Abstract Taking their cue from the internet and popular cultures in which they engage, college students are becoming more comfortable with the notion of intersectionality, a term first coined in the late 1980s by the critical race scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. Drawing from her legal training as well as Black feminist precursors such as Sojourner Truth, Crenshaw shows how to best understand the experiences of the multiply marginalized, not through a simple process of addition (woman plus Black, for instance) but through a careful attention to the way in which the specific combination of those two identities can create new forms of marginalization obscured by single-vector frameworks. For those who teach undergraduate writing students, the proliferation of intersectionality in cultural conversation offers a unique opportunity: here is a densely theoretical concept that students are eager to think about and which, in fact, they may already be thinking about. This piece provides a pedagogical model for approaching intersectionality in the writing classroom. Using Langston Hughes's richly ambiguous short story, “Seven People Dancing,” which foregrounds the racial, sexual, class, and gender identities of its characters, the article guides instructors through a process by which students can use theoretical concepts to produce stronger analyses of complicated texts.

Abstract Kate Chopin's The Awakening (1899) offers a feminist critique of marriage conventions and the Cult of Domesticity that prevailed in the nineteenth century. Yet hidden behind protagonist Edna Pontellier's entrapment in marriage and domestic life lies another systemic hierarchy: white privilege sustained by African American labor. Building from existing scholarship and from sources on teaching race, this essay explores the hidden Black labor that allows Edna's “awakening” to happen at all, given that the entire system is built around white privilege. This essay considers ways to teach The Awakening to a college literature class, illuminating the historical silencing and limitations of Black people in the United States and identifying the mechanisms of white privilege. The essay poses a key question for students: how do the silent Black bodies in The Awakening reinforce white privilege? Using various pedagogical approaches, this essay aims to help students investigate, uncover, and confront white privilege in other texts and in their world.

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Abstract Upon arrival at college, students often experience difficulty integrating themselves into the new space of a university classroom. They may wonder how their previous skills connect to present use or they may feel linguistic, social, gendered, racial-ethnic, or class-related barriers to inclusion — barriers that are all too frequently invisible to faculty members. Classroom Community Agreements (CCAs) can ameliorate these situations by helping students to express their needs to their classmates and to faculty. CCAs operate on principles of antiauthoritarian teaching embraced by bell hooks; they embody Krista Ratcliffe's “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship's “rhetorical empathy,” both of which offer strategies for orienting instructors’ and students’ awareness to others’ needs within a classroom environment. This article studies the processes and effects of CCAs in a first-year writing program at a large university. Five faculty members from the Expository Writing Program at New York University narrate their practices of creating CCAs, which they initiated both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives illuminate the ways CCAs build trust, clarify course values and expectations, and enhance experiences of presence and agency. Collectively, our findings demonstrate the potential that CCAs have to foster student belonging and learning in virtual and physical classroom spaces in first-year writing and other disciplines.

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Abstract This article considers how Jacques Derrida's theory of hospitality, applied within university literature classrooms, can help instructors meaningfully respond to competing student desires for flexibility and belonging. Derrida contends that ideals of “absolute” hospitality must be embodied in concrete and inevitably “conditional” ways. Arguing that the tension between absolute and conditional is one to embrace, the article considers how story-centered classrooms (specifically, general-education literature classes) allow teachers and students alike to move in and out of the roles of welcoming host and gracious guest. The article breaks down this pedagogical process into three overlapping stages, where class participants move from a traditional relationship where a teacher-host welcomes the student-guest, to experiences of readerly co-dwelling in which they collectively allow a story to host its disparate readers. The article argues that this pedagogical rethinking of traditional hospitality hierarchies gives students empowering strategies for welcoming diverse perspectives and inhabiting varied roles with confidence. These hospitality skills, in turn, allow them to practice and experience belonging.

This article explores the benefits of the use of standard versus virtual reality (VR) video when teaching ethics in communication and business courses. It presents a two-semester classroom study in which during one semester, students were given a case analysis and shown either a standard or a VR video, and during the next semester, students were given the same case study but were shown both a standard and a virtual video and engaged in group deliberation. The authors relate their findings from this study to practical wisdom about ethics and offer recommendations for the pedagogical leveraging of visual literacy in communication and business courses.

This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.

How – and why – do students engage with an increasingly diverse range of learning opportunities in the digitised university? This paper investigates students’ motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous study modes and explores the implications for academic writing provision. I reflect on student and teacher experiences on a non-credit, Masters-level academic writing course at a UK university which was delivered through a ‘hybrid-flexible’ approach (Beatty, 2019). Students could opt to learn through synchronous in-person (on-campus) classes, synchronous online classes or asynchronous activities delivered through a virtual learning environment; all study modes supported the same learning outcomes and students could switch between them as they choose. Course evaluations reveal students have different motivations for choosing in-person, online or asynchronous learning, and suggest that learning preference and practical motivations are not always aligned. I reflect on the opportunities and challenges I encountered as a teacher designing and delivering hybrid-flexible academic writing content. I conclude by exploring how tensions between learning preference and practical motivations might be addressed in the design and delivery of in-person, online and asynchronous learning activities.

Abstract This study aims to analyze the perceptions of Spanish secondary school teachers in the fields of social and experimental sciences (n = 215) regarding the formative relevance of argumentative competence in the context of citizenship education. It also seeks to provide a psychometric instrument supported by robust empirical evidence of reliability and validity to achieve this goal. Based on a non-experimental, cross-sectional design, the AASES (Assessment of Argumentation in Social and Experimental Sciences) instrument,—developed ad hoc,—is administered to identify the potential relationship of sociodemographic factors with the theoretical subconstructs it comprises, the statistical association between age, origin, and gender, and the mediating role of gender in the relationship between age/place of origin and the defined latent factors, and the existence of significant differences among sociodemographic groups. The results indicate that, although a statistical association between age and gender was observed, the mediating role of gender in the relationship between age, origin, and the latent factors cannot be confirmed. SEM analyses showed that none of the sociodemographic predictors (age, origin, and gender) exert statistically significant direct or mediating effects on the latent factors. Furthermore, the comparative analyses complement the model by indicating that perceptions vary moderately by gender and age, even though these variables do not explain the latent factors in the SEM. Indeed, the analysis of variance revealed significant differences in the Critical and Ethical Skills dimension based on these two factors, with higher scores among male teachers and in the oldest age group, as well as increasing trends, with age, in the perceived importance of argumentation for the development and acquisition of critical thinking skills, informed decision-making, and ethical discussion. The findings highlight the need to incorporate specific spaces within the curriculum and teacher education programs to foster argumentative competencies and informed engagement with controversial socio-scientific issues, taking into account sociodemographic variables as influential factors in the educational process.

We conducted 10 focus groups with 32 academic consultants to identify three intrinsic rewards categories for academic consulting: meaningful work, professional development, and enhanced teaching. Based on these findings, we propose a typology of academic consulting, teaching-driven consulting, and a multifaceted framework of academic consultant career identity. Our framework provides rhetorical resources for faculty, staff, and administrators to discuss academic consulting identities, tie aspects of identity to preferred rewards categories, and advocate for consulting resources and support.

Abstract This work advocates for an alternative to the principle of charity when teaching critical thinking or informal logic. It provides a brief reconstruction of the principle in the context of argumentation before moving to demonstrate some of the shortcomings associated with different approaches to it in the literature. It argues for placing emphasis not on charity but on the interpretative competence that underlies charity. Doing so avoids the difficulties associated with the principle as such while still fostering the conditions for exploring the kinds of advanced interpretations the pursuit of charity typically yields.

This article examines the relationship between politeness, culture, and speech acts in multilingual corporate communication. It emphasizes the role of second language acquisition (SLA) practices in teaching politeness strategies, with a focus on explicit instruction, immersion programs, and authentic language practice. The article also offers suggestions to enhance communication in such environments, using Luxembourg as an example of a multicultural business environment and highlighting the importance of understanding cultural norms and expectations surrounding politeness. By examining the interplay between these factors, this study aims to contribute to improved communication practices in multilingual corporate settings.

Alongside the self-help industry, self-assessment in higher education and organizational training has blossomed, especially as digital tools have made it possible to provide immediate feedback. Both contexts lack validated tools for accomplishing their goals. This study created and validated a series of self-assessments for classroom and training use. Drawing on student self-report data, self-assessment items were subjected to confirmatory factor analysis to assess construct validity and correlational analysis with existing research instruments to assess convergent validity. A set of 19 self-assessments with their accompanying validity and reliability evidence correspond to the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) career-readiness (2021) skills, including communication, leadership, teamwork, technology, inclusiveness, and critical thinking.

The current study aims to evaluate the impact of Facebook integration on student engagement and academic performance on a business communication course taught in an Indian private university in an online teaching environment. A direct relationship was established between Facebook usage in an online learning environment and student engagement—both situational and personal factors. A quantitative data analysis using structured equation modeling was conducted to test the validity of the conceptualized model. The study reports that integration of contemporary social media tools in academia fosters communication, collaboration, and participation in online learning environment to develop discussion-oriented learning and cocreation.

This article presents a curated collection of 12 teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ speaking skills. This My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching speaking skills in business contexts. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

Effective source use is a critical skill for first-year writing students because it prepares them for academic, professional, and civic engagement; however, existing research demonstrates that selecting appropriate sources and engaging them insightfully remains a significant challenge. While students struggle with the combined pressures to read, evaluate, and synthesize scholarly sources, we argue that online media including news articles, opinion pieces, and social media posts are a potent but underutilized resource for building students’ competence and confidence with source use. In this article, we present the methods that we have collaboratively developed as an instruction librarian and a first-year writing instructor to propose a new approach to teaching undergraduate research using online media. We detail strategies for teaching advanced search skills using Google and social media platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), as well as a “reception study” writing assignment that requires students to develop source evaluation and synthesis skills for engaging these online sources. The success of our module highlights that enabling students to build their research skills in the context of these more familiar source formats can lead them to an enriched understanding of the research process—including formulating an authentic research inquiry and engaging meaningfully with real audiences—while also building their skills in accessing, evaluating, and synthesizing diverse sources. Furthermore, by developing research skills in the context of social media platforms and online popular media sources, students gain a practical sense of the relevance of academic research skills to their daily research habits.

The integration of generative artificial intelligence (AI) into academic writing has raised questions about the syntactic complexity of AI-generated texts compared to human-authored essays. While studies have explored syntactic complexity in human writing, limited research has compared AI-generated argumentative and narrative texts, particularly in isolating cognitive overload and proficiency factors. This study addressed this gap by examining genre-specific syntactic patterns in AI-generated essays. Using the L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer, the study analyzed four hundred AI-generated essays (two hundred argumentative and two hundred narrative) and employed paired T-tests and Pearson correlation coefficients to identify differences and relationships among syntactic measures. Results showed that argumentative essays demonstrated higher syntactic complexity than narrative essays, especially in production unit length, coordination, and phrasal sophistication, while subordination measures remained similar. Correlation analysis revealed that argumentative essays compartmentalized ideas through coordinated and nominally complex structures, while narrative essays integrated descriptive richness through longer sentences and embedded clauses. The findings suggest that genre-specific rhetorical demands shape syntactic complexity in AI-generated writing. Implications for teaching and learning writing and future studies are discussed.

In response to disruptions introduced to the job market by AI resume screeners, this article introduces a novel theoretical framework for the life cycle of artificial intelligence systems to help unblackbox resume screening AI systems. It then applies the AI life cycle framework to a digital case study of RChilli’s job-resume matching algorithm. The article introduces an eleven-step computational job-resume matching assignment that writing instructors can use in their classrooms to explore the pedagogical implications offered by the AI life cycle framework. The assignment helps students simulate important phases in AI production and development while highlighting biases and ethical concerns in AI screening of resumes. By exploring job-resume analytics, this study helps to teach critical AI and data literacy, make job-resume matching algorithms more explainable, and transform how professional writing can be taught in the age of automated hiring.

In the past ten years, scholarship has increasingly directed attention to the intersections between disability studies and writing center work, emphasizing the importance of multimodality, Universal Design Learning (UDL), and academic support for students with disabilities. Though the literature on Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) in writing spaces highlights the personal narratives of student writers, tutors, and administrators (see for example, Garbus, 2017; Stark & Wilson, 2017; Zmudka, 2018), empirically-based research on the topic remains rare. This empirical study looks at how a seemingly invisible disability, like ADHD, affects tutors and clients in the writing center. Results from this study’s survey of existing tutors and clients, in conjunction with semi-structured interviews, revealed tutors and clients’ need for more conversations around neurodivergence, as well as better support and equity in the writing center and in other institutional organizations and academic resources on campus. Participants also highlighted the need to foster a culture of understanding and mutual listening rather than relying on disclosure, to provide accessible modes of tutoring for clients, and to include training around disability literacy in tutor education. Overall, this paper unwraps the often hidden stories of tutors and clients with ADHD and provides ways to (re)think neurodivergence in writing center work. As an international graduate tutor in my writing center, receiving my Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) diagnosis as an adult made me highly cognizant of the issues that neurodivergent [1] students like myself face in academic spaces, including how to navigate our classes, maneuver teaching and tutoring, and educate ourselves and others on the reality of disability (in)justice. Almost three years ago, I encountered a client who disclosed having ADHD in the middle of our face-to-face session. The first-time client had a poster on mental health concerns for her psychology course. She expressed needing help to organize her poster and make sure its content is clear. At one point in the session, she disclosed having ADHD, to which I blurted, “I have ADHD too!” I noticed her demeanor change, as she eased up in her chair. It was my first time disclosing that I have ADHD. In retrospect, my self-disclosure served as an act of awareness, understanding, and reassurance. I also wanted to normalize discussions surrounding disability in the session because it pushed us towards an open and honest conversation about what I could do to adjust my tutoring approach and best support her as a writer. Our overall exchange prompted me to consider what happens when disability comes into the equation in a writing center context. In the past ten years, scholarship has highlighted the intersections between disability studies and writing center work. Much of this work emphasizes the need to conduct more studies on disabilities and neurodivergence in the writing center (Babcock, 2015; Babcock & Daniels, 2017; Daniels et al., 2017; Dembsey, 2020; Hitt, 2012, 2021; Kleinfeld, 2018; Rinaldi, 2015). In particular, Babcock (2015) urges writing center practitioners to produce more empirically-oriented studies on less visible disabilities, including ADHD, one of the most common disabilities among college students. More importantly, this study challenges the problematic rhetorics of disability that show up in our writing center communities, as the writing center is one facet of how an institution functions. Hitt (2021) points out that dominant discourses of disability in writing center work are often concerned with diagnosis and accommodation, which coincides with a remediation model that treats disabilities as problems to diagnose and overcome. Dembsey (2020) sheds light on the discrimination that disabled individuals face in writing center instruction and environment, like questioning whether disabled writers need support, perceiving disability as something to “fix” in a writing center context, and placing burden and judgment on disabled writers and tutors who self-disclose. In response to the positioning of disability as deficit in the writing center, writing center practitioners have challenged this notion and taken the lead on rethinking the disability discourse (for example, Anglesey & McBride, 2019; Degner et al., 2015). This notion coincides with Denny’s (2005) call to think of writing centers as liminal spaces that can disrupt the norm and “destabilize conventional wisdom of what we do and who we are” (p. 56). In the same spirit, this study aims to challenge the problematic discourses that linger in writing center research on disability. Its goal is to also envision the writing center as a rebellious space that can amplify the voices of neurodivergent tutors and clients, promote a culture of intentional listening and accessibility, and adapt to the needs of its diverse tutors and clients. In this empirical study, I focus on the experiences of neurodivergent tutors and clients with ADHD in the writing center space. Using an initial brief survey, followed by semi-structured interviews with tutors and clients with ADHD, I explore how clients and tutors with ADHD recount their experiences in past tutoring sessions and how they describe their writing process(es). I also discuss how clients and tutors with ADHD can be supported in the writing center.

The Northeast Ohio Medical (NEOMED) University Writing Center was founded in the winter of 2022 to support its medical, pharmacy, and graduate students. Through trial, error, and creativity, the Writing Center Specialists developed a successful writing center offering collaborative synchronous and asynchronous sessions. Often, graduate education needs a different type of support than undergraduate students do: in-house editing combined with traditional theory. This initiative highlights the importance of writing and editing support in medical education, addressing diverse needs across NEOMED’s colleges and promoting effective writing practices. On February 21, 2022, in a small meeting space between two offices, Brian sat at a large, wooden, boardroom table staring out the large window into the Aneal Mohan Kohli Academic & Information Technology Center, the official name of the Northeast Ohio Medical University (NEOMED) Library, waiting for the first students to appear for in-person writing tutoring. One week prior, Brian had signed a part-time (20 hours a week) contract to lead a writing center pilot project that ended on June 30, 2024. Brian was the Writing Center Specialist and was tasked with creating a writing center to support the more than 1,000 medical, pharmacy, and graduate students at NEOMED and had less than 30-months to do it. NEOMED is a stand-alone medical university in the rural community of Rootstown in Northeast, Ohio. It is not connected via physical space to any hospital system. NEOMED does not confer any undergraduate degrees but does offer several master’s and PhD programs for its students within its College of Graduate Studies. There are over 600 medical students, 300 pharmacy students, and more than 100 graduate students attending NEOMED. The school is within 50 miles of several teaching hospitals that partner with the NEOMED students in Cleveland, Akron, Canton, and Youngstown areas. The closest clinical location is a 20-mile drive from NEOMED’s campus. Brian’s background was in English Composition and Rhetoric, having taught at several universities since 2010. He worked in a Writing Center as a graduate student and followed writing center theory closely. Now, he was creating a writing center, carte blanche. He was given a common room and two offices. He had a small budget for paper products, a laptop, a bulletin board, and access to various means of communication. He met with the leaders of the three different colleges and asked the same questions: how can a writing center help your students? The answers were all different and began to mold the theoretical approach. NEOMED was founded in 1973 to meet Northeast Ohio’s critical need for primary care physicians. Much of the writing support for the College of Medicine (COM) was provided by the Assistant Director of Student Affairs and the Assistant Dean of Student Affairs. In the College of Pharmacy (COP), the Assistant Dean of Student Success worked with students as they navigated writing assignments. In the College of Graduate Studies (COGS), individual professors were tasked with this writing support. While the individual colleges attempted to support their students in their writing, typically, only the high-stakes professional writing—resumes, curriculum vitae (CVs), personal statements, and letters of intent—were given priority. As an example, the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for the COM reviewed 150-160 CVs and personal statements between May and July each year. The group of third-year medical students submitted their applications for residency programs through the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), the system used by medical graduates to apply for specialized training positions in hospitals. COGS, in which Brian had been an adjunct professor since 2018, needed academic writing support for its students. Many of the nine graduate programs had writing assignments throughout the semester. Some of the program’s students wrote master’s theses and others wrote doctoral dissertations. Many of these students utilized the Writing Center for support. Professors in COGS also asked Brian to create several writing specific videos which covered topics on grammar, punctuation, research writing, and formatting. COP had one goal in mind for the Writing Center, and that was supporting their second language learning (SLL) students. The SLL students struggled with plagiarism, understanding prompts, taking notes, research writing, and reaching out for help. In August 2023, 18 months after Brian was hired, funding was allocated to hire an SLL specialist, and Brook was hired to support the SLL students, specifically those in pharmacy. COM had a detailed list of needs for the Writing Center, much of which was high stakes writing. The number one need of the COM was to support the 600+ medical students as they create their professional CVs. Then, the Writing Center was asked to collaborate with the students as they create personal statements for residency applications and research opportunities. Medical students also created oral and poster presentations, journal articles, and many other writing projects. The University provided its students with 20 hours of writing support. Yet, after a week of being open, students did not come for the support they needed. Brian sent emails to cohorts. Announcements were made. It was clear that sitting at a table facing the window to the library and waiting for students to start coming in for in-person tutoring sessions was not happening. The typical, in-person consultation consisted of reading the paper out loud in the undergraduate writing center world that Brian was accustomed to. Undergraduate writing theory was not what the NEOMED students needed. Instead, it took trial and error, a lot of support, a little bit of money, and some creativity to establish the NEOMED Writing Center as a fully funded center of the University. Ultimately, the NEOMED Writing Center pilot program is a story that all graduate schools can use to create their own writing center. By promoting asynchronous sessions, screenshares, and collaboration, a graduate school writing center became successful.

Historically, in NYU’s Expository Writing Program, we tend to use a pre-selected array of texts as a basis for major essay assignments, to allow students a variety of choices of style and subject matter to engage while maintaining control over the selection. Here I show how using one rich text as the foundation in a major first-semester-writing assignment is useful and interesting for teaching reading and maintaining an overall sense of cohesion and centeredness to the course, and I also demonstrate my process of asking about and exploring this particular practice.  My own writing process for this piece – inductive and recursive – mirrors the process I have scaffolded for my students; my own essay – driven by idea more than thesis, structured in conversation with my idea – also mirrors the kinds of prose I encourage my students to craft.  It is my hope that the culmination of the following progressive sections shows possibilities for using one foundational, rich text to teach a classroom of students to write an essay that is truly driven by inquiry rather than thesis, one that highlights the process of discovering and creating ideas and thrives in doubt.

Research underscores how working-class individuals “disidentify” (Skeggs, 1997) from working-class identities because of the impact of degrading, victim-blaming views of poverty in dominant discourses and in teacher thinking (Gorski, 2016). Contrastingly, a subset of working-class students in this preservice, young adult literature (YAL) course for English language arts (ELA) teachers took up the social class literacy curriculum that featured a sociocultural understanding of social class foregrounding the thoughts, feelings, and beliefs of living as classed subjects under capitalism and embraced their working-class identities. Through the vocabulary of the social class literacy curriculum, analysis of social class in two working-class YA texts, and writing and talking about their classed lives, three working-class students utilized the curriculum to mourn working-class identities previously not discussed in public contexts. Findings from the study reinforce the significance of “mirrors” (Bishop, 1990, ix) in textual selections that feature working-class lives in dignified ways, perhaps as opportunities for working-class students to not only see themselves but also to identify their experiences as valid and to mourn losses of cherished identities.

Based on the notion that one’s critical consciousness development is rooted in understanding how the moments and narratives of our collective past construct our realities, this article brings together theories of critical literacy, critical memory, and critical sociohistorical consciousness to offer a literacy framework that can foster students’ radical imagination. By examining data from an ethnographic study of students’ critical consciousness development in a social justice-oriented urban high school, the author examines how a critical sociohistorical literacy approach to teaching classroom literature presents a site for interrogating and disrupting structures of inequity as well as a pathway for young people to cultivate innovative, literary perspectives in pursuit of social change. The framework and examples offered in this work highlight practical approaches for English educators seeking to support critical consciousness development in classrooms as well as the need for youth to develop critical sociohistorical literacies as a component of social activism and future building.

With a view to better preparing teachers to engage in linguistically responsive feedback practices, we examined what 120 preservice secondary English language arts teachers (PSETs) considered to be “useful” and “appropriate” feedback to English learner (EL) writers by analyzing posts to an online database of student writing and teacher feedback. Findings of this qualitative study show that PSETs valued linguistic diversity, shared many core orientations of linguistically responsive teaching, and sought to give ELs holistic writing feedback; however, they ultimately equated useful feedback with error correction. PSETs were highly attuned to EL errors, but they were not able to connect different types of errors to language development and could not determine which errors were appropriate to correct given the student’s proficiency level. Furthermore, PSETs largely ignored ELA content and attributed appropriate EL feedback to teacher bilingualism rather than recognizing the need to learn about ELs’ interests and backgrounds. We suggest equipping PSETs with skills to learn about ELs and leveraging extant PSET attention to grammar with additional knowledge of language development processes. Identifying proficiency-level-appropriate errors could allow PSETs to selectively correct errors and provide space for more substantive feedback on ELA content.

In this collection, we present the perspectives of seven different writing instructors from backgrounds ranging from comparative literature, creative writing, English, history, and writing studies. We all work in the UC Santa Barbara Writing Program, which has multiple upper-division courses and a Professional Writing Minor track in Science Communication. Here we share our different pedagogical reflections, as well as specific assignments, to illustrate a range of interdisciplinary lenses that can be brought to the classroom.

This design-based study occurred within a writing methods course in an urban teacher education program. We designed an intervention to develop student teachers’ meta-composing strategies, critical thinking, and justice-oriented reflexivity by revising a teacher-as-writer course assignment to achieve two pedagogical goals: (1) synthesizing antiracist and pedagogical content from curated source texts, and (2) explicating racial literacy as future writing teachers of K-6 students. Using discourse synthesis as both an instructional and research method, we analyzed the synthesis outputs of student teachers during a writing assignment designed to communicate their learnings to an intended audience. Outputs included graphic organizers, planning documents, and a range of final products. We employed discourse synthesis to analyze source and synthesis texts through propositionalization, template formation, and thematic categorization, identifying idea unit origins, progression, or omission. Additionally, content and thematic analyses evaluated instructional strategies and materials to assess whether pedagogical objectives were met. Results indicated discourse synthesis instruction facilitated student engagement with antiracism content, such as historical events, systemic trends, and awareness of racist practices in schools. Findings also highlighted areas for improvement, including modifying source texts, revising the teacher-as-writer assignment, and reevaluating assessment practices in antiracist writing pedagogy.

Generative AI has the potential to transform writing in schools and universities. This makes it necessary to develop training programmes for writing with AI, especially for students in teacher training. So far, however, little is known about the students' initial preconditions on which the trainings can be based upon. Evidence so far has come mainly from observational studies and questionnaire studies examining the frequency and type of AI use. However, the students themselves were not considered, nor the extent to which they can be categorised into groups. In other words, the focus has been on the writing rather than on the writers. To address this gap, the present article analyses data from a survey of N=505 students. To identify writer profiles, i.e. groups of students with comparable characteristics, we apply two-step cluster analysis. The students are clustered based on their use of AI for writing, as well as their level of awareness of AI applications, AI literacy, digital media literacy and writing-related self-concept. The results reveal four clusters, the two largest of which are characterised by the fact that students tend not to use AI, sometimes because they apparently have no awareness of AI, sometimes despite having such awareness. Merely one cluster, which describes 20% of the students, is characterised by regular use of AI for writing. The results therefore provide a useful insight for planning training in the context of university teaching.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Millions of scientific research posters are presented at conferences every year, yet little research exists to guide poster design. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> There is widespread dissatisfaction with the state of scientific research posters. Research from technical and professional communication suggests that the typical research poster could be improved with complete sentence assertion headings. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research question:</b> How does poster format affect audience comprehension and reader preference? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> In Study 1, undergraduates read posters in two different formats—Complete Assertion Headings and short, Topical Phrase Headings—and answered questions about comprehension and preference. In Studies 2a (engineering educators) and 2b (engineering faculty), participants answered questions about their perceptions of three different poster formats: Complete Assertion Headings, traditional IMRD headings + Abstract, and the popular #betterposter billboard style template. In a short teaching case study, students used these research results to develop their own posters and adapted the templates that we presented. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results:</b> Study 1 found that Complete Assertion Headings, compared to topical headings, improved student recall, and students preferred the complete assertion format. Study 2a found that engineering educators preferred nontraditional poster formats (both the Complete Assertion Heading and the #betterposter format) to the traditional IMRD + Abstract format. Study 2b found that mechanical engineering faculty preferred the Complete Assertion Heading to other formats. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> We recommend that practitioners consider using Complete Assertion Headings on their posters, and we provide examples of exemplary student posters.

<italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Background:</b></i> Instructors in STEM fields help prepare students to be effective communicators in the workplace, partially through instruction of professional genres such as client-facing reports. At the same time, class sizes are increasing, and writing assessment often falls to teaching assistants (TAs). <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Literature review:</b></i> Research suggests that TAs possess a maturing but inchoate sense of writing in their field, which potentially complicates their ability to deliver quality feedback. This study uses frame semantics, a form of discourse analysis, to probe TAs for their beliefs about writing in statistics. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research questions:</b></i> 1. When asked to describe the function and role of writing in statistics, what lexical verbs do TA informants use? 2. What frames are invoked by those verbs? 3. How do the invoked semantic frames position writing in relation to disciplinary and professional work in the field? <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Research methodology:</b></i> This study interviewed three TAs from an introductory statistics course about their perceptions of writing in statistics. Frame semantics was used to analyze TA responses. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Results:</b></i> Less experienced TAs tended to perceive writing as a means of presentation, which entailed a weak sense of the role of rhetoric in technical communication and a muddied understanding of writing assessment. The more advanced TA perceived writing as a means of contextualizing statistical evidence for particular audiences. <italic xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><b>Conclusion:</b></i> Due to their maturing perceptions of writing in their disciplines, TAs might not possess the ability to deliver quality formative feedback. One means of support for these TAs may be opportunities to discuss assessment decisions with one another, thereby calibrating against available expectations and rubrics.

The purpose of this article is to share teaching strategies within business and professional communication that assisted students in developing a job portfolio, potentially enhancing students’ ability to secure an internship or job after course completion. This article details the application of these strategies over the course of three semesters in 2018 and 2019 at Monmouth University. Student comments suggested these strategies enhanced their chances of employment success. Using course curriculum to put students in position to secure employment should be a goal of the course and curriculum should be adjusted periodically to meet this goal.

This article presents a curated collection of eight teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. These MFA presenters demonstrated teaching ideas specifically on improving students’ writing skills, and this My Favorite Assignment 32nd edition introduces readers to these classroom approaches in teaching business writing. Teaching support materials—instructions to students, stimulus materials, slides, rubrics, frequently asked questions, links, and sample student projects—are downloadable from the Association for Business Communication website.

In User Experience Research and Usability of Health Information Technology , Jessica Lynn Campbell offers a guide on the design and implementation of usability studies to improve the user experience with health information technology (HIT). HIT is a broad and growing category, which includes applications such as telemedicine, electronic health records, and electronic communications between healthcare providers and patients. Given the increasing use of HIT, this is a welcome resource for both researchers and practitioners interested in improving user experiences and, ultimately, positive health outcomes. Campbell brings strong professional experience in the healthcare field, having worked in digital marketing, technical communication, and content creation roles. She is also an accomplished teacher and researcher within the technical communication and user experience disciplines. She draws on this diverse background to create a text intended for use by both academic scholars and healthcare practitioners.

In this paper, I explore first-year students' self-reported preferences for choosing source material in a digital, research-based writing setting. I argue that widespread skepticism towards online information has led to an "objectivity bias," where students prefer sources perceived as neutral and objective. Through qualitative interviews, I report that this bias may result in an overreliance on data-driven and empiricist sources, often at the expense of valuable personal narratives and experiential knowledge. I highlight the role of digital platforms and search algorithms in shaping these preferences and discuss the implications for teaching information literacy.

• Composing process focus including screen recording and think aloud protocols. • 11 explicit composing process activities are defined and described. • Establishes explicit metalanguage for digital multimodal composing teaching & research. • Includes illustrations of complexity of multimodal composing. Daily writing practices occur in digital environments and are often multimodal. Studies have attempted to interpret composing processes in these environments through text-based lenses and findings have yet to explicitly or effectively define and illustrate the complexities. This case study explores processes and activities of 5th-grade students as they compose using digital tools, multimodal resources, and navigate the opportunities those tools and resources afford. Findings suggest 11 process activities; three unique to digital multimodal environments, and all having influences of the digital and multimodal environments in which composing takes place. Results 1) demonstrate the potential to develop a specific metalanguage for digital multimodal composing, 2) begin to inform a specific digital lens for interpreting composing in these 21 st century environments and 3) help practitioners design instruction that best support student composers in classroom contexts.

In the 1930s-1960s, Phibun’s Thai Nationalism campaign promoted the use of the Thai language while segregating and discriminating against non-Thais, especially the Chinese community in Thailand. The government associated the Chinese language with communism, amplified by global Western xenophobic ideologies, leading to the closure of Chinese schools and widespread fear of Chinese literacy. This article explores two key questions: how xenophobic ideologies manifested in education and how the members of this suppressed generation navigated their language and literacy education in and out of school. Drawing on the narratives of five Thai Chinese individuals, aged 73 to 93, it illuminates the factors contributing to the creation of a repressive language ecology, its impact on their learning experiences, and how individuals within such a context made sense of their surroundings. This research enriches literacy studies by broadening its geographical and historical reach, revealing the intricate interplay between language ideology and ecology, and how these concepts help us understand factors in literacy and language learning. Additionally, it underscores narrative inquiry as a teaching and learning tool and offers strategies to prevent the emergence of suppressive ecology in the classroom.

In this study, we examine educators’ orientations to the teaching of “standardized English” (SE)—an idealized form often associated with academic and professional contexts. The perceived status of SE is reinforced by normative standard language ideologies and is often oriented as “correct” and necessary for success in education and employment. SE is also a primary focus in English language arts (ELA) classrooms, with educators often positioned as gatekeepers. In this study, we analyze discussion posts from 91 educators enrolled in an online master’s level sociolinguistics course in which they describe how they would define SE for their students. Through iterative, multi-level qualitative collaborative coding of participants’ discussion posts, we interpret six ideological orientations to SE, ranging from standard language ideology to critical language awareness, with varying degrees of acceptance of linguistic diversity and criticality regarding societal sociolinguistic power relations. Importantly, we discuss the messiness of language ideologies, especially as they pertain to ELA. This study highlights the prevalence of hybrid orientations to SE, indicating that educators’ views on SE are complex and often integrate multiple, sometimes conflicting, language ideologies. We argue for the need for teacher preparation and continuing education programs to address language ideologies, promoting strategies that go beyond respecting linguistic diversity to challenging standard language norms as inroads toward dismantling raciolinguistic and colonial legacies in English language education.

This project is an interdisciplinary endeavor to connect research in the teaching of English with Critical Disability Studies, an intersection that is crucial to disrupting ableism and creating more liberatory schooling and societal contexts that embrace broader notions of human differences. Invoking critical content analysis of five young adult novels that depict characters with Tourette syndrome (TS), we asked, how are various models for understanding “disability” invoked in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? How do these various models function to reinforce, complicate, or reconstruct in a more progressive way notions about human difference in YA fiction that depicts Tourette syndrome? We focused on one of the many pervasive tropes found within all five novels using the psychodynamic construct of splitting. In particular, we call attention to depictions of TS as embodying an animal—most often a dog—that splits off into the bad/dangerous side, usually subsumed within a character’s “normal self.” This trope can be seen as part of broader, historical discourses that have dehumanized disabled people, constructing them as “other” and subsequently rationalizing exclusionary practices. We advocate for and discuss ways for scholars and educators to continue integrating disability from the margins to the center in literacy research.

Yuni Kim Ostman, Heather, Howard Tinberg, and Danizete Martínez, eds. Teaching Writing Through the Immigrant Story. Utah State University Press/University Press of Colorado, 2021. Building on a growing body of scholarship that advocates for student-centered approaches in composition pedagogy, Heather Ostman, Howard Tinberg, and Danizete Martínez advance a narrative-based framework in Teaching Writing Through the [&hellip;]

Hua Wang Vee, Annette, Tim Laquintano, and Carly Schnitzler, editors. TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2023. https://doi.org/10.37514/TWR-J.2023.1.1.02. The rapid rise of AI, especially since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, has intensified debates about the role of AI tools in higher education. While some educators reject AI’s use—particularly in writing [&hellip;]

Manny Piña and Susan Wolff-Murphy Abstract This article examines the complexity with teaching for transfer (TFT) as curricular content through a qualitative study of how TFT was experienced by first-year writing (FYW) students at a regional, Hispanic-Serving public institution. Our analysis of reflective student writing supports previous studies that show that the curriculum supports the [&hellip;]

The guest editors of this special issue of the Journal of Academic Writing present a selection of papers from the 12th Conference of the European Association for the Teaching of Academic Writing, held at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland, on 5–‍7 June, 2023.

Academic writing has always posed a challenge to university students, regardless of the language they are writing in (first, second or foreign language) or the amount of digital support they have access to – for example, online dictionaries, thesauruses, or new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software such as ChatGPT. With the rise of GenAI as a legitimate digital tool in higher education, it is crucial to identify the professional development needs of teaching faculty in order to ensure quality teaching. Based on factors such as digital literacy, or access to digital tools, these needs might differ in various geographical regions. Within the context of the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), this paper aims to provide a differentiated, international student perspective on the use of GenAI in the academic writing process, identifying professional development needs for faculty. We developed an online questionnaire that was filled out by 192 university students from 15 different countries. In addition to their academic and linguistic backgrounds, the respondents answered questions about their own experiences and competences with the use of GenAI within academic research. Results highlight clear discrepancies between geographic regions, for example, in their self-ranked digital proficiency or in what GenAI tools they use. This, along with further results from the analysis, provides the basis to identify some professional development needs.

The article presents results from a survey about the academic writing practices among the students of the University of Tartu (Estonia). We analyse how the use of generative artificial intelligence has changed between spring 2023 and spring 2024. Our data shows that there has been a small increase in the percentage of students who have used the help of AI while writing: in 2023, 43.9% of the students reported using or having used AI, in 2024 it was 51.6%. AI is most popular among the students of Science and Technology and least popular among the students of Humanities. In 2023, using AI was more common among undergraduates than master’s students, but by 2024 this situation had reversed. Among the activities that students use AI for, gathering ideas is most popular in both years. The biggest change between the two years is that the number of students using AI for summaries and overviews has nearly tripled. The paper discusses the possible reasons for these tendencies, as well as some relevant implications for learning and teaching (academic) writing.

This symposium is an extension of a plenary forum on generative AI (hereafter GenAI) held at the EATAW Conference at Zurich University of Applied Sciences in Winterthur, Switzerland, in June 2023. Since the conference, AI – particularly the large language models (LLMs) shaping GenAI such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT – continue to develop rapidly with extensive integration and usage across disciplines and career sectors with educational and societal impacts. Given these developments, we recognize the central role that writing instruction has in fostering critical literacies and engaged usage and, at times, non-usage of GenAI. Just as we have adapted our teaching and learning to other technological developments, so too are we now at a time of transition and adaptation. Our initial discussion at EATAW was wide-ranging, intentionally so because (1) there is so much to explore in relation to GenAI, and (2) the EATAW membership is diverse, coming from a range of academic backgrounds. Thus in our original plenary and here in this symposium we have raised issues ranging from specific pedagogical approaches to questions of program and institutional administration, to broader public issues and conversations about the relationship of humans to machines. Here in this written symposium we each raise a different issue related to GenAI and writing with the aim to foster dialogue and discussion about GenAI in writing-related contexts.

In 1974, the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) drafted a statement recognizing students’ right to their own language. However, many writing classes, including those in college, continue to teach Standard English as the only acceptable language in the classroom. In this article, I argue that a critical place-based college composition course can demonstrate to students that nonstandard dialects can coexist in the writing classroom. Drawing on my experiences teaching critical place-based composition courses, I describe the writing assignments that encourage students to reflect on how their “hometowns” have influenced their current identities as well as to critique the commonly held assumptions that marginalized communities, such as Appalachia, matter less than places with more cultural capital. I also demonstrate how the assignments in this class can encourage students to critique the assumption that Standard English is the only acceptable language in the writing classroom. A critical place-based composition course has the potential to increase students’ sense of belonging in college, inspire students to be more culturally aware of the places they find themselves in, and aid in designing a composition curriculum that is more in line with the CCCC's statement recognizing students’ right to their own language.