To be editors in what is now the Age of Artificial Intelligence is not without a feeling of jamais vu.Our practices are predicated upon the existence of the author, which has been called into question by large language models.Although artificial intelligence is not an author because it cannot produce an original text, its texts are, or soon will be, indistinguishable from those produced by an author.In other words, if the original text and the unoriginal text are identical, then any author is simultaneously a nonauthor.We see this paradox, in its mix of the strange and the familiar, as part of an epistemic transformation of our relationship to the text.This paradox is sustained by a cultural resistance to our changing understanding of authorship.Despite the prominence of such essays as Barthes' (1977) "The Death of the Author" and Foucault's ( 1978) "What is an Author?", which dispute historical assumptions about the author as the origin of the text, these theories have never made "the pedagogical turn" (Graff, 1995) into a praxis for relocating the text's origin.Writing is still widely taught as a response to prompts, which locate the origin of the text inside the student.This method of instruction directs attention to the text as it tacitly perpetuates a belief that writing well is a "gift" innate to the individual.Michael Palmquist and Richard Young (1992) observed that this belief does indeed reappear in the writing classroom and pointed out that students who consider themselves ungifted may not pursue opportunities for learning, given the futility of trying to improve an ability they do not possess.There is a symbolic violence to this process by which students embody a belief that they cannot write but are nevertheless confronted with prompts to revise their writing.Consequently, they may avoid revision because they see it not as practice for improvement but as "punishment" (Downs, 2015, p. 67) for being wrong.This symbolic violence can, however, be converted into critical thinking if the text's origin is relocated.Consider an instruction to produce a piece of writing not by responding to the prompt but by replacing its interrogative pronoun (what, which, who, whom, whose) with its antecedent.The student thereby locates the origin of the text outside themself in a preexisting first draft they make present in writing.The instructor, in turn, decides what part of the text is still missing and adds to the draft the interrogative pronoun or proadverb (why, where, when, how) in a prompt for revision.The student, in turn, replaces the interrogative with its antecedent to produce a second draft.And as an interrogative can be addressed to any draft, revision, as a reversal of proformation, is the disclosure of a text that ever exceeds it.Through revision students gradually embody improvement as "a feel for the game" (Bourdieu, 1998, p. 25), a practical sense of which words go where, and through prompts they reflect on how their manipulation of these words enacts meaningful

AbstractThis article argues that the oral performance of personal monologues in first-year composition courses allows students to identify meaningfully with one another across difference at a time when the American political climate too often forecloses such opportunities. The author considers the opportunity personal monologue provides for parrhesia that recontextualizes the space in which deliberative discourse occurs. Drawing on a case study of the author's food-based composition course, this article provides supporting evidence for the power of performed personal monologue to encourage mutual identification among students that creates a new foundation for subsequent discourse.

AbstractWriting is both affective and ecological. Consequently, effective writing instructors need a deep understanding of writing's affective and ecological aspects, making composition one of the most complex and challenging areas of pedagogical endeavor. This claim is especially true in institutions whose product-oriented epistemologies make writing potentially traumatizing for many student writers. To assist writing teachers in meeting student writers’ needs, this article draws on a diverse body of research to explain writing affect, its role in ecological processes of composition within early collegiate humanities curricula, the relation of writing affect to writers’ identities, and the impact collegiate corporatization may have on composition instruction. Subsequently, this article describes approaches for making writing pedagogy more process oriented, trauma informed, and equity centered.

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

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

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.

While Sada Harbarger is primarily known as the author of the first genre-based technical communication textbook, 1923's English For Engineers, I argue through extensive archival materials that her innovative conferencing with engineering students and interdisciplinary writing efforts, rather, drove her interwar success at Ohio State. Her rural agricultural background and acquaintance with the engineering faculty, combined with her literature training, led to OSU's engineering faculty demanding successfully that English promote her without reference to her textbook. Harbarger is also a notable early example of navigating being a female professor teaching engineering writing in a male-dominated English literature department.

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.

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

The 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.

In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training that we piloted in summer of 2022 to prepare newly hired professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants in-person over a two-day period before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Although we focus on professional staff, our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training graduate and undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we describe our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.

In this article, I argue for centralizing revision in FYC classrooms, thereby establishing it as the vital component of composition that it is. I show that engagement with revision in FYC courses tends to be minimal, relegated to the end of a project, or completely omitted. These low standards for revision pedagogy can result in students not having the know-how or confidence to revise their work as they advance in their careers. Thus, one aim of mine is to invigorate the conversation surrounding revision pedagogy and, in doing so, invite composition instructors to consider altering their own approaches to guiding student revision. To this end, I offer FYC instructors several pedagogical strategies which are easy to implement and which may help students establish and build effective revision practices they can carry with them throughout their college careers and beyond.

The theme course has not held a distinct place in scholarship, despite being a longstanding practice in the field; meanwhile, it has come under scrutiny in teaching for transfer (TFT) scholarship, which perceives the practice as conflicting with writing-centered approaches. In contrast, scholarship on theme courses suggests that a resilient motive for selecting and implementing a theme is to support writing as subject matter. A survey of current practice confirms this motive. If the theme course is not in conflict with disciplinary values, and instead a proponent of them, then the practice should be studied with more intent as a peer or supporting practice to other writing-centered approaches. This article diffuses tensions between TFT and the theme course to reposition the theme course as a method for teaching writing as subject matter.

This article presents students’ experiences with hybrid grading contracts through a thematic analysis of data. We specifically focused on students’ perceptions of the grading contract’s role in improving their writing skills, issues of fairness, labor, and stress. We argue that the stressful conditions of COVID-19 illuminate the benefits and drawbacks of contract grading, especially regarding fairness and equity, when used at institutions that predominantly serve working-class students. This article can serve as an example of how graduate teaching assistants can use hybrid grading contracts in writing classrooms. We conclude with recommendations for instructors on how to adapt grading contracts to meet the needs of the students and suggest a future research agenda to examine grading contracts and stress levels.

This article argues that in the teaching of writing online, incidents of linguistic discrimination can be (in)directly caused by faculty unfamiliarity with online teaching best practices, lack of critical linguistic awareness, and the prevalent legacy of racist and monolingual ideologies. To address this issue, it is necessary to cultivate empathy as a bridge between instructors and students. This article calls for the interconnectedness of empathy and linguistic justice in online writing courses as tools to create more equitable and inclusive environments for all students. The article uses data from a longitudinal, cross-institutional study to apply an empathetic, linguistically just approach to OWI to examine assumptions around technology instructions and use. The authors stress the importance of understanding student perspectives and experiences and outline strategies that humanize students in online writing courses. Implications for teaching include a need for increased reflexivity and pedagogical clarity.

This article offers composition theorists and practitioners insight into how social media pedagogies can help support the development of distributed expertise in writing classrooms. Reporting on the findings of an IRB-approved qualitative case study, this article showcases how students learning from and alongside one another in a Slack social media learning environment can enact distributed expertise within the classroom. After reviewing the study’s findings and contributions, the article offers some “best practices” for supporting distributed expertise with social media pedagogies in composition courses. It closes by considering social justice implications for social media pedagogies, distributed expertise, and composition pedagogy.

While graduate students’ struggles with isolation, self-doubt, low self-esteem, imposter syndrome, anxiety, depression, and burnout are well-documented (Morrison-Saunders et al.; Stachl and Barranger), few writing programs directly address their emotional wellbeing (Russell-Pinson and Harris). Drawing on our backgrounds as a therapist and a writing and yoga instructor, we adapted Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), contemplative practice, and embodied pedagogies to develop WriteFest, an intervention program that supports graduate students’ wellbeing while writing. In WriteFest, we developed a supportive community and deepened students’ mindful awareness of the physical and mental experience of writing. Through CBT, we built on this foundation of awareness to help students identify and reframe unhelpful belief systems, recognize strengths, and develop self-efficacy (Beck). Our theoretical frame and curriculum are valuable for readers in multiple contexts, as our materials could become a unit within a course or a workshop series offered by a graduate school, student counseling center, or academic support unit.

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

Student writers labeled “underprepared” by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term “underprepared” varies across institutional contexts, the designation commonly requires that students enroll in a developmental writing course, making it difficult for these students to feel confident in their work and academic abilities. In this article, I position mindfulness as a strategy instructors can use to nurture students’ emerging scholarly identities. After describing common teaching challenges and the role mindfulness might play in overcoming them, I share a sample course schedule and series of assignments for a first-year writing course that incorporates mindfulness practices, such as slow reading and deep listening. These exercises and assignments can help students develop unique voices and connections to course material, qualities that tend to translate to higher levels of student confidence in both the writing classroom and in the college environment more generally.

The COVID-19 pandemic has generated new pressures for students and exacerbated their pre-pandemic stressors. One example is the impact of increased technology use upon students’ mental health. Interest in contemplative pedagogy has recently grown as instructors seek methods to alleviate the worries that students carry. This piece describes a writing course design that uses written reflection as a contemplative practice. Because the author’s institution requires classes to explicitly align with learning outcomes, the course design is a balance of contemplative practice and the learning outcomes expected by the university.

This essay explores contemplative pedagogies in the writing center, a space the authors believe allows for practices of mindfulness, awareness, and reflection in organic ways, as writing center pedagogy focuses on the importance of the relational, flattening hierarchies, and a focus on the conversation between writer and tutor (or between writers). With a focus on the whole person, the writing center advocates for the type of contemplative pedagogy Mathieu and others have called for: “To see any problem as an opportunity to make ourselves more aware of the way we perpetuate pain and suffering in the world” (Minnix). Grounding this essay in bell hooks’ framework of community, we will explore two important pedagogies to our center: intentional kindness (Boquet) and rhetoric of respect (Rousculp), and ways in which they have fostered contemplative pedagogy in the writing center during difficult and tenuous times in the current political climate.

University students can become overwhelmed and hopeless as they pursue their final capstone writing projects. They are also navigating trying times of overlapping crises such as poverty, environmental decay, and war. To address these challenges, our Capstone Writing Groups (CWG) are designed to develop students’ writerly competence and enhance global citizenship traits of wisdom, courage, and compassion by utilizing contemplative and sōka strategies. Our group sessions focus on “good” writing, time management, and self-care strategies. The findings indicate that our writing groups enhanced participants’ writerly identity, writing skills, and critical reflection. They also fostered sōka global citizenship traits. We advocate for contemplative approaches and sōka global citizenship education to provide a human touch to supporting student writing.

This essay proposes a pedagogical approach to writing instruction in universities facing familiar institutional goals and barriers alongside the heightened emotional complexities of students post-pandemic. Students at these universities often pursue vocational paths, yet since spring 2020, their interpersonal and cultural challenges have deepened, alongside a broader societal awareness. Amidst these changes, students’ desire for meaningful relationships persists. In response, I’ve developed a pedagogical framework called “yogic agency,” which integrates inward experiences with external events. Its principles include writing as an offering, embracing uncertainty, acknowledging the fragility of narratives, and viewing purposeful work as strategic. These principles facilitate critical engagement with inner experiences, bridging the gap between personal feelings and the writing classroom, extending to the broader university context. In essence, yogic agency leverages inward experiences within the writing classroom to influence the world beyond.

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

This article explores the transformative potential of mindfulness and rituals of regard, drawing inspiration from bell hooks’s insights on communities of care. Focusing on the intersection of epistemology, ontology, and pedagogy, I investigate how mindfulness can serve as a liberatory pedagogy, challenging Cartesian legacies and fostering relational selves. Through storytelling and cross-cultural meditations, I illuminate the limitations of traditional pedagogies and the expansive possibilities of mindfulness. By examining concepts like the reconciled self and without-thinking, rooted in Arabic-Islamic and Buddhist traditions, I highlight the power of mindful attention and regard. This piece navigates the tension between critique and affirmation, emphasizing the importance of non-self and regard in mindfulness practices. Ultimately, it underscores the role of mindfulness in shaping both individual and collective narratives, offering pathways to freedom and connection.

In the pursuit of fostering vibrant and inclusive learning environments, this article explores how the practice of community-building can be a contemplative practice. Drawing upon personal experiences and pedagogical insights, Muir navigates the rewards of cultivating authentic connections among students while dismantling hierarchies within the classroom. Through reflective anecdotes and theoretical frameworks, this article underscores the significance of shared values, respecting diversity, and democratic engagement in shaping transformative learning communities. Emphasizing practices such as establishing common ground, engaging in creative expression, and co-constructing syllabi, the article advocates for a holistic approach to education that prioritizes empathy, agency, and reciprocity. By integrating the contemplative practice of community building into the fabric of academic discourse, Muir envisions a future where students and educators alike embrace interconnectedness, compassion, and collective growth.

A large body of literature on writing center pedagogy suggests that serving multilingual student writers requires approaches different from those developed for native English-speaking students, a difference that may pose unique challenges to tutors. To identify and address these challenges, we elicited tutors’ perspectives on their work with multilingual writers as well as examined how these perspectives change as tutors gain experience and in response to revisions in a training curriculum. Specifically, we analyzed survey responses provided by two consecutive tutor cohorts at three points in their first semester working at the writing center. The overriding theme to emerge from participants’ responses was that working with multilingual writers often meant working at the sentence level to help them expand their linguistic and rhetorical choices, but this tutoring was sometimes challenging. The first tutor cohort even described sentence-level tutoring as transgressive, as they struggled to distinguish it from fixing or editing writers’ prose. In contrast, the second cohort, who went through a revised curriculum, treated sentence-level tutoring as acceptable practice, theorized it in richer ways, and expressed themselves as better prepared to support multilingual writers. In addition to describing revisions to the curriculum, this study also provides pedagogical implications for tutor educators.

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

In writing groups (WGs), participants exchange drafts so that their partners’ feedback can be used to improve writing. These groups accompany participants while they face authentic dissertation or publication writing projects, are linked to situated and real demands, and promote participants’ engagement. Nevertheless, this type of pedagogical initiative continues to be uncommon, especially in Latin America. This qualitative exploratory study analyses participants’ perspectives about the benefits and drawbacks found in joining doctoral WGs in the Humanities and Social Sciences. It focuses on three separate sets of doctoral writing groups implemented and facilitated within the last eight years in Argentina. Despite some drawbacks, participants considered these groups as valuable not only for the advancement of dissertation and publication writing, but also as horizontal spaces to develop as scholarly writers. Higher education institutions worldwide could benefit from similar pedagogical initiatives to enhance and promote research writing at the graduate level.

In this teaching practice article, we discuss the possibilities of integrating AI into the writing classroom utilizing prompt engineering techniques. We propose a strategy for prompt engineering in which we see AI as an audience and interlocutor during the invention process. We consider using the method in preparation for argument composition and with that we propose an ethical model for teaching writing based on a view of rhetoric as both technê and praxis. To draw attention to the ethical question in relation to human—non-human interactions, we use as metaphor for AI tools the image of Klara, an android who serves as a children’s companion in Ishiguro’s novel Klara and the Sun (2021).

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

In our changing educational environment, understanding the way students experience community-engaged writing pedagogy has become more important than ever. Following a semester-long qualitative study examining the reflective writing of students and conducting interviews with those students about their experiences, three students were invited to elaborate on their experiences with a critical community-engaged writing and oral communication course. This article will detail the course, discuss the role of emotion in community-engaged writing pedagogy, and share the experiences of these three students. Each student will discuss their experience with critical community-engaged writing, focusing on the impact, both positive and negative, of working in a group community-engaged writing and oral communication project and on the impact, both positive and negative, of previous life experiences and worldviews on community-engagement.

For Reflections readers, the lines between “teaching,” “research,” and “service” have always been fluid. The community-engaged work that some consider “service” is central to the research identity and trajectory of many Reflections readers. In the same way, Reflections readers also understand that  “teaching,” and pedagogy more broadly, takes place in many areas beyond a single classroom.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research problem:</b> A considerable amount of scholarship has amassed over the last 20 years regarding the teaching of user experience (UX) design, but there has been no systematic attempt to review this literature. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research questions:</b> 1.What is the definition of UX pedagogy according to technical communication and adjacent fields? 2. What is the state of specific UX pedagogical approaches in technical communication and adjacent fields? <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Literature review:</b> Our corpus contained 76 sources directly pertaining to the teaching of UX. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Research methodology:</b> The theoretical framework of this study marries rhetorical theory and critical thinking. The former provides technical communication literature reviews with keen discourse analysis and the latter offers objectivity to the evaluation. To use this framework, we sought sources using journals related to technical communication and large databases from adjacent fields, including the ACM digital library and IEEE Xplore. We completed our search using Google Scholar to ensure broad coverage. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results and conclusions:</b> Our review of sources revealed a variety of trends and a remarkably diverse conversation on UX, including various definitions of UX pedagogy, and a large variety of theoretical orientations, educational models, instructional approaches, industry influences, methods, and ethical concerns. From this diverse corpus, we hazard a unifying definition centered on teaching the UX process through hands-on approaches such as engaged learning. We close our article with recommendations for continuing to refine UX pedagogy in the future.

<bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Introduction:</b> Preparing students to pursue user-experience (UX)-related writing careers requires infusing UX instruction into several technical communication courses throughout a degree program. But university writing programs that seek to add UX courses into their curricula often work inside a slow-paced system where amending course objectives to align with job market demands is a slow process. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">About the case:</b> For this collaboration, we forged a symbiotic relationship between a lower- and upper-class course to introduce students to UX early in their program of study and apply additional or nuanced UX methods in several writing courses as they progress through the program. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Situating the case:</b> Faculty in a writing program that does not currently have stand-alone UX classes can collaboratively improve the student UX in a timely fashion while maintaining the flexibility to adapt best practices and contemporary UX processes across classrooms. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Methods/approach:</b> A close reading of test plans (n = 14), usability reports, and reflection essays from 200-level students provided key insights into the understanding of UX strategies. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Results/discussion:</b> Introductory students struggled to make explicit connections between UX strategies and their work, but they demonstrated gained UX skills by the end of the project. <bold xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">Conclusions:</b> Students realized many benefits from learning about and conducting UX research that helped them become more empathetic professional writers. However, instructors should consider additional symbiotic relationships between courses in a professional writing program at several points in the writing process.

Introduction: As a field, we have tended to look at user-experience design (UXD) as a data-driven design process, anchored by usability studies, and anchored in fulfilling user needs and expectations. How then might technical and professional communication (TPC) curricula respond to evolving trends in user-experience (UX) scholarship and pedagogy? About the case: Addressing this question, we share our programmatic journey, a teaching case that represents more than a decade of reflection and evolution, culminating in the launch of a redesigned major and a UXD minor in a stand-alone department at a regional, primarily undergraduate teaching-focused university. Situating the case: Our programmatic identity began to shift toward a designer mindset that embraced three core frames for professional action–information design, problem solving, and civic engagement—and three complementary design tenets—empathy, advocacy, and bricolage. Methods/approach: To better understand this shift, we recognized the need for a multimethod approach of data gathering. Beginning with an annual assessment of our introductory and capstone courses, we collected data through examination of key course artifacts, through department self-studies, which includes surveys, interviews, and focus groups with relevant stakeholders, and through an external review. Results/discussion: Our self-study data indicated that our students would benefit from stronger audience awareness and design competencies. From these data, we discuss curricular revisions, which include creating a UXD minor. Conclusions: We conclude this article by considering the following three questions: 1. What strategies might other programs consider if they want to design empathy-driven UX pedagogy that is responsive to prevailing scholarly and pedagogical trends? 2. Why might programs cultivate student-researchers as UX bricoleurs? 3. What might other programs expect from student-researcher UX bricoleurs?

As a business communication teacher walks into their classroom ready to introduce a wonderful new teaching object, they are riding on a wave of spiritual joy. They know that they are about to transport their students into new business communication skills. It’s magical. My Favorite Assignment is Association for Business Communication’s (ABC’s) resource of classroom-tested pedagogical innovations. This article offers 10 teaching innovations first presented at the 2022 ABC Annual International Conference held in Tampa, Florida USA. Readers can select from assignments designed to teach email, personal and professional development, and social media.

This article argues for repositioning voice within BIPOC histories and contributions to the fields of English/rhetoric/composition studies. By reinvestigating the affordances and constraints of Expressivist-driven definitions of “voice” and the contemporary applications of imitation writing assignments, this article demonstrates alternative approaches to teaching and thinking through voice in writingbased courses.

This paper tells the story of theedubba, the Mesopotamian scribal school. First, theedubba’s pedagogy demonstrates that the first formalized center for teaching writing was more akin to the modern writing center than to the composition classroom. Second, unlike many modern writing centers, theedubbawas multilingual. It is easy to look at the past and congratulate ourselves on how much better we’ve made the future, but theedubbahas something to teach us beyond the fact that it preceded the composition classroom. A circle has no beginning, and both the writing center and the writing classroom are part of one circle—equally important to the students they serve.

In this article, we argue for a coalitional orientation for writing programs and centers to advance language justice and make good on the promises delineated over fifty years ago in the Conference of College Composition and Communication’s publication of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language. Specifically, we argue that writing centers are ripe sites of teaching and learning—not merely auxiliary support for the composition classroom. Indeed, as we demonstrate, many writing centers actively push for language justice by, for example, publishing language diversity/inclusion statements and championing concrete, pedagogically just practices. Accordingly, we urge the discipline of composition and writing centers to work together as coalitional partners to advance language justice across the discipline and, ultimately, beyond.