Writing center studies has sought to move towards research methods that are replicable, aggregable, and data-supported (RAD) as a means to scholarly legitimacy. While a number of RAD research methods have been identified (surveys, qualitative analysis, observation, case studies, experimentation, discourse analysis, teacher research, action research, and ethnography), one important source of information has been largely overlooked: the scheduling metadata that writing centers routinely collect in the course of normal operations. The present research seeks to demonstrate the validity of metadata-driven research by interrogating an area of writing center scholarship that has been predominantly studied through theoretical or small group means: the impact of gender on writing consultations. It investigates whether the gender of the writing consultant significantly affects a student’s choice in scheduling appointments.

While the term neoliberalism is commonly used to explain libertarian and conservative economic perspectives, its rapidly expanding contexts influence every aspect of our cultural environment, even the contexts of higher education. This article explores how neoliberal ideology affects the contemporary teaching environment for women of color teaching ideological critique.

In this interview, poet and LGBTQIA activist Minnie Bruce Pratt shares the development of her pedagogy as a new teacher, the connections between her classroom practices and the women’s liberation movement, and some of the assignments she teaches to help people understand themselves. Paradoxically, Pratt offers both a reminder of the limitations of the classroom as a site for change and specific classroom practices and assignments that thoughtfully enact a pedagogy developed from her life’s work for liberation.

Research Article| January 01 2020 How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon Glenn Michael Gordon is assistant director in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University and course codirector of the class University Writing: Readings in Gender and Sexuality. He is editor-in-chief of the Morningside Review, an online journal that publishes exemplary essays by first-year undergraduates at Columbia. He leads an end-of-semester event on writing and publishing op-ed essays that has supported more than two hundred publications by first-year undergraduates. He lectures to medical and nursing school students at Columbia University Medical Center on compassionate and efficacious communication with LGBT patients and serves as an official faculty mentor to Columbia’s Division 1 wrestling team. Formerly, he was editor-in-chief of ReadersDigest.com, and his writing has appeared in numerous publications, including New York, Self, Departures, Writer’s Digest, Teacher Magazine, and Seventeen. He wrote frequently on men’s health and sexuality topics for WebMD and CNN.com. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2020) 20 (1): 115–126. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Glenn Michael Gordon; How to Teach Gender to Students Who Didn’t Know They Had One. Pedagogy 1 January 2020; 20 (1): 115–126. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-7879103 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search men, masculinities, consent, gender, sexuality, composition The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 2020 by Duke University Press2020 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

A synthesis of converging and contrasting perspectives on ways of knowing and doing in digital rhetoric pedagogy among 25 teacher-scholars that provides a rough sketch of the state of digital rhetoric pedagogy as it is understood and practiced in the second decade of the 21st century and as it is told by a range of voices, including leading voices, in the subfield of Digital Rhetoric and identifies and highlights areas of productive tension among interviewees’ responses.

As more writing centers move to include synchronous chat as a writing center consultation option, writing center researchers and practitioners must continue examining the affordances and constraints of the medium. In this article, we analyze four synchronous online consultation transcripts from one writing center’s pilot program to evaluate consultation patterns and arcs, approaches to teaching and tutoring, and the role of digital language, or netspeak (Crystal 19), in tutors’ feedback. We use this preliminary analysis to argue that writing center tutors can effectively use synchronous tutoring to meet the needs of diverse student populations, but these consultations might be more effective if tutors thoughtfully utilize some of the best practices of face-to-face tutoring. One finding suggests that tutors might engage student writers in online consultations more effectively by employing soliciting and reacting techniques more often than unintentionally using directive structuring practices, which can serve to limit dialogue with student writers (Fanselow 21; Davis et al. 29). Additionally, although netspeak can potentially establish common linguistic ground with writers, tutors should be aware of the disadvantages of using an informal tone and non-academic language in chat consultations; in fact, student writers might benefit from reading tutors’ chat feedback in Edited Academic Discourse. By employing the positive elements of face-to-face consultations in chat sessions, this medium has the potential for effective tutoring in a space where many students feel most comfortable. Our analysis may serve as a heuristic for others to use in assessing chat consultations, developing tutor training, and initiating future research on this consultation option.

This essay contributes to the emerging conversation about two-year college teacher-scholar-activism by revisiting the work of Elisabeth McPherson, the first community college faculty member to chair CCCC. Arguing that McPherson's fade from disciplinary memory reflects the marginalization of two-year college faculty that coincided with the rise of neoliberalism, Christie Toth traces three key themes in McPherson's published work: advocating for two-year colleges and the professionalization of their faculty; subverting institutional labeling of two-year college students; and challenging racism, classism, and sexism through pedagogy and policy. While her published work is not beyond critique, McPherson's career offers historical precedent for a two-year college English professional identity that integrates critical teaching, scholarly and organizational engagement, and activism for social justice at multiple scales.

This essay examines the complexities involved in taking up and sustaining one’s work as a teacher-scholar-activist working within literacy education today.  Spiegel argues that the guerrilla moniker may be a productive metaphor through which faculty can see and resee their positioning and approach to their work.  Focusing upon guerrilla cause, band, and tactics, she provides guided heuristics to help faculty shape their response to local context as exigencies compete, resources drain, and terrain shifts.

Not only is the current scholarship on technology professional development (TPD) of writing faculty at the periphery of Writing Studies, there doesn’t seem to be a clear conceptualization of the scope of knowledge and skills needed to teach writing with technology critically and productively. In this study, I address these issues using two research questions: a) What are the teaching with technology-related expectations for college writing faculty as stipulated in 11 CWPA, CCCC, and NCTE position statements? b) What are the characteristics of technology professional development programs, as identified in these statements, that train teachers to meet these expectations? The deductive analysis of these statements reveals that the three organizations have collectively stipulated three levels of technology-related expectations for writing faculty as well as the fundamental characteristics of an effective TPD program that would train in-service faculty to meet these expectations. Based on findings of this study, I argue that the institutional responsibility to provide writing faculty with robust TPD opportunities is not only professional but ethical as well.

For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current ; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice ). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

In this interview, on the eve of his retirement in spring 2020, I speak with Dr. Lad Tobin about his career and work in composition and rhetoric, his commitment to the teaching of writing, including and especially personal or expressive writing, and his arguments about the continued relevance of creative-nonfiction to composition.

Although writing scholars have increasingly emphasized the need for more equitable approaches to language (difference) in the composition classroom, specific examples of teaching praxis remain sorely needed. In this article, we offer three sets of activities that we have used in our own classes designed for multilingual students. In formulating these activities, we adopt a critical-pragmatic approach to linguistic social justice, inviting students to grapple with standard language ideology and its consequences while questioning the idea that students can or should be liberated by us. Focusing on notions of “standard” and “correct” English, our proposal is grounded in relevant debates, connecting insights from sociolinguistics and World Englishes/Global English Language Teaching with Jerry Won Lee’s theory of “translanguaging pedagogy.” We hope that these examples will inspire more concrete initiatives aimed at promoting linguistic social justice and student agency.

This article affords insights into the interdependence between writing and critical translation to inform implementations of antiracist and translingual writing pedagogies. Promoting linguistic and social justice for multilingual writers, it presents a writing assignment design that focuses on critical translation across asymmetrical power relations between languages, texts, writers, and readers. Critical translations by an international student and a resident multilingual student receive particular attention in this article in that they strategically utilize paratexts as discursive spaces for interrogating, resisting, and reconstituting academic English writing standards and conventions. Foregrounding such paratextual interventions in critical translations as forms of translingual and anti-racist practice can bring about social justice and change in multilingual writing and its teaching.

This article reports survey and interview research on how graduate student instructors (GSIs) across the United States navigate the boundaries of disciplinary expertise that define their work as students and teachers. The disciplinary backgrounds of GSIs in this study influenced their experiences with formal writing pedagogy education and their teaching practices. GSIs imported content, mindsets, pedagogies, and skills and expertise from their home disciplines into the FYW classroom and exported practices and dispositions from FYW into their own work as graduate students. I suggest how writing pedagogy educators might reframe preparation experiences to recognize the disciplinary boundaries GSIs work across and to repurpose these boundaries as sites for richer professional development and writing instruction.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

Teachers’ identities as writers and language users can have an important impact on their pedagogical practices. As the population of writing teachers becomes increasingly diverse, the development of teachers’ identities is an important but under-researched topic. This study examines how three prospective teachers from varied linguistic and cultural backgrounds constructed new identities through a multi-draft literacy autobiography project. We trace how these teachers’ identities changed and developed across the drafts of their literacy autobiographies, how their identity construction was mediated by the feedback they received, and how their language and literacy identities related to their emerging professional identities as prospective writing teachers.

Writing about writing (WAW) is an increasingly popular approach to teaching writing that, while often discussed as a single pedagogy, has always referenced a wide variety of curricula, pedagogies, courses, and assignments. While this diversity has been acknowledged, scholars have yet to fully explore the sources, nature, and implications of this variation. From our reading of over 40 published accounts of WAW courses, curricula, or programs, we articulate a WAW typology using an axiological heuristic that non-reductively but clearly identifies variations of WAW as well as the values that underlie the differences among them. We then explore the implications of these theoretical and axiological differences for the probable results of different WAW approaches, particularly related to claims that WAW effectively facilitates transfer of learning. We conclude with an exploration of questions regarding WAW and transfer that our typology and analysis raise that might be the focus of future research.

Drawing on the Teaching for Transfer (TFT) writing curriculum, this study documents how students in writing courses at four different institutions transferred writing knowledge and practice concurrently into other sites of writing, including other courses, co-curriculars, and workplaces. This research demonstrates that when students, supported by the TFT curriculum, understood that appropriate transfer of writing knowledge and practice is both possible and desirable, (1) they engaged in writing transfer during the TFT course into other sites of writing; (2) they transferred from in-school contexts into out-of-school contexts with facility; and (3) in both cases, they engaged in a just-in-time transfer.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Writing about environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity, especially in lower-division writing courses. Yet, for teachers and writing program administrators, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in first-year composition affect students’ writing outcomes? This article discusses a two-year, case study at a comprehensive research university of an experimental course-design model involving 1,421 students and 63 teachers. Students engaged with the university’s sustainability theme in Composition I, as well as other courses. This article includes a description of Composition I’s framework and its assessment practices, and raters measure the writing outcomes for the class’s major essay, a literature review. Overall, teachers utilizing ecocomposition practices presented students with a cohesive, relevant curriculum and assisted them in developing and organizing the literature review; writing and thinking about diverse spaces related to their experiences, majors, and futures; and forging and documenting campus and local ties, including through community-based learning. The study’s results have implications for teaching ecocomposition and sustainability themes in first-year composition.

This article identifies how a cohort of preservice teachers educated during the No Child Left Behind Era thought about the teaching of writing when they entered a secondary English Language Arts (ELA) teacher preparation program. Most participants shared the beliefs that: (1) writing was primarily the demonstration of specific skills, often on a standardized test; (2) alternatives to the five-paragraph essay would be extra, with formulaic writing central to instruction; (3) teachers had little role in student writing development beyond assigning writing; (4) feedback on writing should be ‘objective’ and tied to a grade; and (5) the purpose of ELA is primarily to teach literature. Authors believe identifying preservice teachers’ beliefs about writing and the role of the writing teacher at the beginning of a program can help teacher educators design experiences to expand students’ notions of literacy and of writing instruction.

The socially tumultuous Chicago of the 1890s—epicenter of the Pullman Strike of 1894, home to immigrants, site of a new kind of urban poverty—also saw the birth of two monumental projects in American pragmatism: John Dewey's pioneering work in education at the University of Chicago in 1896 and Jane Addams's founding of Hull House in 1889. Dewey and Addams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for her advocacy on behalf of immigrants and the poor, were close collaborators as they developed the theory and practice of pragmatism. Addams is not the overt focus of Robert Danisch's book Building a Social Democracy: The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism, but Hull House, its founder, and that social project are recurring touchstones throughout, serving as exemplars of the themes his title suggests. Danisch asserts that American pragmatism's key commitment is to social democracy, arguing as Dewey and other pragmatists have that democracy is “not just a system of government” but “a way of life.” Civic-oriented projects such as Dewey's experimental school in Chicago and Addams's settlement house “made that argument real.” Indeed, one might say that making the American pragmatist philosophy “real”—to concretize it in our communities and daily lives, in our social interactions, speeches, and deliberations—is Danisch's purpose here. To not do so is to leave idle and unused “America's greatest intellectual contribution to the world.”To renew democracy and fulfill its greater promise—as Danisch claims in this book and Dewey in The Public and Its Problems—we must revitalize how we communicate. Because both the nature of existence and the social fabric of America are marked by contingency, uncertainty, and pluralism, it is through rhetorical communication that we find the “principal means of coping.” While Dewey valorizes communication explicitly throughout his work, he does not specifically discuss “rhetoric.” However, Danisch is right to say that often when Dewey is writing about communication, he actually means rhetoric. For Danisch, communication is a “broad, constitutive process of making meaning” whereas rhetoric is a “narrower, more focused kind of ‘communication’ practice related to the long civic tradition of rhetorical studies.” In the Greek tradition, rhetoric was “the artful use of language … capable of generating some degree of order out of uncertainty and ambiguity,” a practice and purpose Dewey certainly embraced, if not the word itself. Thus, in his project to recover and make use of rhetorical resources from the American pragmatist tradition, Danisch makes a distinction between philosophical pragmatism and rhetorical pragmatism. His core argument is that pragmatists such as Dewey developed the philosophical strand of pragmatism, which formed strong underpinnings for a rhetorical strand of pragmatism, but that the neopragmatists failed to complete the rhetorical turn, leaving it to others to realize the socially constructive potential of rhetorical pragmatism.The book's argument is organized in three parts. In the first part, Danisch follows his account of traditional pragmatism's implicit valuing of social democracy and rhetoric with a sustained criticism of mainstream neopragmatism's alleged neglect of both. In the second part, he explores the origins of a rhetorical turn in pragmatism within the works of relatively unknown figures outside of mainstream philosophy—“the lost voices of pragmatism”—during the mid-twentieth century. In the third part, he proposes to demonstrate how rhetorical pragmatism can be put into practice.Although traditional American pragmatism clearly valued communication as the fundamental process of democracy and community life, Dewey and others neglected to give clear guidance on how to enact a pragmatist rhetoric. In the work of neopragmatists Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and Cornel West, the author sees a missed opportunity to make a much-needed turn toward rhetoric as the practical means to renew American social democracy. In Danisch's analysis, we see that Rorty, while full of praise for pragmatism, fails to fully move from philosophical issues to practical, rhetorical solutions. Rorty's linguistic turn makes for an “inconsequential” kind of pragmatism, one ironically still mired in traditional philosophical problems, which have no real impact on social democracy. One might object, thinking of Rorty's commitment to “edifying conversation” for instance, but as Danisch attempts to show, Rorty's offering is “thin” at best compared to Dewey's. Turning to Fish's contribution to neopragmatism, Danisch cites the eminent literary analyst's commitment to anti-foundationalism, which traditional pragmatists share. But his brand of anti-foundationalism makes Fish wary of social projects, which, as Danisch contends, shows Fish's “flawed” understanding of both pragmatism and its rhetorical resources. In the cases of Rorty and Fish, both approach rhetoric in unhelpful ways, but as problematic for Danisch is their disregard for, practically speaking, the search for ways to build social democracy. West, on the other hand, is more clearly committed to social democracy. And yet, according to Danisch, “West reads communication … out of the pragmatist tradition.” Danisch also sees West's focus on Socrates as the “model and hero” of philosophy as emblematic of the problem. Socrates's penchant for speculative philosophy, his misgivings toward democracy, and his hostility toward rhetoric work against the social democratic project. The neopragmatists are caught in the postmodern turn, deconstruction, and the “university's abstract pursuit of knowledge,” such that they fail to “answer the how question.” And much like the other neopragmatists, West is caught within traditional philosophical problems, blind to the need for real, practical, rhetorical solutions to actual, current social problems—emphasis on rhetorical. Readers' reception of Danisch's argument will rest much on how well they take to heart his critique of academic philosophy as well as his valuation of rhetoric and its fundamental necessity to meliorating social problems.At this point, Danisch turns to what he calls “outliers” in the history of pragmatism to find a deliberate, effective turn from merely philosophical pragmatism to the “promises” of rhetorical pragmatism. Readers already familiar with the intellectual history of American pragmatism might find Danisch's recovery of these “lost voices” of pragmatism enlightening, and perhaps of most interest. The first figure, Richard McKeon, was a student of Dewey and a teacher of Rorty. McKeon's focus on rhetoric and practical solutions to problems—he was instrumental in the development of UNESCO as well as being an academic—caused him to fall outside the mainstream of philosophy. Yet his development of a new rhetoric as “a universal and architectonic art”—uniting philosophers and rhetoricians in one enterprise, promoting interdisciplinary communication and “the art of doing”—makes a key, if underappreciated, contribution to the “pivot” from philosophical pragmatism to rhetorical pragmatism Danisch wants to make. Another academic to make this pivot was Hugh Dalziel Duncan, a sociologist at the University of Chicago. Duncan was a close associate of Kenneth Burke, whom Danisch also treats as a pivotal figure—though his contribution is sketched lightly here. “Both are a useful resource for the development of contemporary pragmatism,” Danisch argues, “because they provide the means by which we can explain how communication works within democratic societies, what effect communicative practices produce, and why communication is necessary in the maintenance of social order.” Again, communication here in the pragmatist sense means rhetoric—communicative practices that work toward changing society and constructing social democracy.The resources for rhetorical pragmatism, dormant in the tradition, unrealized in neopragmatism, elaborated by little-known pragmatist thinkers during the middle of the twentieth century, come to fruition in the final section of the book, “The Promise of Rhetorical Pragmatism.” Here, Danisch touches on Hull House once again, because for him it constitutes what he calls a “rhetorical structure.” It is actual concrete institutions like Hull House—a place where people commune, deliberate, and commit to action—that provide the structure necessary for rhetoric to fulfill its purpose. They enable what Danisch calls “deliberative ecologies,” a concept that honors how communication is not mere transmission but a complex web of interconnected persons, environments, social structures, and symbols. Danisch goes on to analyze the Occupy Wall Street movement to examine what he calls “rhetorical citizenship.” By this he means “a citizen is not just someone in possession of legal status within a state. A citizen is also a person engaged in rhetorical practices that help shape the process of decision-making.” Drawing on C. S. Peirce, he uses the OWS movement to show how a Peircean commitment to inquiry is fundamental to a rhetorical kind of citizenship. Another fundamental is artistry, which is a key aspect of Dewey's work. To illustrate artistry, Danisch draws on another relatively unknown figure, Donald Schön, a philosopher, sometime academic, and student of Dewey. Speaking of the art of conversation and improvisation, Schön wrote that a rhetorically minded citizen ought to be comfortable with uncertainty and be willing to experiment in the face of the unknown. Finally, Danisch ties the foregoing together with a final concept necessary for the fulfillment of a rhetorical pragmatism: “rhetorical leadership.” Such a leader demonstrates, supports, and teaches “an array of communication practices able to aid in the coordination, collaboration and cooperation of plural, diverse groups of citizens.” As examples of rhetorical leadership aside from Addams, Danisch offers William James as a circuit lecturer, Saul Alinsky's community organizing, and Barack Obama's first presidential campaign.In addition to foregrounding these rhetorical leaders and recovering the “lost voices” of pragmatism, the main value of Building a Social Democracy is its exhortation for scholars of communication, rhetoric, and democracy to study and fulfill American pragmatism's rich offering for renewing our democratic way of life. In response to questions raised by pragmatic rhetorical leaders such as Addams, it will not suffice to “spin out analytical explanations.” We must, as Dewey put it, commit to developing and enacting “the art of full and moving communication.”

This essay explores the ways in which narratives pieces (beginning with my own personal narrative, moving to the community outreach project that I have been working with, and finally through the narratives of my students) fit together to inform my work and I hope the work of other emerging scholars interested in community outreach. Ultimately,… Continue reading Piecing Together Narrative Puzzles: A New Scholar’s Reflections on a Community Partnership in an Attempt to Reconcile the Research Teaching and Outreach Triad by Sheila Carter-Tod

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I argue that literacy studies needs to define the role of peace in our efforts to pursue social justice. Drawing on the work of Vietnamese Zen Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh, I show that promoting peace is the means, as well as the end, of working toward social justice. Further, I demonstrate that the process of&hellip; Continue reading Writing Peace: From Alienation to Connection by Gwen Gorzelsky

My experiences teaching a service-learning composition class entitled Writing Women Safe that dealt with sexual violence against women point to a missing link between course content and community-based activism. Students in my all-female class wrote about and discussed the reality of rape, sometimes in the context of their own lives. However, for all the real talk&hellip; Continue reading Absent Voices: Rethinking Writing Women Safe by Jessica Restaino

Over the past year, I have been struck by the ways in which a commitment to peace seems to permeate almost every aspect of work in our field. This issue of Reflections has given me access to a constant stream of anecdotes, stories, poems, essays, and photographs by scholars, activists and students working for peace&hellip; Continue reading Teaching Peace: On The Frontlines of Non-Violence by Steve Parks

Victor Villanueva studies the intersections of rhetoric and racism. He is the recipient of the 2009 CCCC Exemplar Award, which honors scholars whose work represents the best our field has to offer. Villanueva also won NCTE&#8217;s David H. Russell Award for Distinguished Research in the Teaching of English and CEE&#8217;s Richard Meade Award for Research&hellip; Continue reading Interview: Victor Villanueva, Washington State University by Brian Bailie, Collette Caton, Rachael Shapiro

This paper reports on an exploratory study that investigated the relationship between English as a foreign language (EFL) writers’ reported metacognitive strategy knowledge and their English writing performance in multimedia environments in a Chinese tertiary context. A self-report questionnaire was used to collect data on 126 participants’ metacognitive strategy knowledge and EFL writing scores. Mann-Whitney U Tests were conducted to explore differences between high (n = 65) and low (n = 61) EFL proficiency groups. Analysis of the data revealed that the participants’ metacognitive strategy knowledge was correlated significantly with their writing performance. The high EFL-proficiency group reported having statistically significantly more metacognitive knowledge about three clusters of metacognitive strategies (planning, monitoring, and evaluating) than their low EFL-proficiency counterpart. These important findings point to pedagogical implications that there is a need to integrate metacognitive strategies into teaching and researching EFL writing.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a&hellip; Continue reading Diving in to Prison Teaching: Mina Shaughnessy, Teacher Development, and the Realities of Prison Teaching by Laura Rogers

This article makes two arguments. First, the article argues that threshold concepts provide a useful lens for thinking about how faculty learn service-learning pedagogy. Second, the article illustrates how particular kinds of support can help faculty learn the pedagogy’s threshold concepts by helping them make sense of the challenges they face in teaching through service-learning.&hellip; Continue reading Transforming Failures into Threshold Moments: Supporting Faculty through the Challenges of Service-Learning by Jaclyn M. Wells

The collected essays in composing(media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing articulate our relationship with new media and current and emerging technologies as a dual process of embodiment: As producers of new media /technologies, we express what matters to us, yet as consumers we are always already carried into and through a&hellip; Continue reading Review: composing (media) = composing(embodiment): bodies, technologies, writing, the teaching of writing by Jennifer England

Rhetoric and composition now has a history of teaching, research, and engagement with communities. We also have a number of terms for describing this work, each with its own history: community literacy and service learning are but the two most common. The historical roots that led to community literacy have also yielded shoots of growth&hellip; Continue reading Writing Theories / Changing Communities: Introduction by Jeffrey T. Grabill &#038; Ellen Cushman

This study follows Mike, a police officer in training, as he runs a Criminal Justice Club at an after-school center in a working-class Mexican@ neighborhood. Employing James Paul Gee’s theories of discourse and identity, the study shows how this club enables the teens to shed the identity of at-risk youths and inhabit the identity of&hellip; Continue reading A Clear Path: Teaching Police Discourse in Barrio After School Center by Lance Langdon

Although trade and politics have made the world a smaller place, politics and businesses remain local in most parts of the world (Starke-Meyerring, 2005). Therefore, industries and practices are be...

This article reports on a mixed methods rhetorical analysis of a data set of news reports on campus sexual assault. A macro-level qualitative analysis of narratives combined with micro-level quantitative content analysis of verb voice offers insight into how news media shapes perceptions of power, blame, and agency in reporting. These findings offer implications for how public actors discuss campus sexual assault and implications for the teaching and practice of research methods in technical communication.

This paper extends our research into a novel Story-Writing-Coding engine, where Primary School children produce animated stories through writing computer code. We first discuss the theoretical basis of our engine design, drawing on Systemic Functional Grammar, embodied cognition and perceived animacy. This design aims to help children draw on the appearances of characters, props and scenery to evoke linguistic constructs leading to the emergence of stories. The second part of this paper reports on an empirical study where we aim to answer two research questions. First can compositions so produced be seen as valid compositions? To answer this question we conducted a linguistic analysis of coded stories and those written in an English classroom, and also using teacher ratings of these stories. Results indicate that while there are no significant linguistic differences between coded and English stories, coded stories are impoverished and should be seen as a first-draft to be revised in the English classroom. The second question was to probe our observation that while coding, children spontaneously told stories. Here we draw upon theories of embodied cognition and of perceived animacy. Our analysis suggests that these theories, taken together, help to explain the spontaneous emergence of stories.

There is no shortage of research on learner preferences and teacher perceptions of the value of feedback in L2 writing. However, studies comparing opinions from both sides are rare. Moreover, little is known whether L2 proficiency impacts learner preferences for feedback. To bridge these gaps, this study surveyed 70 students and 16 teachers from an intensive English program in the U.S. on their preferences concerning six dimensions of L2 writing feedback: source, mode, tone, focus, scope, and explicitness. The findings suggest that (1) students overall regarded teachers as the most credible source of feedback and wanted teachers to mark all errors in their writing and correct them directly; (2) higher proficiency students showed more positive attitudes towards peer feedback and inclination towards written, comprehensive, and indirect correction; (3) students at the two ends of proficiency (high and low) favored feedback in a mixed tone; (4) while teachers and students were allies on the usefulness of oral feedback, feedback on both rhetorical and language issues, and feedback in a balanced tone, teachers were nonetheless neutral about the benefits of peer feedback and preferred focused, indirect feedback. Suggestions are offered for ESL writing instructors to adapt their feedback for its maximum effects.