This paper draws on Bakhtins notion of heteroglossia to expand theorizations of community translanguaging. Ethnographic and practitioner inquiry methods are used to explore the multiple voices that multilingual elementary students adopted and adapted in their digital, translingual texts. Findings illustrate how children drew from multiple voices, including popular media, family collective memories, the school/teacher, peers, and heritage languages, and how they used those voices to recontextualize ideologies about language, literacy, and schooling and to participate in the social and academic work of the classroom. Implications for emerging theorizations of community translanguaging as well as design of more equitable pedagogical practices for multilingual learners are discussed.

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move conceptualizations of student agency as primarily housed within student exercise of choice toward more robust understandings and facilitation of student agency via placement. Extending recent calls to reconsider methodological traditions like directed self-placement to more explicitly account for educational equity issues, our two pilot assessments illustrate how we might reposition student agency within writing placement as emergent from situational interactions with faculty and the institutions they represent, rather than merely authorized by them.

Abstract If writing studies today is engaged in a project to remake composition pedagogy apart from modern language ideologies, then medieval writing reminds us that such ideologies were not always dominant. This essay asks how medieval texts, written before monolingualism became normative, might help student writers to imagine possibilities for composing beyond monolingualism. What happens when students are invited to read Dante Alighieri's defense of his Italian vernacular in book 1 of the Convivio alongside contemporary defenses of linguistic diversity more commonly taught in the first-year writing classroom? As this experiment suggests, assigning medieval texts in composition courses offers at least two advantages to student writers in support of linguistic justice and critical language awareness learning goals. For one, contradicting a modern view of translingualism as deviation from a monolingual norm, students learn that writers have had to assume language difference, rather than homogeneity, as a condition of composition for most of history. Second, the juxtaposition of medieval and contemporary, far from flattening historical difference, prompts students to think even more specifically and critically about the conditions for and consequences of translingual practices in particular times and places.

Abstract This article discusses the development and design of a ten-week first-year seminar course, which has been offered in various modalities (online synchronous as well as in person) at the University of Iowa. The course specifically focuses on teaching first-year university students with limited background information about neo- and pseudo-medieval concepts based on popular medieval story clusters (e.g., Arthurian lore, Robin Hood tales, Norse sagas), as evidenced in literature of the Middle Ages which has been (re)adapted in popular culture (visual media, literary adaptations, video games, etc.). First-year students gain access to historical and scholarly contexts surrounding the stories and discuss how the Middle Ages (and its fandom) have inspired fantasy epics rooted in medieval-ish universes (e.g., The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones), as well as video games and cosplaying events. Students review pop culture items, explore archival repositories, and complete a multimodal assignment based on course readings and individual research.

Abstract This essay demonstrates the ways in which one assignment, the creation of a class bestiary, fulfills the course outcomes of a first-year seminar course introducing students to reading and writing in the humanities. Evolving from the critical field of monster theory, the assignment crumples the timeline between the medieval and the modern in four distinct ways: it responds to the anxieties of identity and definitions of the human by exploring questions of hybridity; it centers concerns about nature and the environment; it opens conversations about race and stereotypes through animal imagery; and it considers the role of technology and classification in shaping the future. The assignment reveals that student fears for the future, not merely of the individual, but of the human species and even the planet itself need to be addressed more deliberately in first-year courses and suggests methods for revising the course to help students articulate and respond to the anxieties of the twenty-first century, even as they look back and contemplate their connections with the past.

Abstract Considering the recent erasure of LGBTQ+ representation in school curricula in states like Texas, this article explores the benefits of pairing medieval flytings (verbal battles with homophobic insults) in “Loki's Quarrel” from The Poetic Edda with recent homophobic discourse over rapper Lil Nas X's controversial music video “Montero.” It suggests that teaching such pairings of past and present queer texts and utilizing a range of inclusive practices and activities in the college classroom can highlight queer experiences and foster inclusion through representation. Through comparing insults that the trickster god Loki is ergi (a bottom) with Lil Nas X's Twitter defense reclaiming his agency as a “power bottom,” the article shows as well how homophobia and misogyny intersect in practices of medieval and modern bottom shaming. Moreover, it demonstrates how queer figures, whether in Viking culture or American pop culture, have always drawn power from queerness to challenge heteronormative masculinity.

Abstract Students in a first-year seminar gained a deeper understanding of Arthurian literature and its modern adaptations by studying the 2018 animated series She-Ra and the Princesses of Power in conversation with Chrétien de Troyes's twelfth-century story Perceval. She-Ra and Perceval share many motifs, symbols, and character elements due to their common heritage in medieval romance. Students analyzed how the inclusive, diverse She-Ra recuperates the themes of the Grail story from Perceval and extended its tradition of coming-of-age stories, which provides strategies for other teachers to use in bringing together historically and generically disparate texts. Studying She-Ra in the context of medieval literature enabled my students to deepen their understanding of both works and to think critically about how modern media transforms and transmits the stories and ideologies of the past.

Abstract This introduction defines crumpling the timeline as a classroom practice in which instructors and students explore medieval texts alongside twentieth- and twenty-first-century works. In this special issue, some contributors describe teaching strategies that pair premodern literature with overtly “medievalist” contemporary works. Other contributors engage students in analyzing themes, questions, and rhetorical strategies found both in medieval texts and in more recent works that do not explicitly invoke the Middle Ages. Developments within medieval studies as a field necessitate new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between the present and the past. Often surprised by the common ground between medieval preoccupations and our own, students embrace the opportunity to incorporate their own cultural expertise into classroom conversations.

Abstract Although the collected essays in this special issue were not expressly intended to address the impact of the digital environment on current pedagogies, all the contributions demonstrate in one way or another how computer-based communication modifies the work of teachers and students. Using the key concepts of hybridity, spatiality, connectivity, and user response, this essay describes how the internet, as the dominant twenty-first-century medium for knowledge exchange, has become the filter through which medieval ideas are presented and received. Hybridity refers to a teaching approach that combines face-to-face with virtual, computer-mediated (and often asynchronous) methods, whereas an awareness of spatiality emerges from the advanced geo-location tools now used unthinkingly. Connectivity allows for the creation of virtual communities and communications among their members, while user response refers to the many ways that the digital world supports and even encourages input about computer-based ideas. Since the medieval and digital eras share many characteristics not found in cultures of print communication, making such connections, and thereby crumpling the timeline, can often be automatic and perhaps even unintentional for instructors. The methods described in all the contributions demonstrate the validity of medieval themes for the modern world, which in turn can be effective tools to reach learners beyond traditional academic settings.

We ask, “What genre conventions are shared in 18th- and 21st-century midwifery manuals?” The article responds to this question by situating manuals as cultural arbiters and defining genre in a cultural context. The article identifies parallels between 18th-century and 21st-century midwifery manuals that focus on the rhetorical situation (via front matter, including title pages and prefaces) and accessibility of information (via design, definitions, and step-by-step procedures). Midwifery practices have changed drastically in the modern era, but the underlying goals—safety and health for the birthing person and child—remain constant. Increased publication of manuals dedicated to midwifery in the 18th century suggests a heightened focus on practices leading to successful outcomes in childbirth that highlight the value of examining manuals as a genre reflecting humanistic elements in technical documents. We argue that midwifery manuals emphasize underlying ideologies in the production and reproduction of socio-cultural consciousness still present today.

While user experience (UX) and technical and professional communication (TPC) are intertwined, how UX is taught in TPC is highly variable. In this article, we report data from a study with TPC instructors who teach UX to identify patterns in approaches to teaching UX. We provide background on UX pedagogy, share methods including collecting data from a questionnaire and interviews and conducting qualitative analysis. The findings map teaching activities onto the design process and show patterns and commonalities. We conclude by proposing a process-based approach for teaching UX in TPC classes and programs to provide scaffolding and connections for students.

This article examines issues of authenticity involved in using generative AI to compose technical and professional communication (TPC) documents. Authenticity is defined through an Aristotelian understanding of ethos, which includes goodwill ( eunoia), practical wisdom ( phronesis), virtuousness ( arete), and Fromm's concepts of true self and pseudo self. The authors conducted an initial analysis of AI affordances that align with TPC concerns—genre, plain language, and grammatical/mechanical correctness. The preliminary results show that these affordances may be limited by issues of inauthenticity. The authors suggest that in order to address AI's limitations, writers should adopt a rhetoric of authenticity via real-world engagement, human centeredness, and personal style.

Generative AI tools allow anyone without web-design experience to have a business website created when the user provides a few specifications about the business, such as its name, type, and location. But the resulting websites not only fall short of the business's basic needs but they also raise major concerns about their accessibility for disabled users. This study specifically examines whether these AI generated websites are accessible to screen-reader users with visual disabilities. It presents data about the usability and accessibility of the products of three generative AI website builders, highlights the specific problems found by an expert screen reader test along with an automated machine scan of these sites, and discusses some causes of and recommendations for solving these problems.

This article focuses on the unique ways that technical and professional communication (TPC) researchers can study artificial intelligence (AI) models that challenge the idea that humans and machines are separate yet equal entities. The authors present a brief definition of AI, a recap of HCI research paradigms, and a description of how AI models challenge traditional HCI research and how TPC researchers might respond to these challenges in their studies. Rather than presenting clear-cut methods for studying AI, the article highlights questions that researchers need to consider as they develop approaches for studying AI.

This article assesses the data practices of Grammarly, the prominent AI-assisted writing technology, by applying data principles that advocate for empowering Indigenous data sovereignty. The assessment is informed by the authors’ work with an Inuit tribal organization from rural Arctic Alaska that generated data and metadata about potentially sacred tribal activities. Their analysis of Grammarly's large-language modeling practices demonstrates how technical communication can hold businesses to principled data practices created by Indigenous nations and communities that understand how to create more just futures.

The concept of a public—a group of strangers drawn together through their mutual attention to a text—has historically been tied to the notion of human intentionality. The recent popularization of artificial intelligence (AI) large language models (such as ChatGPT) destabilizes this connection. When large language models generate text, they may inadvertently form stochastic publics—groups pulled together through the randomization of biased data patterns drawn from AI training material. This exploratory study draws on a three-phase dialogue with OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 to identify the risks of stochastic publics and suggest human-originated interventions grounded in feminist care ethics.

High school students for whom English is a second language (L2) often struggle with effective text revision because of limited ability to self-regulate their writing, that is, to manage the subprocesses of writing and to use writing-related knowledge and strategies. To help students in China acquire effective text revision skills for English persuasive essays, self-regulated strategy development (SRSD) revision instruction was applied both with and without peer interaction targeting knowledge of six writing dimensions. An experimental design involving 120 Chinese 11th-grade students in three conditions, that is, SRSD revision instruction with and without peer interaction (two treatment conditions) and conventional instruction without SRSD (control condition), was applied to examine the instructional effects on students’ writing and text revisions. Analyses of covariance revealed a statistically significant increase in text length and improvement in students’ text quality regarding higher-order content-level writing dimensions in both treatment conditions compared to the control condition in a post-intervention test. Notably, the most substantial improvement regarding both text length and text quality was observed in the SRSD plus peer interaction condition. Further, students in both treatment conditions made more text revisions involving longer text segments aimed at improving quality and changing meaning compared to those in the control condition. Among these, the students in the SRSD plus peer interaction condition exhibited the highest frequency of high-quality text revision during the posttest. The findings provide new insights into the effectiveness of SRSD revision instruction and peer interaction in developing L2 high school students’ self-regulation in revising English persuasive essays.

This study examines how supervisor-candidate coauthoring collaborations contribute to doctoral students’ writer identity. Three candidates’ coauthorship experiences with their supervisors were investigated in depth using a multiple-case study design. Interviews, written reflections, and email correspondence between coauthors enabled thick descriptions of these candidates’ writer identity formation. Guided by Burgess and Ivanič’s framework of writer identity, the multiple-case study showed how the candidates’ autobiographical selves, discoursal selves, authorial selves, and perceived writer were influenced through the experience of coauthoring with supervisors. Notably, the candidates benefited from supervisor-candidate coauthorship by engaging in scholarly collaborations, bolstering their confidence as academic writers, and strengthening their authorial voice and rhetorical awareness. This study also reveals potential pitfalls or challenges of such collaborations, highlighting key considerations for supervisors and candidates considering coauthorship.

This article presents the development of a specialized data set for analyzing Estonian metadiscourse markers in academic usage, extending Hyland's interpersonal metadiscourse model to a non–Indo-European language. Our goal is to show how metadiscourse, as a feature of a writing tradition, can reveal aspects of writing in languages other than English, complementing the traditionally Anglo-centric perspective in metadiscourse research. By analyzing 21 Estonian linguistics research articles, we offer a transparent procedure to address methodological issues in metadiscourse studies and demonstrate the need for language-specific adjustments in the framework. We introduce statistical methods for analyzing multidimensional associations among marker categories, linguistic level, and rhetorical text structure. The findings suggest that Hyland’s metadiscourse model can be adjusted for specific languages, highlighting the influence of language structure on metadiscourse category variation and linguistic expression levels. The study reinforces that the distribution and manifestation of metadiscourse are shaped, among other factors, by unique writing traditions.

ABSTRACT There is a growing body of literature on virtue signaling or moral grandstanding, but relatively little has been said about virtue signaling’s cousin, intellect signaling or intellectual grandstanding. This article develops a working definition of intellectual grandstanding as it occurs in argumentative contexts. With this definition in hand, this article argues that intellectual grandstanding impedes epistemic success in argument on each major model of argument today. Intellectual grandstanding in argument fails to respect other arguers, it sustains disagreements, and it produces little reliable epistemic justification. Given this convergence of reasons, the article concludes that intellectual grandstanding poses a serious epistemic problem for argumentative exchange and deserves our immediate attention.

ABSTRACT This interdisciplinary article brings continental philosophy and rhetorical theory to an exploration of crucial scenes between Iphigenia and her mother Clytemnestra in Lady Jane Lumley’s sixteenth-century manuscript translation of Euripides’s Iphigenia at Aulis. In Lumley’s translation, mother and daughter model—through listening to each other, through repetition, and through their ineffective and yet constitutive arguments as Iphigenia approaches death—how the living may allow the dying to become dead, each opening toward the other without closure even as they separate. The article argues that attending to Lumley’s important translation (in light of the work of philosophers and rhetoricians such as Michel Serres, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jim Corder, and Jessica Restaino) reveals repetition as instructive, constitutive, and caring.

PDF version Our lives are moving images and sounds. Shapes and textures. Rhythm and truths.I’ve always wondered what it would’ve been like to have an HBCU experience.Here, I can document my imaginings with photographs and pop cultural bounce.Y’all can tell me if I caught a bit of the spirit. – k(R)

PDF version Abstract Students are often clamoring for assignments that connect to real-life situations. This paper will highlight various projects assigned in my classes, including the midterm and minor writing submissions, which cover both modern and historical cases, student responses, and student feedback regarding the assignments, along with how and why I continue to incorporate… Continue reading Researching and Resisting: Incorporating Social Justice and Resistance in First-Year Writing Courses

This article examines the presence of intensive mothering within incarcerated motherhood and how mothers in jail manage the constraints this ideology imposes on their mothering practices. Analyzing questionnaire data collected from mothers in a Texas county jail through a feminist maternal framework reveals that these mothers have been influenced by the ideology of intensive mothering to serve as their children’s educator. Considering the standard to educate one’s children reinforces the idea that mothers must apply an autonomous model of literacy to childrearing, this article examines the ways in which mothers feel compelled to seek further instruction in order to mother and communicate with their children effectively. This article also examines incarcerated mothers’ simultaneous use of literacy to (re)appropriate intensive mothering and (re)claim agency as mothers. 

Before the isolation of HIV in 1984, members of queer sex communities developed robust explanatory frameworks for not only understanding AIDS but also mitigating its possible sociopolitical consequences. These frameworks retooled political values inherited from past modes of sexual health activism to introduce flexible, future-oriented sexual health policies. This essay considers how AIDS commentators working during the first year-and-a-half of the crisis tailored their speculative arguments about appropriate AIDS-era sexual health ethics in ways that attempted to address the enigmatic epidemic’s intersecting medical, political, and sexual crises. Drawing on work that considers the embodied dimensions of Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s concepts of presence and communion, I argue that, in the absence of clear biomedical information about AIDS, early AIDS commentators devised what I call vernacular policies of feeling. Unlike traditional health policies that rely on empirical evidence, vernacular policies of feeling make present communal ways of sensing risks to stabilize biomedical controversy, induce collective action, and affirm community values. Along with demonstrating how the body serves as a rhetorical resource for those made vulnerable to illness and death, vernacular policies of feeling productively illustrate how non-expert communities construct future-oriented arguments in moments of overwhelming contingency.

While Louis Pasteur’s germ theory functions as one of the foundational concepts of modern medicine, resistance to COVID-19 prevention measures reveal a rejection not just of government mandates, but of germ theory as well. Therefore, this article seeks to trace the rhetorical linear of rejections of germ theory denialism through an examination of primary and secondary texts from Pasteur’s contemporaries, through the development of chiropractic, and into the COVID-19 pandemic. The author finds that the denial of viruses offers a peculiar form of biorhetoric that invokes absence and invisibility, rather than presence, as rhetorical grounds for rejecting public health directives.

While survey data identifies that most Gen Z and Millennials are anxious about climate change, are supportive of climate activists, and agree that climate change is anthropogenic, that same data fails to nuance these generations' intersectional and relational environmental beliefs. The problem is both methodological and rhetorical, because assumptions built into closed-question public opinion surveys can fail to match younger generations' perceptions on the environment. Additional research methods concerned with capturing these relations, including the cognitive interviews that survey designers already employ, could illuminate these environmental perspectives. We see models for this approach in the preliminary interviews used in large-scale surveys, in the field of climate psychology, and in arguments for ecological rhetoric in communication studies. Building from these fields, we provide example questions that are emblematic of these relational environmental and argue for increasing numbers of smaller, qualitative studies which investigate the many relations that younger generations already experience.

A tick-borne illness has spread throughout the eastern United States, causing victims to develop a spontaneous allergic reaction to eating red meat. This condition’s etiology intersects with notable recent cases of porcine xenotransplantation: the insertion of organs from genetically altered pigs into human hosts. The antagonist in these scenarios is the sugar alpha-gal, which is naturally present in most mammals although not humans. This article draws from Bruno Latour’s depiction of modernity as an engine that produces contradictory hybrids to examine the capitalist ethic impelling cultural engagements with alpha-gal, in which the bodies of pigs and humans are cyclically conflated and differentiated as medical and edible commodities—both forms of sustenance. The consumption of these resources has a Gothic cast, which provides insight into their strange appeal, affect, and implications. This kind of quotidian Gothic invisibly pervades contemporary life, becoming palpable only through novelty, as transient examples emerge and dissipate while eliciting little sustained consternation. 

• This study explores GenAI's role in multimodal composition, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E. • GenAI reshapes the composition stages of invention, designing, and revising. • Despite its limitations, GenAI offers alternative solutions to wicked problems. • Post-GenAI use, students critically revise and iterate their compositions. • The study contributes to future research and teaching of AI-assisted composition. This study explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) design technologies, including Adobe Firefly and DALL·E, into the teaching and learning of multimodal composition. Through focus group discussions and case studies, this paper demonstrates the potential of GenAI in reshaping the various stages of the composition process, including invention, designing, and revising. The findings reveal that GenAI technologies have the potential to enhance students’ multimodal composition practices and offer alternative solutions to the wicked problems encountered during the design process. Specifically, GenAI facilitates invention by offering design inspirations and enriches designing by expanding, removing, and editing the student-produced design contents. The students in this study also shared their critical stance on the revision process by modifying and iterating their designs after their uses of GenAI. Through showcasing both the opportunities and challenges of GenAI technologies, this paper contributes to the ongoing scholarly conversations on multimodal composition and pedagogy. Moreover, the paper offers implications for the future research and teaching of GenAI-assisted multimodal composition projects, with the aim of encouraging thoughtful integration of GenAI technologies to foster critical AI literacy among college composition students.

In this article, I provide a chronological narrative to my ungrading choices in composition classes as a neurodiverse single mother from a working-class background. I discuss my positionality as a White person committed to justice and my experiences as an “assessment killjoy” (West-Puckett et al.) during the ethical turn in writing studies. From this foundation, I reflect on my attempts to grade more equitably. I discuss my pedagogical goals, which are grounded in intersectional feminist theory (hooks; Royster and Kirsch), standpoint theory (Harding), learning sciences (Hammond; Ross), and a robust model of the writing construct (White et al.), and analyze the consequences of exit portfolios, labor-based contract grading (Inoue), and specifications grading (Nilson) via this integrated framework.

Abstract This essay turns to an early 1920s controversy over a proposed Lost Cause Mammy monument to examine how Black activists crafted their collective commemorative authority over Mammy and her memory. It uses 15 letters and editorials published across several Black press publications to argue activists deployed a complex series of dissociations to displace dominant memory of Mammy and craft their commemorative authority. Activists split the singular, powerful memory of Mammy reified by Lost Cause mythology at several points to uncover a critical alternative, a vision of her in accord with Black freedom. This essay extends existing scholarship on critical memory by inflecting it with an emphasis on authority and revealing how traditionally subaltern stories of the past can gain public influence. Additionally, this case offers lessons for modern activists seeking to discredit renewed white supremacist histories.

The immigration of Black people from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to the United States can be described as a phenomenon that is not of recent origin (Konadu-Agyeman, Takyi, & Arthur, 2006). The review of legislative policies at the height of the Civil Rights movement in 1965 and the subsequent abolition of restrictive immigration laws made it possible for immigration from Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin America to occur (Hamilton, 2020; Konadu-Agyeman & Takyi, 2006). Cultural practices, epistemologies, ontologies, semiotic resources, and axiologies have been introduced into these new environments as a result of these waves of Black migration (Amoako, 2006; Benson, 2006; Bryce-Laporte, 1972; Dei 2005; N’Diaye & N’Diaye, 2006; Shaw-Taylor & Tuch, 2007; Watson, 2020). This essay proposes the use of theoretical and conceptual frameworks for understanding such phenomena. Black immigrant youth cultural practices and values are explored through Africana phenomenological theoretical perspectives and Sankofa and Tete wo bi kyere conceptual frameworks. This article highlights the importance of studying the experiences of Black immigrant youth through the use of African frameworks as crucial tools for investigating and understand the experiences of Black immigrant youth.

Abstract This study addresses the paucity of literature on the impact of ungrading — contract grading, specifically — on international students at American colleges. Over the course of four semesters, 307 international and domestic students were surveyed (anonymously) about their perceptions of grading contracts in their writing (and writing-heavy) classes. Specifically, the survey was designed to find out if grading contracts serve as “just another thing” to navigate as international students transition into the Western educational setting and, furthermore, to find out if grading contracts inadvertently do more harm than good. Ultimately, international students perceive more overall benefits than drawbacks of ungrading. However, the data show that international students do find contract grading confusing — especially at first. This article analyzes the sources of confusion along with mitigating topics named by the survey participants, such as fairness, student agency, and stress reduction. The data also show that ungrading practices can serve as a transitional tool to ease international students into American education; a portion of students identify the grading contract as a means of facilitating the transition into American education, rather than as a barrier to it.

Abstract This article offers a theory of action model for grading in first-year writing classes, as enacted at two public, suburban, Midwestern two-year colleges. First, it analyzes labor-based contract grading and specifications grading through this model, examining how these popular grading methods have manifested in unintended negative consequences for historically and multiply marginalized students. Then, it proposes a sociocognitive grading model designed to maximize course-level success rates for New Majority college students. The sociocognitive model was iteratively built on feminist standpoint theory, intersectional learning sciences, multilingual writing pedagogy, and disability studies. Thus far, student course-level success has improved, along with their learning in four domains of a robust writing construct: intrapersonal, interpersonal, cognitive, and health. While it does not prescribe specific patterns of response, this model nevertheless establishes an overall referential frame that holds the potential to incorporate empirically based best response practices.

Abstract The word ungrading means raising an eyebrow at grades as a systemic practice, distinct from simply not grading. The word is a present participle, an ongoing process, not a static set of practices. Too many approaches to grades treat students as if they are interchangeable and fail to recognize their complexity. Educational institutions need to start by rewriting policies and imagining new ways forward for the most marginalized students. This essay examines contemporary approaches to assessment; considers the history of grades; interrogates the bias inherent in standardized systems; and explores methods and approaches for designing assessments that push back against traditional notions of grading.

Abstract While ungrading is gaining traction within higher education, many teachers still struggle with applying ungrading systems successfully in their classrooms. This article is designed to bridge the gap between an ideological commitment to ungrading and pedagogical praxis by focusing on the ideologies that are embedded in ungrading systems. This represents an important shift from the focus on tools or methods to a focus on the habits of mind necessary to adapt ungrading to individual classrooms. This article claims that one of the key challenges to implementing ungrading stems from attempting to tack alternative assessment onto existing pedagogical frameworks. By utilizing a disability justice approach, the author offers a praxis-based primer to support educators in shifting their habits of mind to facilitate ungrading. First, the article asks readers to examine their ideological assumptions surrounding classrooms and demonstrates how these ideologies influence and interact with ungrading principles. Next, the article explores how a disability justice framework provides important contextualizing guidance to enacting ungrading ideologies. Finally, it synthesizes key lessons from disability justice theory and localizes them in examples of classroom praxis, demonstrating how a reorientation away from a “best practices” approach to ungrading facilitates successful implementation in the classroom.

Previous literature has shown that generative artificial intelligence (GAI) software, including large language model (LLM) chatbots, might contribute to qualitative research studies. However, there is still a need to examine the relationships between researchers, GAI technologies, data, and findings. To address this need, our team conducted a thematic analysis of our reflexive journals from an LLM chatbot-assisted research project. We identified four roles that researchers adopted: managers closely monitored the LLM's work, teachers instructed the LLM on theories and methods, colleagues openly discussed the data with the LLM, and advocates worked with the LLM to improve user experiences. Planning for and playing with multiple roles also helped to enrich the research process. This study underscores the potential for using conversational roles as a framework to support reflexivity when working with GAI technologies on qualitative research.

The use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) large language models has increased in both professional and classroom technical writing settings. One common response to student use of GAI is to increase surveillance, incorporating plagiarism detection services or banning certain composing activities from the classroom. This paper argues such measures are harmful and instead proposes a “CARE” framework: critical, authorial, rhetorical, and educational—a nuanced approach emphasizing ethical and contextual AI use in technical writing classrooms. This framework aligns with plagiarism best practices, initially devised from when rhetoric and composition scholars considered the pedagogical implications of the Internet.

This study conducts a multimodal discourse analysis of the live streaming of Jiaqi Li, a well-known Chinese streamer. Integrating systemic functional grammar and systemic visual grammar to explore the construction of interpersonal meanings in Li's live streams, the authors found that Li uses verbal semiotics to convey information and feelings and, more important, to create his different interactive roles as an authoritative opinion leader, a protector of consumers’ benefits, and a friend who shares his experiences and recommends products. This study offers insight into e-commerce discourse and communication, adding to the literature on live streaming in commerce and business communication.

This study describes the pathways by which prospective users of a website for natural hazard communication experienced agency as user-centered design (UCD) participants. Formative interviews with residents, community managers, and outreach professionals revealed two pathways for agency during the design process—by directly influencing design changes and by indirectly affecting developers’ understanding of user needs—and previewed users’ potential agency during real-world use. Findings reveal how agential opportunities were constrained by UCD structure and choices of the development team. The authors discuss how supporting user agency during UCD can improve design and support buy-in for humanistic methods in interdisciplinary research teams.

Developing students’ source-based argument writing skills is a vital educational goal for the 21st-century information society. Consequently, researchers and educators continually seek ways to understand and improve students’ capacities for advancing arguments and synthesizing multiple documents, texts, or sources in a range of subject areas in secondary schools. This study examined differences between middle and high school students’ argument essays (N = 207) in multiple dimensions of source-based argument writing in history, the dimensions writing in history, and the relations of identified dimensions to overall writing quality. Using multivariate analysis of covariance, middle and high school students’ writing significantly varied in areas of writing related to language use, the presentation of ideas, and evidence use. Their writing varied less so for skills related to historical thinking, indicating a lack of development in these skills across secondary school. Findings from confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling showed a bifactor model with a general factor and 4 specific factors—Presentation of Ideas, Evidence Use, Language Use, and Historical Thinking—best represented writing in this genre, with the general factor strongly predicting holistic writing scores. Implications for both research and educational practice are discussed, including the importance of attending to developmental variation in discrete writing skills.