Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 I am grateful to RR reviewers Brandee Easter and Bridget Gelms for their help and guidance in the revision process and to Erin Johns Speese for her invaluable feedback throughout my work on this manuscript.

For decades, scholars have considered the construct of voice in student writing, and although defining the term remains difficult (see Jeffery; Tardy, Current ; Yancey), the metaphor of voice is still useful and popular in discussions about student writing (see Bryant; Elbow, Voice ). In this article, we first explore the field’s use of the term “voice” as describing writers’ subject positions within the texts and contexts in which they compose. In doing so, we represent the tensions that prior work has identified within the construct of voice. While prior empirical work explored faculty members’ identification of student writers’ voice, it has not used writing by faculty members’ own students. We then report on our study, which was designed to elicit two teachers’ identification of their own students’ voice in their writing. Findings suggest that instructors’ knowledge about their students and classroom contexts contributed to their understanding of voice in their students’ papers. The piece concludes with implications for how teachers can bring critical discussions of voice into the classroom and use our study results to inform their teaching students to attend to ideas of voice in writing.

Instructors recount the challenges and successes that accompanied a collaborative peer review project between first-year college students at two institutions.