Thirty-seven years after its initial publication, David Bartholomae's essay “Inventing the University” ([1986] 2005) remains indelible in the contemporary project and continual reinvention of composition studies. Indeed, the collected essays and vignettes featured in Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition Studies—its title echoing Bartholomae's piece—pay deliberate homage to Bartholomae by reverently calling his piece “seminal,” “pivotal,” and “long studied” even as the authors by turns complicate, disagree, and expand his initial concepts.The constant among these fifteen full-length chapters and eight vignettes is a deep, abiding respect for student writing, including the varied, nonlinear processes, outputs, and modes of exploration that students experience in our classes. As coeditor Stacey Waite situates the project in the introduction, “In our current political moment, how do students and scholars ‘invent the university’ now? What are the structures of universities in/against which students make work in our courses? How have our students helped us to create, shape, disrupt, and revise our field?” While these questions are equal parts vital and esoteric, the pieces in this anthology approach these lines of inquiry via a range of methods and theoretical positionings. Amid this diversity of perspectives, Ashanka Kumari's chapter, “Inventing Happens in Perpetuity,” might well function as a high-level overview of the issues raised across the anthology. Discussing the importance of continually checking our own perceptions about students’ writing, Kumari offers, “I often ask students to ask ‘Why’ whenever we complete an activity—why on Earth might I have made us do the thing we just did? Through this practice, I think with students about writing practices, about the histories informing what is deemed as a concept to spend time on in our classroom space.” As such, these chapters and vignettes reinvigorate Karen L. Lowenstein's (2009) concept of a “parallel practice” in higher education, wherein the ways we hope our students will write and move through the world after taking our courses must necessarily parallel the ways we ourselves teach them. In this spirit, Inventing the Discipline walks the walk of accessibility in its open-source, digital format that is fully available for any interested reader online.While the anthology's contents are not grouped by subheadings—a move I interpret as inviting readers to draw their own connections and patterns among the chapters—I have organized my review into three loose themes: the explicit rejection of student writing as somehow “less than” other forms of writing, the pedagogical and rhetorical centering of student writing in composition classrooms and in formal writing projects, and an explication of the sticky moral and linguistic issues involved in centering student writing both in the academy and, from a metaphysical standpoint, in anthologies such as this one. My grouping of these themes is not indicative of any particular authority I have in this field; rather, I offer these as one possible framework of many that readers may use as they dive into this spirited and essential collection.Fittingly, many of the early essays in Inventing the Discipline grapple with the central problem of labeling anything student writing. In “Pedagogical Genealogies,” the opening chapter of the anthology, Peter Wayne Moe traces the pedagogical genealogies he has inherited through Bartholomae, William E. Coles, Jr., and Theodore Baird, and questions how these genealogies sit differently in his particular person—how they work (or don't) in his context and to what extent these genealogies may or may not be appropriate for an ever-diversifying composition classroom. “Every teacher must, at some point, come to terms with such pedagogical genealogies, locating ourselves within? alongside? outside? against? the traditions that make our own work possible,” writes Moe. Because these genealogies inform our own positionalities as instructors, embedded within them are particular—if sometimes subconscious—orientations to the students we teach.Bruce Horner, in his chapter “Student Writing,” takes up the dialectal student-teacher relationship and calls out the deficit-based views inherent in many discussions of student writing: “ ‘Student,’ when used as a modifier—as in student work, student writing, student housing, student government, student life—typically serves to demean what it modifies by signaling its character as somehow lesser in quality than what is modified: less authentic, valuable, lasting, real, valid, substantive.” Student writing is not taken seriously in this formulation and is in fact often positioned as “not real” as a result. Horner, however, rejects this conception, and the “autonomous” view of literacy and language it contains, in favor of an epistemology that emphasizes the embeddedness of the social world in every utterance. Student and teacher alike are thus “fellow reworkers of language and knowledge,” so that, rather than dismissing student work as of low value out of hand, or fetishizing it as some immaculate artifact, the solution is “to behave . . . [as if] all of us, and all writing, remain in that same, incomplete condition.”Of course, student writing is only one element of the teacher-student dialectic. Michael Bunn, in “Undervaluing Student Writing in Composition Courses: A Reading Problem,” suggests that more attention ought to be given to how students read and, more broadly, how we in the field read student writing. Where writing pedagogies are numerous and well integrated into composition programs, Bunn urges compositionists “to pay more attention to reading.” As a means of troubling a differential valuation of writing by the professional-academic class and that of students, Bunn argues that “students are best served when they are taught to read both published and student-produced texts in the same ways.” This is, he cautions, not to say that published texts and our students’ paper submissions are of the same quality; rather, they are merely “at different stages in the writing and professionalization process.”Taken together, Moe, Horner, and Bunn remind us to question the pedagogical genealogies we've inherited, to tweak and/or dismantle them as necessary in our unique institutional contexts, and to take great care as we continue to work with students and their writing—which, like our own writing, is always already in a state of becoming. The pieces I've included in the following section are largely concerned with how we might merge these ideas within the composition classroom.A second theme I noted concerned the pedagogical possibilities presented by student writing. As one might anticipate, an anthology dedicated to the radical (re)examination of student writing features a fair amount of writing by students throughout its pages. Indeed, most of the book's chapters and vignettes fall into this broad category, though the overlaps and tensions among the approaches described are important to name. As such, I've opted to take a page from Eric A. House, who asks in his vignette, “ ‘It's Not about You,’ or, Getting out of My Own Way to Better Perceive Composition,” “I'm wondering how often instructors get out of our own way, admit that maybe the flow of the class isn't necessarily about us, and allow ourselves to be moved by students?” As a means of “getting out of the way,” a pedagogical concept I first encountered through literary scholar Marcelle M. Haddix (2018), I have opted to center actual students’ writing as much as possible in this part of the review.Consider Michael, a student of author Gina Tranisi's described in her contribution, “Respectfully Michael: A Narrative Exploration of Student Writing and What We Might Make of Its Beautiful Disruptions.” As Michael, a white, cisgender undergraduate in a midwestern university, grapples with stepping out of his comfort zone to research the stigma faced by transgender communities, he reaches a moment of struggle in the drafting process in which he confesses, “I feel like my paper is boring to read . . . I wasn't very creative with this one at least so far. My only creativity is the beginning letter of each paragraph spells out the words stigmas and distress which I feel are really important to understand with this topic.” Tranisi draws on Michael's words both to acknowledge the creative writerly choices our students make that we often miss and to lobby the rest of us to consider “the people behind the papers.”Where Michael's example hinted at the potential for worldview change through writing, Chanon Adsanatham describes how his communication students in Bangkok blended conventions of English-language business correspondence with Thai communication practices. While initially disappointed by his students’ “failure” to grasp the content, Adsanatham later realized this happenstance was a “rhetorical clash,” or “a moment in which knowledge, familiarity, and expectations about discursive arrangement, conventions, and practices from a tradition or curriculum creates questions or doubts about appropriate composing moves in a writing assignment in an intercultural rhetorical situation.” These clashes are inherently generative and productive if embraced as such. Of course, part of the work of embracing these opportunities requires a commitment to reflective practice, or an “after pedagogy,” as Paul Lynch (2011) has called it.Donna Qualley and Matthew Sorlien put this “after pedagogy” into practice in their chapter, “Our (Students’) Work (and Play) Can Make Us Smarter Next Time.” Building on the twenty-first-century literate practice of content curation, Donna asks how students and teachers can embark on writing and reading through new media literacies when both teacher and student are nonexperts in these genres, while Matthew dives head first into the Prezi Classic platform to create a presentation of over two hundred slides, complete with multiple “What I'm Thinking” slides that he notes “allowed me to present myself authentically within the work—not as a disembodied voice faking expertise, objectivity, or even comfort, but as a writer still trying to make something out of the material, even though they aren't sure what that something is.” This theme of playfulness finds a nice complement in Derek Tanios Imad Mkhaiel and Jacqueline Rhodes's vignette, “Messiness Matters: A Story of Writing in One Act,” in which the virtues of messiness, nonlinearity, and spontaneity are celebrated as thinking tools that generate powerful writing. Mkhaiel, a student in Rhodes's graduate seminar, underscores this point: Messy moments feel like moments of creative intellectual endeavor—my WRA 101 students and I are trying to write thought. Run-ons are excited ideas that don't know when to quit; fragments are dramatic brevity, not mistake. One time I had a student who used an excessive (I thought) number of commas; when I commented on the punctuation, I learned that she was trying to teach me how to breathe while reading her thoughts.In “Disrupting Hierarchies of Knowledge: Student Writing in the Digital Transgender Archive(?),” authors Mariel Aleman, Alice Galvinhill, Keith Plummer, and K. J. Rawson depict reflections gleaned from their work with the Digital Transgender Archive (DTA) housed at the College of the Holy Cross, where Rawson led the project and Aleman, Galvinhill, and Plummer were undergraduate student workers and archivists. The authors describe the immense value and responsibility of working for the project, ensuring the accessibility and accuracy of artifacts, as well as the role of scholar-activism in fighting for the visibility of minoritized communities. As Plummer writes, “Working for the DTA showed me the importance of scholarly activism to unearth stories made invisible by our culture, how a mission is a much more meaningful motivator than a grade, and how a scholarly intervention can become an empowering space that's impact reaches far beyond the confines of a lab.”Just as Aleman et al. challenge the kind of writing that counts as “writing”—and who that writing does and does not typically center—Rachael Shah's vignette “Writing with Students to Make an Academia with More Room” discusses the challenges she has encountered with cowriting research with high school students. Though this sort of writing creates more space, or “more room,” as she puts it, in academia, “the message we were receiving about who writes research—and who does not—was crystal clear. It was a message I found myself constantly trying to counter, both for the students I was writing with and for academics who encountered their work.” In a similar vein, Cory Holding's vignette, “The Field and the Force: Notes from Prison Teaching” critiques the practice of writing about student writing in favor of writing with students in a variety of settings, including prisons. This shift “means not only quoting from students’ work, or even co-writing, but working together to form the research question, to think through research methods, to process critical feedback, and to imagine interventions, implications, and next steps,” writes Holding.“Writing for Change: Re-inventing the University” takes on Holding's and Shah's call to make “more room” in academe for a variety of writers in its assembling of twenty-two University of Pittsburgh undergraduate authors to ask, “What would your ideal university do?” In their employment of a Black feminist epistemology, these authors depict their ideal university as one with frequent opportunities for professionalization and with ample support for everyday financial tasks. They seek increased integration with the surrounding community and, fundamentally, an acknowledgment of difference as “an essential and permanent part of our society, making it crucial to work to celebrate that in the face of people who try to destroy it.” In so doing, they offer a powerful example of the “critical story-ing” called for in Sherita V. Roundtree's chapter, “(Re)Humanizing the Discipline: Students’ Critical Story-ing as a Resource Archive.” Roundtree, like Aleman et al., finds digital archives to be productive spaces that “help students actively see themselves as members of discourse communities within and outside of the university.”Where compositionists may well agree on a number of pedagogical principles (many of them outlined in the aforementioned chapters), there still exists a richness of tension and debate in the field. The final set of chapters and vignettes zeroes in on these tensions, many of them arising from Bartholomae's original essay. He argues of students, “They must learn to speak our language” (5), but more recently, scholars have taken issue with this dictum—do they? and to what end? Take, for a start, Pritha Prasad's chapter, “(Anti)Racist World-Making in the University: Reinventing Student Work,” which attends to the moral injury faced by BIPOC students as they attempt to “invent the university” amid harassment and assault, and asks, “How can we look at the theory-building and knowledge-creating work our BIPOC students—and particularly women of color and queer people of color—are already doing in the spaces in which they live and work as a basis for understanding how race and racism operate in our classrooms, universities, and beyond? Prasad ends the chapter by sounding an alarm regarding the use of “the master's tools,” in Audre Lorde's words, because a myopic focus on standard language forms suggests that BIPOC students only need to master the linguistic tools of what Lisa calls the of in to political Prasad's up College Students at the the of in the Composition in which she a focus on among her students, many of are and I to students the importance of different language forms for social and describe language as a of the importance of to in different and This the value of the language students already that the use of may not be appropriate for such as with and the use of language is not ideal for social such as a or in question raised for me among these two chapters is one that's the in our field for what like that Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” how much we students to their language and literacies to with the discourse community of the and how much we instructors, and in this the academy such that space for the variety of and that our students us of our with to the of institutional change on this in his vignette, with Composition Composition to seek to if this a when it . . . they just to I to as the for composition of because any field is made up of of a of scholars and and they be behind when they and is while this both in content and in author of While Inventing the this the of an as a crucial means of for minoritized students in higher In this way, “not only do students have to the university, but they need to the role of to in the L. and M. the to of the in and while out critical spaces for and Black of within the by their for final theme I noted in my reading of this concerned the of student writing in vignette, A at the that when we student writing from its original “I from essays that were and sometimes not that well and I used to make the I to she In to the Student The and E. by his not to any student writing in his that from student writing is a very he writes, “I to ask what on student writing might look like if not by the to from student the inherent differential in the of student to make one or something that vignette Though she is to and with students, the of which such have as I have to it, I've always had the most Indeed, I've the one positioned to do the she As a to this I to call out the work of L. and Cory In “Student Writing on Student Writing,” the authors that the university and the both will a about the structures which are particularly on they out the of and composition scholars the in this As they put it, who would write about student writing in terms of how it the to to with student writing less and student instructors and other instructors who would and to on ways to the of the are often from such As is in this the by Inventing the Discipline: Student Work in Composition is It is that anthology that the reader both with and and with vital questions about the and the role of student work within Waite notes in her that attention to student work is just as as it was in when Bartholomae's “Inventing the University” was first our field this radical all of its and the to

Keene State College's fact book for 2022–23 notes that 40 percent of the student body at my institution in 2020 identified as the first generation in their family to attend college, yet it's rare that a student discloses this identity in the context of our Center for Research and Writing. It's likely that, in my day-to-day work as the assistant director of the center, I work with first-generation college students every day, but because we don't ask students to disclose this demographic information on our appointment intake form, I rarely know for certain. On the one hand, the invisibility of this identity is surprising: in our writing center we learn a lot about students—they disclose all sorts of things to tutors in their sessions, from the mundane (how much they like or dislike an assignment or their major) to the personal (their work history, hometown, mental health challenges, or linguistic identity). And yet, students’ first-generation status often remains unknown. Such status does not physically or linguistically “mark” a student in the same way as many other identity markers (e.g., race, gender, or socioeconomic status)—first-gen students can, at least sometimes, decide who knows their status. On the other hand, the fact that students don't regularly disclose this information to me, in particular, is probably no surprise at all.As a continuing-gen student myself (my mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother all graduated from college before I set foot on my undergraduate campus), I know that I speak and act in ways that mark me as an institutional insider and thus potentially, and very unfortunately, as someone who might unfairly judge first-gen students. (When I asked a few of our undergraduate peer tutors whether students ever disclosed their first-gen status during sessions, they reported that it did happen occasionally, most commonly after a good deal of rapport building or when the student was writing a personal narrative.) Beyond the barriers that my identities and positionality might present, however, I also wonder whether the writing center is a fraught space for disclosing a first-gen identity. Because writing centers are often—wrongly—conceived as sites of remediation, a first-generation student struggling with imposter syndrome might worry that accessing our services is an admission that they “don't belong” in our academic community. (Not true!) However, since we don't currently collect this kind of demographic information from students who use our center's services, I can't say for certain that first-gen students are avoiding (or using) our services.This not knowing about our work with first-gen students, along with the intention to design services that are welcoming and supportive to this group, prompted me to read Beyond Fitting In. As a relative newcomer to the first-gen conversation, I wasn't fully ready for the sustained interrogation of term/identity first-generation that persists across the collection. (Silly me: I thought because it is a widely recognized identity category that it was also easy to define.) While the collection is divided into three sections, with only the first dedicated to unpacking the meaning of first-generation, almost every essay it contains addresses the problem of definition. One strength of this collection, then, is that it offers an opportunity to witness scholars actively grappling with meaning while also showing, as Anne Ruggles Gere asserts in her intro/preface, that “first-gen students are a real group” (ix). First-gen student, faculty, and administrative voices resonate throughout the collection, which features qualitative research on the lived experiences and perspectives of members of this group, as well as reflections from the contributors themselves, many of whom claim a first-gen identity.Because the collection resists a unified definition of the term, my conceptualization of first-gen accordioned as I read—expanding, contracting, and expanding again. For example, Christine Alfano, Megan Formato, Jennifer Johnson, and Ashley Newby's essay, “Research-Writing Pedagogy,” shares definitions of first-gen generated by students at Stanford who self-identified this way. Although one of these students had family who attended college, she viewed herself as first-gen because she was the first in her family to enroll at an elite institution: “First-gen is no longer just a first in your family to go to college but more first to reach a new height of educational level” (256). While students can certainly be empowered by fitting this label to their personal experiences, other essays, including Beth Towle's “Finding First-Generation Students through an Intersectional Approach to Institutional and Programmatic Data,” make clear that overly broad institutionally imposed definitions may harm the most vulnerable students by “eras[ing] their unique cultural backgrounds” and making them “even less visible by institutional structures” (101).Towle self-identified as a “poor” undergraduate student but shared the institutionally imposed first-generation label with students of middle-class backgrounds, causing her to feel unseen. In turn, Towle argues, labels like “working-class, low-income, and lower socioeconomic status can serve us better than first-generation when we are talking about specific student needs and cultural experiences” (111). In the case of the Stanford student, the first-gen label seems to have helped her recognize and even embrace her particular cultural circumstances and positionality within her institution. In Towle's case, the first-gen label exacerbated feelings of otherness.While authors in the first section of this collection, “Defining First- Generation Students,” interrogate “first-gen” as an identity category, the second and third sections address questions of literacy education for first-generation students, beginning with a consideration of pedagogies at traditional sites of literacy instruction in part 2 (i.e., the first-year writing classroom, the writing center) and concluding, in part 3, with a series of essays exploring where and how literacy instruction is happening across campus—including within Bridge programs, STEM-intensive programs, and co-curricular and work activities.Part 2, “First-Generation Students in the First Year and Beyond,” includes Shurli Makmillen's essay “First Generation Students at a Historically Black University Talk about ‘Proper English,’ ” which interrogates literacy norms at a historically Black university through the voices of students whose parents immigrated to the United States. One reflects, “You know how recently there have been so many incidents where people or the police are getting mad at people for speaking a different language in public. So that resonates within me because it's almost as if that could happen to me, very easily. Or that could happen to my mom or my dad. It resonates very personally” (201). This example, among many in the collection, impressed upon me that literacy education can be a site of advocacy and empowerment for first-gen students, while at the same time literacies can mark and unfairly disadvantage these students both within and outside the classroom.One thing I appreciate about this collection is that it does not just name the curriculum as a site of advocacy but often provides illustrative examples of how that work might unfold within a classroom. My favorite example of this kind is offered in part 1, in Jenny Rice's “Integrated Regionalism and First-Generation Students: A Place-Conscious Heuristic.” This essay is a tightly woven and sometimes lyrical advocation for and illustration of the generative potential of teaching place-based literacies, focused on regional pedagogies of “teachers in the mountains” of Appalachia. These pedagogies emerge from a specific place, time, and culture, drawing together literacies of home and literacies of school.In part 3, “Writing Contexts for First-Generation Students, Teachers, and Administrators,” Courtney Adams Wooten and Jacob Babb explore how self-identified first-gen writing program administrators (WPAs) see their work as influenced by their identity and educational histories. This essay gently challenges the notion that advocacy efforts are best made at the system level, as many of the WPA participants reflected that they more often pursued “individual rather than programmatic interventions when working with first-generation students perhaps because it is in these interactions that they feel a real difference can be made” (311). It's heartening to read that one-to-one mentorship, of the kind that happens in writing centers every day, can meaningfully impact first-gen students. However, Adams Wooten and Babb's essay also underscores the challenge that WPAs like me have “in wielding their limited programmatic power to make significant changes” (312). And, for this reason, I would argue that this collection might be especially useful reading for those in administrative roles with the power to make curricular decisions or to influence institutional policy; the challenges that face first-gen students are both individual and systemic.Indeed, one of the collection's unifying themes is a call for systemic change and what the collection's editor, Kelly Ritter, calls “concrete, collective action” (2; see, more specifically, essays by Moreland on dual enrollment programs, Towle on institutional and programmatic data, and DeGenaro and MacDonald on institutional messaging). Elaine P. Maimon's afterword focuses mainly on reshaping PhD programs but makes this broader call to action: “New majority students often listen to demeaning and unhelpful internal voices that tell them they are not fit for college because they are too old, too poor, or too different. We must shift the emphasis from what's wrong with students to what's not right with our institutions” (318).Finally, upon closing the book, I found myself lingering over the definitional questions raised within its pages. As many of the essays demonstrate, first-gen status can be empowering when it is defined and claimed by individual students. As William DeGenaro and Michael T. MacDonald argue, “Ultimately, agency and transformation come not from being a first-gen student but rather from claiming an identity as one—there is power in naming oneself” (24). At the same time, institutions have used “first-gen” as a data point and often as a means of counting students served and tracking risk; as Christina Saidy notes in her essay on paired retention and first-year writing courses, “Often, the scholarship and university edicts regarding at-risk students, especially first-gen students, focus on the deficits of these students and the challenges they face in entering higher education. These deficits are tied to measurable data—test scores, high school grades, socioeconomic status, first-gen status—and are measured by attrition rates” (146). It's tempting to ask, after reading Beyond Fitting In, if we can we have one (self-identification) without the other (institutional identification and tracking).Answers to this question may be beyond my pay grade. There are many, many reasons to classify and count students, including those of equity and inclusion. And, in fact, before I started writing this review, I consulted our institutional statistics and noted, with real shock, that between 2012 and 2021 our institution retained less than 60 percent of first-gen students through their fourth year. Those numbers are abysmal and obviously demand a response—and the essays in this collection offer paths forward, ways to support first-gen students and demonstrate their belonging, for institutions willing to invest in this group.What does this discussion mean for my writing center space? I want first-gen students to know they are welcome, that they belong, but I don't want them to take our efforts at inclusion as a prejudgment of their abilities. Come to the writing center, first-gen students! We know you're out there and likely struggling! However, I am not convinced, after reading this collection, that this work should begin with tracking or data collection. Working to track first-gen students’ engagement with our center would require that we settle on a definition that very likely wouldn't accurately or adequately capture the experiences of these students. Instead, I want to continue to work to make our space one that validates the experiences and literacies of all the students who step through our door, to lift up and celebrate the accomplishments of first-gen students—and tutors—as a way to demonstrate their belonging in our space. These efforts necessitate the kind of one-on-one work, as described by Adams Wooten and Babb's WPA participants, that is the heart of writing center practice. And for me personally, it means continuing to do listening work that can fuel change, the kind of listening Christie Toth describes in her contribution to the collection, which requires paying special attention to “perspectives that challenge my assumptions about what we are building together” (174).

Vivian Kao is associate professor of English and director of the first-year composition program at Lawrence Technological University. She teaches courses in writing, literature, film, and the intersection of technology and the humanities. Her courses often feature multimodal assignments that challenge students to think about composition as activity, experiment, and craft. Her other publications include an account of students exploring essay form by building three-dimensional structures, and a forthcoming visual essay on virtual museum exhibits created in response to modernist literary texts.Jessica Masterson is assistant professor at Washington State University Vancouver, where her research concerns the intersections of language, literacy, and democratic teacher education.Sarah Moon is assistant professor of humanities at Massachusetts Maritime Academy, where she teaches composition, writing about literature, environmental writing, and American theater. Her scholarly work has been published in Community Literacy Journal, Literacy in Composition Studies, Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics, and Center for Sustainable Practices in the Arts Quarterly. A playwright, she was the 2023 artist in residence for Eastern Connecticut Center for History, Art, and Performance, where she developed the original full-length drama Apostates.Molly Parsons earned her PhD in English and education at the University of Michigan. She is currently assistant director of the Center for Research and Writing at Keene State College, where she has the privilege of learning alongside talented undergraduate tutors. Her research interests include the ethics of writing center practice, grammar instruction for tutors, and, presently, the implications of artificial intelligence for tutoring and teaching. Find her other work in Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Writing Lab Newsletter, and Another Word, a blog from the University of Wisconsin-Madison's writing center.Kevin Piper teaches literature and composition at Madison College and is an honorary fellow at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his PhD. His recent work looks at how teachers can use student feedback to improve their practice. His literary scholarship has spanned a wide range of areas, including ethnic and Indigenous literatures, postsecular literature, and literary modernisms. He can be reached at kcpiper@madisoncollege.edu.Malini Johar Schueller is professor in the Department of English at the University of Florida. She has been the faculty advisor for Students for Justice in Palestine on her campus for many years and is a member of the organizing collective for the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel. She is the author of several books, including U.S. Orientalisms: Race, Nation, and Gender in Literature, 1790–1890 (1998), Locating Race: Global Sites of Post-Colonial Citizenship (2009), and Campaigns of Knowledge: U.S. Pedagogies of Colonialism and Occupation in the Philippines and Japan (2019). She has coedited Exceptional State: Contemporary US Culture and the New Imperialism (2007) and Dangerous Professors: Academic Freedom and the National Security Campus (2009). She is the director of the award-winning documentary In His Own Home (2015) about police brutality and campus militarization. In 2019 she was selected to participate in a Faculty Development Seminar by the Palestinian American Research Council. Currently she is working on an essay collection, From Palestine to You. She teaches courses in comparative settler colonialism, including Palestine, and courses in postcolonial theory, Asian American studies, and US imperialism.Elina Siltanen was university lecturer at the Department of English, University of Turku at the time of writing this article, and now works at the University of Eastern Finland. Her research focuses on contemporary American poetry, more specifically on the role of affect in reading complex literary texts, and her article is a part of her research project “Difficult Relations: Reading for Emotion in Recent American Experimental Poetry.” Recently, she has published articles on the connections between conceptualism and confessionalism in poetry in the Journal of Modern Literature and on metamodernism and New Sincerity in English Studies. She has a double doctoral degree from the University of Turku and Luleå University of Technology.D. T. Spitzer-Hanks is an early-career researcher interested in critical composition studies and in transatlantic critical classical reception in the long nineteenth century, specifically in North America and the United Kingdom. Spitzer-Hanks is particularly interested in analyzing how patterns of communication and perception create social structures in which inequity is fostered and sustained and seeks to find ways to intervene in such processes both as a scholar and as a member of society. Trained in gender and ethnicity studies at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, Spitzer-Hanks earned a PhD in English studies from the University of Texas at Austin. In their private life, Spitzer-Hanks enjoys gardening, parenting, and running from their anxieties.

This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

The COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a renewed interest in intergenerational letter and email writing. Evidence shows that expressive writing, including letter writing, has a number of benefits including improved literacy and perceived well-being, and it can also facilitate a deep connection with another person. This scoping review provides an overview of the existing research on letter and email writing between different age cohorts. Of the 471 articles retrieved from Scopus, CINAHL, PsycINFO, MEDLINE, Academic Search Premier, and Web of Science, 17 studies met the inclusion criteria and were critically appraised and synthesized in this review. The studies were grouped into two themes according to their stated aims and outcomes: (a) studies exploring changes in perceptions, and (b) studies relating to skills development and bonds. The results showed a range of benefits for intergenerational letter writers, from more positive perceptions of the other age group, through improved writing skills and subject knowledge, to forming intergenerational memories and bonds. The review also highlights some of the limitations of the current research and formulates recommendations for future studies in the fields of writing studies, intergenerational research, and educational gerontology.

This course design integrates the use of contemplative practices, specifically applied improvisational theater, into writing pedagogies to foster mindfulness and critical engagement. It explores the theoretical, neuroscientific, and practical rationale for incorporating contemplative pedagogies in writing classrooms, arguing that applied improv offers a unique framework for examining sociocultural and political contexts in writing instruction. Drawing on research in neuroscience, it demonstrates how applied improv promotes affective well-being, interpersonal skills, and rhetorical listening. By embracing uncertainty and cultivating resilience, students engage in contemplative practices and presence, challenging dominant discourses and power dynamics. The course design emphasizes the potential of applied improv to disrupt conventional teaching paradigms and empower students in their literacy learning. Through reflective analysis and student feedback, it evaluates the effectiveness and limitations of this approach in facilitating mindful engagement with writing and dismantling inequitable structures in education.

In response to the increasing alienation from nature exacerbated by digital living, this course design presents an advanced composition “rewilding” course. Combining natural history writing, nature therapy research, and mindfulness activities, the course aims to reconnect students with the natural world. Inspired by Micah Mortali’s concept of rewilding and Barry Lopez’s exploration of inner and outer landscapes, the course emphasizes experiential learning. Through natural history writing, students develop attentiveness to the environment, fostering a sense of wonder and connection. By centering on our innate relationship with nature, rewilding becomes a transformative practice, preparing students for ecological literacy and meaningful engagement with the world.

This article offers “Self/Society Care,” a pedagogical unit originally developed for a Professional Writing Skills course. The unit aims to have students reconceptualize “self-care” as “self/society care,” a reframing that requires recognizing our interconnectedness with others. It centers on care- and listening-based versions of mindfulness—distinct from neoliberal ones—and thus offers both a holistic and embodied approach to care. Following a personal reflection on prejudice, isolation, and care, I discuss four components of the unit: 1) Mindfulness Media Literacy, 2) Beginner’s Mind and Listening, 3) Beginner’s Mind of Inner-Rhetorics and Emotions, and 4) Brain/Body Literacy.

This study analyzes the experiences of undergraduate peer-tutors in a heritage language writing center (HLWC) located at a large public university in the United States. As former heritage language (HL) students themselves, tutors have to navigate the complexities of being bilingual advocates for their tutees while promoting the linguistic ideals of the academic community, where literacy expectations can be more rigid. In order to delve into their experiences at the center, this qualitative investigation examines the end-of- term reflections of 19 Spanish HL tutors working at a Spanish HLWC, addressing the following questions: (1) How do tutors perceive their role as language advocates and arbiters? (2) How can these beliefs be supported or addressed by the HL program? Ideal tutors occupy a middle ground between being a peer-student and an expert-student, whose role is to scaffold the mentee’s process. However, we find that HL tutors struggle with competing linguistic expectations between the heritage and the academic community. Finally, we discuss three areas of tension that are important to address in HL tutor training and program design: ambivalent notions about students’ proficiency and preparedness, their role in the instructional team, and their relationship to expertise.

Editorial for the issue. Addresses the themes of the articles along the lines of situating and contextualising academic literacies.

Richmond’s Academic Literacies Programme (ALP) is a content-based form of instruction for university students which teaches critical reading, research skills, content synthesis, and writing and presentation skills. It is designed to empower all students to research and write effectively throughout their undergraduate studies. This article is a quantitative case study review of a British-American university’s ALP, examining student feedback across academic disciplines on specific taught ALP skills and comparing their improvement from 2014 to 2022. Chi-squared goodness-of-fit tests showed students valued research, critical reading, academic writing, essay structure, understanding academic honesty, using tutor feedback, and referencing skills; however, survey development and recommendation reports were not meeting student needs in their majors and so were removed from the programme. In comparison, in a follow-up review conducted in 2022, the skill of identifying research gaps was not effectively used or applied. However, independent group testing found the usefulness of skills at the lower learning level improved from 2014 to 2022, as did the application of skills at the higher level. This study concludes that ALPs are valuable for all university students beginning higher education research, regardless of first language or degree course.

Academic literacies refer to academic writing as social practices. This study describes first-term nursing students’ perceptions of the academic literacy education provided and its significance for their forthcoming training and clinical practice. Nine student nurses at the Swedish Red Cross University participated in semi-structured interviews. Data were analysed using latent content analysis. Two categories were identified: A challenging but rewarding step focused on the students’ struggles to become academically literate. A professional outlook targeted the students’ perceptions of the requirement to acquire academic literacies for their training and future clinical practice. The results provide insights of dichotomous perspectives among nursing students regarding their need to acquire academic literacies. Some of the students convey a resistant and sceptical view of adding academic education to nursing training. Others acknowledge the requirement of being academically literate, a competence sometimes hard-won. However, in their struggles, teacher guidance was requested; an appeal that needs to be met with creative solutions. Repetitive approaches by teachers combined with the use of student initiatives are proposed to enable improved academic literacy levels among the students.

In this article, I chart my efforts in teaching a first-year writing class centered around mutual aid at a predominantly white institution. After contextualizing mutual aid and explaining my local institutional context, I describe the course I taught, “Rhetorics and Literacies of Mutual Aid.” In particular, I detail the Mini Solidarity Campaign, one major assignment that asks students to work collaboratively as an entire class to engage a campus issue in their lives. After doing so, I conclude by reflecting on the limits and challenges of doing mutual aid work in mainstream educational settings.

Drawing on their embodied experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing a student-founded, student-led community literacy program, this article foregrounds queercrip embodied experiences to reinterpret normative notions of failure in community literacy programs. Using our own experiences as queer disabled graduate students directing the community literacy program, queer and disability theory, and community literacy studies scholarship, the authors unpack their own stories of failure and argue, through queercrip readings of that failure, that failure should be seen as generative, as relational, and as bound by institutional perspective.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Background:</b> The intertwined fields of technical and professional communication (TPC) and user experience (UX) have positioned graduates of TPC programs as strong candidates for careers in UX. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Although there is some scholarship addressing competencies required for UX positions as well as some investigation into UX course content within TPC programs, there is still a need for a comparative analysis of outcomes in UX courses in TPC and industry expectations for UX positions. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1. What qualifications are essential to current UX industry positions? What qualifications are stated in current UX industry advertisements? 2. How do these qualifications compare to a sample of existing UX outcomes within TPC programs? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> A qualitative content analysis of two datasets—a collection of UX job advertisements and a collection of UX course outcomes—was conducted through a systematic coding of texts. Qualifications and outcomes were categorized by UX competencies needed prior to employment. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Results show job ads prioritize on project management including Agile and Scrum, and other skills such as writing, designing prototypes, software and coding languages, and portfolios. Course outcomes reflect strengths in writing and design, but do not include significant reference to specific concepts or tools. Suggestions for improving TPC/UX courses include diversifying existing skills and addressing deficient skills in project management and digital literacies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusion:</b> Challenges for re-envisioning UX courses in TPC programs are considered and addressed.

We are now a decade into the call for comprehensive community college “redesign” known as Guided Pathways. This introduction provides an overview of the Guided Pathways model and its advocacy arm and reviews critiques of the model in education research and two-year college literacy studies. These reviews contextualize the contents of the special issue.

Using classroom play to promote comfort between composition students, encouraging greater participation and experimentation by helping students feel safe traversing educational and social boundaries, is supported in a theoretical lens connecting play to both pedagogy and various literacies valued in college writing. One practical framework, with student interviews, is described.

Composing a well-written text is a prolonged and challenging process. The present study explored the incipient stages in descriptive texts written (pen and paper) or dictated by 283 Hebrew-speaking Israeli children in second to fifth grades. This study aims to better understand the interplay between age, literacy-related abilities, and descriptive text quality by exploring developmental aspects across grade levels regarding text structural quality, length of text and literacy related abilities, and by analyzing the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities (cognitive, transcriptional, linguistic, and reading), beyond length of text and grade level. Regarding the developmental aspects, the results indicate that text structure quality becomes more sophisticated and complete with age, attaining high-quality descriptive text structure from third grade on in the production of autonomous texts with genre-driven elaborate features. Length of text and literacy related abilities also increase with age. Regarding the relation between text structural quality and literacy related abilities, we found in 2nd grade, for P&P text, a significant total effect of syntactic lexical ability on text structure rank, partially mediated by length of text, and a weaker but still significant direct effect of syntactic lexical ability on TS rank, when controlling for length of text. We also found in 5th grade, for DICT text, a significant total effect of reading high ability on TS rank, not mediated by length of text.

Drawing on a yearlong ethnography I conducted at a public, urban, comprehensive high school in the midwestern United States, in this article I analyze a classroom instructional conversation about gender and trans identities in a sophomore humanities (grade 10) course that combined English language arts and social studies. In the conversation, youth constructed temporalities (i.e., relationships among pasts, presents, and futures) that were out of sync with the temporalities sanctioned by the school. In doing so, they drew on ideologies about gender, religion, race, sexuality, and class. Yet different youth offered futures that were incommensurate, particularly because they clashed over whether temporalities were rigid, fixed, and unchangeable or fluid, variable, multiple, and thus open to change. Being out of sync signaled possibilities, but not guarantees, of more just futures and suggested a need for literacy educators and researchers to rethink the roles of (un)certainty, (in)stability, and (non)linearity in classroom instruction with respect to sexual and gender diversity. In making this argument, I integrate queer and trans theorizations of temporality and futurity with adolescent queer literacies scholarship, specifically the concept of literacy performances.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023. It is available in an English translation by Benjamin de Buen on the RTE webpage at https://t.ly/Rf7KX. David Poveda es profesor titular de universidad en el Departamento de Psicología Evolutiva y de la Educación, Facultad de Psicología de la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. Lleva algo más de dos décadas investigando a través de metodologías etnográficas y cualitativas un abanico amplio de cuestiones relacionadas con la educación y los procesos de socialización de la infancia y juventud contemporáneas.

Time and temporality are variously conceptualized and employed ubiquitously in both theoretical and empirical studies of education and literacy. Since education and learning are inherently defined as change over time, any theory of learning or education makes implicit or explicit claims about the nature of time. In this exploratory conceptual review / theoretical essay, temporal discourse analysis is used to identify the temporal claims operating in six studies drawing on six different theoretical framings: (1) predictive theorizing (Sénéchal & LeFevre, 2002); (2) developmental theorizing (Sulzby, 1985); (3) sociocultural theorizing (Gonzalez et al., 1995); (4) critical literacy theorizing (Jones & Enriquez, 2009); (5) critical race theory (Solórzano & Yosso, 2001); and (6) queer theorizing (Schey, 2023). Each theorization brings theoretical, methodological, and practical implications related to how research might be conducted, what changes across time, how time operates, and what might be tracked across time. Theorizations of time have substantive implications for what happens in classrooms and how what happens is interpreted by teachers, students, and researchers.

Against the backdrop of White Christian nationalism, which fomented an intensifying atmosphere of religious marginalization and violence toward transnationals in the US between 2015 and 2020, and in the context of teachers responding to this atmosphere of marginalization and violence with their writing curriculum and pedagogies, this study compared how three transnational youth wrote to express religious being and belonging in secondary classrooms. Adapting portraiture research approaches in a narrative study, we explored the how, who, and why of transnational youth writing across three classrooms where teachers made room for their cultural identity meaning-making through composing in diverse modes, genres, and media. In dialogue with pluriversal theorizing about the religious, specifically individual experiences of religious being and collective experiences of belonging, the research composed and compared portraits across three different public school settings. Working with three previously generated data sets, we retroactively asked: How, for whom, and to what purposes did three transnational youth express religious being and belonging through writing in public US secondary classrooms? The portraits illuminate how these youth wrote to accurately portray Islam, to poetically express and analytically discuss the fears and vulnerabilities Muslim women experience in wearing the hijab, and to share and interpret Christian familial experiences with ethnoreligious violence. In conclusion, we highlight complexities and further questions facing literacy teachers seeking to cultivate curiosity about youths’ religious being and belonging and to make room for these aspects of students’ experience as part of cultural assets approaches to writing curriculum and pedagogy.

This interview was conducted on February 14, 2023, and is published in the original Spanish in volume 58, issue 1 of Research in the Teaching of English. It was translated into English by Benjamin de Buen. David Poveda is associate professor at the Department of Developmental and Educational Psychology, School of Psychology of the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has been using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies for over two decades to study a wide range of educational and socialization processes of contemporary childhood and youth.

The author proposes a model for reading material characterized by “nested” literacies to decipher complex information where literacy operates in enmeshed and unpredictable ways. A case study of a nesting Allosaurus fragilis illustrates how deciphering multiple interacting literacies can identify areas needing technical communication intervention. In this context, multiple literacies include the usual reconstruction of Allosaurus fragilis in museum displays, the public discourses surrounding the nesting Allosaurus, and the associated scientific literature.

Research on corrective feedback (CF) has developed from its original focus on identifying which type of CF is most effective for developing L2 language learners’ grammatical accuracy to focusing on how learners use CF. Underpinning this is the assumption that learners know what to do with CF when they receive it. The concept of “feedback literacy” challenges this assumption. Carless and Boud (2018), define feedback literacy as “the understandings, capacities and dispositions needed to make sense of information and use it to enhance work or learning strategies” (p. 1316). Our intention in this paper is to reflect on the manner in which theoretical and empirical work on feedback literacy can contribute to advancing L2 written corrective feedback (WCF) research agendas. Central in our proposal is the partially under-researched aspect of experience in terms of the L2 writers’ educational background experience, particularly experience with L1 and L2 writing. We further argue that how learners were taught L1 writing and how the L1 educational culture/ society values writing can impact on how learners approach L2 writing tasks and accompanying feedback. Implications of this inclusive view of the learner for future research and pedagogy is discussed.

Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

Generative AI may significantly disrupt the teaching and practice of business communication. This study of 343 communication instructors revealed a collective view that AI-assisted writing will be widely adopted in the workplace and will require significant changes to instruction. Key perceived challenges include less critical thinking and authenticity in writing. Key perceived benefits include more efficiency and better idea generation in writing. Students will need to develop AI literacy—composed of application, authenticity, accountability, and agency—to succeed in the workplace. Recommendations are provided for instructors and administrators to ensure the benefits of AI-assisted writing can outweigh the challenges.

In the wake of the controversy surrounding the new AI chatbot application, ChatGPT, I wonder how Logie would seek to include this new technology in his work. I ponder this because, throughout the book, Logie presents compelling evidence for why the concepts of invention, composition, and internetworked writing should be embraced and not feared. While some denounce the application and take to social media to disparage the possible negative impact on students, creativity, and composition, ChatGPT, I believe Logie would argue, would be a powerful tool we can implement to become "composers." He believes that through cloud computing services we are now more apt to collaborate, use, remix, and create rhetorical modes that extend far beyond the formulaic argument, therefore we are composers. So, Logie applies the idea of a composer as someone who is a "prosumer" (Toffler). This composer is media literate and transforms traditional rhetorical canons into multimodal compositions such as memes, Google Docs, and digital collages. However, his overarching argument is that internetworked writing tools have democratized writing through that same offering of innovative outlets. His book is arranged in a way that walks the reader through this argument.

Preview this article: Editor’s Introduction: One Does Not Simply Teach in Mordor: Literacy Studies and the Triumph of Neoliberal Ideology, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/tetyc/51/1/teachingenglishinthetwo-yearcollege32712-1.gif

This is a lightly edited version of the TYCA Chair’s Address delivered at the 2023 National TYCA Conference in Chicago, Illinois.

This article presents a video discussion board assignment designed to foster belonging and academic language practice in a remote classroom. We consider how the assignment supported robust discussion and multimodal composition in Critical Reading and Writing, a course run with synchronous and asynchronous components during the COVID-19 pandemic at a technical college.

Preview this article: “I’m a Bad Writer”: Latina College Students’ Traumatic Literacy Experiences, Page 1 of 1 < Previous page | Next page > /docserver/preview/fulltext/ce/86/1/collegeenglish32659-1.gif

This article examines how individuals experiencing incarceration inside jails and prisons use tenets of cultural rhetorics and digital literacies to reshape understandings about composition students and how they make knowledge to envision and practice freedom inside unconventional educational spaces. By primarily analyzing the prison podcastEar Hustle, the author addresses how incarcerated people turn to podcasting not only to sharpen their composing skills but also to build literate communities inside demoralizing environments.

This reflective article discusses lessons learned when Reading Landscapes & Writing Nature, an annual collaboration between a National Writing Project site and Weir Farm National Historical Park, migrated online in 2020 as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The organizations have used critical pedagogies of place (Gruenewald, 2003) since 2017 to guide teacher writing workshops, and reimagined the professional development in digital spaces with multimodal literacies (Kinloch, 2009; Kress, 2003). This including 360 photospheres and Padlet as tools to expand educators’ understandings of literacy, wellness, and place.

The spring and summer of 2020 were rife with tension emanating from hate speech, racial violence, and a global health pandemic. Educators deliberated over the uncertainties of equitable access to learning, healthcare, and wellbeing. This article will describe how the Red Mountain Writing Project created a third space (Gutierrez, 2008) grounded by Critical Race Theory (CRT) in education (Solorzano & Delgado Bernal, 2001; Solorzano & Yosso, 2001) and Historically Responsive Literacy (Muhammad, 2020) to center the lives of teachers, their experiences, and their stories during a tumultuous time. The authors will share how they built and maintained a supportive virtual space for teachers to critically examine and reflect on their lived experiences, social awareness, sense of agency, and anti-racist teaching and writing practices. Now, after more than two years, teacher-writer communities are especially needed – third spaces where teachers from diverse backgrounds can hold space together and engage in writing to heal, find joy, empathize, and amplify their experiential knowledges.

This online antiracist program for children as young as 3 and their parents/caregivers took place in June of 2020 early in the COVID-19 pandemic. Driven by a desire to build change in opposition to racism and unite families during a time of quarantine and isolation, the program fuses family literacy practices to create space for discussions surrounding race, racism, anti-racism and alliance. The model of the program uses children’s literature to make difficult topics accessible to young children, and provides literacy activities which are engaging, age appropriate, and adaptable to materials at hand, interests, abilities and attention spans of each child. This success of this program demonstrates the power of the model to engage with young children and issues of social justice.

This piece reflects on a secondary teacher’s attempt to empower her students during the Covid Pandemic crisis schooling response in the United States. In this article, the students engage with their hybrid identities and lived experiences to build skills and criticality toward cultivating the changemaker within themselves. Selections of student testimony and the reflexive practices of the teacher are centered in the explanation of a project rooted in Culturally and Historically Responsive literacy.

In this reflective article, a case study, we draw upon scholarship on a critical friendship (Schuck & Russell, 2005; Silva, 2003) that grew in 2020 as we worked to assist one another in creating NWP writing programs for teachers and youth. At the heart of our professional collaboration was our desire to maintain and cultivate community engagement (Deans, Roswell, & Wurr, 2010; Preece, 2017), while advancing racial literacies in digital spaces (Price-Dennis & Sealey-Ruiz, 2021) and as we worked with a framework for instructional equity (Muhammad, 2020). Weekly meetings led us to using Padlet for 189 hours of professional development, 9 programs with 511 youth, and 7 courses with 320 students. Padlet became a location for curation, especially as we worked to promote diverse, inclusive children’s and young adult texts as models for classroom teacher and student writers.

Socio-cultural and practice-based approaches to literacy, associated with the (New) Literacy Studies, having emerged in the 1980s, nowadays are an established research field. Based on in-depth research, in many contexts and countries, the (New) Literacy Studies has much to offer to teachers and policymakers. And yet this impressive body of work has had little impact on policy. Taking as my example England, I ask what research has shaped policy in the past 30 years and why socio-cultural and practice-based studies have been ignored. Thus, I address the question of where the field has been and where it should go to from the point of view of its relationship with policy. My focus is on the initial teaching of literacy in primary (elementary) schools. I discuss three factors which I believe contribute to our struggles to influence policy: the policy environment itself and how it has changed; the wider economy of literacy research and what knowledge counts in the interface between research and policy; and, finally, the role of the media and public discourse in the relationship between research and policy. I end with questions about what we may have missed and where the field might want to go.

I offer a meditation on current challenges faced by literacy educators and researchers and uses those challenges to suggest new directions for the field. Citing the precipitous decline in interest in the humanities and the field of literacy education, I consider the significance of tools such as ChatGPT for the teaching of writing. I explore the significance of out-of-school literacies and the linguistic diversity of today’s students in terms of their implications for literacy instruction. I also remind us of the chilling political climate in which we find ourselves, especially with regard to LGBTQ+ identities. Given these contemporary challenges, I suggest that we in the field of literacy education rethink the nature of writing instruction, restructure our research paradigm to be more inclusive and democratic, and continue to be forceful political advocates for pedagogies, practices, and policies that will ensure a just and equitable literacy education for all.