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4678 articlesApril 2025
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Effects of Online Professional Development on First-Grade Writing Instruction: Coaching plus Manual Improves Teachers’ Implementation, Confidence, and Students’ Writing Quality ↗
Abstract
This mixed-methods study examined the effects of different models of online professional development (PD) on 21 US elementary teachers’ writing instruction, on the teachers’ confidence, and on students’ writing quality. Participants were first-grade teachers who were randomly assigned to one of three conditions: Coaching-plus-Manual (C+M), Manual (M), or Business-as-Usual (BAU). All teachers received online-PD but the C+M and the M conditions received PD on genre-based writing-strategy instruction. The M group taught using only the manual of that approach but the C+M also received coaching. Results found that C+M teachers increased the most in their writing confidence, and C+M students wrote papers of better quality at posttest compared to the M and BAU students.
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Translanguaging Space Construction in Five Chinese EFL Learners’ Collaborative English-Language Culture-Introduction Videos: Patterns and Influential Factors ↗
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The study investigates how Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners construct translanguaging space via multimodal orchestration in collaborative English-language YouTube videos introducing Chinese culture. By triangulating multimodal analysis of videos and students’ interview responses, the current research maps translanguaging space construction within and across modes and identifies four multimodal translanguaging space patterns. Meanwhile, learners’ understanding of modal affordances, their intents, their perceptions of the intended audience, and their experiences with relevant (multimodal) texts were found to influence their multimodal orchestration in translanguaging space construction. Digital multimodal composing (DMC) provides EFL learners with opportunities to draw upon their expanded multimodal repertoires, to combine multiple modes for meaning-making creatively, and to transcend the boundaries of languages and modalities critically. Pedagogical suggestions are provided regarding integrating DMC tasks into multilingual learning environments.
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Large language models continue to evolve at a far faster pace than policies at colleges and universities. Writing instruction and peer-tutoring, in consequence, will have to change faster still. In six months of testing by the researchers, ChatGPT began to produce prose with ever greater clarity, analysis, and varied (if often formulaic) stylistic choices. At the same time, all AIs tested struggled with copyrighted materials, sometimes refusing to employ them or quoting sources while claiming not to have done so. The authors include preliminary suggestions for those who staff and direct writing centers, specifically methods for adopting generative AI rather than flatly opposing it. We draw from student responses to a campus survey administered in 2023 and 2024, plus one partnership between AI and sixteen first-year students. Such adaptation to AI may prove particularly useful for those helping writers otherwise marginalized by socioeconomic background, neurodiversity, or personal identity. Finally, we advocate getting ahead of any administrative efforts to dictate terms for use of AI that may lead to reduced status, or outright elimination, of human tutors.
Subjects: Generative AI, LLMs, pedagogy, prompt-engineering, praxis, drafts, working conditions, neoliberalism, employment -
Abstract
The widespread adoption of GenAI tools has the potential to reproduce hegemonic and colonial discourse as the writing process is radically disrupted. As a writing center in an Indigenous-serving institution, we address GenAI’s reproduction of privileged discourses through framing writing as a conscious political act of survivance and work to re-establishing writers’ rhetorical sovereignty through place-based pedagogy. In this praxis-oriented piece, we demonstrate how writing centers can use their values as a foundation to develop strategies that empower GenAI users to re-enter the writing process and reclaim agency.
Subjects: writing centers, GenAI, place-based pedagogy, sovereignty, survivance -
Abstract
This paper explores the implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) on writing center instructions and presents a professional development workshop designed for writing center tutors to help them discover the affordances and the constraints of using AI in tutoring. Since AI became increasingly integrated in the academic environment, writing center tutors face new challenges and opportunities in supporting the students’ writing. The paper highlights key strategies for tutors to integrate AI awareness into their teaching practices, ensuring they remain effective in guiding students through the writing process while fostering academic integrity. Through a combination of theoretical insights and practical exercises, this professional development initiative promotes a balanced approach, emphasizing both the potential and limitations of AI in the writing center context. The goal is to prepare tutors for the evolving landscape of academic writing and enhance their ability to support students in a technology-driven educational environment. Keywords : AI policy, writing center practices, workshop, AI assisted writing, tutor training In the fall of 2022, a writer visited the Kathleen Jones Writing Center at Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP) to schedule a writing tutorial. Their main objective for the session was to ensure that their piece sounded more humane. During the session, the writer disclosed that their paper had been generated by ChatGPT and sought assistance to avoid detection by their professors. Although there was no existing policy on AI at the time, the tutor politely informed the writer that the center only worked with human-authored pieces. Following this incident, the director of the IUP Writing Center established an AI task force, with its first mission being the creation of an official AI policy for the center. As PhD candidates in Composition and Applied Linguistics, the task force members knew their AI policy should not violate the objectives of first-year Composition classes. As a result, the policy recognizes AI as “not reflective of a student’s own understanding and effort and, thus, is not acceptable, unless authorized specifically by the instructor/administrator.” The Kathleen Jones White Writing Center at IUP supports student success and engages in creating AI policies for the departments to implement in their classrooms. While concerns about AI’s potential to reduce students’ engagement with writing are valid, writing center tutors as well as students have also explored its potential benefits. For instance, ChatGPT could serve as a writing coach or a source of inspiration (Kleiman, 2022), or it might “support bottom-up writing skills, freeing up time, space, and energy for more advanced aspects of composition” (Daniel et al., 2023, p. 37). Mollick and Mollick (2023) provide a list of ways students can engage with AI as a partner in their work. For instance, AI can assist students in writing by offering real-time feedback, suggesting improvements in grammar and style, and providing creative prompts, allowing them to refine their work while enhancing their writing skills. Moreover, AI has the potential not only to enhance writing processes, but to transform or even redefine them—much like Google Docs redefined collaborative writing by enabling real-time, location-independent co-authoring (Puentedura, 2013). As a result of this growing body of literature that emphasizes the potential benefits of AI, the writing center held a tutor training about AI to help tutors direct their writers who use AI in the writing session. One of the ways to make writing center tutors aware of students’ challenges and concerns and help them overcome those challenges is to conduct a professional development workshop, which we did at Kathleen Jones White Writing Center. This workshop was designed and led in February 2024 and aimed to highlight the importance of creating a united AI policy to help tutors work with students who use AI tools to write their papers. It also aimed to help tutors discuss possible challenging situations around AI that they might expect in the writing center. One more goal of that workshop was to compare the feedback given by writing center tutors with AI feedback provided by ChatGPT to learn specific features of AI writing and to recognize its rhetorical moves. This workshop was titled Overview of AI Technology and its Relevance to Writing Center Support and consisted of four main parts: (a) discussion of different challenging issues concerning AI technology; (b) lecture and discussion, which focused on the introduction of AI and open discussion about its use; (c) an activity part that focused on proving different types of feedback and comparing human and AI feedback; (d) and creating a brief draft of a united AI policy that would help tutors work with students who use AI to write their papers.
March 2025
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Abstract
Daniel Libertz Abstract Over the past decade, more attention to data, quantitative, and critical data literacies in writing studies has led to a variety of approaches for getting students to experiment with data in their writing projects. This article explores an approach combining “data feminism” and “quantitative rhetoric” that asks students to consider data literacy […]
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Ben Kuebrich Ira Shor taught for over forty years at CUNY Staten Island and the CUNY Graduate Center. Well-known for his experiments with critical pedagogy, Shor has authored several books, including When Students Have Power: Negotiating Authority in a Critical Pedagogy, Critical Teaching and Everyday Life, and A Pedagogy for Liberation: Dialogues on Transforming Education, […]
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Design Fiction as a Novel Approach to Cultivate Awareness of Social Responsibilities: An Explorative Study in a Technical Writing Course for Engineering Students ↗
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<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> It has long been advocated that engineers should enhance their social and ethical responsibilities. With the rapid advancement of science and technology, this imperative becomes increasingly pressing. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> This teaching case took place in a public research university in China. The primary objective is to enhance engineering students’ understanding of their social responsibilities. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> This study is an exploration of the application of design fiction, a commonly utilized practice in interaction design, within the context of a technical writing course. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods/approach:</b> Within the study, participants were tasked to engage in creating speculative scenarios of future food in 2040. This scenario revolved around an imaginary technology related to food, envisioning its impact on people's lives and society. Through a structured process of guided speculation and critical reflection, participants wove together fragments of these future scenarios to craft complete fictional narratives. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> The result of this investigation revealed that the fictions generated by participants encompass a diverse array of elements that manifest the writers’ heightened awareness of social responsibilities. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> We contend that this study introduces an innovative and engaging approach to the teaching of technical writing, one that holds promise as a valuable complement to the existing curriculum. Moreover, within the sphere of engineering education, this research underscores the potential of design fiction in nurturing a deeper understanding of social responsibilities among engineers, particularly on a “macroethical” scale.
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<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> Technical communication job advertisements can indicate current and future trends for pedagogy and practice, and for the development of the profession. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Although recent research has explored US technical communication job ads, no study to date has examined advertisements specifically for technical writer roles based in the UK. The unique academic and industrial context in the UK warrants such a study. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What role do educational qualifications play in the UK technical communication job market? 2. What skills and competencies do employers see as part of technical communication roles in the UK job market? 3. What are the sectors in which technical communicators are employed in the UK? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methodology:</b> This study involves a quantitative and qualitative analysis of job advertisements collected over a one-week period from LinkedIn and Indeed, and two prominent job search aggregator platforms in the UK. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Despite the absence of formal third-level technical communication academic programs in the UK, the terms “technical writer” and “technical author” are prominent in the job market. Where educational requirements are included in advertisements, these tend to be domain-specific. Software development is the leading employment sector, with available jobs distributed across a range of additional sectors. Personal characteristics and competencies required are broadly in line with previous research. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Our findings suggest key competencies associated with the specific job title “technical writer/author.” They are a springboard for further qualitative research—e.g., using interviews—to explore the profiles and boundaries in technical communication in the UK. A mixed-methods study that includes job ads, questionnaires, and in-person observations would enable further classification of technical communication roles.
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Abstract Debates have long been an effective educational method in various fields, including argumentation education. In debates in which participants are divided into affirmative and negative sides, engagement in argumentation is heightened. Numerous studies have attempted to demonstrate this, but the question of whether participation in debates leads to increased argumentativeness, or whether individuals who engage in debates inherently have a higher orientation towards argumentation, remains unresolved. In the present study, debates were conducted for 15 weeks, and argumentativeness was measured using pre-and post-tests. The results confirmed that debate participation increases argumentativeness. Furthermore, while previous research has mostly focused on argumentativeness in the first language, the present study deepens the relationship between argumentativeness in both first and second languages. Specifically, focusing on Japan, where the first language (Japanese) is high-context and the second language (English) is low-context, this research clarifies the relationship between argumentativeness in the first and second languages, as well as the impact of debate.
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Review of "User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice by Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook," Crane, K., & Cook, K. C. (Eds.). (2023). User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice. University Press of Colorado. ↗
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Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook's edited collection on User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice offers case studies in technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy that premise around user experience (UX) design as an integrated and proactive academic practice. TPC has a rich history of UX-specific scholarship that focuses on creating holistic user experiences and conceptions such as experience architecture (Potts, 2014), design as advocacy (Rose, 2016), and participatory design (Muller, 2009). These are consistently weaved throughout the book. Crane and Cook define UX as a "theory and practice that emphasizes the need for functional products that integrate the users' needs and experiences" (p. 10). This collection features exploratory studies that discuss key methods and approaches for facilitating UX-inspired curricular design by framing student-users as co-creators in the process.
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Tables, one of the most familiar forms of data visualization, are often put to use as a popular workaround for laying out pages in word processing programs. This article illustrates examples of friction, compatibility , and congruence between accepted guidance for designing effective tables in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) and widely adopted accessibility standards outlined by the largest international software vendors and non-profit organizations. While acknowledging critiques in critical disability studies and in TPC of standards-based approaches to accessibility, we argue that adherence to standards offers a starting point for redressing the inaccessibility created by some TPC pedagogical practices. Navigating these departures and overlaps is important because designing effective data visualizations, laying out pages, and creating accessible documents are core competencies in technical communication that instantiate deeply held professional and disciplinary commitments to creating usable and ethical documents.
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High-context instruction: A case study of community college student responses for academic success in online composition courses ↗
Abstract
• Hispanic women engage more in check-in assignments than men. • Hispanic enrollment (37.71 %) exceeds community college average. • Main themes: course perceptions, personal challenges, faculty-student relations. • Check-in assignments enhance engagement and faculty-student bonds for Hispanic women. • Advanced course students report more personal challenges, greater faculty reliance. While online community college students’ engagement with coursework, class retention, and motivation to participate are critical for academic success, these needs often go unmet for diverse and underrepresented populations, especially in the absence of culturally responsive and inclusive teaching practices. This study contributes to the limited research on culturally responsive pedagogy in online community college settings by exploring the implementation and impact of high-context communication practices in that setting, with a focus on improving engagement and academic outcomes for diverse student populations. Drawing on frameworks of culturally responsive teaching and high-context communication, the research examines the effectiveness of “check-in assignments” as a low-stakes, personalized intervention designed to foster stronger faculty-student relationships, enhance student belonging, and bridge cultural communication gaps in online learning environments. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study analyzes quantitative data on assignment engagement and qualitative themes from student responses. Findings indicate that high-context communication practices promote deeper engagement, especially among Hispanic and non-Hispanic females, while highlighting disparities in engagement among male students. Key themes—course perceptions, personal challenges, and faculty-student relationships—underscore the role of culturally informed interventions in addressing the needs of underrepresented groups and enhancing engagement and academic success. Future research could expand on these findings by exploring longitudinal outcomes and adaptive strategies for diverse learning environments.
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This article explores teaching writing with generative AI as critical play where students and teachers engage in an ethically dialectical and aleatory game with generative AI. I qualitatively surveyed 24 writing teachers about how they teach writing with generative AI as well as its advantages and disadvantages. I discovered that teachers used generative AI to teach about the ethics of generative AI's design and rhetorical use to avoid plagiarism. Teachers also critically played with generative AI to teach the writing process of invention, drafting, revision, and editing. Specifically, the critical, dialectical interplay of human and machine invents in aleatory and emergent ways, creating moments of epiphany for students and teachers within the writing process for invention, drafting, revision, and editing while the real time pace of generative AI democratizes education, making writing and teaching more accessible for them.
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Multimodal composing with generative AI: Examining preservice teachers’ processes and perspectives ↗
Abstract
The question of how generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen AI) will reshape communication is causing questions and concerns across the field of education, particular literacy and writing classrooms. Although important questions have surfaced surrounding the varied effects on writing instruction and ethical implications of AI in the classroom, there are calls for deeper investigations about how these tools might shape multimodal composing processes. This study builds upon this developing field by exploring how 21 university students in literacy education courses multimodally composed with generative AI and their perspectives on the use of AI in the classroom. Data sources included screen capture and video observations, design interviews, pre- and post- surveys, and multimodal products. Through qualitative and multimodal analysis, four main themes emerged for understanding preservice teachers’ multimodal composing processes: (1) composing was an iterative process of prompting guided by the AI tools, (2) composers exhibited two distinct processes when designing their projects, (3) AI shaped creative possibilities, and (4) play, humor, and surprise served a key function while composing. Preservice teachers’ perspectives also revealed insights into how AI shaped engagement with content, the importance of scaffolding AI in the classroom, and how ethics were intertwined with technical function and teaching beliefs.
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Abstract
According to professional correspondence from Harvard, the spring 2024 anti-war and Palestine solidarity protests on campus were “disruptive.”1 UCLA similarly claimed that their students’ encampment was “a focal point for serious violence.”2 Despite these assertions, independent non-profit Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project analyzed 533 US campus demonstrations from that spring and found that 97 percent were uneventful.3 Journalist Steven W. Thrasher spent time at four camps and describes these as “beautiful” encounters.4 CNN examined “the role professors have played in the demonstrations,” a facet of the protests that “received comparatively little attention.”5 At my own institution's protest—Virginia Commonwealth University—I watched students set up food and medical stations, deliberate, and intermittently chant at a volume slightly higher than the towering, middle-aged white man who, almost every week, projects a monologue about hell outside the library.When it comes to student-driven political activity on college campuses, charged and widespread commentary often clashes with far more banal and contradictory perspectives. One of John McWhorter's New York Times op-eds, for instance, calls the 2024 student protests “a form of abuse.”6 Online comments on this piece display a range of assumptions about US higher education: someone writes that people with humanities and social science degrees graduate “with zero knowledge.” Another person maintains that the protests “are purely performative.” What I hear in these comments and in the broader narrativizing around college students are resonances of truisms that Bradford Vivian's vital book Campus Misinformation: The Real Threat to Free Speech in American Higher Education would categorize as, indeed, misinformation7. To Vivian, such truisms coalesce into an farfetched worldview where college students “crave confirmation” to the extent that they “frequently shut down campus events and even assume power over entire universities,” rendering an alternative reality where college is a breeding ground for extremism.8 As Vivian argues, this implausible perspective grows out of “fixations on the idea of trigger warnings and safe spaces,”9 the circulation of which produces reactionary doctrines like “viewpoint diversity.” These doctrines perform propagandistic moves such as proliferating data to mimic scientific or theological argumentation and appealing to feelings like cynicism as expertise. Vivian emphasizes that casting doubt on the legitimacy of universities “is common in periods of rising authoritarian sentiment.”10 A year after the publication of Campus Misinformation, Donald J. Trump chose Senator J.D. Vance as his running mate—the same man who in 2021 delivered a speech titled “The Universities are the Enemy” for the National Conservatism Conference.11Kendall Gerdes's compelling Sensitive Rhetorics: Academic Freedom and Campus Activism is a smart analysis of how such misinformation forms. Gerdes's book unpacks public critiques of (over)sensitivity to show how those critiques fuel misinformation about college students and higher ed more generally. Gerdes argues that critiques of sensitivity mark an “ideological discomfort with the idea that language is a form of action” (4). Even though misinformation does not persuade on a purely intellectual level, language is still reduced to mere correspondence. If words are just words, then college students are too sensitive about what texts they're asked to read, what visitors are paid to speak on campus, how violations are managed, and so on. But if words are more than just words—if language is perlocutionary—then language initiates a sensitivity that resonates in far more collective ways than previously realized. As Gerdes articulates, “the sensitivity of rhetorical subjects is a generalized condition of possibility for rhetorical affection” (51). Universities and colleges pose a threat because they reveal how vulnerable or exposed we really are, together, within language.Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity is revelatory: with each site of inquiry—trigger warnings, sexual misconduct policy, Black student activism, and campus carry policies in Texas—rhetoricity itself is resignified. The book articulates that it is one thing to think of sensitivity as a weakness—it is an entirely different thing to think of sensitivity as “an irremissible exposedness.” “Before symbolic persuasion,” Gerdes writes, “before thinking and knowing, even before the experience of being, a rhetorical sensitivity obtains, opening us to existence as rhetorical subjects” (91). This conception transforms many of rhetoric's givens. If sensitivity is a mutual condition “of one's constitution in language” (38), then “vulnerability and exposedness” are not “simply matters of individual agentive choice” (51). Rather, vulnerability is a radical openness to being addressed. At all times, to be rhetorical existents is to sit in the potential for language to affect.Readers of Rhetoric & Public Affairs will be interested in how Gerdes demonstrates that public critiques of sensitivity enlist the topos of academic freedom, often misunderstood as adjacent to free speech. Academic freedom is supposed “to provide insulation for those with less rhetorical power,” since the production of knowledge should be free from hegemonic pressures (9). Still, academic freedom is a baggy topos. In 2025, I think we are more aware than ever that appeals to academic freedom do not always protect against “harassment campaigns” and remain contingent on the governor's board of visitors (9). Infrastructurally, academic freedom is often a tool or gauge of rhetorical power. As Gerdes points out, arguments about curricular changes and practices even put academic freedom in opposition to students. When “trigger warnings” were constructed as a talking point—cherry-picked from isolated contexts—academic freedom was simultaneously turned into an exigence. Gerdes refers to a 2015 Chronicle of Higher Education article that used trigger warnings as evidence of an existential threat to the university (25). Many such opinion pieces not only amplify suspicion of students but also “pit the rights of instructors against the rights of students” (26). I think most rhetoricians would be wary of that dynamic. All told, Gerdes's theory of rhetorical sensitivity provides a nuanced reading of trigger warnings as advocacy for accessibility given that trauma modulates bodily response.Gerdes's third chapter argues that college campuses do not feel safe for historically disenfranchised students. Most campuses, Gerdes argues, are defined by what Louis M. Maraj references as “white institutional defensiveness, policies, and practices that posture tentatively (often in racially colorblind ways) so as to avoid causing racial stress for white individuals.”12 Black student activism that demands “safe spaces,” such as the productive 2015 occupation of the Carnahan Quad on the University of Missouri's campus, is always resistant to Diane Lynn Gusa's conception of “white institutional presence,” which is another example where Gerdes shows how rhetorical sensitivity can be a transformative tactic for invention (63).Sensitive Rhetorics not only takes student activism seriously as institutional critique, but it also implies that college students are uniquely attuned to our shared openness. The issues that college students raise make explicit the “power of language to injure, wound, or harm” (4), implying that the practice of learning sensitizes you, making the address of others more salient and available while you yourself grow more responsive. In this way, Gerdes communicates what many lifelong learners feel: the simultaneous heaviness of beginning to notice differently—notice more—while beginning to feel slightly more responsible. College students are not fragile or self-absorbed. In their quest for trigger warnings and safe spaces, students are practicing ethical sociality. Activism mobilized by sensitivity is not whimsy nor idiosyncrasy—it's an active negotiation with what it feels like to become more responsible for yourself with others.In the book's composition, it is inspiring to witness Gerdes pulling from sensitivity as a resource. If vulnerability is distributed, as Sensitive Rhetorics argues, then even experts on sensitivity are themselves drained, prickled, and agitated, with or without personal permission. While Gerdes shows remarkable restraint referencing egregious arguments as well as questionable decisions to platform speakers like Milo Yiannopoulos outside of “peer review and shared governance” (31), every so often Gerdes delivers a biting critique. In the book's rundown of how students pursuing the Title IX process to address abuses are demeaned, Gerdes writes: “It's worth noting when scholars complain about students acting like consumers but appeal to the ‘marketplace of ideas’ as a justification for academic freedom, as if the metaphor of an intellectual marketplace should only extend to those it figures as merchants, as if the responsibility for rhetorical engagement amounts to something like ‘buyer beware”’ (49). In response to misinformation about trigger warnings, Gerdes sneaks in some fair snark: “This claim implies that the potential for trauma is so regularly inflicted on students that to advise them about it in advance would halt the day-to-day activities of teaching” (35).This book sensitized me. The first chapter on trigger warnings is a tour-de-force and the arrangement of the book is incredibly smart. I'm now wondering what “ambient norms” my pedagogical and professional choices perpetuate (29). I'm struck by what it means to be unendingly affected by others. I'm spinning stories of rhetoric where sensitivity is “a rhetorical term of art” (3). I'm listening for fallacies of false dilemmas or those moments when higher ed values serve misinformation. My antenna is up, I'm reminded of precious commitments, and it's all due to the “uncloseable openness” of Sensitive Rhetorics (4).
February 2025
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Teaching Academic Writing Skills: A Narrative Literature Review of Unifying Academic Values through Academic Integrity ↗
Abstract
Academic integrity continues to concern educators worldwide. Furthermore, general guidelines for ensuring academic integrity do not seem to encompass all the angles that are required to be taken into consideration when exploring the factors that contribute to multicultural students’ decision to adhere to the norms and values of academic integrity. This literature review focuses on how academic values can be unified through academic integrity, and specifically explores factors and perspectives of utilising academic integrity to unify academic values when teaching academic writing. The dimensions of academic values explored in this paper are: a) beliefs and attitudes of multicultural undergraduate students and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB), b) the value of academic performance in academic writing classes, c) exploring the development of multicultural students’ authorial voice while maintaining academic integrity, and d) using technology to encourage academic integrity in academic writing classes. Over 56 identified sources were chosen carefully to ensure unbiased approaches to the issues of academic integrity and development of academic writing skills. The authors explored the issues from a variety of perspectives. The gap noticed in the review of literature is the disconnection between academic values and academic integrity. The authors make recommendations for future research.
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This article examines how four students in high school or college choose to integrate sources in their assignments using quotation and paraphrases. Implementing an innovative methodology, a digital screen capture software was used to record all the participants’ actions as they wrote a 500-word argumentative essay. A video of each participant’s actions was produced. These actions translated as quantitative results and showed the frequency of various actions grouped within five categories of strategies linked to various skills (informational skills, writing skills, referencing skills, basic computer skills and task compliance skills) and a sixth category linked to plagiarism actions. The four texts were also analysed for their quality and their level of plagiarism. Results show that the college students performed better on overall text quality, but their texts contained more plagiarism. When looking at the strategies used, all students spent more time on their informational and writing strategies than on their referencing strategies. When using sources, in general, participants had more difficulties with paraphrasing than with quoting, often not referencing their paraphrases, which resulted in plagiarism. Patterns emerged for the data showing four types of actions when integrating sources in assignments: the casual integrator, the aspiring integrator, the fearless integrator and the ethical integrator. For each profile, recommendations on how to better develop students’ paraphrasing, quoting, and referencing skills are provided.
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Being and Becoming: Addressing Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Issues in Learning Academic Writing through an Academic Integrity Socialisation Process ↗
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Addressing issues of equity, diversity, and inclusion in academic writing is vital in higher education, especially when considering the lived experiences and education of undergraduates from diverse backgrounds. This paper acknowledges the challenges faced by students unfamiliar with Western academic integrity standards, emphasising the disparities experienced by socioeconomically disadvantaged, racialised, and international students. The paper describes an innovative learner-agentic empowerment approach at a Canadian university designed to enable students from diverse backgrounds to gain the academic, cultural, disciplinary and linguistic capital required to practise academic integrity. Through a mixed-method analysis of 182 undergraduates in a writing support program, we found that students who responded to a reflective prompt on academic integrity at the start of the program wrote substantially more (mean 7050 words) than those who did not respond to the prompt (mean 1692 words) during the month-long program. Qualitative analyses revealed students' unfamiliarity with cultural differences, academic integrity practices, linguistic challenges, and penalty severity. This model suggests the importance of a proactive, learner-agentic approach to facilitate education about academic integrity and to address equity and inclusivity. The study underscores the importance of systemic pedagogical changes, furthering the dialogue on equity, diversity, and inclusion in higher education.
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Defining Writing Lingo: Using Interviews to Investigate Language about Writing and the Writing Process ↗
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In this project, students examine their previous definitions and associations with writing-related vocabulary and investigate the complexity of this terminology by interviewing other writers about their writing processes. The “Good Writing” Analysis is an argumentative paper that asks students to investigate a writing term and then argue for its significance to the writing process. As their evidence for this essay, students interview three people they consider to be good writers about how each writer uses or understands the chosen term as part of their writing process. This assignment is used in a first-year writing course which uses a Writing about Writing-based curriculum, but this assignment could easily be used in any unit that asks students to investigate the writing process. By completing this assignment, students broaden their definitions of writing vocabulary and its impact on good writing, they gain experience in conducting and coding interviews, and they develop metacognitive awareness of themselves as writers and researchers.
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This essay introduces a circulation analysis assignment, blending together insights from multimodal composition, remix/assemblage pedagogy, and circulation studies to encourage writing transfer. The assignment asks students to document the origins and evolution of a cultural meme (as coined by evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins) as it is adapted for different rhetorical situations, modeled for students in the titular documentary film Feels Good Man. By completing this analysis, presenting it in multimodal contexts, and reflecting upon how they adapted that presentation for their audience, students begin to develop the metacognitive, cross-contextual thinking necessary for successful writing transfer.
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This article describes a seven-week project in which writing students design digitally mediated, play-based activities (card games, board games, pop-up books, or similar) to encourage children to experience a sense of environmental enchantment: an attentive, empathetic connection with the more-than-human world. The project emerged after students in several writing courses lamented modern life’s quickening pace and a corresponding loss of pleasurable nature experience. The project gives students space to practice—and to practice encouraging in others—slower, more attentive ecological relations while strengthening media production skills aimed at non-academic audiences. In doing so, students produce projects that, in the words of virologist Jonas Salk, practice being “good ancestors” to future generations.
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Abstract
This low-stakes assignment invites students in an online corequisite first-year writing course to explore the archives of a local historic African American newspaper as an alternative to more conventional research-based writing tasks. This course is taught at a large public community college with a predominantly white student population in Louisville, Kentucky. For this activity, students first are introduced to the concept of archives through a reading and a video. Next, they are invited to freely explore the digitized newspaper archive, choose one article that captures their interest to read in full and sharing a short summary of it along with a reflection on their experience of navigating the digital archive on a discussion board. Finally, each student is asked to respond to at least two classmates, looking for harmonies and tensions between their and their classmates’ summarized articles and experiences in the archive. The local focus of this assignment encourages students to see research as personal and quite literally close to home, while the focus on reflection and response encourages students to work collaboratively to overcome challenges when navigating difficult digital sources. In an online writing classroom, which can often be an isolating and unfamiliar space, particularly for the historically underserved populations most likely to be in a developmental writing course, this assignment encourages students to embrace their roles as researchers in community with other researchers.
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Abstract
This writing assignment, titled Metacognitive Analysis, prompts awareness of metacognition in learners early in their medical disciplines as they critically evaluate their process for making medical decisions. The Metacognitive Analysis assignment is completed by first-year graduate health profession students in a master’s level physician assistant (PA) course focused on the development of critical thinking and clinical decision-making. Throughout the semester, patient teaching cases are discussed and dissected by the students in small-group, problem-based learning sessions. In the Metacognitive Analysis assignment, students extend this learning by evaluating their own individual decision-making process in relation to concepts of intuitive and analytic reasoning.
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“That Poem Was Pretty Wild to Me”: On Personal Safety and Precarious Moments in Teacher Candidates’ Responses to Sexual Assault Narratives ↗
Abstract
Please note that some discussions of domestic, sexual, and racial violence are included in this article. This article explores how teachers and students in a teacher training program constructed precarious moments by engaging with sexual assault literature and pedagogy that centers rape culture and sexual trauma. In this qualitative feminist study, 23 participants took up readings of a sexual trauma text set and responded to pedagogy for teaching such texts with adolescent students in the Canadian K-12 public school system. A focal aim of this project is to think ahead to how teachers in training might cultivate radical communities prepared to address the pervasiveness of sexual assault and the insidiousness of rape culture in the secondary English classroom. As such, the ways in which teacher candidates’ experiences of and witnessing precarious personal safety, as well as how precarious moments impacted their attitudes toward considering this pedagogy in particular, are analyzed.
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Heteroglossia and Community Translanguaging in an English-Medium Classroom: Multilingual Elementary Students’ Use of Multiple Voices in Digital Texts ↗
Abstract
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.
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Abstract
This Research Brief provides an overview of the current scholarship on transnational feminist rhetorics (TFR), drawing from interdisciplinary traditions. TFR inquiries should always begin with “a cogent analysis of power” (Dingo et al.), attending to how transnational power dynamics act on gendered bodies and how those bodies engage with and speak back to intersectional geopolitical forces. They rely primarily on the analysis of textual and visual artifacts in historical and contemporary contexts and use a variety of concepts and theories from rhetoric and elsewhere, grounded in the lived experiences of marginalized communities. The Research Brief ends with a discussion of future directions for this field, calling for more interdisciplinary inquiries, continued critical intersectional engagement with diverse transnational communities and subjectivities, reflexive and ethical research practices, and pedagogical applications.
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Abstract
Critiques of neoliberal capitalism have offered a rich vocabulary for the analysis of the political economy of literacy across professional, public, and classroom contexts. Since the Great Recession, commonplaces about work-readiness have been conditioned by economic precarity and changes to the social contract of work that blur the lines between professionalization and exploitation. Looking beyond the confines of the neoliberal present, the uncertain future of work for our undergraduate students will be shaped by what the World Economic Forum describes as the “double-disruption” of the pandemic and the rise of automation. Whereas neoliberal critique offers a vocabulary for describing many job seekers’ experience of the present, this article seeks to recover an element of “literacy hope” (Wan) by looking to speculative and utopian postcapitalist theory to inform and challenge career guidance conversations with students in writing studies. By framing the future as a resource in the rhetorical constitution of present-day workers, this article advances an inquiry-focused career-guidance pedagogy that asks: How do our assumptions about the future of work inform our relationships with employers and each other in the present?
January 2025
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Abstract
The problem of discourse marginalization in intercultural meetings is usually attributed to linguistic or pragmatic shortcomings of marginalized second language English speakers who are seen as either “learners,” in contrast to first-language English speakers, as uncommunicative, or even as professionally incompetent. The influence of culturally oriented participation styles, distinct patterns of turn-taking behavior, has so far not been considered as a contributing factor. The present study examines intercultural meeting discourse and reveals how diverse participation styles can lead to marginalization. Pedagogical implications are discussed.
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Abstract
We argue that calling attention to how workplace writing is constructed in rhetorical contexts is a useful way to disrupt the seemingly “common sense” logic of professional participation. The first part of this article introduces the framework’s questions and explains the purpose of the framework. The second part of the article describes two writing assignments from our classrooms to illustrate how the framework functions as a prefigurative approach.
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A Black Fetus? Examining Social Justice in Medical Illustrations in Technical and Professional Communication (TPC) Pedagogical Materials ↗
Abstract
Although the field of illustration is a major topic in technical and professional communication (TPC), social justice regarding medical illustrations is yet to be investigated. Drawing from an analysis of TPC journals, program websites, textbooks, and syllabi, this study explores how TPC could advance a social justice view on medical illustration, especially in the textbooks that we use in teaching medical and science writing courses. Not only did we find that very few medical and science writing textbooks included illustrations, but a significant number of illustrations were white. We suggest intentionality in the choice of pedagogical materials, overt discussion of social justice in the curriculum, and critical borrowing of pedagogical materials.
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A meta-analysis of relationships between syntactic features and writing performance and how the relationships vary by student characteristics and measurement features ↗
Abstract
Students’ proficiency in constructing sentences impacts the writing process and writing products. Linguistic demands in writing differ in terms of both student characteristics and measurement features. To identify various syntactic demands considering these features, we conducted a meta-analysis examining the relationships between syntactic features (complexity and accuracy) and writing performance (quality, productivity, and fluency) and moderating effects of both student characteristics and measurement features. A total of 109 studies (effect sizes: 871; the total number of participants: 24,628) met the inclusion criteria. Results showed that there was a weak relationship for syntactic accuracy (r = .25) and complexity (r = .16). Writers' characteristics, including grade level and language proficiency, and measurement features, writing genres, writing outcomes, whether the writing task is text-based or not, and type of syntactic complexity measures, were significant moderators for certain syntactic features. The findings highlighted the importance of writer and measurement factors when considering the relationships between linguistic features in writing and writing performance. Implications were discussed regarding the selection of syntactic features in assessing language use in writing, gaps in the literature, and significance for writing instruction and assessment. • Aimed to depict the relationships between syntactic features and writing performance. • Found weak relationships between syntactic features and writing outcomes. • Relationships vary as a function of student characteristics and measurement features. • Noun phrase complexity might be more valid than some traditional syntactic complexity measures. • Findings have important implications for writing assessments.
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Cluster Conversation: (Re)Writing our Histories, (Re)Building Feminist Worlds: Working Toward Hope in the Archives: Introduction ↗
Abstract
[Introduction] "Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. [...] Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency." - Rebecca Solnit In 2018, Cheryl Glenn wrote, "The work of feminist rhetorical historiography is far from done; in fact, it has just begun-and it is anchored in hope." Following Glenn, we explore hope in this cluster as a methodological imperative in the archives. Informed by theorists Paulo Freire, bell hooks, Rebecca Solnit, and Cornel West, the writers in this Cluster Conversation envision hope as a radical orientation toward building new worlds and a willingness to do the work to make those worlds possible. Following the models of Jacqueline Jones Royster, Charles Morris, Terese Guinsatao Monberg, and others, we see archives and archival methods as a particularly valuable part of doing such work. As Linda Tuhiwai Smith argues in Decolonizing Methodologies, "To hold alternative histories is to hold alternative knowledges. The pedagogical implication of this access to alternative knowledges is that they can form the basis of alternative ways of doing things" (36). Archives and archival methods are vital to creating such alternative histories and knowledges.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Abstract
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.
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Composing Time in a Secondary U.S. Classroom: (Not) Challenging Ideological Polarization through Straight and Queer Temporal Movements ↗
Abstract
Drawing on a larger year-long ethnography at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the Midwestern United States, this article describes the texts students composed in a co-taught sophomore (grade 10) humanities course combining social studies and English language arts. Bringing together sociocultural perspectives on literacy and composition with queer theorizations of time, I argue for the utility of attending not only to time’s multi dimensionality but also its multi directionality. Doing so in writing instruction can help thaw binary polarization and foster more humanizing temporal and in turn ideological movements. To illustrate, I present an ethnographic case of students writing about the history of gendered clothing in 20th-century U.S. society. I examine how different temporal ideologies had consequences for students (not) reproducing antagonistic, polarized binaries with respect to oppressive values, in particular anti-LGBTQIA+ values as they intersect with class, race, and politics. Although my emphasis is how gender and sexuality intertwine with economics, race, and politics, this article suggests that attending to the multidimensionality and multidirectionality of time is a productive site for scholars and educators committed to praxes of justice in writing instruction.
2025
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Mapping It Out: Rhizomatic Learning of Peer Embedded Tutors for Composition Classes – A Case Study ↗
Abstract
This article contributes to the writing center scholarship in three ways. First, it revisits and further develops the discussion on course-embedded writing support programs; in particular, it builds on Kelly Webster and Jake Hansen’s “recursive reflection about course-embedded tutoring” and responds to Mary Tetreault et al.’s call for utilizing archival research as a resource for tutor education. Second, it takes a unique approach to tutor education by exploring how embedded tutors for first-year composition classes develop their expertise outside of the formal training sessions. Third, it applies the theoretical framework of rhizomatic learning that has not been previously utilized to investigate the diverse experiences embedded tutors undergo as they acquire and refine their tutoring skills. The qualitative data for this case study were obtained from the Coordinator of Composition Tutoring’s reflective journal as well as session logs and reflections completed by course-embedded peer tutors for composition courses at a four-year Northeastern institution over the period of four semesters. The analysis of the data reveals the rhizomatic character of embedded tutors’ learning, where elements of the learning processes are interconnected and ever-expanding (Deleuze and Guattari; Grellier). The discussion includes a set of questions designed to encourage tutors to reflect on their learning processes. Writing center administrators can use these questions to gather data on how tutors develop their skills within their specific contexts.
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Abstract
Reflecting on the experiences of two graduate students from speech-language pathology (SLP) who became generalist writing consultants, this article examines the intersections between the academic homes of generalist graduate consultants and their writing center education and work and analyzes what these intersections tell us about consultant education. We briefly introduce SLP and identify the specific ways that both fields address writing. We then explore how the disciplinary intersections enhance or hinder the work that graduate students do in either field. Based on this foundation, we propose a four-step process for educating graduate consultants that promotes an awareness of how similarities enhance work in either field, how differences can hinder the work, and how bidirectional transference between fields can benefit graduate students as both consultants and as academics in their home discipline. Ultimately, this paper highlights the untapped potential of the theory and pedagogy of consultants’ home disciplines for effective generalist consultant education.
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Navigating Writing Center Timescapes: Reflections on Tutor Self-Efficacy at University and Community Sites ↗
Abstract
This reflection came together over the course of a semester while the co-authors were working in their University Writing Center and at community partner sites. Only a handful of writing center scholarship has investigated how time as an agent plays into pedagogical performance (Geller, “Tick-Tock”; Geller et al., The Everyday Writing Center ; Terzano, “Short-Time Tutorials”). Yet, across writing centers we’re all negotiating these material and temporal realities as part of the daily structure of our work. And, as Powell and Hixson-Bowles point out, writing center studies often publishes about the writing self-efficacy of the students and clientele of center services but not tutor self-efficacy. We therefore use time as a lens with which to view and better understand our individualized tutoring efficacies. The co-authors’ stories demonstrate how time can be a valuable reflective lens for connecting theory to action within a session and for the development of one’s sense of self as a writing center professional (their tutor self-efficacy) across sessions and spaces. By so doing, exploring time as a pedagogical influence, tutors can carve out more confidence in themselves, authority in their self-efficacy, and find success in familiar and unfamiliar writing center terrains.
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Abstract
Trauma is ubiquitous, including in post-secondary settings, meaning that trauma-affected individuals are present in every classroom or service setting. While research has investigated the engagement of post-secondary instructors with student trauma disclosures, this work has not extended to cover the unique role of post-secondary writing center staff. Writing tutors may encounter trauma narratives through written assignments or verbal disclosures and often labour under a degree of precarity and lack control over curricular and assignment design, giving them little preparation before encountering emotionally challenging material. As a “helping profession,” writing tutors may be at risk of secondary trauma, re-traumatization based on personal trauma histories, or unsustainable levels of emotional labour. Employing a critical disability lens and an equity-centered trauma-informed framework, this project engaged eight university-based writing center staff in Ontario, Canada in semi-structured interviews to explore how they perceive and narrate their engagement with student trauma and how this may relate to trauma-informed pedagogical practices. Based on a Reflexive Thematic Analysis, several themes are explored, including the relationship between writing center structure/labour conditions and trauma-informed practices, types of emotionally challenging interactions, strategies tutors employ to engage with students during trauma-adjacent sessions, and gaps in ability to provide trauma-informed service. These themes provide insight into tutors’ experience with student trauma and imply recommendations to improve staff and student well-being through engaging with trauma-informed practices in the writing center.