PDF version Articles in the Spring 2024 issue of Reflections engage with the concepts of positionality and collaboration. The authors in this issue recognize their own positionalities as researchers, and they also interrogate the interactions between their own positionalities and those of their respective institutions and communities. As community-engaged researchers, we should consistently recognize how… Continue reading Introduction: Positionality and Collaboration in Community-Engaged Research

Abstract Indigenous feminist voices have been long used as sources of inspiration for feminist movements, environmental justice movements, and other public facing work. When taken out of context, these voices can easily become clips and accessories to decorate other work. However, Indigenous women's voices have been central to change for Indigenous people and beyond. This essay focuses on the leadership of Zitkala-Ša, Laura Cornelius Kellogg, and Deb Haaland in their advocacy for systematic change while discussing how their locality and connection to their ancestral lands remains central to their rhetorical choices. By existing in what many Indigenous people describe as walking in two worlds, these three women serve as bridges through their Indigenous rhetorical choices helping show that Indigenous women have always been political and will not be silenced.

Abstract In 2014, Elaine Brown evoked “legacy leadership,” a form of leadership that supports Black liberation. Legacy leadership is a version of leadership that both lauds and laments a legacy to persuade audience members to fight for liberation in the present. In her 2014 lecture at the University of Georgia titled, “Education for Liberation,” Brown leaned on the highs and lows of Black Panther Party history to persuade her audience that they should commit their lives to the struggle for Black freedom. In turning to Brown's “Education for Liberation,” this essay extends contemporary rhetorical understandings of leadership by revealing how reflecting on previous ideological commitments, recharacterizing concrete conditions, and inspiring individuals to act immediately can produce a form of leadership that serves liberation.

Abstract In this essay, we respond to claims made about so-called leaderless social movements, which tend to overstate the organizing abilities of their membership. Like many Indigenous, feminist, and activist scholars, however, we contend that many so-called leaderless social movements are land-based and rely on cultivating human connection to land or, in some cases, severing human connection to land. This essay re-centers land and land-based leadership in a conceptualization of rhetorical leadership that accounts for social movements mediated through shared space. Then, the essay draws from a case where social movements described as leaderless draw direction from a relationship to place, what we call land-led politics: the enduring Syrian revolution. We show how a land-led politics is impelled not only by the severing of people from their subsistence base and the expropriation of their lands but by an ontological relation that draws leadership from the land. Hence, the land as theopanic influences social actor subjectivities and how they manage their conduct in relation to land. Emphasizing the amorphous, symbiotic, and rhizomatic relationships social actors have with land brings to light the land's political power and agentic qualities. As such, land-led politics demonstrates the limits of a leader-centric approach, which reproduces colonial understandings of power by failing to account for the political valence of land in realizing visions of a transformed landscape.

Abstract Developments in teleconferencing, necessitated by the COVID pandemic, have changed the ways that Indigenous and marginalized communities participate in development planning. In this paper I examine digital artifacts (recorded Zoom meetings and digital data stories) to uncover the rhetorical leadership strategies of Indigenous and minority population leaders as they reach international audiences. I ask if presentation of data stories and participation in international development meetings facilitated by teleconferencing have become a way to resist dominant social narratives that have been produced by mainstream media with little grounding in or for the community. To answer this question, I examine the use of emplaced rhetoric and the ways that leaders have negotiated the presentation of community data in these new digital spaces. I focus on one moment of conflict—the eviction of 8,000 Kenyans from Kariobangi North in May of 2020. I examine how this community, which has been historically excluded from decision making, negotiated the unique rhetorical constraints and opportunities afforded by digital storytelling and teleconferencing to establish their own for rhetorical leadership that successfully stopped future evictions.

Abstract Queer rhetorical leadership describes performances of leadership with a queer disposition. As an idea, it exceeds the doing of traditional models of rhetorical leadership by queer rhetors for queer audiences on matters of queer concerns. Rather, queer rhetorical leadership subverts, inverts, and reconceptualizes many of the most common assumptions about how to do “good” leadership in order to lead others in the construction of more queer worlds. This essay explores the notion of queer rhetorical leadership by investigating the discourses of Janet W. Hardy and Dossie Easton in their influential text, The Ethical Slut (1997). In particular, the essay notes how the rhetors use radical revisioning, transformational vulgarities, and cultivating comfort in irresolution to lead readers toward a queerer world via the practice of polyamory.

While writing studies and linguistic scholarship has interrogated race and college writing instruction over the last fifty years, we contend that explicit, actionable, and supportive guidance on giving feedback to Black students’ writing is still needed. Building on the legacy of work visible in the Students’ Right to Their Own Language original (Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1974) and updated (2006) annotated bibliography, as well as the crucial work done since then, our interdisciplinary team of linguists and writing studies scholars and students constructed the Students’ Right to Their Own Writing website. We describe the research-based design of the website and share evaluations of the website from focus group sessions. Acknowledging the contingent and overburdened nature of the labor force in most writing programs, the focus group participants particularly appreciated the infographics, how-tos and how-not-tos, and samples of feedback. The result is a demonstration of how to actually take up the call to enact Black Linguistic Justice (Baker-Bell et al., “This Ain’t Another Statement”).

English as a Second Language (ESL) students’ silent expression in writing is often perceived as “indirect” or “inarticulate” in the views of Western rhetoric and academia. However, the meaning of silence and its rhetorical practice can differ from culture to culture, and this difference forms a cultural ethos that is unique and significant to the writer. In response to Anne Gere’s aesthetic, ethical, and political dimensions of silence, I explore cultural ethos as another dimension to recognize ESL students’ silent rhetoric and to expand the theoretical and pedagogical landscape of rhetoric and composition.

Rhetoric is a trace retained in and by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. This concept illuminates how rhetoric and AI have faced issues related to information abundance, entrenched social inequalities, discriminatory biases, and the reproduction of repressive ideologies. Drawing on their shared root terminology (stochastic/artifice), common logic (zero-agency), and similar forms of organization (trope+algorithm), this essay urges readers to consider the etymological, ontological, and formal dimensions of rhetoric as inherent features of contemporary AI.

This Instructional Note is designed to assist students with using the rhetorical skills they already have as a bridge to writing rhetorical analysis essays.

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Children’s literature contains shared meanings that not only reflect societal norms, but also reinstate and reconstitute societal norms. This study used critical content analysis methods grounded in place theory to analyze the textual constructions of rurality in 52 contemporary, middle grade, realistic fiction novels set in US rural places. Findings revealed five salient themes, three of which are discussed in this article: systems work to keep rural people in poverty; rural people have deep connections to place; and rural people have diverse, intersectional identities. While some middle grade books in the sample move toward challenging stereotypes of rural places as monolithic (e.g., White-majority, socially conservative) by including nuanced portrayals of some characters of color, LGBTQ+ characters, and characters with disabilities, others rely on simplistic and otherwise problematic representations, using familiar tropes about rural people that suggest racial and cultural homogeneity privileging Whiteness and making invisible BIPOC in rural communities. Given the powerful impact of stories on identity formation and sensemaking, this study analyzes textual representations of rural people and places in books for middle grade readers.

Joining the growing scholarly conversation on food rhetorics and technical and professional communication (TPC), this rhetorical analysis addresses two themes that arise in a Jell-O booklet (circa 1913): 1) constructing white femininity through women’s frustration and technical failure related to cooking and 2) asserting the Black mammy stereotype as a mechanism of maintaining white supremacy. Such analysis illustrates how food-related artifacts construct ideologies as they simultaneously offer technical instruction.

Abstract This article suggests pedagogical practices to help first-generation students gain effective problem-solving strategies for the future transfer of writing knowledge and skills. The retention of first-generation students depends on developing four positive dispositions for learning: success attribution, self-efficacy, expectancy value, and self-regulation. Meaningful writing assignments with a connection to students’ cultural experiences are an essential foundation for improving transfer. Specific reflective activities are detailed for analyzing emotional reactions to writing experiences, evaluating procedural writing strategies, and solving current and future writing-related problems. A reflective problem-solving pedagogy promotes deep learning by emphasizing students’ agency in responding to writing difficulties and their resourcefulness in creating successful solutions.

Abstract This article addresses a pervasive but undertheorized literacy practice: ghostwriting. Drawing on a five-year interview study with undergraduate students, I describe the many ghostwriting tasks that participants were asked to perform for their co-op jobs and how they perceived those tasks. Overall, students were bewildered by ghostwriting and found it very different from, and in some ways at odds with, their academic writing. Given the ubiquity of ghostwriting and the likelihood that much of it will be offloaded to artificial intelligence in coming years, I call for and begin to outline a critical pedagogical approach to ghostwriting grounded in critical language awareness.

Abstract This essay suggests that our understanding of writing workshop pedagogy has been limited by a divide between composition and creative writing, and by the ways we've narrated this pedagogy in our respective fields, leaving us with little knowledge of what actually happens in writing workshops. To open new possibilities within workshop pedagogy, the author argues, we need to tell our workshop stories differently: not as method or myth, but as a complex classroom scene.

Abstract Natasha Trethewey's poem “Native Guard” begins and ends with the phrase “Truth be told,” but the poem demonstrates just how difficult it can be to tell the truth — or even a truth — about history. “Native Guard” excavates historical events that many readers will find unfamiliar: the experience of Black Union troops guarding Confederate prisoners on Ship Island in the Mississippi Gulf Coast during the Civil War. This complex history is expressed in a crosshatched poetic form: contemporaneous journal entries arranged in a series of interlinked sonnets that juxtapose the history written in ink on paper with the pain written in blood on people's bodies and the bones buried beneath every historical account. While teaching the poem requires careful attention to historical context, poetic form, and repetition of words, the experience provides an answer to the question students keep asking: Why do we have to keep reading about slavery? This essay describes some pedagogical choices that may help students grasp their responsibility for seeking truths that can't easily be told because they lie buried beneath unexamined historical narratives.

This paper introduces the concerns of the papers in the Special Issue and examines communication as a chameleon discipline that responds and adapts to sometimes very challenging contexts. It explores the strengths and weaknesses of the diversity of approaches that exist in communication studies and shows how this diversity offers both opportunities to be resourceful and hurdles to be managed. The paper reflects on the definitional ambiguity of communication and the ways that communication is perceived and approached in different institutions globally. Its aim is to forge a way through debates about the nature of the field by paying attention to the responsiveness and adaptability of those who teach communication in the face of educational and political change.

Communication as a discipline has a curious double life, being both disavowed in favor of something else, yet remains as a conceptual anchor point for a diverse range of intellectual projects. This argument focuses upon four challenges, or “turns,” that communication as a field has experienced: the “cultural turn” associated with cultural studies; the global turn; the “creative turn”; and the “digital turn” associated with the Internet and social media. It is observed that these have been collectively incorporated into a broadened communication field, and that concepts associated with communication remain relevant to other disciplines and fields.

Business communication students should be taught how to innovate because the ability to do so is an important skill for business success. Despite knowing that business communication students need to learn how to innovate, instructors are not always equipped with the proper tools to teach students how to innovate based on sound principles. This article provides one such tool by translating the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL) principles into specific practices designed to help students innovate. By understanding these practices, instructors will be well-equipped to foster student innovation in their own classrooms based on SoTL principles.

The letter of recommendation (LOR) is a stylized form of direct sponsorship, a rhetorical appeal that confers favor on a person or object in keeping with the writer’s—or sponsor’s—character, authority, and expertise. In response to Swales’s call to “unveil” the rhetorical features of occluded genres, this research employs a move-step analysis to determine the rhetorical features of a sample of 83 LORs written by college faculty and administrators for a nationally competitive, postgraduate fellowship. This study finds five core moves expressed in its LOR sample: (1) sponsor positioning, (2) applicant performance, (3) applicant attributes, (4) future projection, and (5) audience appeals. Our discussion offers three key insights and provides macro-level takeaways in an effort to raise rhetorical awareness for LOR writers and requestors alike.

Developing academic writers must continually position themselves discursively as they negotiate institutional, programmatic, and disciplinary contexts. The inextricable relationship of writing and identities raises questions of access to social identities in schools, a particularly salient issue when considering the complexities and challenges of the high school to college transition for students from historically marginalized groups. This study focuses on Jain, a first-generation Latino college student, as he positions himself as a writer over 18 months in response to a range of school-based writing tasks. My analysis finds that Jain’s identity negotiations are influenced by a history of social positioning in schools, as his stance-making patterns and sense of self as a writer reflect resources and opportunities he encounters. This study adds to research demonstrating the role teachers and institutions can play in (in)validating certain aspects of students’ identities and influencing belonging in school spaces, indicating a need for educators and researchers across K-12 and college contexts to continue to challenge the standardization of school writing and the prevalence of assessments that limit curricula and constrain identities.

This study examines the effects of a curriculum based on self-regulated strategy instruction in an accelerated developmental education (DE) English course in a community college. Faculty at the college had established a four-week, two-credit compressed course that enabled students to enroll in an eleven-week first-year composition (FYC) course in the same semester, reducing remediation from fifteen weeks to just four weeks. The course focused on writing argumentative essays using sources. The study used a quasi-experimental design with five instructors and sixty-six students to compare the experimental curriculum to a business-as-usual control condition. In the experimental curriculum, students learned strategies for writing using sources, including strategies for critical reading and for planning and revising. In addition to writing and reading strategies, students also learned metacognitive, self-regulation strategies, such as goal setting, task management, and reflection. The study found a large positive effect (ES = .96) of the treatment on quality of an argument essay written using sources. However, no significant effects were found on a summary outline, self-efficacy, or completion of the subsequent FYC course. The study demonstrates the value of strategy instruction in DE English courses; it is the first experimental study of strategy instruction in an accelerated DE course. Further research is needed to evaluate the effects of strategy instruction in corequisite courses and in FYC.

This Instructional Note elaborates on how weekly anonymous wellness check-in surveys can be designed and implemented in English courses to support students’ purposeful awareness of their well-being and to create a sense of supportive community in the composition classroom.

This essay seeks to add to existing conversations about the role of first-year composition (FYC) in relation to students’ subsequent literacy experiences. Using data from an open-ended survey of former students five years after they completed FYC, in which they describe their current reading and writing practices and reflect on how these practices connect (or fail to connect) to what they recall from FYC, this article positions the findings within the context of scholarship on WAW and TFT and ultimately calls for increased attention to the situated nature of writing as part of the FYC curriculum at two-year colleges.

Constellating Home: Trans and Queer Asian American Rhetorics explores three trans and queer Asian American archives to ask, how can homing as a form of storytelling assist in situating trans and queer Asian Americans (QTAPI) in the United States’ broader narrative of belonging?Throughout the book, V. Jo Hsu conceptualizes and works with the following key terms: homing, a critical approach to storytelling that situates individual experiences in relevant histories and events (9); constellation, the plotting of individual narratives into a network that has the capacity to hold a multitude of relationships and responsibilities (11); diasporic listening, the act of critically attuning oneself to reciprocities ignored or obscured by normative frames (11); and lastly, commonplaces, storylines upon which common understanding can be found, similar to Aristotle's topoi (26).Hsu begins by situating the reader in a brief overview of Asian American history in the United States. Back to the exploitation of Chinese railroad laborers, Hsu traces the evolution of the spaces of “belonging” wherein Asian Americans have been conceptualized via public imagination—from yellow peril as diseased and hypersexualized beings to the model minority of assimilation, and back to anti-Asian hate during and beyond the age of COVID-19. By drawing upon homing as method, Hsu argues that individual stories from trans and queer Asian American individuals can be placed within a larger history and narrative of control. “Listening diasporically to this history exposes the entanglements of yellow peril/model minority with other controlling narratives of U.S. history,” Hsu writes (21). Each chapter explores an archive of oral histories, photography, community work, and storytelling by and for QTAPI, challenging the model minority myth in their respective ways. How do such stories work in tandem, Hsu asks, to interpret and invent Asian America's past and future?Chapter 1, titled love, showcases the Dragon Fruit Project, an intergenerational oral history project that connects younger QTAPI volunteers with older QTAPI activists to record stories about love, family, and community (27). The project was created by historian Amy Sueyoshi upon finding that only two out of 702 entries in the GLBT Historical Society's archive were voices of Asian and Pacific Islander women. Sueyoshi passed the project along to API Equality—Northern California (APIENC) to expand and maintain (39). Love, when constricted by capitalist logics to the idea of the heterosexual productive nuclear family, has scripted the racialization of Asian Americans who, at times, were projected to defy said logics in relation to whiteness (38). The Dragon Fruit Project illustrates alternate intimacies and belongings, challenging normative scripts of love by means of constellating various individual stories into an interconnected narrative (39).Chapter 2, titled resilience, examines the Visibility Project, an archive of photographs that place empowerment in the context of community, pushing against neoliberal, individualist understandings of resilience (74). The Visibility Project reconstructs the commonplace to critique racialized, gendered, and ableist constructions of resilience. Photographer, activist, and archivist Mia Nakano photographed over two hundred queer, trans, and gender-nonconforming Asian Americans, making this the largest collection focusing specifically on this population (86). Photos are displayed along with annotations of how individuals self-identified in terms of gender and ethnicity. As Hsu writes, “the subjects in the Visibility Project renounce the desire for belonging on normative terms, whether through U.S. citizenship or through inclusion in the majoritarian story of Asian America” (90). The Visibility Project also includes a digital history tour of Bay Area Queer Asian Pacific American History and a storytelling and performance workshop built upon archival material (84–85). Ultimately, the Visibility Project reframes Asian American resilience as a “communal empathy” that “channels individual stories into negotiations of communal needs,” empowering QTAPI as “co-conspirators at the fore of a transformational American story” (107).Chapter 3, titled ancestry, features the Queer Ancestors Project, a printmaking and writing workshop for LGBTQ+ youth. Given the complicated experiences of family that queer diasporic subjects often have, the Queer Ancestors Project ensconces students within queer family and encourages them to “listen for submerged relations and story them into far-reaching genealogies” and tend to their chosen familial bonds (111). Ancestry may be understood here as “an array of stories through which QTAPI place themselves in longer traditions of resistance, courage, and care,” connecting them to past and future trans and queer kin (111). Hsu identifies the Queer Ancestors Project's workshop anthologies as a form of kuaer pedagogy. This combines critical pedagogy and queer theory by drawing upon E. Patrick Johnson's quare studies, which center race and class in experiences of gender and sexuality, and Wenshu Lee's subsequent kuaer theory, which takes quare studies through a transnational, transcultural turn across borders.1 Identification goes beyond genetic ancestry tests and “scientific racism”—ancestors can be chosen via shared struggle and resistance, “reaching across timelines and geographies for sturdy, imaginative family formations” (121–122).Chapter 4 centers Hsu themself within the themes of love, resilience, and ancestry, as well as proposing the bodymind as a form of archive that records experiences and stories. Hsu constellates their own personal experiences within their parents’ stories and histories, their experiences of resilience within pain and disability in the academy. To connect bodyminds to homing, Hsu writes that if “our bodyminds archive the experiences we encounter, then homing not only assigns meaning to those archives, but channels that meaning into new ways of encountering ourselves and one another” (183). Homing can be a writing praxis, a way for diasporic subjects to reinterpret their places of origin, creating new connections of belonging and theorizing how we survive together (146). Especially for diasporic subjects, homing is a verb in actively shaping spaces into those of belonging and community for their own selves (183).As a diasporic subject myself who found herself resonating with many of Hsu's stories, I found Hsu's concepts and frameworks to be imaginative and generative. Hsu's work is particularly helpful for scholars looking for frameworks to situate a seemingly disparate scattering of individual narratives and stories within a larger constellation, making meaning out of many. It is also bound to be helpful for scholars looking for methods that center subjects’ active meaning-making in their worlds, their own definitions of belonging, of family—of homing. Hsu's in-depth research into each of these queer and trans Asian American archives is an invaluable piece of critical scholarship.

Abstract This essay examines the first major American debate over aerial warfare as a case study in the relationship between visual spectacle and warfighting technologies. In the early 1920s, Brigadier General William “Billy” Mitchell mounted a short but intense advocacy campaign to win public approval for a standalone and fully supported air force. He justified his arguments with sanitized depictions of the warplane's idealized deployment. I call such depictions technological spectacles, and I parse their three hallmarks in Mitchell's advocacy: the dissociation of violence and destruction, the self-justification of technology, and the confusion of possibility for probability. I demonstrate that these habits of spectacle pervaded not only Mitchell's rhetoric but the coverage he received in the press. The essay establishes Mitchell as a key figure in the history of American rhetoric about military technology and, in the process, offers new historical context and critical vocabulary for diagnosing rhetorics of technological spectacle.

Because algorithms form the audiences that reach us online, students need algorithmic literacy as well as rhetorical awareness when learning to write online. This article examines student writing to explore how students can use theorycrafting to systematically test an algorithm to gain more critical awareness of how the algorithm functions and forms publics online. Finally, this article explores how students can use the algorithmic knowledge they learned from theorycrafting to reflect on the ethics their algorithm constructs for users and how it constructs ad hoc publics. The article then explores how students can create multimodal intersectional counternarratives in response that they can also more effectively circulate online to more deliberately construct inclusive online publics.

This essay reconsiders&nbsp;the role of the “self-sponsored” writer in the attention economy&nbsp;by suggesting&nbsp;that contemporary do-it-yourself publishers have not only attempted&nbsp;to negotiate a&nbsp;public sphere which has linked&nbsp;"self-sponsored" to "entrepreneurial," but contend with a&nbsp;digital&nbsp;environment that makes it difficult to parse authorial desire from&nbsp;neoliberal rationality. Ultimately,&nbsp;this essay suggests that materialist models&nbsp;of circulation should be accounted for in studies of&nbsp;extracurricular literacies,&nbsp;specifically by drawing from the literacy narratives of public writers such&nbsp;as&nbsp;zine authors. It thus provides a method of analysis for understanding how these&nbsp;writers, who&nbsp;must necessarily exist within a broader political economy, have&nbsp;developed publishing strategies to&nbsp;negotiate an alternative position&nbsp;— a stance which can benefit not only our disciplinary research&nbsp;on literacy and&nbsp;public writing, but our publicly-oriented composition classrooms as well.

Dignity is an important construct for all students, especially those whose voices and perspectives have been historically relegated to the margins because of their racial, ethnic, and linguistic identities. With recent legislation that stands to further calcify the systemic oppression and racial violence that remains so deeply entrenched in US schools, it is urgent to understand how minoritized students broker dignity—or feelings of self-worth, value, and well-being—while navigating multiple and oftentimes intersectional keloids of dehumanization. Currently, we know very little about how dignity is developed and enacted by students within educational settings, and even less attention is paid to how literacy factors into these engagements. To address this gap, my paper is guided by the following inquiry, explored within the context of a yearlong youth participatory action research class: How do BIPOC, middle school youth leverage critical literacies and epistemologies to negotiate dignity? Data for this paper, which were drawn from a larger, critical ethnographic study, were analyzed using what I name as a literacies of dignity framework that utilized theories of critical literacies (Freire, 1970/2000; Janks, 2013), felt dignity (Gallagher, 2004; Stephens &amp; Kanov, 2017), and youth epistemologies (Filipiak, 2020; Green et al., 2020; Kelly, 2023) to explore how middle school youth examined and critiqued three sites of devaluation: media, schooling, and adult/youth relationships. Findings reveal important ways youth were able to reimagine ways of being together and caring for one another in social, educational, and even global contexts that rendered them disposable, leveraging critical literacy engagements to broker moments of collective intimacy and vulnerability. This, in turn, fueled their sense of dignity, offering important implications for justice-centered literacy education.

Yonas Mesfun Asfaha is an associate professor at Asmara College of Education in Eritrea, and recently he accepted the role of acting dean of the College of Education. He is a well-known literacy scholar specializing in African literacies as well as multilingual language policy as it relates to education. Lydiah Kiramba is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska and is originally from Kenya. Her areas of expertise include multilingual and ESL education, language and literacy teaching and assessment, and bi/multiliteracy development. Lydiah Kiramba talked with Yonas Asfaha via Zoom during the spring/summer months of 2023 about epistemologies and ontologies that have significantly influenced his work.

Using interpretive phenomenological analysis of oral history interviews, this study explored poetic experiences of nine US secondary English language arts teachers who participated in a month of online poetry writing during COVID-19. The manuscript explores how poetic relationality created space for these secondary English language arts teachers, mostly in rural school districts, to reflect on their realities during COVID-19. These teachers came to understand themselves not just as teachers but also as poets, an understanding that helped sustain them as they taught in digital contexts, during social distancing and school closures.

AbstractDrawing on object-oriented approaches to rhetoric and the scholarship of museum education, the author describes her development of a first-year composition experience that puts observation at the center of first-year writing—observation of an art object and its context of display, as well as self-observation of a writer interacting with that object. The experience uses these object-oriented encounters to broaden students’ understanding of the role that close observation plays in effective writing while acting as a case study for how first-year composition instructors can draw on object and museum theories to design experiences and assignments conducted outside of traditional classroom spaces.

We use a continuous improvement model to evaluate an information design assignment by analyzing 120 student drafts and finals alongside instructor feedback. Using data from across sections ( N = 118), we illustrate a process focused on improving student learning that other technical and professional communication program administrators and faculty can follow, while also offering insights into ways programs can assist a contingent labor force with improving pedagogical practice. This study provides insights into assignment design through data-driven evidence and reflective work that is necessary to help continuously improve a service course and to assist students in meeting learning outcomes.

Forms and surveys often require address information, including state. State data entry fields in online forms typically use a dropdown where the user selects one state from the list. A review of online forms shows a variety of state lists used, with some including the state name fully spelled out while others use the state abbreviation, and still others use a combination of the two, like MD-Maryland. Through a series of three independent experiments, we investigate usability of state list designs as measured by time-on-task, accuracy of answers, or user preference. Results indicate that participants have difficulty with state abbreviations alone. That design results in longer time-on-task, and lower accuracy and preference, particularly for states where the user does not live. We did not find any significant difference in usability for full state names compared to the abbreviation and state name combination in a dropdown design.

Employers are increasingly turning to innovative artificial intelligence recruiting technologies to evaluate candidates’ online presence and make hiring decisions. Such social media screening, or social profiling, is an emerging approach to assessing candidates’ social influence, personalities, and workplace behaviors through their publicly shared data on social networking sites. This article introduces the processes, benefits, and risks of social profiling in employment decision making. The authors provide important guidance for job applicants, technical and professional communication instructors, and hiring professionals on how to strategically respond to the opportunities and challenges of automated social profiling technologies.

This article presents a case study of an online class in technical and professional communication pedagogy (the teaching of technical and professional writing) that uses digital video technology for discussions. Because students in the class share their experiences using the video technology, the study uses a collaborative autoethnography framework to learn if the digital technology, Flipgrid, would enhance students’ experiences with discussions in an online class compared to their experiences with discussions on traditional discussion boards. Providing such exposure to a new technology tool can help students gain the confidence that is necessary for learning new technologies in the workplace. When the technology did not provide the hoped-for results after a few weeks, the class stopped using it, returning to the traditional discussion board in the learning management system, which can be more effective when teachers participate and organize students into small groups. Reflecting on what happened, students in the class collaborated on this article to share their experiences.

In order to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of the varied ways multiple language competencies are invoked in scientific communication and publication, this study features a content analysis of a collection of English, French, and Arabic abstracts from 14 articles of Al-Awamia, a Moroccan agronomic journal. Mapping rhetorically significant differences across abstracts in different languages suggests that EN/FR abstracts are tailored to an international specialist audience and Arabic abstracts favor a domestic policymaker audience in several key ways. The textual moves made to address these different audiences are typical of those studied by scholars of science communication, and accordingly this study indicates that plurilingual textual practices in scientific writing are associated with differences in audience and stakeholders. These findings carry implications for trans/pluri/multilingually oriented scholars of scientific communication, as well as for those who prepare future researchers for the demands of publication, suggesting that the flexible use of diverse linguistic resources is important to scientific practice in a globalized world.

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

This essay takes as its focus the everyday writing that people compose: the self-sponsored, nonobligatory texts that people write mainly outside of work and school. Through analysis of 713 survey responses and 27 interviews with accompanying writing samples, this study provides a panoramic view of the functions of self-sponsored writing and rhetorical activity for U.S. adults, ages 18 to 65+ years, from a range of geographic, cultural, and professional backgrounds. The Taxonomy of Life Writing presented in this essay demonstrates the range of ways that writing functions in people’s daily lives. It includes 19 key functions of life writing, organized into six metafunctions: Creativity and Expression, Identity and Relationships, Organization and Coordination, Preservation and Memory, Reflection and Emotion, and Teaching and Learning. Based on our findings, we affirm the important and diverse functions that life writing serves and propose expanding the threshold concepts of writing to include greater focus on nonobligatory, self-sponsored writing activity.

The Chilean curriculum for writing education includes five paradigms: cultural, macro-linguistic, micro-linguistic, procedural, and communicative. The implementation of such a poly-paradigmatic curriculum can occur in multiple ways. Therefore, we analyzed classroom practices with two aims: (a) to describe how the paradigms are evident across practices, and (b) to analyze the paradigms’ internal alignment within each practice. We conducted classroom observations with five Spanish language teachers with varied orientations toward writing instruction. A content analysis of teachers’ discourse formed the basis for a narrative case-by-case analysis and a cross-case analysis. This process was guided by data collected during a previous survey study and supported by teachers’ interviews. Findings revealed that the cultural, macro- and micro- linguistic paradigms were implemented most often, while the implementation of procedural and communicative paradigms was rare. Additionally, paradigm alignment was visible in two practices but not in other practices. Possible reasons for this lack of integration and potential solutions to resolve this issue are discussed.

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

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