This article reports on a multimodal podcasting unit conducted during a two-week modified summer bridge program for at-risk incoming first-year students. The examples from student work show how teaching a multimodal genre encourages writers to draw from their prior knowledge of standardized genres learned in high school to effectively transition to college composition.

Drawing on the work of Broad (2003), I created a Value Mapping assignment that asked graduate TAs in a composition practicum course to map the values of their assigned teaching mentors. Through analysis of syllabi, assignments, grading, and personal interviews, TAs made visual maps of their assigned mentors' teaching values and shared them with the class. Together, they discovered not only the values of the first-year writing program but also how teaching materials convey those values to students. This assignment may be adapted to other types of courses to help students see the different values that underlie their majors or professions.

In teaching technical writing for nearly 20 years, I have recognized the importance of including writing assignments focused on improving students' clarity and effectiveness at the sentence level. I present a writing assignment for STEM students ranging from freshman to graduate-level. Students first find a published abstract in their discipline and then use readability tools to analyze the abstract's style. They revise the abstract for better readability while maintaining professional tone. This assignment reinforces research skills, audience awareness, and reflection on sentence-level stylistic choices.

A major challenge in teaching is helping students integrate course concepts to understand the big picture of a field and apply those concepts in new situations. To address this challenge in a tutorial course about astrochemistry (taught by graduate students to chemistry undergraduates), we implemented a progressive writing assignment that culminated in a final presentation. In the progressive writing assignment, students chose an astrochemistry topic they found interesting to be the subject of three sequential papers, which became the basis for their presentations. The purpose of this assignment was to gradually introduce chemistry students to research areas in astronomy, which is by nature outside the general chemistry curriculum, while also providing students with regular feedback. Over the course of the assignment, students applied key themes in the course—significance of astrochemistry research, research methods, and chemistry in astronomical environments—separately to their chosen topics before explaining in the final presentation how these different aspects of astrochemistry work together. By incorporating stories and anaologies, rather than just facts, students gave presentations that were accessible to a novice audience. As a result, students explained broader impacts of astrochemistry research, rather than just focusing on results, and they entertained questions with answers that went beyond clarification of the material discussed.

The present book addresses strategy-focused instruction in writing.This type of instruction proposes a global package of content and components, which together have shown effects in improving writing competence in children.Strategy instruction has been proven to be one of the most effective teaching practices for improving writing skills, as well as writing to learn in different content domains.The book starts with an introduction by the editors about the importance of strategy-focused instruction to promote writing in the school context, both as a content and as a learning tool.This book has a total of 12 chapters, divided in four sections.The first section includes an introduction and three chapters that approach writing instruction from different perspectives.The second section presents well-validated intervention programs for learning to write.This section includes two chapters presenting two specific instructional programs that can be used with full-range students in classrooms, across different educational contexts.The third part is composed of three chapters that address instructional programs focused on writing-to-learn.Finally, the fourth section includes the conclusion, as well as three chapters that discuss the strategy-instruction models presented in the previous sections.

Epideictic rhetoric reifies and reshapes the shared values of a community, and in this article, I reread William E. Coles Jr.’sThe Plural Ias showing forth a classroom built upon epideictic rhetoric, his own epideictic pedagogy asking that teachers of writing engage student work not expecting to be persuaded but as observers of rhetorical display.

Shannon Walters’ Rhetorical Touch stretches the consideration of embodied rhetorics to embrace the sense of touch through both classical rhetoric and contemporary disability studies. Key to Walters’ project is a rereading of Aristotle’s pisteis—logos, pathos, and ethos—through the sense of touch. To examine the productions of a variety of disabled rhetors, she draws upon rhetoricians from Empedocles to Burke, on phenomenologists such as Merleau-Ponty, and on disability-studies scholars such as Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson and Brenda Brueggemann. This broad, disciplinary-crossing quality of her scholarship makes sense because she situates touch as “a sense that transcends bodily boundaries; it demands an approach that also transcends boundaries” (8). Though her project is solidly within the realm of disability studies, it can and should affect how we do scholarship in rhetoric.Through an understanding of Empedocles’ sense of logos, Walters argues that touch is the broadest means of persuasion, and, furthermore, that it is the sense that ties all humans together, those who are disabled as well as those who are temporarily able-bodied. In so doing, Walters calls for a radical repositioning of all rhetorical appeals as fundamentally rooted in the sense of touch. This is the most radical and fascinating claim of the book, and it holds up for both individual rhetors as well as amorphous rhetors who are harder to identify. Walters not only uses this understanding of rhetoric to guide examination of Helen Keller, Temple Grandin, and Nancy Mairs, but also in her examination of the birth of the Disability Rights Movement in the 1950s and 1960s through the 1977 demonstrations for the enforcement of Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973. At times, her broad historical and theoretical approach weaves together unevenly, but the overarching argument’s contribution to reimagining pisteis is solid and perhaps even groundbreaking.The first chapter examines the tactile experience of Helen Keller’s rhetorical productions through a careful consideration of her texts, the context in which they were produced, and the theoretical implications of her practice. A facet of this chapter that I found particularly relevant and insightful was Walter’s examination of the doubt of authenticity and individual authorship that accompanied all of Keller’s writings. Walters reads the accusations of plagiarism against Keller as stemming directly from Keller’s relationship to communication as tactile and inherently collaborative. Though Keller is an exceptional example of these facets of rhetorical production, we all draw on sources we have absorbed unknowingly, on collaboration with present and distant others, and on a tactile experience. Walters argues we thus must reshape rhetoric to account for this dynamic. To do so, she literally redraws the traditional rhetorical triangle into a doubled triangle, forming either a diamond with an entire side “touching,” representing both traditional ethos and her reinterpretation through mêtis, or an angular and precarious hourglass, intersecting at the point of two interpretations of logos—Aristotle’s and Empedocles’.Chapter two examines the demonstrations by disability activists demanding enforcement of Section 504, simultaneously continuing Walters’ theoretical underpinnings, which rest on an understanding of rhetorical identification largely dependent on Burke, but shaped through theories of touch by Merleau-Ponty, Nancy, and Deleuze. Walters identifies a key problem with rhetorical models of identification: they “do not accommodate the identities of people with disabilities or identifications made possible by the lived experience of disability” (62). Walters’ retheorization seeks to accommodate identification: “Specifically, identification via sensation and touch possesses the potential to reform and reshape the process of identification” (64). Walters suggests Deleuze’s concept of the “fold” as a model of Burkean identification that includes division. Though I find this chapter fascinating and ambitious, I’m left wondering why we must accommodate identification at all. This seems a retrofitting strategy and potentially less radical than an outright dismissal, or even a redefinition, as Walters does so well in her reimagining of pisteis.In the next three chapters, Walters molds the rhetorical triangle into something radically different from what our first-year composition textbooks taught us in order to be inclusive of touch and thus of disabled rhetors. Instead of Aristotle’s autonomous, rational logos, in chapter three, Walters puts forward Empedocles’ felt sense of logos, which is touch-based and enables a facilitated model of rhetoric. She finds this extralinguistic approach to logos more appropriate for rhetors with psychological disabilities and suggests that, “Empedocles’ sense of logos, felt in the heart as much as exhibited by one’s cognition, is physical, psychological, and embodied” (98). Walters then applies this reading of felt logos to online support forums for schizophrenia and depression, in which participants explicitly discuss touch and the lack of it in their lives. This reading is innovative, though perhaps limited in this online form.In the following chapter, Walters pushes her readers to reexamine how we presume an ethos that is neurotypical. She suggests, “Simply put, autistic people are seen as ethos-less when viewed through a narrowly medical or pathological lens” (113). This pathological lens casts autists as unable to identify and connect with others and therefore unable to construct ethos. In this chapter, Walters is doing her most expansive work to develop lines of thought already established in considerations of disability and of bodily knowing within our discipline, such as those developed by Debra Hawhee and Jay Dolmage, who both look to mêtis as an alternative knowledge production within rhetoric that is also based in bodily adaptation. Walters builds directly on this scholarship in order to suggest an approach to ethos that is neuro-diverse: “I redefine mêtis as a tactile relationship of embodied cognition between people and their environments that supports a method of character formation not based on traditional notions of ability and neurotypicality” (118). In this chapter, Walters makes a significant contribution to disability rhetoric as a field by showing how mêtis can accommodate those who use facilitated communication as well as those who are neuro-divergent and may use touch in nontypical ways to build trust and character.In the next chapter, Walters articulates how facility with kairos can make new forms of pathos possible: “I redefine kairos though special attention to the sense of touch, showing how kairos operates tactilely to create new emotional and physical connections among bodies in close proximity and contact” (145). Walters uses the term “redefine” in this chapter and the last in ways that may lead a reader to think she has no regard for rhetorical history. Quite to the contrary, Walters is changing perspective and illuminating a connection to touch that has always been related to the terms she is deploying. For instance, Walters notes that in the first uses of the term kairos, in Homer and Hesiod, the term is “nearly synonymous with ‘disability,’ indicating places of bodily vulnerability and impairment that are penetrable tactilely” (153). Here, Walters traces an etymology that classically may have worked to further disadvantage those who are impaired, but that in current rhetorical scholarship can call attention to the tactile and kairotic ways of employing pathos, which disabled rhetors, such as Nancy Mairs, Harriet McBryde Johnson, and John Hockenberry, have opened as rhetorical possibilities.Her final two chapters work to conclude her reexamination of rhetoric through the sense of touch. Chapter six explores the possibilities of teaching with haptic technologies. Far from an afterthought, this chapter remains deeply theoretical, engaged in historiography, and pulls together her shape-shifting pisteis within the classroom. Walters leads the reader as she leads her students through a critical investigation of haptic technologies, showing the ableist assumptions embedded within them. Not only is this investigation pertinent to disability studies, but it also models the kind of deep critical analysis we should all be guiding our students toward. Walters’ conclusion reminds us that we are all embedded in haptic technologies and the future of communication technology will only embed us further. As we critically engage technology, we need a lens through which to understand touch, which Walters has provided.Rhetorical Touch is an important contribution to the historiography of rhetoric, to rhetorical theory, to disability studies, and to composition rhetoric. I look forward to seeing how other scholars take up this reshaping of the traditional rhetorical triangle. The only disappointment I can manage to find in the book is the continued adherence to identification. However, Walters provides analytical insight and new perspectives on the tradition that are radical and inclusive of diverse bodies and minds. That is what this book offers to the world of rhetoric.

This article outlines an approach to teaching a Writing for the Health Professions course and situates this approach within the aims of and tensions between the medical humanities, the rhetoric of health and medicine, and disability studies. This analysis provides a pragmatic walkthrough of how assignments in such courses can be linked to programmatic outcomes (with SOAP [Subjective, Objective, Assessment, Plan] note and patient education assignments as extended examples) as well as an interdisciplinary framework for future empirical studies.

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring the extent to which an accredited Academic Writing and Publishing (AWP) module for faculty and graduate students helped them develop as scholars and how, over time, it affected their instructional beliefs and attitudes in working with their own undergraduate students. For the two module tutors, it was important to know how the participants applied what they learned from the module in their own teaching practice and to identify particularly effective aspects of the module that translated to this other context. Therefore, key themes explored in this paper are the impact of the module’s critical thinking-reading-writing (CTRW) strategies on faculty writing practice and their subsequent transference to students across a range of disciplines. The module participants include faculty from higher and further education, PhD students, and professional educators (consultants and trainers). While the module tends to draw in new faculty and PhD students, in particular, for the support it provides for increasing their academic publications, this support is balanced with the assistance it can give participants to subsequently help their own students navigate critical thinking, reading and writing in the disciplines. Academic reading and writing, as well as research strategies and the ability to engage with ideas critically, are core expectations in most fields of study in higher education (Spiller & Ferguson, 2011). Complementing these generic competencies are the unique requirements associated with reading, writing and methods of inquiry in particular disciplines. However, Migliaccio and Carrigan (2017) reported that programs often struggle to address writing adequately because of the difficulty of fully evaluating student work and responding to any identified limitations, largely because of the impact on staff workload. Faculty may understand that teaching students to write is nevertheless a shared responsibility, not left to dedicated writing centers or foundational writing/composition courses alone. There are simple strategies that can form part of their daily teaching, such as those suggested by Angelo and Cross (1993) and Bean (2011)—strategies that can help students to deepen their intellectual grasp of a subject and develop the capacity to manage complex ideas in writing. Menary (2007) maintained that “writing is thinking in action” and “the act of writing is itself a process of thinking” (p. 622). Writing can force the clarification of ideas, attention to details and the logical assembly of reasons. However, designing writing activities that can only be completed with mind engagement takes effort on the part of the faculty member, and again, professional development has a role to play here. Clarence (2011) argued that there is a gap between what faculty think students need to do to develop as competent writers and thinkers and what these faculty are doing to help students achieve this goal. The AWP module, which is focused on supporting faculty writing and publishing, can, in turn, be applied pedagogically to students’ holistic writing development in order to begin to close the gap. The next section of this paper describes the context for the study (the AWP module and the participants who provided the data for the study). A literature review discussing critical thinking-reading-writing in the disciplines is then included. A subsequent section explains how this theoretical discussion informs aspects of the module. The research design of the qualitative study (with the module as its context) is then described, followed by an outline of how data were analysed using appropriate qualitative methods, including a process for coding transcripts. Given next is a presentation of the findings, which offer a basis for generalization and conclusions.

Background: Research incorporating large data sets and data and text mining methodologies is making initial contributions to writing studies. In writing program administration (WPA) work, one could best characterize the body of publications as small but growing, led by such work as Moxley and Eubanks’ 2015 “On Keeping Score: Instructors' vs. Students' Rubric Ratings of 46,689 Essays” and Arizona State University’s Science of Learning & Educational Technology (SoLET) Lab. Given the information that large-scale textual analysis can provide, it seems incumbent on program administrators to explore ways to make regular and aggressive use of such opportunities to give both students and instructors more resources for learning and development. This project is one attempt to add to this corpus of work; the sample for the study consisted of 17,534 pieces of student writing representing 141,659 discrete comments on that writing, with 58,300 unique words out of over 8.25 million total words written. This data is used to examine trends in the program’s instructor commentary over five years’ time.  By doing so, this study revisits a fundamental task of writing instruction—responding to student writing, and from the data’s results considers how large writing programs with constant turnover of graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) might manage their ongoing instructor professional development and how those GTAs will improve their ability to teach and respond to writing.Literature Review: Researchers have attempted to unpack and understand the task of instructor commentary for several decades; the published literature demonstrates a complex and occasionally ambivalent relationship with this central task of writing instruction. Recent scholarship has moved from the small-scale studies long used by the field to implement large-scale examinations of the instruction occurring in writing programs. Research questions: Three questions guided the inquiry:Does the work of new instructors (MA1s) more closely resemble the lexicon of novice or experienced responders to student writing?How does the new instructors’ work compare to that of more experienced (PHD1 or INS) instructors in the program throughout their time?How does their work evolve over a four-semester longitudinal time frame (as MA1 or MA2 experience levels) in the first-year writing program? [Please note that the abbreviations used above and throughout the article to designate instructor experience levels are as follows: MA1 (first-year master’s students); MA2 (second-year master’s students); PHD1 (first-year doctoral students); INS (instructors—those with 3 or more years’ experience teaching and who are not currently pursuing an additional degree—nearly all of these individuals held a Master’s degree)].Methodology: This study extends the work of Anson and Anson (2017) who first surveyed writing instructors and program administrators to create wordlists that survey respondents associated with “high-quality” and “novice” responses, and then examined a corpus of nearly 50,000 peer responses produced at a single university to learn to what extent instructors and student peers adopted this lexicon. Specifically, the study analyzes a corpus of instructor comments to students using the Anson and Anson wordlists associated with principled and novice commentary to see if new writing instructors align more closely with the concepts represented in either list during their first semester in the program.  It then tracks four cohorts for evolution and change in their vocabulary of feedback over their next three semesters in the program; the study also compares the vocabulary used in their comments to that used by experienced instructors in the program over the same time.Results: The study found that from the outset, the new instructors (MA1) incorporated more of the principled response terms than the novice response terms. Overall, in comparing the MA1 instructors with the most experienced group (INS), the results reveal three important findings about the feedback of both MA1s and INSs in this program.While there are some differences in commentary as seen via examination of the two lexicons, the differences are perhaps less than one might assume.The cohorts do increase their use of the principled terms as they move through the two years’ appointment in the program, but few of the increases demonstrate statistical significance.Few of the terms from either the novice or principled lexicon, with the exception of terms that also appear in the assignment descriptions, what I label as “content terms,” appear frequently in the overall corpus.Discussion: Based on the results, the instructors in this program had acquired a more consistent vocabulary, but not primarily one based on Anson and Anson’s two lexicons—instead, the most frequent and commonly used terms seem to come from a more local “canon,” that is, one based on the assignment descriptions and course outcomes. Regardless of whether the acquisition of a common vocabulary came from more global concepts or an assignment-based local canon, using common terms is something that Nancy Sommers (1982) saw as contributing to “thoughtful commentary” on student writing. As no one has previously studied how quickly new instructors acquire a professional vocabulary for responding to student writing, it is hard to know whether or not the results of this particular group of instructors would be considered “typical.” However, it may well be that the context of this writing program contributed to a more accelerated acquisition.Conclusions: Working with the lexicons developed via Anson and Anson’s survey is a useful starting point for understanding more of what our instructors actually do when responding to student writing, as well as for identifying critical differences in our instructors’ comments. The lexicons, though, only provide us with a subset of expected (thus acceptable) terms included in commentary—terms that afford students the opportunity to act upon receiving them via revision or transfer. Directions for Future Research: Additional research is necessary to expand and refine the lexicons and their impact on student writing. One possibility is to return to the current data set to engage in additional lexical analysis of both the novice and principled lexicons as well as the overall frequency tables to understand how terms are used in the context of response by the various instructor groups. Differences in the application of the terms might help us understand why comments might be labeled as more or less helpful to writers.  Another strategy is to examine the data in terms of markers of stance; finally, topic modeling could be used to locate more subtle differences in the instructor comments that are not as easily identifiable with lexical analysis. Such examinations could serve as a baseline for broadening the study out to other sets of assignments and commentary, perhaps helping us build a set of threshold concepts for talking about writing with our students. Ultimately, it is important to replicate and expand Anson and Anson’s survey to other stakeholder groups. As with much research on the teaching of writing, we default to the group most accessible to us—other writing professionals. Replicating this survey with other stakeholders—graduate teaching assistants, undergraduate students at both lower and upper division levels— could help us understand whether or not a gap exists in understanding what constitutes good feedback from the various stakeholders.

Background: Employing natural language processing and latent semantic analysis, the current work was completed as a constituent part of a larger research project for designing and launching artificial intelligence in the form of deep artificial neural networks. The models were evaluated on a proprietary corpus retrieved from a data warehouse, where it was extracted from MyReviewers, a sophisticated web application purposed for peer review in written communication, which was actively used in several higher education institutions. The corpus of laboratory reports in STEM annotated by instructors and students was used to train the models. Under the Common Rule, research ethics were ensured by protecting the privacy of subjects and maintaining the confidentiality of data, which mandated corpus de-identification.Literature Review: De-identification and pseudonymization of textual data remains an actively studied research question for several decades. Its importance is stipulated by numerous laws and regulations in the United States and internationally with HIPAA Privacy Rule and FERPA.Research Question: Text de-identification requires a significant amount of manual post-processing for eliminating faculty and student names.  This work investigated automated and semi-automated methods for de-identifying student and faculty entities while preserving author names in cited sources and reference lists. It was hypothesized that a natural language processing toolkit and an artificial neural network model with named entity recognition capabilities would facilitate text processing and reduce the amount of manual labor required for post-processing after matching essays to a list of users’ names. The suggested techniques were applied with supplied pre-trained models without additional tagging and training. The goal of the study was to evaluate three approaches and find the most efficient one among those using a users’ list, a named entity recognition toolkit, and an artificial neural network.Research Methodology: The current work studied de-identification of STEM laboratory reports and evaluated the performance of the three techniques: brute forth search with a user lists, named entity recognition with the OpenNLP machine learning toolkit, and NeuroNER, an artificial neural network for named entity recognition built on the TensorFlow platform. The complexity of the given task was determined by the dilemma, where names belonging to students, instructors, or teaching assistants must be removed, while the rest of the names (e.g., authors of referenced papers) must be preserved.Results: The evaluation of the three selected methods demonstrated that automating de-identification of STEM lab reports is not possible in the setting, when named entity recognition methods are employed with pre-trained models. The highest results were achieved by the users’ list technique with 0.79 precision, 0.75 recall, and 0.77 F1 measure, which significantly outweighed OpenNLP with 0.06 precision, 0.14 recall, and 0.09 F1, and NeuroNER with 0.14 precision, 0.56 recall, and 0.23 F1.Discussion: Low performance of OpenNLP and NeuroNER toolkits was explained by the complexity of the task and unattainability of customized models due to imposed time constraints. An approach for masking possible de-identification errors is suggested.Conclusion: Unlike multiple cases described in the related work, de-identification of laboratory reports in STEM remained a non-trivial labor-intensive task. Applied out of the box, a machine learning toolkit and an artificial neural network technique did not enhance performance of the brute forth approach based on user list matching.Directions for Future Research: Customized tagging and training on the STEM corpus were presumed to advance outcomes of machine learning and predominantly artificial intelligence methods. Application of other natural language toolkits may lead to deducing a more effective solution.

Considering the need for writing and language programs to develop translingual and transdisciplinary pedagogies for teacher development at the graduate level (Canagarajah, 2016; Williams & Rodrigue, 2016), the authors examine the design of a multilingual pedagogy professional development series for first-year Spanish and Writing teaching assistants (TAs). As designers of and participants in the series, the authors explore the benefits and challenges inherent in transdisciplinary and translingual conversations and discuss implications for teaching and research in language and writing instruction and teacher development. In order to advance transdisciplinary and translingual approaches as a new normal in composition studies (Tardy 2017; Horner, NeCamp, and Donahue 2011), the authors hope to provide a professional development framework that adapts to the linguistic realities of different institutional contexts and students’ lived language experiences.

Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of

Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of

When community literacy partners work to gether with academic organizers, both groups recognize the uncertainties of risk, the importance of trust, and the necessity of clear communication in accomplishing their goals.Likewise, professors who use service learning must help their students negotiate experiences that are often unpredictable or uncomfortable.In both scenarios, conversations that spark reflection, untangle problems, and guide action are vital.These objectives, and their reliance on open, guided conversation, are central to a new offering by mother-daughter team Nel Noddings and Laurie Brooks: Teaching Controversial Issues: The Case for Critical Thinking and Moral Commitment in the Classroom.In this book, Noddings, an emerita Professor of Education at Stanford and prominent contributor to feminist care theory, and Brooks, a member of the board of Provident Financial Services and advisory boards for North Carolina State and Rutgers universities, point out that teachers today must help students cultivate critical awareness while navigating a minefield of highly controversial issues such as authority and obedience, religion, race, gender, and socioeconomic class.While Noddings and Brooks intend to target K-12 teachers, administrators, and parents, many community literacy scholars and practitioners will appreciate the ideas the authors suggest that enable their readers to more thoughtfully create room for co-inquiry, conversation, and examining resources across different disciplines and perspectives.Noddings and Brooks' core purpose with this text lies in their dedication to helping students "prepare for active life in a participatory democracy" (2).To achieve this, they insist that adults not shy away from joining forces with students to examine complex and challenging questions.The authors advocate for critical thinking bolstered and emboldened by moral commitment, which, in their words, is "to bring people together-to help them understand each other in the fullness of their humanity" (159).Noddings and Brooks approach this task from an interdisciplinary lens, one that enables them to reach across and through traditional divisions among disciplines, genres, and media.This text provides specific suggestions for educators

Multimajor professional writing courses are becoming extremely common in English departments, which presents specific challenges for curricular design because of the diversity of the majors and professional goals of students. This article describes the theoretical, programmatic, and curricular details of a multimajor professional writing course. We argue that the design of a course that places a central focus on writing theory and writing knowledge can encourage learning transfer. Such an approach helps to overcome the challenges of a multimajor course by allowing the study of a common subject among students hoping to enter a number of different professions after college. Our design leans heavily on concrete knowledge domains—genre knowledge, social knowledge, procedural knowledge—and their application to specific disciplinary or professional contexts. The article’s discussion of course assignments and contexts demonstrates how these domains are applied and provides detailed information on our experiences teaching the course.

The article explores the connections between the seemingly dissimilar experiences of teaching required courses in Renaissance literature and literature by historically underrepresented authors. Both fields feature unfamiliar and challenging histories and texts. Moreover, the requirement itself, though necessary, is a constraint on autonomy that many students resent, which can impede their motivation to learn. Using research on intrinsic motivation and autonomy, we argue for giving students more opportunities to determine their own readings, assignments, and syllabi within these required classes.

This article argues that to help students join academic conversations we should look for opportunities to integrate multimedia texts into the classroom, both as artifacts to study and as models for assignments. In contrast to traditional assignments like response papers, projects that invite students to engage with texts and ideas in multiple ways—digital, oral and nonverbal, and visual, as well as through writing—can make our classrooms and academic conversations more accessible and inclusive. Often our students struggle with not what to say but how to say it in an academic register; using a more accessible and inclusive approach creates space for students to join the conversation while they are still learning the norms of academic discourse. Drawing on my experience teaching a freely accessible online adaptation of a classic novel, I emphasize that models of more inclusive and accessible ways for students to respond to course material can be found all around us. I offer teachers strategies and a rationale for integrating more digital texts, tools, and platforms into their course and assignment design.

Claims abound about passives and the impersonal style they create. Few studies, however, check the claims with a large, systematic analysis of texts from either academia or industry. Motivated by the need to teach effective workplace writing skills to undergraduate engineering students, this study investigates the use of passives and associated impersonal style features in 170 practitioner reports, journal articles, and student reports from civil engineering. Using multidimensional analysis (a technique from corpus linguistics) and interviews of practitioners, students, and faculty, the study found that, as expected, engineering texts, compared to nontechnical texts, have a frequent use of impersonal style features; however, they use passives for a wider range of functions than is typically described in technical writing literature. Furthermore, compared to the journal articles and student reports, the practitioner reports use significantly fewer features of impersonal style. The findings inform teaching materials that present a more realistically complex picture of the language structures and functions important for civil engineering practice.

Writing studies scholarship has long understood the need for context-based studies of student writing. Few studies, however, have closely examined how students use intertextual relationships in the context of learning to compose argumentative essays. Drawing on a 17-day argumentative writing unit in a ninth-grade humanities classroom, this article uses the concept of “intertextual trace” to explore how students make intertextual connections in their writing and negotiate the social dynamics of classroom learning. Intertextual analysis of students’ final essays revealed overlapping tracings and resonances across multiple resources, showing how and the ways in which students create arguments and respond to exigencies within a classroom setting. Analysis of thematic, structural, and lexical tracings also showed students making intertextual connections through repeating, reordering, responding to, and extending the texts offered by their teacher and peers. In so doing, students served as curators—shaping ideas, curricular offerings, and language into final argumentative essays—who were able to develop agency in and through their writing.

My article reports on an annual series of workshops I launched as director of my writing center. This ongoing initiative, titled Workshops on Real World Writing Genres, aims to introduce undergraduates to genres they will practice in their prospective careers. It is part of a larger effort at the University of Toronto to support students as they think ahead to life beyond their degrees. Drawing on material from workshops covering print journalism, law, public policy, medicine, and fiction, the article reflects on how well our theoretical presuppositions about genre help us prepare students to apply in their professional lives those critical thinking skills we seek to foster in our teaching. By regarding all knowledge as socially situated, contemporary genre theory has raised doubts about the capacity of our students to transfer even knowledge from one context to another. Insofar as genre theorists focus on the social creation of meaning, their account of genre, like their account of knowledge, must, I argue, remain incomplete. An exclusive focus on writing as social practice reflects a problematic division of labor in the academy between the sciences on the one hand and the social sciences and humanities on the other. The notion of writing as radically situated has always posed a problem for writing centers, since we do not typically find ourselves situated in the same communities of practice as our students. The recent interest in transfer in writing center scholarship reflects a promising shift towards a vision of the disciplines as interconnected.

Without offering explicit, basic instruction in writing to graduate students, we up the risks of maintaining the exclusion of the most underserved of adult learners in graduate education, and, thus, perpetuating social and racial hierarchies in professions requiring advanced degrees and in society writ large. This article highlights the ways in which graduate writing intersects with Basic Writing, especially given the politics of remediation facing adult learners in both contexts. It then analyzes one attempt to administer and teach a graduate writing course for English language learners and concludes with a catalog of administrative concerns Basic Writing teachers and administrators may want to consider when developing and teaching similar courses.

Collaborative learning theory points to knowledge construction as an outcome of peer interaction, justifying widespread implementation of collaborative activities (like small group discussion) that scaffold toward individual writing projects. This article offers a qualitative investigation into the process of collaborating with peers and the extent to which peer interaction facilitates knowledge construction. More specifically, I present two case studies from FYC courses, one of a debate activity that successfully facilitated knowledge construction and the other of a Google document activity that was not successful. The methodology—triangulating interviews, observations, and an analysis of student writing—presents a replicable strategy for measuring knowledge construction as a result of peer interaction in FYC. I analyze these findings in light of the Community of Inquiry Framework, arguing that the knowledge construction (cognitive presence) that resulted from the collaborative activities I observed was supported by the instructor emphasizing multiple perspectives in the activity design (teaching presence) and establishing a strong sense of community (social presence).

In this article, we discuss what it means to learn troublesome “threshold concepts” about writing that cannot be adequately grappled with in a single course or assignment. Here, two faculty members and a graduate of a writing major reflect on elements of the writing curriculum, the writing center practicum, and the learning dispositions and experiences the student brought to the program in order to consider what ongoing, deep learning of writing threshold concepts can look like, as well as how programmatic and pedagogical elements may afford and constrain such learning.

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers’ understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving conceptions of genre among thirty-three new first-year writing teachers, examining their understandings--and, occasionally, tensions--at different points in time as they encounter the concept in their teacher preparation and with their own students. Through written reflections and focus group interviews, we identify key patterns in how the teachers define genre over time and some of the influences on those dynamic conceptions. Findings from this research have implications for teacher preparation and curriculum development in the context of U.S. college composition.

In this interview, Shirley Wilson Logan reflects on her major roles as a scholar, teacher, and an administrator. She describes her journey as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, only one of a few black women to do so. Logan is also credited with launching the study of African American women’s rhetoric as a field, writing one of the early books on African American women rhetors. Logan discusses her motivations for writing this book, With Pen and Voice: A Critical Anthology of Nineteenth-Century African American Women , and makes connections between her scholarly focus and her work as both a teacher and an administrator.

This essay offers a review of Jay Dolmage’s Academic Ableism: Disability and Higher Education and Asao Inoue’s Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future with the intent of reminding composition instructors of the importance of intersectionality and accessibility. Each text encourages us to challenge traditional perceptions of success and failure thereby also interrogating imbalanced power dynamics between instructors and students particularly in regards to writing assessment and other pedagogical priorities. Finding ways to acknowledge difference, and affirm it, is vital to our collective success especially in the writing classroom.

This article offers the term “accommodation transfer” as a way to understand the rhetorical skills disabled students transfer alongside writing knowledge as they access college writing assignments and writing classrooms. This study is based on five qualitative interviews with disabled college students and draws upon both writing transfer research and disability studies. The author explores how participants adapted writing process knowledge and learned how to negotiate their accommodation needs with instructors across their academic careers. Specifically, these negotiations include assessing instructors’ stances towards disability and testing effective genres and vocabulary to communicate about disability with instructors. The article concludes with two suggestions for cripping teaching for transfer: embracing and teaching crip time for writing, and highlighting the relationship between mentorship and interdependence.

Expert readers’ responses to texts offer specific, meaningful insights useful in building English language arts models (ELA) for student writers. In the case of academic peer review, previous research has demonstrated that expert reviewers have specific expectations involving readers, texts, and processes. Identifying congruence between research on expert readers and the design of ELA models, however, has proven elusive—and detrimental to the advancement of student learning. One promising integrative direction is the study of two complementary ELA models, one emphasizing the role of meta-reading and the other of cognition. To explore the capability of an ELA model for writing studies informed by expert reader practice, we present a case study that has educative implications for the teaching of writing. Specifically, the study reports the observations of six expert readers reviewing manuscripts for an academic journal in writing studies. Following completion of an online survey of their reading aims as they reviewed manuscripts for publication, colleagues participated in a 30-minute semi-structured recorded interview about their strategies. The interview responses were coded using both meta-reading and cognitive models. Based on analysis of 529 reviewer comments included in the analysis, the findings support conceptualization of integrated, multi-faceted ELA models. While limited, our study has generative research and classroom implications for the development of writing studies pedagogy.

This article presents data from a 2013 survey of students enrolled in a longstanding rhetoric and composition Ph.D. program at the University of Louisville (U of L), a mid-sized public institution in the American South. The survey collected data regarding graduate students’ perceptions of language diversity in the context of their professional development as composition teacher-scholars. It interprets the data in relationship to what Yasemin Yildiz has described as the “postmonolingual condition” of 21st century Western social life: a field of tension between monolingualist ideology and increasingly visible multilingual practices. Drawing from student recommendations, it suggests ways this program, and others like it, can leverage students’ positive perceptions of and attitudes toward multilingualism to norm language differences in its mainstream rhetoric and composition graduate curriculum.

Because social media skills are increasingly viewed as essential for professionals, social media is incorporated frequently in business communication courses. When students are asked to consider professional uses of social media, however, they are often unwilling to critically engage these technologies. This article continues discussions of students’ reticence due largely to negative cultural narratives that label social media as unprofessional, or that link social media only with reputation management. Using student interviews and writing from a social media writing course, I discuss challenges posed by students’ adherence to these narratives and conclude with five suggestions for implementing social media successfully.

This study reviews the application of a new training model, Sprint’s Social Media Ninja program, an innovative approach to using new media to initiate change. Sprint recognized change management must occur from employee ambassadors to relevant audiences including consumers and other employees. By teaching volunteer employees the strategic message savvy and tactical strengths needed to address social media comments about Sprint, “Social Media Ninjas” have become active change agents in Sprint’s reputation management strategies, product launches, and turnaround story. These unmasked company employees volunteer to address questions, concerns, and comments about the company, as well as to start original conversations.

The implementation of genre theory in the business communication classroom could lead to the cultivation of critical thinking skills in students. The lack of a common definition of critical thinking skills across academia and the workplace creates a difficult end goal to pursue; therefore, teachers should consider explicitly teaching to the outcome, or telos , of critical thinking through genre. This article examines a small corner of genre theory, identifies a genre theory framework for business communication, and discusses the implications of such a framework.

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Book Review| December 01 2017 Performing Native Rhetorics of Resistance and Identity American Indians and the Rhetoric of Removal and Allotment. By Jason Edward Black. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2015; pp. 228. $65.00 hardback.The Erotics of Sovereignty: Queer Native Writing in the Era of Self-Determination. By Mark Rifkin. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012; pp. 352. $25.00 paperback.Mark My Words: Native Women Mapping Our Nations. By Mishuana Goeman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013; pp. 256. $75.00 cloth; $25.00 paperback.Native Acts: Indian Performance, 1603–1832. Edited by David Bellin Joshua and Laura L. Mielke. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011; pp. 344. $35.00 paperback. Christy-Dale L. Sims Christy-Dale L. Sims Christy-Dale L. Sims was a Visiting Assistant Teaching Professor in the Communication Studies Department of the University of Denver at the time of writing. She can be reached at Christy-Dale.Sims@DU.edu. Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Rhetoric and Public Affairs (2017) 20 (4): 731–750. https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.4.0731 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Christy-Dale L. Sims; Performing Native Rhetorics of Resistance and Identity. Rhetoric and Public Affairs 1 December 2017; 20 (4): 731–750. doi: https://doi.org/10.14321/rhetpublaffa.20.4.0731 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 All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveMichigan State University PressRhetoric and Public Affairs Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2017 Michigan State University Board of Trustees. All rights reserved.2017 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have highly negative effects on AAL (African American Language) speakers. Thus, as an alternative to code-switching pedagogical practices, I introduce a comparative approach that may be applied across all minority language groups and that highlights African and African American contributions to standardized American written communication structures and demonstrates the value of AVT in academic settings. This comparative rhetorical approach may have a positive impact on student language attitudes toward AAL by illustrating that many academic writers from varied racial/ethnic backgrounds often use AVT in their writing for rhetorical purposes and to produce lively, image-filled, concrete, readable essays.

This article addresses the challenge of writing instruction in a standards-based environment where students are accountable for mastering different genres and text types. The Common Core State Standards (CCSS), now adopted by the majority of states in the USA, provide exemplars of successful papers in the different disciplines, but offer no guidelines for teaching, particularly to inexperienced writers or English language learners. Since a text in any genre can be developed in a limitless variety of ways, students need a methodology for analyzing effective texts, and for developing their own. This article proposes that focusing on grammatical choice offers an entry point into understanding the craft of Explanations and Arguments. To illustrate, four samples of high school writing are analyzed from the published CCSS exemplars: two Explanations and two Arguments, all with very different purposes and development. The analysis demonstrates the central role that grammar plays in constructing these differences. Specifically, the analysis focuses on information management across noun groups for the Explanations, and on verb choice and modality for the Arguments. Drawing on functional grammar insights, this article proposes a pathway for students from the analysis of model texts to the effective construction of their own.

There has been little scholarly work looking at the use of creative writing pedagogy within non-creative writing courses. However, ‘Outside the box: Incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into non-major literature courses, a case study’ demonstrates promising findings when incorporating high stakes creative writing assignments into the curriculum for core English literature courses. This article gives an overview of the Progressive history of ‘creative’ writing in the academy and then outlines contemporary sources that reference the burgeoning field of Creative Writing Studies and how creative writing pedagogy may be used more broadly in classrooms in a variety of disciplines. Then the case study details the assignments and experience of teaching a high stakes creative assignment in a non-major literature course at an undergraduate liberal arts institution. Using 25 representative student responses from among 50 total students over multiple semesters, the article concludes by asserting the findings that the inclusion of a high stakes creative assignment – in this case an original short story that is workshopped by peers and then revised – results in students who note increased confidence and creativity, and who state making connections between the relevance of writing instruction and workshopping to their lives outside of the classroom. While further, more formalized study would be beneficial on this topic, this study provides a useful perspective not just to teachers within the English department but also has ramifications for interdisciplinary scholarship.

A number of studies have used interviews to find out L2 learners’ perceptions of different feedback practices. Usually, learners who have been interviewed have experienced a number of different feedback practices. The purpose of the present study is to investigate learner revision practices and perceptions of peer and teacher feedback after having received feedback from only one source. In this study, learners received either teacher feedback alone or only peer feedback for one year. Twelve students were then interviewed to investigate their revision practices and perceptions of both peer and teacher feedback. The narrative analysis of the interview data showed that participants were very concerned about ‘correcting’ their drafts. Students in both groups had similar levels of comprehension of feedback; however, those in the peer feedback group were more forthcoming about asking their peers when they did not understand. Students in the teacher feedback group felt that they did not have enough time between drafts for the revisions they wanted to make. It was also found that students in the peer feedback group seemed to benefit more from reading their peers’ writing than from receiving peer feedback.

Multimodal composing can activate literacy practices and identities not typically privileged in verbocentric English classrooms, and students’ identities as particular kinds of learners (e.g.,“visual artist”) may propel—or limit—their engagement in classroom work, including in multimodal composing. Although researchers have studied the ways multimodal projects can evidence literacy learning and have argued that identity is negotiated, improvisational, and hybrid, they have offered few sustained analyses of the processes by which identities evolve during and across multimodal composing tasks. By examining how students position themselves and one another as particular kinds of learners over time, researchers can better understand the ways in which multimodal tasks help students explore new skills and roles or reify old ones. Drawing on an approach to discourse analysis from the linguistic anthropology of education, we trace the pathways of three 12th graders’ learner identities across two events as they worked in a group to compose visual responses to literary texts for their English class. We examine how one student’s robust identity as an artist emerged in tandem with the devaluing of other participants’ artist identities. Seven weeks later, these positionings led her to act as the painting’s primary author and other students to act in increasingly perfunctory ways. We call for teachers and researchers to consider how students’ identities—interacting with factors such as the teacher’s expectations for group work and the affordances of particular media and materials for collaboration—drive students’ participation in and ownership of multimodal compositions.

Professional knowledge production through involvement in research/writing activities is a valued dimension of the work of university-based teacher educators. However, little attention has been given to how teacher-education doctoral students (predominantly former schoolteachers) become education-research writers as part of their professional development as university-based teacher educators. In this article, I examine 11 former elementary and secondary teachers’ professional identity work as writers, scholars, and researchers during their teacher-education doctoral studies. All 11 specialized in language, literacy, and/or literature education. I focus my analysis on their (dis)identifications with the terms writer, scholar, and researcher in stream-of-consciousness quick-writes that they produced at regular intervals throughout their semesters of participation in five extracurricular peer writing groups that I facilitated. To contextualize these writings, I also draw on observations that I made during five years of ethnographic fieldwork for my longitudinal study. Through my analysis, I demonstrate that the 10 women respondents tended to recount a similar genre of (dis)identification narrative, one in which they disavowed their own authority as writers, scholars, and/or researchers, excluding available evidence to the contrary. I argue that the women’s teacher-education doctoral program, which maintained researcher/teacher, faculty/teacher, and faculty/student hierarchies, may have resonated in particular with these former schoolteachers’ previous experiences of sociocultural marginalization as women, and may thus have contributed to the emergence of their (dis)identification-narrative genre. To enhance the professional development of teacher-education doctoral students and faculty alike, I offer suggestions for how faculty might facilitate doctoral students’ writing groups while positioning/figuring themselves as group members’ colleagues.

This essay examines the teaching of composition at Harvard University alongside the teaching of rhetoric at Boston College by returning to a published debate over education reform between Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard, and Timothy Brosnahan, SJ, president of Boston College. The debate, contextualized alongside each school’s curriculum, captures the religious tension at the heart of the turn from rhetoric to composition during the end of the nineteenth century. A reprise for understanding education as religious and rhetorical, Brosnahan's resistance to Eliot’s narrative of “the new education” exposes the unseen religious assumptions behind Eliot's attempt at secularizing the American university.

This article argues for a purposeful, racial justice–focused framework for community-engaged projects in rhetoric and composition so that faculty, students, and community partners work together to understand and overcome the myriad ways racist and racial discourses perpetuate injustice. The author explores critical race inquiry in community-engaged projects by presenting analyses of successes and missed opportunities of an ongoing multi-year partnership with a small, local, all-volunteer, collector-based museum and the local branch of the NAACP. These projects reveal insights about pedagogy and disciplinary knowledge and suggest possible forward paths that may lead to more egalitarian partnerships, multi-perspectival knowledge, and impactful antiracist writing instruction in our classes and communities.

Understanding technological literacy for technical communicators is crucial for effective pedagogy in technical and professional communication. Challenges of teaching technical communication students the functions and concepts of workplace software include the number of rapidly changing applications, a desire to focus on education over training, limited faculty expertise in software, limited resources for teaching software, and a desire to focus on technical communication principles. To address these challenges, the authors explore how to use a four-level framework of technological literacy along with existing resources to design a course to help students use, understand, and evaluate technical communication technology.