in jail, making the development of infrastructure challenging. Such reality compels engaged teacher-researchers to develop tactical methods for promoting literacy with limited social and material support from institutions that are primarily invested in compliant behavior. Rather than relying upon traditional models for building engaged university-community infrastructure in such contexts, I suggest a participatory curatorial model and explore the notion of curating a program within an ever-shifting set of artists, regulations, allegiances, and expectations.

Most time spent writing in schools is typically in the form of writing practice, often in short-form writing assignments, and focused on the mechanics and cognitive approaches to writing, rather than motivation. Research has only recently begun to document a direct relationship between writing achievement and writing motivation, but so far concludes that the two constructs do inform each other. Therefore, for the present study, we independently examined the impacts of motivation to write, students’ perceived value of writing achievement, and students’ self-belief as writers on their writing outcomes. Focusing on middle and high school classrooms, we triangulated data through students’ writing samples, students’ writing scores from the Test of Written Language-IV (TOWL-4), and students’ writing achievement provided by teacher ratings. Our study adds support to previous work on writing motivation by demonstrating that middle and high school students’ motivation to write is correlated strongly with their writing achievement. To expand on our results from this study, additional research is needed to better understand the relationships between writing motivation and the complex, intersecting identities students bring with them into their writing.

This study examined the relationships between writing anxiety, writing self-efficacy, and perceived use of revision strategies in high school students with different achievement goals as they learned argumentative writing in English Language Arts classrooms. Three achievement goal orientation profiles emerged from a sample of 307 American high school students on the basis of their mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goal orientations: Low on All, Average on All, and High on All. These three profiles of students significantly differed with respect to their writing anxiety and their perceived use of revision strategies. Writing self-efficacy mediated the effect of writing anxiety on the perceived use of revision strategies for students in the Average on All profile only. The findings suggest that students are diverse in their motivational and affective experiences with respect to argumentative writing, and caution against using a one-size-fits-all approach for teaching argumentative writing to students.

The aim of the present study is to bring new momentum into research on students’ understanding of academic writing. Drawing on the idea that metaphors give insight into implicit conceptions of abstract entities and processes, we developed a detailed and differentiated set of conceptual metaphors that can be used to study student ideas about writing in research, teaching, and interventions. A large sample of undergraduates produced their everyday understanding of writing in short texts beginning with a self-generated metaphor. Based on theories from cognitive linguistics, the conceptual metaphors in their texts were analyzed in terms of their action quality (transitivity) and spatiality (spatial primitives). The undergraduates’ conceptualizations were very heterogeneous. Most metaphors depart strongly from scientific approaches to academic writing within cognitive psychology and sociocultural theory. Roughly half of the metaphors could be collated to one of four metaphor systems. Depending on the desired degree of abstraction or concreteness, conceptual metaphors or metaphor systems can be employed in further studies to illuminate thinking about writing.

Efforts to accelerate the pace of adoption of writing-to-learn (WTL) practices in undergraduate STEM courses have been limited by a lack of theoretical and conceptual frameworks to systematically guide research and empirical evidence about the extent to which intrapersonal attributes and contextual factors, particularly faculty beliefs and disciplinary cultures, influence faculty use of writing assignments in their teaching. To address these gaps, we adopted an ecological systems perspective and conducted a national survey of faculty in STEM departments across 63 research-intensive universities in the United States. Overall, the findings indicated that 70% of faculty assigned writing. However, the assignment of writing differed by faculty demographics, discipline, and beliefs. More specifically, faculty demographics accounted for 5% of the variance in assignment of writing.  Faculty discipline accounted for an additional 6% increment in variance, and faculty epistemic beliefs and beliefs about effectiveness of WTL practices and contextual resources and constraints influencing the use of writing in their teaching together accounted for an additional 30% increment in variance. The findings point to faculty beliefs as salient intervention targets and highlight the importance of disciplinary specific approaches to the promotion of the adoption of WTL practices.

This article discusses a final writing assignment for “Culturally Responsive Service Learning,” a course taught during a four-week experiential education program in rural Fiji. This elective course was situated in an undergraduate teacher preparation program but included students from a wide variety of disciplines and majors. This article discusses the theoretical and cultural framework for the assignment, the pedagogical decisions that led to the final paper, the process of sharing the assignment with the community through a public event, the limitations of using a storytelling framework from another culture, and suggestions for future adaptations. In alignment with the topic, the author uses two different voices to interweave personal storytelling with academic research. The article opens and closes with vignettes that demonstrate how the class arrived at new levels of critical consciousness through engagement with the readings and learning from Indigenous community partners. The body of this article is written in a traditional academic format. Storied vignettes are italicized for clarity.

This action research assignment invites students to participate in the progress of the UN’s Sustainable Development Goal #6 (SDG6) by contributing knowledge to two distinct public discourse communities: Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia and Consilience: The Journal of Sustainable Development. SDG6 targets access to clean water and sanitation for all by the year 2030. But, in order to accomplish this, the rate of progress must accelerate dramatically. In small groups, students research an SDG6-related topic and improve a Wikipedia article to make it neutral, balanced, and organized in accordance with Wikipedia quality assessment standards. Simultaneously, students compose an opinion paper addressing SDG6 goals and targeting the cross-disciplinary audience of Consilience: A Journal of Sustainable Development. The project raises awareness of discourse communities while students make headway on SDG6 by publicly sharing their research. The assignment is adaptable to an extensive range of subject matter suitable in both face-to-face and online teaching platforms. Students reflect on their own connections and learn to empathize with others by analyzing how lack of access to potable water and sanitation causes suffering. Action research calls on students, thinking as global citizens, to be bold in creating a new and better world—a world where access to clean water and sanitation brings justice to all.

The American Essay and the Future of Writing Studies, Nicole B. Wallack offers a perceptive and stimulating account of what essays are, how they work conceptually and aesthetically, and why it is important for American university writing programs to adopt an essay-centered curriculum. In an age of the Common Core State Standards, the essay has been marginalized by curriculum reform that reduces literacy to "skills acquisition" and assumes student writers are simply "protean workers who need to be readied to fulfill others' goals for their thinking and writing: intellectual 'stem-cells' for the world beyond school" that can be replicated indefinitely for someone else's use (3)(4). The director of the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University, Wallack argues that the essay-and a curriculum centered on having students read and write essays-promotes the values of a liberal arts education, while also establishing common ground for the fields of composition studies, literary studies, and creative writing. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book will appeal to writing program administrators, scholars of writing and literature, creative writers and essayists, and teachers of writing across the disciplinary spectrum. Crafting Presence includes chapters on the history of the essay as a genre distinct from other forms of nonfiction writing, close readings of specific essays from The Best American Essays series, and short pedagogical reflections, informed by Wallack's twenty-plus years of teaching experience. Although the essay may have been discarded from much of today's writing curricula for its association with the tradition of belles-lettres on the one hand and well-worn "school writing" on the other, Wallack maintains that the essay not only fulfills the goals of national curricular standards but also cultivates the intellectual, creative, and ethical thinking students need in order to become "reflective citizens, " to borrow Andrew Delbanco's term, who serve their community with their education. Some readers may chafe at Wallack's appeals to the values of good, old-fashioned liberal humanism, but her book presents a timely and inspiring vision of what the writing classroom-and, by extension, the universitycould become.

Writing classrooms focused on summative assessment are likely to lack formative feedback components that contribute to more motivated, confident, and autonomous writers, notes Icy Lee (2017), author of Classroom Writing Assessment and Feedback in L2 School Contexts. Ranging from $66.02 (Kindle) to $69.49– $102.24 (hardcopy), this 157-page work presents a strong case for school second-language (L2) writing education to shift away from traditional, score-based assessment. Though Lee targets L2 writing teachers and teacher trainers, she also appeals to researchers of L2 writing. Ten chapters provide thorough theoretical and research-based justification for a student-centered, learning-oriented feedback and assessment system and also provide practical suggestions for implementation. These chapters begin with the purpose, theory, and practice of L2 writing assessment and then explores various types of assessment and feedback, as well as the use of portfolios for assessment. The text concludes with chapters on technology in L2 writing assessment and classroom assessment literacy for L2 writing teachers. As a whole, the research-based guidance that Lee offers encourages writing teachers and educators to implement assessment, so it can “bring improvement to student learning and is supported by self-, peer-, and teacher-feedback” (p. 5).

for a video conference to discuss the second edition of Illegal Alphabets. Below are excerpts from their exchange, edited for clarity and length. Their conversation focused on the book's origins and the context of the scholarly commentaries that appear in the second edition. Kalmar and Leonard also discuss the book's contributions to literacy studies, teaching the book, and its lasting relevance to notions of migration, borders, discrimination, identity, language, and legality. Leonard's review of the second edition of the book follows her interview with Kalmar and frames its relevance to community literacy researchers, practitioners

Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy: Latino Migrants Crossing the Linguistic Border, Toms Mario Kalmar has composed a parable about literacy. A simple story used to demonstrate a lesson with "serious political implications" (xv), Kalmar's parable tells the tale of a group of "illegal" migrants in Southern Illinois in the eighties, working together to create an "illegal" alphabet to get by in their labor camp. After a series of violent events between the migrant and anglo populations in town, the migrants leverage their history of biliteracy-primarily among indigenous languages and Spanishto write English como de veras se oye, the way it really sounds. To do this, they break linguistic laws, creating bilingual glossaries that are governed by hybrid English/ Spanish sounds. The question of legality gives the parable its deep resonance: In order for their labor to have value, migrants must cross borders and challenge the laws that police national/linguistic geographies. In the book's terms of literacy learning, "the law itself poses a major part of the problem to be solved" (77). In other words, Illegal Alphabets and Adult Biliteracy is a story about migrants working at the borders of literacy in order to survive. That this story is true, and stems from three years of ethnographic fieldwork, makes it a book with lasting relevance for any literacy teacher or researcher working with communities whose creative, strategic, and serious writing work is marginalized or deemed somehow illegal.

Reviewed by: Principal Writings on Rhetoric by Philipp Melanchthon Kees Meerhoff Philipp Melanchthon, Principal Writings on Rhetoric. Edited by William P. Weaver, Stefan Strohm, and Volkhard Wels. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017. liv + 594 pp. ISBN 9783110561197 Publication of a brand new, state-of-the-art critical edition of Philip Melanchthon’s (1497–1560) major writings on rhetoric is excellent news for all scholars working in the field of Renaissance rhetoric. The volume under discussion here is the very first of a multi-volume edition of the opera philosophic, that is, of all major writings concerning the arts curriculum, taught according to the highest standards of humanism. Volume II-2 will be supplemented by a volume (II-l) in which the writings on dialectic will be published. This volume will also be of particular interest to students of rhetoric, since Melanchthon—following Valla’s and Agricola’s lead—placed dialectic at the heart of rhetoric. Melanchthon firmly believed in the classical [End Page 118] conception of the enkyklios paideia, so eloquently highlighted by Cicero in his oration Pro Archia, which was, not by accident, one of Melanchthon’s favourite speeches. True to the author’s conception, already expressed in his inaugural lecture (1518), the opera philosophies series will also republish his writings on grammar, classical literature, history, ethics, politics, physics, and mathematics. Moreover, since Melanchthon defended his philosophical conceptions on numerous occasions, either personally or by proxy, the final volume will contain his famous declamations concerning all areas of academic teaching. In short, this major enterprise, undertaken by the director of the Melanchthouhaus in Bretten, Günter Frank, and by church historian Walter Sparn, will supersede the previous editions of Melanchthon’s writings, notably the Bretschneider & Bindseil twenty-eight-volume edition published in the Corpus Rcformatontm over the course of the nineteenth century and the so-called MSA-edition of selected writings directed by R. Stupperich and published from 1951 onward. Volume II-2 contains the three textbooks on rhetoric published by Melanchthon in 1519, 1521, and 1531. These textbooks are supplemented by the republication of H. Zwicker’s earlier edition of the Dispositiones rhetoricae (1553), which first appeared in 1911 and was reprinted in 1968. These Dispositiones offer 160 outlines of speeches on all kind of matters and are thus working examples of declamations written according to the rules of composition proposed in the textbooks. Melanchthon’s writings on homiletics (De officiis conionatoris, etc.) are not included in the volume. But they are discussed through the annotations concerning the sections on preaching one finds in the textbooks from the very start. The volume is co-ordinated by William Weaver. Weaver is the editor of the 1521 Institutiones rhetoricae. Stefan Strohm, assisted by Hartmut Schmid, edited the 1519 De rhetorica libri tres. And Volkhard Wels was responsible for editing the 1531 Elementorum rehtorices libri duo. I shall refer to them as Editor B, A, and C, respectively. All texts are published in Latin, without translation; the introductions and annotations are either in English or in German. The quotations given in the notes are in Greek and in Latin. A modern translation with Greek key words added in brackets, especially for the longer quotations in Greek (of Aristotle, Plutarch, etc.), would have been defensible, if not preferable. Each editor enjoyed maximum scientific freedom in accomplishing his formidable task. And each individual edition offers not only a perfectly established text, but also a rich critical apparatus and a wealth of explanatory notes. The introductions and annotations demonstrate in a definitive way the importance of classical and humanist sources in Melanchthon’s writings. Among his humanist predecessors, Agricola and Erasmus are Melanchthon’s key authors; but, at a certain stage, George of Trebizond also played a remarkable part. Erasmus is the chief source, not only as the author of De copia and similar writings, but also as an interpreter of the Scriptures and as a collector of ancient wisdom in the Adagia. With Agricola, he is the great ancestor, who already conceived of rhetoric in close relationship to exegesis and homiletics and who advocated for an eloquence fuelled by [End Page 119] ancient literature. For Melanchthon as well, rhetoric became a tool for analysing...

Theme courses are a common practice despite their limited presence in composition scholarship, which contributes to a fractured understanding of the theme course’s purpose and place in the discipline. This article offers an aggregate picture of theme (or topic) based courses based on disparate scholarly publications and affirmed by data collected through an online survey of writing instructors and program administrators. To trace the theme course within our disciplinary tradition and as a continuing practice, this article defines the theme course, distinguishing between writing as subject matter and theme content as a form of reinforcement. It furthermore historicizes the theme course’s limited life in scholarship, synthesizing key features of theme course practice, reinforced by survey responses. Ultimately, this article offers a framework for reflective practice that all theme course practitioners can use for developing, implementing, and evaluating their teaching methods. The underlying argument is that theme courses can support learning about writing, so long as theme selection and implementation work in purposeful support of the course’s learning about writing goals.

How should we teach a class on family in the twenty-first century, when the meaning and makeup of “family” are under attack from all political angles? This article relates an attempt to rethink the family course as interdisciplinary, thematically arranged, heavily dependent on student engagement, and collaborative. From course conception to pitfalls and retrospection, this article provides an overview of a course implemented by the authors and their students as part of the honors program at the University of Portland. At the center of the course was a common curiosity for the material that emerged in hallway conversations at the intersection of different disciplines, at the intersection of ecocriticism and feminist theory, and at the intersection of popular media and personal life. The authors argue that collaborative teaching and intersectionality led to more productive classroom discussions and destabilized assumptions for all the course participants, instructors included.

This article analyzes two of the inevitable messes of translingual scholarship and teaching in composition studies: the criticism that arose from cross-disciplinary conflict with second language writing and the semantic ambiguities that result from the–ism in translingualism. The article reviews a variation in uptakes of translingualism, while arguing that specific strands—translingualism as a disposition and praxis—are the most fruitful in pushing English studies toward a more collective pursuit of language awareness and justice.

Using a classroom experience teaching Nella Larsen’s 1929 novel Passing alongside a contemporary controversy over racial identity, this article explores the value of literary study for intervening in student attitudes toward core curriculum requirements. The author argues that literature is uniquely situated to teach the skills colleges most want students to acquire in their general education curricula, in turn providing a crucial method for responding to the “crisis” of the humanities in higher education today.

This article describes an interdisciplinary, partially online honors course entitled Video Game Theory and Design. The article reviews the literature surrounding video games and technical communication and then outlines the learning objectives for the course. The authors describe individual and team-produced assignments and suggest game design techniques for motivating students. We explain how we assess different projects, including oral game pitches and the complex technical Game Design Documents that are students’ final deliverables. Finally, we discuss how game design techniques provide new perspectives on writing and generate new possibilities for technical communication assignments. We close by proposing three tactics that are useful for teaching technical communication students in hybrid and fully online courses: (a) nonlinear association for creative thinking; (b) team-based assignments for writing and editing using game-based tools; and (c) iterative prototyping and playtesting for multimodal production. Each tactic is contextualized using examples drawn from the field.

Teaching and composing with multimedia humanizes online technical writing and communication classes. However, students do not always see the connection between multimedia instructional materials, multimedia assignments, and the course learning outcomes. Purposeful pedagogy-driven course design uses multimedia instructional materials to connect assignments, course materials, and assessments with course outcomes. Technical writing instructors can integrate synchronous and asynchronous multimedia elements to address not only the what and why of online technical writing instruction but also the how of multimedia instructional materials. Example multimedia instructional materials and student projects discussed in the article can increase student retention and promote engaged learning.

This article reports findings from an institutional ethnography of university stakeholders’ writing in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, illustrating the affordances of this methodology for professional and technical communication. Drawing on interview transcripts with faculty and administrators from across the university, the authors contextualize the role of writing in the iterative, collaborative, distributed writing processes by which the university transitioned from a traditional A–F grading scheme to a pass or fail option in just a few business days. They analyze these stakeholders’ experiences, discussing some effects of this accelerated timeline on policy development, writing processes, and uses of writing technologies within this new context of remote teaching and learning.

This article employs cross-cultural communication approaches to teaching instructional design in the times of COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on instructions from France, India, Spain, and the United States for making protective masks, the authors highlight how the writers and designers of these four documents from each culture approach their audiences, organize their DIY instructions, make language choices, employ images and other illustration devices, and culturally persuade users. While acknowledging cultural differences, the authors urge students to identify and adopt design strengths from diverse cultures in their own ideas about composing instructions.

The COVID-19 pandemic created major disruptions in technical communication classrooms everywhere. Although technical communication instructors are used to teaching in a variety of contexts and settings, adopting a flexible approach in the first place will allow them to be better prepared for the changing dynamics of an unpredictable world. The authors present an approach that constructs pedagogical scaffolding to emphasize outcomes, interactions, relationships, and projects. These interrelated aspects form a coherent vision that can support both pedagogical planning and real-time decision making in specific instructional situations.

This webtext presents video recordings of writing conferences with two students in a lower-division online research writing course, analyzed in light of online writing instruction and writing center scholarship on synchronous conferencing—specifically considering the extent to which students in the conference practice or acquire digital literacy skills, benefit from the immediacy of the interaction, and experience an asymmetrical power dynamic.