This article presents a case study using ethnographic and visual methods to investigate the framing activity of engineering students. Findings suggest students use the rhetorical figure of hypotyposis to produce the vivid images needed to frame engineering constraints. Data reveal students multimodally inducing collaboration between group members to construct images as ways to configure engineering constraints. The author argues for the usefulness of hypotyposis for understanding the framing of engineers, technical communicators, and other designers.

As technical communication (TC) instructors, it is vital that we continue reimagining our curricula as the field itself is continually reimagined in light of new technologies, genres, workplace practices, and theories—theories such as those from disability studies scholarship. Here, the authors offer an approach to including disability studies in TC curricula through the inclusion of a “critical accessibility case study” (CACS). In explicating the theoretical and practical foundations that support teaching a CACS in TC courses, the authors provide an overview of how TC scholars have productively engaged with disability studies and case studies to question both our curricular content and classroom practices. They offer as an example their “New York City Evacuation CACS,” developed for and taught in TC for Health Sciences courses, which demonstrates that critical disability theory can help us better teach distribution and design of technical information and user-based approaches to TC. The conceptual framework of the CACS functions as a strategy for TC instructors to integrate disability studies and attention to disability and accessibility into TC curricula, meeting both ethical calls to do so as well as practical pedagogical goals.

Engineering disciplines have focused on recruiting and retaining women, assessing factors that contribute to decisions to enter or exit the field at every level. While many studies have examined writing in engineering disciplines, few have looked at writing’s role in women’s decisions to remain in or leave engineering. Using a case study of a professional civil engineer, Katy, this study examines the role that writing played in her dissatisfaction with engineering and her ultimate decision to leave the field. The author analyzes two genres of writing, meeting minutes and a preliminary engineering report, to explore how Katy’s writing practices often ran counter to her coworkers’ or supervisors’ approaches. While a single case study makes generalization impossible, this work opens the door to future research that accounts for writing in recruiting and retaining women.

Under the rapid advances of digital technology, traditional paper-based forms of reading and writing are steadily giving way to digital-based literacies, in theory as well as in application. Drawing on a study of literacy in a medical workplace context, this article examines critically the shift toward computer-mediated textual practices. While a considerable body of research has investigated benefits and issues associated with digital literacy tools in medicine, we consider the affordances of paper-based practices. Our analysis of verbal interaction and textual artifacts drawn from a qualitative study of oncology visits indicates that the uses of pen and paper are advantageous for both doctor and patient. Specifically, they allow doctors to process and package information in ways that are favorable to their personal modus operandi, and they enable patients to participate in the medical visit and take an active role in managing their medical treatment. Understanding the affordances of paper-based literacy provides insights for refining digital tools as well as for motivating the design of possible hybrid forms and digital-analog intersections that can best support medical practices.

This study examines the composing process and authorial agency of a college ESL writer as she remediated an argumentative essay into a multimodal digital video. Employing principles of sociosemiotic ethnography, and drawing on the concepts of resemiotization and recontextualization, the study investigated multiple types of data, including an argumentative paper, video transcript, multimedia video, interview transcripts, and observation notes. Data analysis shows that her choice and orchestration of modal resources were shaped by her textual identity construction work, efforts to accommodate perceived audiences, and previous experience with the medium. Remediation with multimedia offered the student more semiotic resources to expand authorship, but the contextual forces of audience and medium bounded her authorial expression. The student’s multimodal writing illustrated discursive processes of negotiating and performing authorial positions for rhetorical goals with awareness of the linguistic, social, and cultural contexts of text production. This investigation ultimately aims to expand aspects of multimodal writing and literacy practice by examining the discursive nature of the design process in linguistically and culturally diverse contexts.

Tracing the literacy practices of an Israeli soldier, this case study examines how his engagement in multilingual and multimodal (MML) composing affects his ways of thinking about and doing literacy. It specifically attends to how MML practices dispose writers to certain orientations to reading, writing, speaking, and design.

In this article, I analyze the debate between Raimond Gaita and Christopher Hamilton on the rhetorical practices appropriate to achieving lucidity (full attention to moral reality). I concentrate on the deployment of untimely terms (taking “soul” as my central example) as a means by which both Gaita and Hamilton attempt to provoke lucidity in the reader. In the final sections of the article, I use this case study of the moral term “soul” to set out a theoretical model for the process of becoming lucid in order to (partially) defend Gaita's philosophical style against Hamilton's criticisms. At stake is the possibility of other forms of rigor, other forms of clarity, and other forms of cogency than analytic philosophizing typically presumes.

Two disabled researchers draw from their experiences conducting an interview study with a population of self-identified disabled faculty members to question some long-held commonplaces about qualitative interviewing. They use the phrase centering disability to emphasize disability as a critical lens and form of embodied experience that has theoretical and methodological implications for qualitative interviewing research design, implementation, and analysis.

Technical communication research has critically engaged with organizational trends toward flattened organizations like networks, horizontal arrangements, and adhocracies, assemblages that hybridize top-down management in favor of autonomous groups. There has been no engagement with a related but distinct trend: worker cooperatives. Co-ops promise similar advantages but are distinct as they claim to deliver what flat organizations promise: access to governance, empowerment, and autonomy. In this article, I survey literature on flattened organizations, apply technical communication theory to account for cooperative communication, and conclude with an analysis from a qualitative study at a cooperative site.

Using cultural empowerment as a conceptual framework, this study emphasizes the interrelated role of culture, rhetorical agency, and empowerment in discursive analysis and communicative practice. Twelve black business owners were interviewed using a narrative inquiry approach. Thematic analysis revealed that these entrepreneurs enacted rhetorical agency in ways that work within oppressive systems and resisted damaging dominate discourses about black businesses. By highlighting the rhetorical narratives of black entrepreneurs, this study also addresses the need for a more culturally sensitive approach in business, professional, and organizational communication.

Most of the literature on the assignment traditionally called the research paper focusses on first-year students, and often centers on what they don’t know or can’t do. This article seeks to expand the conversation to one about the skills and knowledge displayed by senior students, and about their perceptions of the universe of academic research and their place in it. It does so by means of a qualitative study of 13 senior students at the University of Calgary. Through interviews, I probe their understanding of their own research processes, how they think they learned to do what they do, and, most important, their understanding of what it means to conduct academic research.

In a moment when schools are failing to meet the needs of many youth, recent research has suggested that relational and art-based pedagogies, such as spoken word poetry, offer possibilities for repurposing classrooms to meet the needs of students who have experienced marginalization in schools and other institutions. This article contributes to the literature in critical pedagogy and youth spoken word by taking a retrospective perspective to analyze what a group of urban youth who experienced failure in schools remembered as meaningful from a high school poetry class they identified as empowering. Using case study and interview methods to unpack participants’memories of their poetry class as early adults, the study identifies that the poetry community served as a turning point for many youth because it allowed them to nurture healing relationships in the context of a school community that helped them shatter institutional silence about various forms of oppression and trauma and sparked changes in the ways they saw themselves as individuals and community members. Through participation in the structures and rituals of this literacy-learning community, participants remembered developing agentive identities and transforming their struggles into sources of strength. That this class and the writing practices it engendered continued to hold meaning for this group of youth, who had otherwise held generally negative narratives about schooling, advances current perspectives on the role of nontraditional approaches to literacy instruction in schools.

This article takes up an area of central concern for educators in an era of global connectivity: howto account for the mobility of people, texts, and practices while simultaneously addressing persistent educational inequalities. In attending to the ways people participate in unequal globalized contexts,even educational contexts constructed to bring students and teachers together, we examine how resources such as time, space, materials, national identity, genre, and language are all unequally distributed and unequally ordered in various hierarchies. We propose the notion of scale to offer literacy researchers a flexible conceptual tool with which to examine educational inequities by capturing how movement and mobility are not simple processes of relocation; rather, literacies and texts are always dynamically constructed in relation to hierarchical orders of varying spatial and temporal dimensions. Through multisited ethnography, we engage in a scalar analysis of teachers’ cross-cultural collaborations to illustrate how they produced various categories of space and time (e.g., local, national, global) through routine literacy engagements. In explaining how different scales are invoked, implicated, and constructed in interaction, we find that participants engaged in six scalar moves-upscaling, downscaling, aligning, contesting, anchoring, and embedding-and offer these in response to the pressing need to develop sensitive analytical toolsthat can bring to the surface the ways inequalities are inscribed in literacy practices and texts.Implications of conceptualizing scaling as literacy activity include disrupting smooth narratives of global connectedness in educational collaborations and highlighting the multiscalar nature of all literacy practice.

Literacy “sponsorship” in refugee communities is not without its risks and limitations. For potential sponsors, risks include the commodification of refugee voices, while limits include inaccurate generalizations of those being sponsored. This essay draws from a case study of refugee student discourse to discuss how a more explicit decolonial approach to sponsorship can help sponsors rethink a giver-receiver paradigm. This approach would first deconstruct imperialist discourses of power and then replace them with new, alternatives to meaning-making. While contingent on local contexts, this study aims to set an agenda for continued debate within refugee community literacy support projects.

As technology continues to become more ubiquitous and touches almost every aspect of the composing process, students and teachers are faced with new means to make writing a multimodal experience. This article embraces the emerging sector of wearable technology, presenting wearable writing strategies that would reimagine composition pedagogy. Specifically, the article introduces Google Glass and explores its affordances in reframing student peer-review activities. To do so, the author presents a brief overview of wearables and writing technology, a case study of how the author deployed Google Glass in a first-year writing course, and a set of tips for using wearable technology in general and technical writing courses.

Stephanie West-Puckett argues for open badging as an alternative born-digital assessment paradigm that can, when attendant to critical validity inquiry, promote full participation and more equitable outcomes for students of color and lower income students. Her case study of digital badging in first-year composition demonstrates how students and teachers can negotiate “good writing,” interrupting bias through the co-creation of digital badges that demystify disciplinary knowledge and serve as portable assessment objects that build social capital across contexts.

Human-centered design expands the context and reach of the work of technical communicators and provides an opportunity to investigate and advocate for the needs of vulnerable populations. This article summarizes and contributes to the conversation about social justice occurring in both technical communication and design. Using a variety of qualitative methods as a type of design ethnography, this article shares findings from a study that investigated the experiences of homeless bus riders. The study findings provide an opportunity to examine the design of information and communication technologies and changes to policies that impact vulnerable populations. The article discusses the implications of an advocacy perspective for technical communicators practicing human-centered design and their role and opportunity to bring about socially responsible design.

This article is an investigation of composing practices through which people create networks with mobile phones. By looking through the lens of actor-network theory, the author portrays the networking activity of mobile phone users as translation, what Latour describes as an infralanguage to which different disciplinary perspectives can be appended. Given how much mobile phone use is information-based, the author describes how five people composed on mobile phones to create coordinated networks of professional and domestic activity. To arrive at this discussion, the author first considers the objectives of mobile networking, which include creating a sense of place and coordination within that space. The author then describes the findings of a case study of mobile phone users who build translational networks. The discussion focuses on the participants’ composing practices.

Pulling data from a year-long case study into a Division II men’s basketball team, this article suggests how threshold concepts as currently conceptualized and implemented in first-year composition pedagogy and curriculum could more directly consider unique forms of literacies student-athletes bring into the classroom.

This article explores the performance of Appalachian identity via the use of tellable narratives by students in two composition classrooms that were the focus of an ethnographic case study. Utilizing examples gleaned from interviews, classroom observations, and student writing, I illustrate how the students in my study demonstrated narrative complexity as they skillfully and creatively mediated the rhetorical situations they faced, crafting tellable and untellable narratives of Appalachian identity in response to their audience’s needs.

In this article, I draw from a qualitative case study supported by theoretical framing from John Dewey and Gregory Schraw to explore how and why video composition could be a particularly useful site for the development of meta-awareness about composition within a writing course. Specifically, video opened space for rhetorically layered actions, metacognitive articulations, and interest, which led students to consider, plan for, or recount the transfer of compositional knowledge across media

Drawing from a large qualitative study, we examine how students experience writing in college, focusing on the conditions that allow students to develop their authorship and those that encourage students to experience writing as a process of following rules and regulations. We situate students’ perceptions, and the assignments and practices that led to them, within what anthropologists call “audit culture”—accounting practices and their technologies, which have migrated across institutions, including higher education. We suggest our field’s institutional status and pedagogical complexities make us especially susceptible to audit culture, and we argue that students’ experiences in our writing classrooms, where they face an ever-increasing bureaucratization of literacy, is an urgent area of research. We ask readers to consider the extent to which audit culture encourages teachers to create closed systems that privilege outcomes rather than consequences with an end-inview. We conclude by calling for an artisanal identity for both teachers and students.

This phenomenological case study explores the disconnect that high school readers labeled as struggling perceived between their reading identities and experiences in traditional English classes. It analyzes how participation in a young adult literature (YAL) elective provided participants space in which to enact identities and exhibit agency in ways that were different from those afforded in their English classes. This paper contributes uniquely to the larger research conversation by examining two different spaces (traditional English classes and a YAL class) and demonstrating how students’ identities as readers manifested in different ways across two contexts. Using Holland, Lachicotte, Skinner, and Cain’s (1998) theory of identity as a lens of analysis across student-generated oral reflections gathered through Seidman’s (2006) interview protocol, the study reveals how student participants were supported in their attempts to deconstruct their experiences in traditional classroom spaces, build new conceptions of their reading selves in a unique classroom setting, and, in the process, assume greater agency in shaping their individual reader identities, advancing the argument that differing classroom contexts can provide students with varying levels of opportunity to reject and/or accept ascribed reading identities. This work is significant in the way it emphasizes the importance of classroom and school contexts, the possibilities that come with inviting students to engage as readers in school rather than engage in school reading, the benefits and risks of reimagined relationships between students and teachers and students and peers, and the possibility that young adult literature in and of itself offers implications for reader agency.

This essay examines four disciplinary challenges that faculty from broad, diverse disciplines such as rhetoric and composition encounter during tenure, promotion, and reappointment (TP&R) and highlights the arguments and rhetorical strategies that can be utilized to demonstrate scholarly worth and significance.

In this article, we use extant International Business Machines' internal communications to demonstrate how Boje’s notion of “antenarrative” can serve as a methodology for feminist historiography and as a way of uncovering forgotten and unchallenged systems of power and legitimacy in technical and professional communication. The antenarrative fragments of any official, sanctioned story give us insight into the ways in which power has been distributed throughout an organization and where agency can be claimed in real time. We also see that a methodology that considers the untold and unofficial stories of women in the workplace works to explain current distributions of power. This can be done by investigating the antenarratives that threaten to disrupt the prepackaged grand narrative of organizations; we show this specifically through a case study of International Business Machines' archival memos in contrast with the company’s website and public relations documents.

This article examines the oral communication training that took place in Eloqi, a virtual language-learning community. Eloqi (a pseudonym) was a for-profit start-up that built and operated a proprietary Web-based, voice-enabled platform connecting English-language learners in China with trainers in the United States. While it existed, Eloqi’s unique platform was used to deliver short, one-on-one lessons designed to improve students’ oral English communication skills. Using the ethnography of communication and speech codes theory, a theoretical–methodological approach, the author presents an analysis of the speech code, or code of communicative conduct, employed at Eloqi. This code of English logic, which Eloqi’s community members associated with native English speech, comprised six locally defined rules for oral English speech; namely, speech had to be organized, succinct, spontaneously composed rather than rehearsed, original and honest, proactively improved, and positive. This article discusses the significance of this code, particularly as it pertains to cultural communication, and concludes with some implications for researchers and practitioners in business and technical communication.

In this case study, an accomplished academic writer struggles to produce very brief game summaries for a local newspaper as part of the service requirements to his son’s community football team. An analysis of his experience demonstrates the universal challenge of transfer regardless of prior knowledge or meta-awareness of rhetorical strategies for writing in new or unfamiliar settings and argues for a more nuanced understanding of existing ability, disposition, context, and genre in the deployment of knowledge for writing.

Textbooks are commonly used to teach English in Africa, and most often are designed either by Westerners who are native speakers or by the Western-trained educators who took over the education of Africa’s children after colonialism. The issue is whether these educators can emancipate learners through the curricular choices they make in the versions of textbooks endorsed by their governments. Unfortunately, this is not the case. This article examines the content of nonfiction passages in four textbook series that have been used or are currently in use for English language and literacy education in Anglophone Cameroon to understand the shift in educational philosophies that might have occurred between the colonial period of the first textbook and the modern globalization period of current textbooks. It also questions the criteria for selection of passages to be included in these textbooks and their possible ramifications for learners’ identities as Africans,Cameroonians, and global citizens. Informed by postcolonialism, with a particular bent toward decolonial theory, the study utilizes content analysis, a qualitative research method that validates textual interpretations through inference (Krippendorf, 2004) and that seeks to understand meanings embedded in texts and their sociocultural/political significance. Findings reveal that while the Oxford English Readers for Africa of the colonial times are long gone, this series’ ideology of white superiority lingers in contemporary textbooks. They also reveal that there is an attempt to standardize cultural practices and belief systems based on Western models. This draws attention to minority rights, reminding educators to acknowledge pluralism in their literacy practices.

Literacy scholars have long studied migrant literacies in host countries, but have largely overlooked how emigration shapes literacy learning in migrants’ homelands. Yet homelands are crucial site sof literacy research, as left-behind family members of migrants learn new literacy practices to communicate with loved ones laboring or studying abroad. This article examines this overlooked phenomenon by reporting on an ongoing qualitative study of migrants’ family members and return migrants in a midsized town in Brazil. Further developing a sociomaterial framework for transnational literacy, it demonstrates that emigration promotes literacy learning among homeland residents via the circulation of “writing remittances”—the hardware, software, and knowledge about communication media that migrants often remit home. As objects of emotional and economic value, writing remittances demand literacy learning as one condition of their exchange. Because such learning, like money, is fungible, homeland residents often circulate and reinvest it locally, with varying returns. Writing remittances mediate both intimate interpersonal communication and the larger context of global economic inequity in which migrant families are implicated, making such remittances rich sites of print and digital literacy practice across borders.

While English literature once occupied a central position in national curricula, enrollment in the subject has undergone a continuing decline in English-speaking countries such as the United States and United Kingdom. Its marginal position may also be observed in formerly colonized countries such as Singapore, where the subject was introduced, appropriated, and reconstructed. My aim,in this paper, is to propose a reenvisioning of literature education premised on the principles of ethical cosmopolitanism. In the first part of the paper, I describe ethical cosmopolitanism by distinguishing it from strategic cosmopolitanism, which has more recently emerged in response to the pressures of economic globalization, leading to the economization of education. In the second part of the paper, I show how the principles of strategic cosmopolitanism have directed the national literature curriculum in Singapore through my analysis of the national syllabus and high-stakes examination papers from 1990 to the present. This leads to the third part of the paper, in which I use a case study of four literature teachers in Singapore secondary schools to characterize the ethical cosmopolitan pedagogies they employ to circumvent nation-centric, economic pressures of strategic cosmopolitanism operating at the national level. More importantly, I discuss how such pedagogies have the potential to foster a hospitable imagination, which constitutes the strongest defense one can give to literature education in the context of an increasingly culturally complex,connected, and contested global sphere.

This qualitative study traces different articulations of the public, emotional honesty, and economic advantage in the literacy sponsorship of detained writer Lil’ Purp by The Beat Within, a publication for incarcerated youth and adults. Findings are compared to The Beat’s own account of Purp’s progress, revealing a set of practices reminiscent of Socratic parrhêsia that revise understanding of literacy sponsorship by expanding it to a philosophical register. Because The Beat also becomes a site of affective solidarity among detained writers in a way that resists the directional logic of writing toward civic participation, the study supports thinking about affect in public writing not as a process that moves toward political action, but rather as action in the immediate space of its utterance and reception. Such findings have implications both for public writing pedagogy and for community-based literacy scholarship.

Based on a qualitative study of students’ experiences, we offer a new typology of student reading behaviors across the disciplines at a community college.

K6015, a South Korean firm seeking to commercialize its magnet technology in the US market, entered a technology commercialization training program structured as a competition. Through this program, K6015 (and others in the program) used several genres to progressively interest different sets of stakeholders. To understand how K6015 applied these genres, we analyze this case study in terms of interessement, a concept from actor-network theory, and standing sets of transformations, a related concept from workplace writing studies in which enacting a set of genres entails a controlled, progressive transformation of arguments. We examine the entire competition process, using K6015 and three other competitors to illustrate this process and to examine rhetorical transformations responding to different criteria. In enacting these standing sets of transformations, K6015 and other competitors transformed their innovations into commercialized technologies–and transformed themselves from innovators into entrepreneurs. Finally, we discuss implications for understanding entrepreneurship rhetorically.

ABSTRACT“Like race” analogies have been critiqued from various perspectives, and this article enters that conversation to engage those criticisms from a rhetorical perspective. In short, this article makes a case for resisting proscriptive judgments about these analogies until they have been contextualized and afforded their complexity as rhetorical figures. A rhetorical perspective of analogies engages them not as truth statements or as part of propositional logic (a monological view of communication) but instead as invitations to explore similar sets of relationships that are qualified through continued dialogue (a dialogical view of communication). Through a case study of a highly recirculated issue of the Advocate, this essay demonstrates the productive possibilities and limitations of analogical reasoning.

Children’s development of literacy in multiple languages has received increasing attention in Literacy Studies (I. Reyes). Researchers have noted the role that family support plays in children’s biliteracy development (Bauer and Gort; Gregory; Li; M. Reyes). Yet the impact of this support on the adult literacies of parents has received much less attention. This study focuses on Arab immigrant parents’ participation in their children’s emergent biliteracy, on the development of digital and transnational literacies by immigrant parents, and on how specifically they are influenced by the digital technologies used to support their children’s developing biliteracy in Arabic and English. We use the framework of Digital Biliteracy, which focuses on “the process of developing literacy in two language[s] through the use of digital technologies” (Al-Salmi, “Digital Biliteracy as a Social Practice” 4352), to examine digital literacy development in two languages among immigrant families. In this qualitative case study of transnational literacies of Arab immigrant mothers, we show that as these parents become involved in their children’s biliteracy, they use digital technologies to produce and interpret written texts in English and Arabic. In doing so, these mothers’ literacies are shaped through the process of helping their children become literate in Arabic and English via on-line and digital technologies.

In this article, I examine the role of affect management in the transnational migration of Filipino care workers. Drawing on qualitative research in the Philippines, I claim that in government-mandated skills training, opportunities for Filipino migrants to critically engage in print and English literacies were often limited to standardized and rote practices to enhance transferability. In response, these migrant workers turned to affective literacies to engage in the kind of critical thinking and knowledge transformation necessary to challenge their labor conditions or simply survive the daily traumas of migrant life. While policies for skills-based labor migration categorize workers and their migration trajectories through a high-skills/low-skills divide, I suggest that affect management is the “high-skilled” work in such contexts where the mobility and flexibility of the global economy are experienced as precarity and insecurity. This reversal of high-low skill categories prompts a re-imagining of the transnational movement of labor—one where worker-citizens and their literacies move through a continuous series of affective attachments to and detachments from the nation-state.

In this article, I turn to a grounded theory study that examines the experiences of students participating in an individual project-based FYW course, exploring up close the exploits,—practices, and products of one student “writing to assemble.” I question pedagogy stayed to theory that would treat writing as primarily a technology of representation, and in its place—introduce the concept of “writing as assemblage.” Positing a theory of the writing space that underscores writing’s more generative qualities, I call for a new definition of proficiency—for all manner of first-year writing courses.

For at least the last several decades, argumentative writing has been of central importance in secondary and higher education, and this emphasis has been heightened by argumentation’s designation as a “cornerstone” of the Common Core State Standards. Moreover, this focus on argumentation has been encouraged by extensive scholarship that investigates how argumentation is learned and deployed in various settings and how the teaching of argumentation might be improved. However, far less attention has been paid to determining why so many literacy educators,researchers, and policy makers believe that privileging argumentative writing is justified.Using a methodology that combines ethnographic case study of writing pedagogy in an urban high school with theoretical analysis of scholarly writings that endorse argumentation, in this essay I demonstrate that the prominence of argumentation is underwritten by three commonly held assumptions: (1) that argumentative writing promotes clear and critical thinking, (2) that it provides training in the rational deliberation that is essential for a democratic citizenry, and(3) that it imparts to students a form of cultural capital that facilitates their upward academic and socioeconomic mobility. My findings are that these assumptions are unwarranted and that schools’ overemphasis on argumentation imposes severe limits on what counts as valid thought,legitimate political subjectivity, and a feasible strategy for addressing economic inequality. This study’s implication is that educators should reassess the value of argumentation and revise ELA curricula to include more diverse genres and discursive modes.

This study uses dialogic theory to understand teacher-writers’ practices across in- and out-of-school contexts. Using case study methods to closely observe and interview a middle school teacher and a high school teacher, as well as analyze their writing, the study identified similarities in the teachers’ appropriations of language, textual practices, and ideologies across contexts. However, each teacher appropriated distinct practices in discipline-specific ways, with one focused onthe literate practices of creative writers and the other focused on the literate practices of online, networked writers. These contrastive examples highlight ways in which teacher-writers’ literate and instructional activities dialogically inform each other in both similar and distinct ways. Ultimately, I make the argument that dialogic perspectives that attend to teachers’ out-of-school practices provide richer, more complex understandings of instructional practice than currently popular conceptions of “best practices” and “value-added” teaching.

In this study, the researcher explores the role of literacy—specifically writing in the lives of adolescent Muslim girls who used writing as a sociopolitical tool when participating in a literacy collaborative grounded in Islamic principles and writing for social change. Previously, researchers have largely focused on the literacies of immigrant adolescent Muslims, leaving African American girls out of scholarly conversations. Employing methods of intertextual analysis grounded within a qualitative study, the researcher examined two questions: (a) What social issues do African American Muslim girls choose to write within broadside poetry? (b) How do these self-selected social issues relate to their identities? Findings show girls most frequently wrote about issues related to (a) war and violence and (b) the abuse, violence, and mistreatment of women and girls. Writing was a means to make sense of and critically shape their multiple identities, including who they are as Muslims, their community, and ethnic and gendered identities.

This qualitative study examines how writers perceive the mobilization and adaptation of their print-based writing knowledge and multiple literacies when remediating written essays into digital stories. It also outlines a pedagogical tool that can help writers reflect on what they might transfer as they compose across media.

Examining the context and production of a community publication, I Witness: Perspectives on Policing in the Near Westside, this essay analyzes the ways in which local neighborhood authors situate themselves rhetorically when engaging with police issues within conditions of asymmetrical power. Furthermore, it describes the collective processes neighborhood residents used to empower their perspectives. The essay applies this case study to debates over open-hand and closed-fist rhetorics and the roles of scholars as sponsors to such rhetorical forms.

In this article, I report on the results of a case study of two students with self-identified Asperger Syndrome (AS) in first-year university writing courses. After exploring existing conversations that tend to ignore the voices of students with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD), I propose a methodology based on the concept of ASD as insight, rooted in critical disability studies, in which the perspectives of neurodiverse students are prioritized. My findings reveal the neurotypical assumptions of some traditional writing pedagogies, such as those based on a process model and the understanding of writing as a social activity. These approaches often do not value the critical literacies and social activities involved in writing done by neurodiverse students outside the classroom. Drawing from my participants’ insights, I explore the potentials of critical pedagogy for valuing the neurodiverse social literacies of ASD students. I demonstrate how a critical pedagogy better attuned to neurodiversity can support the alternative social literacies of neurodiverse students and resist stereotypes of ASD writers as asocial.

The study takes a situated and material approach to texts and writing practices and examines writing ethnographically as it transpires and displayed in museums. The ethnography highlights the richness and sociality embodied in writing practices as well as the ideological, communal, and ritualistic functions that writing and texts serve in cultural institutions. Specifically, I offer a comparative study of visitor books and similar writing platforms in two Jewish heritage museums in the United States. Extended ethnographic observations of visitors’ writing activities are augmented by analysis of visitors’ texts, which, following Bakhtin, are understood in terms of their addressivity structures or whom they are addressed to. The study shows how visitors’ texts amount to collective contributions that are part of museums’ heritage display, and that visitors become rhetors when their mode of heritage consumption is the production of texts.

Current research suggests that emotional investment is essential for helping students critically engage in learning in the English language arts classroom. Yet, scholarship on the role of emotion in literary response has been limited, focusing chiefly on considerations of the merits of personal response—a focus that reflects dominant theories of emotion as located in the individual. Tethered to the personal, emotion has been conceptualized as a peripheral part of literary engagement—as something to be ignored, leveraged, or gotten beyond in an effort to move students toward more substantial textual engagement. This paper proposes that a sociocultural theory of emotion provides a new lens for considering how emotion engages students in literature learning. In this view, emotion is in the fabric of every classroom context, manifesting as “emotional rules” that have material implications for learning. Constructed using methods from Critical Discourse Analysis, the case study outlined in this paper demonstrates how emotional rules were perceived, taken up, and even transformed by one student, Nina, in two discussion contexts—a seminar circle and a literature circle—playing a central role in the work of literature learning in each context. Our findings advance scholarship on the relationship between response and emotion by suggesting that emotion cannot simply be invited in or left out of the literature classroom in the interest of moving students toward literary engagement, but instead is already fundamentally a part of literary engagement and must be noticed, interrogated, and sometimes disrupted in the interest of expanding interpretive possibilities.

Johnny Saldana and his late coauthors, Matthew B. Miles and A. Michael Huberman, accomplish at least two ambitious goals in Qualitative Data Analysis: A Methods Sourcebook and The Coding Manual for...