d/Deaf students face a unique set of problems in the education system. Most of these struggles stem from their use of Signed language systems, such as American Sign Language. However, the current education system is also Problematic, as it promotes an Audist-centric learning environment. Additionally, many educators do not understand That signed language systems are completely different from spoken or written English and thus do not treat their d/Deaf pupils as multilingual learners. College writing centers, while heavily influenced by the current education System, have an ability to be incredibly flexible with their methods when working with students. This flexibility that Writing centers allow can be used in tandem with the translingual theory of writing when working with d/Deaf Students to revolutionize the way d/Deaf writers and students are taught in the education system. Keywords : d/Deaf students, signed language systems, Writing Centers, Translingualism

This program profile details the incorporation, scaffolding, and assessment of a large programmatic common reading initiative as a framework for other program directors to incorporate programmatic change and generate faculty buy-in. This profile describes the integration of a diversity-themed common reader used in a first-year experience program into a first-year composition program. The authors describe the main elements of implementation: selecting a diversity-themed common reader and preparing and executing multiple methods of faculty training. Additionally, the assessment methods of the program—including a faculty survey providing feedback on the administrative support and activities surrounding the common reading program, a survey collecting students’ diversity experiences, and student focus groups that collect the students’ responses to the pedagogical methods engaging them in diversity-themed work—are discussed. How the program’s implementation, faculty development activities, and assessment methods have been modified based on faculty engagement, student feedback, and survey results is also defined.

This profile offers insights from an established dual credit first-year composition program at a public state university in Texas, focusing in particular on the preparation and professional development of high school instructors who deliver college writing curriculum through an embedded partnership. The authors provide an overview of dual credit’s expansion and exigency nationwide, describe the history of the program at their institution, offer a discussion of relevant literature and research opportunities in composition studies, examine the program’s affordances and constraints, and conclude with strategies for writing pedagogy administrators and others with stakes in first-year composition/dual credit partnerships.

Not only is the current scholarship on technology professional development (TPD) of writing faculty at the periphery of Writing Studies, there doesn’t seem to be a clear conceptualization of the scope of knowledge and skills needed to teach writing with technology critically and productively. In this study, I address these issues using two research questions: a) What are the teaching with technology-related expectations for college writing faculty as stipulated in 11 CWPA, CCCC, and NCTE position statements? b) What are the characteristics of technology professional development programs, as identified in these statements, that train teachers to meet these expectations? The deductive analysis of these statements reveals that the three organizations have collectively stipulated three levels of technology-related expectations for writing faculty as well as the fundamental characteristics of an effective TPD program that would train in-service faculty to meet these expectations. Based on findings of this study, I argue that the institutional responsibility to provide writing faculty with robust TPD opportunities is not only professional but ethical as well.

This article reports findings from a single-bounded case study on student-athletes’ performance of what educational psychologist Yves Karlen refers to as metacognitive strategy knowledge (MSK) in two first-year composition assignments. This case study is focused on the following research question: how might the promotion of MSK in a FYC class support the development of student-athletes’ writing skills? Data collection includes semi-structured, in-person interviews, visual and bodily mapping exercises, and textual analysis of research participants’ academic writing. This essay offers a two-pronged argument based on the data. First, promoting the development of MSK through established composition and rhetoric writing assignments dovetails with student-athletes’ athletic literacy and supports their development as academic writers. Second, student-athletes’ prior knowledge and practice of metacognition helps instructors gain a stronger understanding of how they may use MSK to facilitate future writing assignments.

Current paraphrasing instruction in the composition classroom may ironically promote “knowledge telling” source use, such as patchwriting. We argue for an approach to source use instruction that teaches paraphrase as a spectrum of task-dependent rhetorical skills ranging from knowledge telling to knowledge transforming. We encapsulate and test the effectiveness of this approach in a series of interactive videos. These videos present a rhetorically-grounded framework for source use instruction, including think-aloud protocols that demystify how reading processes can be used to critically engage with source content. We validate this approach with two different demographics: Non-Native English speaking graduate students and First Year Writing students. Findings suggest our approach, compared with a workshop that used ‘traditional’ fear-of-plagiarism tactics, helped NNES students better recognize knowledge transforming as a task-dependent option and understand the process of note-taking to transform source texts. In contrast, the traditional workshop promoted knowledge telling behaviors.

This article proposes a model for collaboration between composition instructors and instructional librarians to promote visual literacy instruction in first-year writing courses. While the creation of visual content is essential to digital composing technologies, it often remains underutilized as a tool for writing development in first-year curricula. Drawing from complementary threshold concepts outlined in composition scholarship and the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy , we demonstrate how librarians and writing instructors can engage in collaborative instruction to bridge gaps between theory and practice and leverage existing institutional expertise to support multimodal instruction in first-year writing.

This program profile describes how teachers and administrators have collaborated in the design and implementation of a number of linguistic, cultural, and transmodal pedagogical and curricular initiatives. Strategies that writing teachers can implement to best meet the needs of multilingual students across a range of institutional contexts are discussed via a social justice lens. A focused examination of our First-Year Writing program’s layered response to increased international multilingual student enrolment as well as a brief discussion of campus-wide responses are offered to showcase how translingual, transcultural, and transmodal approaches to First-Year Writing can empower students, inviting them to learn from their existing linguistic and cultural funds of knowledge.

In this program profile, we describe how the FYC program at Texas A&M University-San Antonio is working towards developing an antiracist and decolonial program in response to our recognition of the racialized violence and injustice the program was unintentionally inflicting on our student population. We structure this profile using comadrismo, a conversation between two Latina faculty, to describe their experiences around five themes: labor division and equity, assessment and social justice, revising programmatic documents, professional development, and constraints and shortcomings. Furthermore, we discuss the most salient aspects of this work for programs that may also be interested in seeking social justice through antiracism and decolonization. Specifically, we work through and identify three forms of labor we have learned are necessary to engaging in this work: honest and critical self-interrogation, faculty buy-in and community building, and an understanding that this kind of work is an ongoing process.

This article seeks to answer two questions: what kinds of expertise are needed to lead an effective dissertation boot camp; and how can those outside the graduate student’s discipline support their writing? Drawing on four years of application data and post-camp interviews, I reveal how writing process knowledge—similar to that described in the scholarship on first-year composition—is a fundamental reason dissertators seek help from the boot camps. Ultimately, the article argues that the importance of writing as a dissertation-related threshold concept should be clearly stated and understood across all disciplines: doctoral researchers continue to learn and practice writing. As part of broadly accepting this threshold concept, it becomes clearer that those trained in writing pedagogy and its theories are best situated to lead the most helpful writing-process style boot camps.

Wikipedia’s gender gaps are both well-established and well-challenged, and while Wikipedia-based assignments have become more common in composition, teacher-scholars have not fully explored the opportunities for feminist pedagogy offered by the encyclopedia. This article reports on a teacher research study designed to examine the efficacy of the feminist rhetorical approach for understanding critical literacy learning through Wikipedia-based assignments in First-Year Composition (FYC). Findings from student forum posts, surveys, and reflection essays suggest that, despite its benefits, the Wikipedia assignment has been met with challenges that hinder students from making contributions critically and effectively, especially as they struggle to assume agency and criticality in the FYC classroom. By identifying and addressing these challenges, we seek to offer alternative approaches to teaching feminist rhetorical inquiries in FYC, and to expand the current critical practices in Wikipedia-based writing instruction.

This paper aims to investigate the effectiveness of Halliday’s Sydney School genrebased approach in teaching Chinese written composition to South Asian ethnic minority students in Hong Kong. Chinese language, with its heightened status in Hong Kong, holds a key for South Asians with low socio-economic status to obtain upward mobility (Shum, Gao, Tsung, and Ki, 2011). However, South Asian ethnic minority students, as a disadvantaged group of second language learners, lack sufficient parental and institutional support in Chinese language learning. The genrebased pedagogy derived from Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was applied in this study to improve Chinese language performance of South Asian ethnic minority students for a better chance to participate in mainstream society. The SFL approach is primarily concerned with language choice in social situations and has been widely applied in sociolinguistics (Hyland, 2007, 2012). Its latest model in language teaching methodology, the ’Reading to Learn, Learning to Write’ (R2L) pedagogy, is a genre-based teaching strategy which is designed to guide students to experience different levels of language through extensive classroom reading and writing activities with selected texts. The current study is intended to extend the approach to teaching and learning Chinese as a second language. The employment of genre-based pedagogy aims to support South Asian students with their learning of Chinese written composition in the senior secondary curriculum. The Chinese teachers involved were first provided with appropriate training in the genre-based approach to language teaching focusing on the genres of Narration and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use theand Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the and Explanation. Research data were collected while the teachers began to use the genre-based teaching approach, by means of pre- and post-tests after and before genre instruction. Text analysis based on SFL was then employed to analyze the students’ written composition in both pre- and post-tests in order to understand the effectiveness of the genre-based pedagogy in teaching Chinese as a second language. The finding shows that the students at the high, medium, and low levels improved both in the construction of schematic structure and the variation of lexicogrammatical choices from the whole-text, sentence and word levels respectively in their writing performance. Hopefully, the findings will help curriculum development and teacher education for teaching Chinese as a second language to non-Chinese speaking students in Hong Kong and beyond.

Writing about environmental and sustainability issues has grown in popularity, especially in lower-division writing courses. Yet, for teachers and writing program administrators, what are the benefits and drawbacks in asking students to interact with place-based discourses? How does implementing an ecocomposition curriculum and sustainability topics in first-year composition affect students’ writing outcomes? This article discusses a two-year, case study at a comprehensive research university of an experimental course-design model involving 1,421 students and 63 teachers. Students engaged with the university’s sustainability theme in Composition I, as well as other courses. This article includes a description of Composition I’s framework and its assessment practices, and raters measure the writing outcomes for the class’s major essay, a literature review. Overall, teachers utilizing ecocomposition practices presented students with a cohesive, relevant curriculum and assisted them in developing and organizing the literature review; writing and thinking about diverse spaces related to their experiences, majors, and futures; and forging and documenting campus and local ties, including through community-based learning. The study’s results have implications for teaching ecocomposition and sustainability themes in first-year composition.

Book Review| November 01 2019 Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden Sarah Walden, Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018. 220 pp. ISBN: 0822965135 Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Paige V. Banaji Assistant Professor, English Director of First-Year Writing English & Foreign Languages College of Arts & Sciences Barry University 11300 NE 2nd Ave Miami Shores, FL 33161 pbanaji@barry.edu Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Rhetorica (2019) 37 (4): 422–424. https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Twitter LinkedIn Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Paige V. Banaji; Review: Tasteful Domesticity: Women's Rhetoric and the American Cookbook, 1790–1940, by Sarah Walden. Rhetorica 1 November 2019; 37 (4): 422–424. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/rh.2019.37.4.422 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentRhetorica Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by The International Society for the History of Rhetoric. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of first-year composition instructors (n=3) and students (n=8) about the goals of peer review. The three instructor interviewees each described a specific and distinct goal for peer review: constructing quality feedback, identifying effective writing, and developing peer trust. However, when asked about the purpose of peer review, all eight of the students focused on one goal: improving draft quality. This article recommends increased attention to naming and differentiating among specific goals of peer review, as well as more discussion of ways to deliberately articulate those goals to students.

This study explores the perceptions of first-year composition (FYC) students toward written teacher feedback and compares the preferences of L1 English and international ESL writers. We used an online questionnaire to collect both quantitative and qualitative data. The first part of the questionnaire consists of 43 Likert items regarding teacher feedback in the context of a selected argumentative essay, and the second part consists of two open-ended questions regarding students’ opinions on teacher feedback. A total of 345 FYC students participated in the study. Our results show that both L1 and ESL writers prefer feedback that offers directions for improvement rather than general comments regarding errors in the writing, that both groups have an aversion to comments that offer no suggestions, that ESL writers are more enthusiastic about sentence-level feedback than L1 writers, and that terms like “constructive criticism” are largely absent from the lexicon of ESL writers. More broadly, L1 writers are more oriented toward how instructors provide feedback while the ESL writers are more oriented toward the text itself. Ultimately, these findings are meant to help FYC instructors work in classrooms that contain both L1 and ESL writers.

Given that feedback from different sources is combined to ripple through the entire revision process, it is important to create a space where students can understand and interact with different modes of feedback in order to work through it. However, pedagogy for the use of multiple feedback sources from a practitioner’s perspective has been rare. To address this paucity of attention, this teaching article suggests a feedback-rich framework to help students grow as independent writers who can navigate the various interactional spaces for their writing and presents a narrative example of a feedback-rich environment for an ESL first-year composition class. Teacher observations of student performance indicate that the emphasis on multiple forms of feedback and reflection helped the students become more analytical about their revisions, more active in writing conferences, more willing to solicit feedback, and thus more engaged with revision.

Recent interest in reflective writing in the classroom is tied to the suggested links among reflection, metacognition, and learning transfer. There is still a limited understanding, however, about the distinguishing features of reflective writing and how teachers might identify and use these features to teach effective reflective practices and to interact with student reflective writing. This study uses Gorzelsky et al.’s (2016) taxonomy of metacognitive behaviors to examine the end-of-semester reflective essays of undergraduate students enrolled in a first-year writing course at a large midwestern university. The authors identify and describe a feature of student reflective writing involving the use of emotional language and, working from their findings, suggest a teaching strategy and set of classroom activities aimed at leveraging students’ emotive expressions in ways that foster metacognitive awareness.

Over the course of my career, I have been privileged to review a number of single-volume surveys of the discipline of rhetoric, including Theresa Enos’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition in the 1990s and Thomas O. Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Rhetoric in the 2000s. Now, at the close of the 2010s, I am pleased to consider Michael MacDonald’s Oxford Handbook of Rhetorical Studies, which – although not an encyclopedia – offers an encyclopedic perspective on the discipline a decade and a half after Sloane’s volume appeared. Like its predecessors, MacDonald’s volume ably documents the breadth and advance of rhetorical scholarship.Comprising the editor’s introduction and 60 individual essays, the Handbook spans myriad topics through millennia, from the early theorizing and speechmaking of the ancient Mediterranean to the digital media distinguishing the twenty-first century. MacDonald divides the volume into six periods of rhetorical study and practice: Ancient Greek, Ancient Roman, Medieval, Renaissance, Early Modern and Enlightenment, and Modern and Contemporary. As this distribution suggests, the collection privileges a chronological, historically centered approach to the discipline, which MacDonald refers to in his introduction as “the diachronic ‘journey’ ” (2). Nonetheless, he does not offer “a teleological narrative tracing the evolution – or devolution – of a fixed, unitary ‘classical’ rhetorical tradition over the arc of centuries,” nor does he posit rhetoric as a “monolithic cultural institution.” In his words, he wishes to portray “a protean, chameleonic art whose identity, purpose, and significance are contested in every period” (3).To highlight common concerns across historical periods, MacDonald commissioned multiple chapters on similar topics, forming what he refers to as “the synchronic ‘network.’ ” For example, chapters on rhetoric and politics appear in all six sections of the volume, while discussions of rhetoric and law are found in four. He describes the volume’s design as a “double structure”: “a chronological history with thematically interlocking chapters” that enables “the Handbook to be read serially, by historical period, as well as topically, by subject matter.” Touting the breadth of scholarship assembled in the volume, MacDonald notes that the scholarship assembled represents “30 academic disciplines and fields of social practice” (2).Ever the self-aware rhetorician, MacDonald explicitly identifies his intended audience: “readers approaching rhetoric for the first time” (2). More specifically, he describes four varieties of readers: “undergraduate and graduate students,” “university instructors,” “advanced scholars of rhetoric searching for historical context and new points of departure for research projects,” and “scholars in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences looking for points of entry into the field of rhetoric.” He also calls attention to nine features intended “to make the Handbook useful and accessible” (3), including translations of foreign language passages, a glossary of Greek and Latin rhetorical terms, suggestions for further reading, and cross-referencing of chapters. Furthermore, he thoughtfully reviews the history of definitions of his key term, rhetoric, before offering his own: “I shall define rhetoric (nebulously enough) as the art of effective composition and persuasion in speech, writing, and other media” (5).The 60 individual chapters comprising the Handbook are – with few exceptions – consistently well written, engaging, and easily accessible for the audiences MacDonald identifies without being simplistic, pedantic, or stale. This, in itself, is a praiseworthy editorial achievement. The high quality of writing that distinguishes this volume is not surprising, considering the impressive team of scholars MacDonald enlists, whom he describes as “leading rhetoric experts from 12 countries” (2).In addition to lauding the caliber of writing that distinguishes this volume, I call attention to the healthy variety of inventional approaches the Handbook’s contributors employ. Some provide strong, yet traditionally crafted surveys of the topic at hand – such as Heinrich Plett’s treatment of “Rhetoric and Humanism” – while others emphasize the scholarship concerning the topic, often reviewing the major controversies or points of difference within this body of work. Arthur Walzer’s “Origins of British Enlightenment Rhetoric” ably exemplifies the latter category. Several offer exhortations concerning the direction of future scholarship. For example, Cheryl Glenn and Andrea Lunsford in “Rhetoric and Feminism” call enthusiastically for further feminist rhetorical practice and scholarship. “Such feminist interventions into traditional rhetorical principles,” they conclude, “provide opportunities for new ways of being rhetorical, of showing respect, making commitments, sharing power, and distinguishing ourselves as human” (595). Likewise, in his chapter on Renaissance pedagogy, Peter Mack pleads for “many more local studies, which should be more thorough, thoughtful, and detailed than this selective survey” (409). Some contributors reflect on the rhetorical implications of producing rhetorical scholarship, such as Angela Ray, whose “Rhetoric and Feminism in the Nineteenth-Century United States” considers the rhetoric of activism and the highly rhetorical nature of scholarship about it. At least one scholar, John O. Ward, uses his chapter, “The Development of Medieval Rhetoric,” to introduce an important but previously unstudied manual or summa that “enables us to peer into that dark arena and throw a little light upon the rhetoric of the period” (321).Predictably, the most memorable chapters provide reliable introductory material for the nonexpert reader while delivering sophisticated insights for those more knowledgeable of the topic. My favorites include Jeffrey Walker’s account of ancient Greek “Rhetoric and Poetics,” in which he lucidly details the two primary critical positions toward poetry that distinguish ancient Greek culture; Laurent Pernot’s essay covering “Rhetoric and the Greco-Roman Second Sophistic,” which succinctly demonstrates the value of the progymnasmata and elegantly complicates the “decline of rhetoric” narrative fed many of us in graduate seminars in years gone by; and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “Rhetoric and Race in the United States,” which frames future scholarship in this area and issues a memorable call for innovative research. Less successful chapters feature either highly specific explorations of specialized topics or relatively partisan discussions of winners and losers amongst the scholarship they review.MacDonald’s cross-referencing, which he identifies as one of the special features of the volume, deserves recognition. Clearly, he worked meticulously to demonstrate the links among the many diverse essays he commissioned, and both the novice and the expert will find this feature enlightening. As I sampled the essays featured in the volume, MacDonald’s cross- referencing facilitated a lively conversation among the contributors, both those I know personally and by reputation and those previously unfamiliar to me. This multivocal symposium, which informs the entire volume, is one of its unexpected gifts.As mentioned at the outset, MacDonald favors a historical approach. In fact, 75 percent of the Handbook’s chapters focus on pre-twentieth-century topics. This strong emphasis on rhetoric’s past aligns with his own scholarly inclinations and those of the readership of Advances in the History of Rhetoric. Rhetoric is an ancient art, after all, which treasures its roots, and historically rhetorical scholars have viewed their study through the lens of time. Nonetheless, this historical focus can be seen as a limitation, particularly considering the breadth suggested by the volume’s title and the readers he posits. MacDonald himself reveals his inability to cover all topics, particularly recent scholarship, noting, “Gaps and lacunae abound in every period, especially in the modern and contemporary section, which lacks contributions on postcolonial rhetoric, disability rhetoric, comparative rhetoric, queer rhetoric, and countless other burgeoning other areas of inquiry.” I also note that although the volume’s title suggests a treatment of the subject that expands beyond the rhetoric of the West, the Handbook, in MacDonald’s words, “is limited to the study of rhetoric in Europe and North America” (4). To be fair, as he states, “no book or series of books could hope to provide a speculum, or panoptic survey, of the realm of rhetoric” (3), but nonetheless I might respectfully suggest a slightly different balance between the historical and the contemporary, the West and other world traditions.Ultimately, of course, it is prudent to focus upon what such a volume delivers, rather than what it omits. MacDonald’s Handbook provides five dozen essays of strikingly good quality that are useful to students and scholars alike. Furthermore, the care with which he has arrayed and contextualized these essays significantly enhances their utility. The value of the Handbook quickly became apparent to me, for even before I began the review, I was already employing its chapters in my teaching and research. This, to me, is the best indication of such a volume’s ultimate worth.I began by suggesting that MacDonald’s Handbook demonstrates the recent progress of rhetorical scholarship, and the primary goal of this review has been to build this case. Yet while sampling the Handbook’s chapters, I am reminded of the elusive nature of “the state of the art.” For example, when Malcom Heath states in the “further reading” section of his chapter on “Rhetoric and Pedagogy” that “There is no satisfactory account of Greek rhetorical education in the classical period” (82), Jeffrey Walker’s The Genuine Teachers of This Art immediately comes to mind. Capturing any field of study in a single volume is a worthy goal vexed by page restrictions and the passage of time. Given these inevitable limitations, MacDonald has performed admirably, and I am grateful for his impressive contribution to our field.

This paper argues that instructors should prioritize the teaching of peer review. The authors have encouraged collaborative peer review by making it the most important work of their first-year writing course.

Two-year college faculty have begun articulating ateacher-scholar-activistprofessional identity. After tracing the emergence of this concept and calls for solidarity in two-year college writing studies, we draw on two case studies to advocate for cross-sector disciplinary alliances that expand educational opportunity, improve professional equity, and advance social justice.

At the comprehensive research university described in this study, some students taking a required, first-semester, composition course in the fall make great progress in their ability to draft and revise the curriculum’s major essays. Yet, they still fail the class. Many of these students are on their way to becoming practiced writers but require additional assistance to move beyond a definition of revision consisting solely of editing and proofreading strategies. To support such students, I created a voluntary, spring-semester, Composition I course foregrounding both lower- and higher-order revision practices in which students could continue to work on previous assignment drafts from fall. In a three-year, mixed methods, case study involving an experimental course-design model, students enrolling in a Composition I class focused on revision strategies demonstrated both positive revision-related drafting and course outcomes, according to findings. This article includes a description of the course’s framework and its assessment practices. The results of this study have implications for teaching revision in first-year composition.

Background: Professional communication instructors give profuse feedback on student writing in service or introductory courses; however, professional communication has traditionally borrowed feedback practices from first-year writing. In addition, professional communication instructors have relied on lore instead of data when giving students feedback. Literature review: Three recent studies examine the content of feedback comments given by professional communication instructors; nevertheless, these studies open questions about how professional communication instructors enact their pedagogical values when giving feedback. Research questions: 1. What do instructors value when teaching professional communication service courses? 2. What do instructors emphasize in their feedback? 3. To what extent do instructors' values align with the feedback that they give on students' writing? Research methodology: To answer these questions, this pilot study does close qualitative work to test interview questions and a coding scheme formed by inductive content analysis. I triangulated four interviews about instructors' pedagogical values with content analysis of their 599 feedback comments on students' writing. Results and discussion: The results reveal three implications: Rhetorical terminology may contradict the goals of professional communication, overly conversational or directive feedback may not give students tools to improve their writing, and borrowing pedagogical training from first-year composition may not prepare instructors to teach professional communication. Conclusion: Tensions between instructors' values and their feedback comments highlight a lack of consensus about professional communication's pedagogical values for the service course, particularly higher order values, such as audience analysis or purpose through giving feedback.

Using assignments drawn from a first-year composition course that centers the Southern Life Histories Collection, part of the New Deal’s Federal Writers’ Project, this paper argues for a pedagogical approach that teaches students digital literacy through archival rhetorics by converting archival texts into data.

This article presents a new examination of the history of the first-year composition requirement using the “adaptive cycle” idea about the resilience of systems. The author argues that we may be experiencing the collapse of required FYC and should look to other possible futures of college writing.

This article demonstrates the important role that student researchers play in developing two-year college writing center assessment. As part of a tutoring practicum assignment, students from Bristol Community College co-designed a survey that assessed the perceptions of students who do and do not utilize a writing center at their mid-sized community college. Students collected 865 responses between 2014 and 2015. This article provides a road map to developing student-led RAD research through a two-year college writing center and its attendant course; it also shares positive pedagogical and programmatic outcomes from the project.

This article applies critical race theory to an institutional analysis of writing curricular outcomes to assist two-year college writing program administrators, curriculum coordinators, and instructors with examining the racist implications of writing curriculum outcomes and to develop antiracist curricula that support the academic, professional, and civic success of the majority of their students.

This article theorizes how students know when to activate knowledge acquired in FYC courses. Addressing knowledge activation as motivated by pursuing activity-specific objectives, the author calls for situating students’ encounter with and acquisition of rhetorical knowledge and practices of writing as knowledge of how to perform activities other than writing.

This article details an assignment sequence asking students to apply an adaptation of Swales and Feak's (2009) model of social sciences abstract writing to articles in the humanities. This model works as an exploded diagram of the article, explicitly identifying research questions, data, methods, results, interpretations, and implications. The assignment provides students, first, with a reading tool for exposing the articulated construction of academic research articles. Second, as a writing tool, it allows students to practice comprehensive synthesis; the breakdown of multi-part claims; concision and clarity; and selective quotation. Finally, it facilitates the next step in students' research process: framing new inquiry by identifying uses and limitations in prior scholarship. This assignment sequence has been used in first-year composition and upper-division WID/WAC courses in the humanities; it can be adapted for courses in social and natural sciences and for graduate courses.

Grounded in the authors’ dissatisfaction with academic leadership after the 2016 presidential election, this article complicates the idea of the WPA-as-manager by introducing the framework of feminist, transformational, and intersectional writing program leadership. As writing program administrators, the authors identify the problems with calls for civility and neutrality post-election, particularly as these calls came down to the many nontenure-track faculty and graduate students teaching first-year writing. The authors introduce two methods of moving beyond writing program management to include greater attention to community engagement and leadership post-Trump: through revising curricula and course materials and by diversifying professional development opportunities. WPAs may find themselves in a rare moment where the pedagogical approaches for which we have long advocated—attention to marginalized voices, representation of complex arguments grounded in material realities, validation of the rhetorical import of nonacademic texts—are immediately practicable as a condition of civic engagement. Curricula and course materials may convey these commitments beyond the classroom. Further, the authors address the need for greater attention to professional development for faculty, particularly focusing on addressing the needs of vulnerable populations. They discuss two professional development resources beyond individual campus resources: the National Coalition Building Institute (NCBI) and the University of Michigan’s Program on Intergroup Relations (IGR). By grounding this renovated image of the writing program administrator as a writing program leader, situated theoretically in leadership studies, the authors extend the work of scholars who see the WPA as a site of radical advocacy.

The value of higher education in the United States tends to be addressed in terms of the postmodern commodification of knowledge.As Lyotard (1984) reported, the grand narratives of modernity, which had unified knowledge and legitimated it as Truth or Emancipation, have disintegrated into incommensurate language games, fragmenting knowledge, which is now legitimated by performativity.According to Lyotard, each game consists of rules that form among its players a consensus on which utterances, or moves, are meaningful, with the objective of the game being to produce, with maximum efficiency, knowledge as a commodity: a game is legitimated when investment in it is exceeded by the economic value of the knowledge it produces; conversely, a game is delegitimated when investment in it exceeds the economic value of the knowledge it produces.As college tuition costs continue to outpace median income, with student loan debt having collectively surpassed a staggering $1.5 trillion, what return on an investment in the game of higher education can be expected by graduates entering a highly competitive global economy?It seems uncertain.Writing in Inside Higher Ed, Schlueter (2016) argued that with digital technology making information widely available, the purpose of colleges and universities must be to teach the critical thinking skills necessary to process that information.Having surveyed a number of university mission statements, Schlueter observed that higher education has indeed come to widely promote critical thinking as its central learning outcome.But at the same time, he contended, there exists as yet no consensus on what critical thinking is, whether it exists, and whether it can be taught.Given the stakes involved, it is clear, according to Schlueter, that "higher education has gambled on critical thinking" (para.7) and that it needs to secure a consensus on it "if we are not to lose our shirts on this bet" (para.22). 1 Schlueter's (2016) discussion of critical thinking suggests a conflict within performativity between how this knowledge operates and its legitimation in economic terms.As a gamble on what students will be able to do by graduation, critical thinking has essentially become a commodity in the futures market.The uncertainty of its value is, however, due not to the vicissitudes of the market but to an instability of the rules needed to produce critical thinking as a clear and coherent product, which can thereby be assigned a value.Consider that, beginning in 1981, when college tuition costs began to increase sharply, 2 so did the frequency of the phrase "critical thinking" appearing in American English books. 3It seems that as investment in the game of higher education has grown, it has been played more often.And yet, despite the stakes having been raised over these last four decades, research over this period has shown a range of critical thinking definitions, theories, and test results, reflecting, both implicitly and explicitly, variations in the rules of the game.So if higher education has gambled on critical thinking, it is a wager in which final gains or losses seem to be deferred indefinitely and can, therefore, be neither legitimated nor delegitimated by performativity.

: This article offers an overview of a first-year writing course in Aotearoa New Zealand, Tū Kupu: Writing and Inquiry, which forms part of a core Bachelor of Arts (BA) curriculum with “citizenship” as a key theme. I situate the course in the context of the tertiary sector in Aotearoa New Zealand, and the social and political contexts for teaching here, analysing how these contexts deeply inform the sense of “the civic” that we engage in writing instruction. In particular, I account for neoliberal trends in higher education and the complexities of citizenship, including the multiple and sometimes competing kinds of belonging, participation, and publics we invoke when we name citizenship as a teaching focus, and the role of writing in their enactment. My broadest claim is that this set of complexities is a useful one to illuminate the multifaceted work of writing instruction in this country. In addition, in three sections, this article works through some of the institutional and policy demands on writing instruction, the competing accounts of citizenship that we\nmight engage, and how our assignments, text choices, and workshop pedagogy model civic engagement and frame writing in terms of inquiry and collectivity, amid\nshifting frames and hierarchies of belonging, and questions about the role of the university.

Though enrollment of learning-disability (LD) students is on the rise in higher education, instructors are often underprepared to effectively support them. The composition pedagogy community needs more discussion of strategies to help LD students in the writing classroom. Scholarship on writing tutoring suggests that one such strategy is to exhibit active and intentional empathy. Tutoring pedagogy has long advocated approaching students with compassion through strategies such as empathic listening and interrogative, coparticipatory dialogue. To best serve all of our students, particularly those with learning disabilities or attention deficit disorders or who are on the autism spectrum, composition instructors should look to tutoring pedagogy’s model of a nonhierarchical, interrogatory, listening-based approach to working with students. These strategies begin with empathy for our students.

Positioned within our field’s work on supporting transfer of writing-related knowledge through careful course design, this article describes the development of a pedagogical intervention designed to help students identify knowledge gaps and pose questions about rhetoric and genre. Below, I tell the story of a 2012 teacher research study that helped me identify a key problem in my inquiry-based first-year composition classroom: while students were comfortable asking questions, they were not asking the kinds of questions that would help them move across assigned genres most successfully. I explain how this finding led me to develop a rhetorical reflection assignment and explore the rhetorical reflections of two students in my fall 2016 FYC course to identify and describe what happens when these knowledge domains are explicitly emphasized in reflective tasks and to consider questions for future study of this kind of reflective writing.

This article searches after more nuanced understandings of safe space pedagogies in writing classrooms. Drawing on experiences of teaching a first-year writing course on a campus that had been tagged with white supremacist graffiti, this article uses autoethnography and narrative to rethink the function of place in composition pedagogy and develop feminist tools for teaching. This article suggests that classrooms should not be thought of as singular places, and for that reason a safe space pedagogy cannot be thought of in stable or static terms; instead, this article attempts to articulate a situated and contingent idea of safe space pedagogies.

This article explores the scope , foundation , and application of autoethnography in first-year composition and critical thinking classrooms. I broaden autoethnography’s scope from Mary Louise Pratt’s focus on colonial power dynamics to engage rhetoric, discourse, ideology, and materiality at large. I argue that indexing this broader conceptual scope to place-based education produces four key pedagogical effects : to increase students’ awareness of assumptions and practices, their engagement with learning, their opportunities to encounter difference, and their capacity to effect change. Place-based autoethnography, in turn, spatializes writing theory by attending to student geographies. Two assignments—the “autoethnography” and “cultural artifact”—redevelop writing as a space between chaos (disorder) and cosmos (order). I suggest that writing functions as a way to take up space and endow it with place, or value. Mapping the effects and affects of cultural artifacts from their lives, students chart the meaningfulness of objects and discourses in their socialization, leading to the aforementioned pedagogical effects. Consequently, place-based autoethnography is uniquely situated to engage students ( and teachers) with their lifeworlds.

This profile of the Writing at Moravian program discusses how an application of activity theory has facilitated a collaborative and context-responsive (re)development of the First-Year Writing, Writing Fellows, and Writing-Enriched Curriculum programs at our small liberal arts college. Activity theory is presented as a lens and flexible tool that allows us to identify and evaluate the myriad dynamic components of these interrelated programs in order to align the objectives of each program to work towards our programmatic mission built upon the fundamental ideas of transfer, reflective practice, and threshold concepts.

This article revisits the relationships among gender, service, and composition pedagogy through a qualitative study of active-duty military officers who teach first-year writing at the United States Air Force Academy, one of the five major U.S. national military service academies. The U.S. national military service academies are under-studied sites of writing; there is little published about the experiences of the active-duty officers who comprise a significant portion of the first-year writing teaching faculty at these institutions. Interviews with the officers about their first-year writing pedagogy are framed by an analysis of military leadership policy as well as scholarship on writing teacher development, feminist composition pedagogy theories, and critiques of the role of service in composition studies. This study describes the officers’ first-year writing pedagogy and argues that the experience of these officers, framed through the theories of military leadership and the military service ethos, introduces a new way to understand how the concept of service could operate in first-year writing pedagogy. The officers’ experiences also support arguments that service in composition classrooms is still problematically gendered: even within a military environment, female officers report that they have less freedom than their male colleagues to demonstrate an ethic of care towards their first-year writing students.

Writing Studies’ emphasis on knowledge-transfer and learning stems from our pedagogical focus and is motivated by the fact that much of our research is about and our teaching is directed at students who will be entering other disciplines. Much of the research in the field has focused on tracing transfer and learning longitudinally through students’ college careers. This paper contributes to this larger body of research by presenting an approach to researching transfer and learning that focuses on the situated, moment-to-moment interactions that occur when students learn, when their dispositions form, and when they experience transfer. Initial findings from a study conducted at an R1 public university following this approach reveal that within these moments, students engage in complex boundary-marking interactions that iteratively define the material and discursive world and students’ place within it. The boundary marked in each iteration then affects future boundary-work, a phenomenon this study calls micro-transfer . The initial findings reveal that any given moment can have a profound impact on the trajectory of a student through a class, and that boundaries themselves have different characteristics and micro-transfer depends upon these characteristics. This study presents an initial set of categories of boundaries based on their flexibility and permeability and the field in which they form that could be a foundation for future research in boundary-work and micro-transfer in writing studies.

Diana George is professor emerita at both Virginia Tech and Michigan Technological University . In this interview, Diana reflects on moving late in her career to revitalize a first year writing program and writing center at a different university. She also discusses her approach to publication; institutional capital; finding balance across teaching, scholarship, service, and administrative duties; and the importance of collaboration and supportive colleagues.

Despite community college teachers teaching nearly 50 percent of all first-year composition, our experiences and hands-on knowledge are not viewed as scholarly contributions to writing studies. The scholarship of writing studies needs to be expanded through redefining what constitutes scholarly work as well as providing mentoring to two-year faculty who possess critical knowledge on composition and pedagogy.

This article explores the use of the work narrative to engage students, particularly FLI (first-generation and low-income) students.