This article draws on examples of student interviews incorporating multiple modalities to explore the writing lives of students as part of a larger project focusing on participants’ experiences of writing within and beyond the university. We explain this innovative, iterative research method combining multiple texts and maps, characterizing it as a kind of triangulation operating inside the frame of the interview. Through students’ triangulated multiple representations, the interviewer learns about, and from, students’ tacit knowledge of their experiences as it is made explicit through multiple modalities: visual as well as linguistic (oral and written). Our study suggests that engaging students in multiple modalities allows researchers to get a more comprehensive understanding of participants’ experiences. Moreover, as we demonstrate from our findings, students found that the mapping activity helped them understand their own writing and the relationships among their spheres of writing more fully. We argue for the value of engaging research participants in multiple modalities as a way of eliciting tacit knowledge through triangulating the data in the discourse-based interview.

Though composition studies has long sought to leverage new technologies of literacy to help students go public, we remain anxious about our ability to do so, as students commonly enter our classrooms already composing for diverse public audiences in a variety of digital contexts. Yet students, too, are often anxious about these new modes of composition, which circulate in a destabilized rhetorical environment where traditional understandings of authority, argument, and audience no longer hold. This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape— presence , persistence , permeability , promiscuity, and power —describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help students negotiate emerging networked publics.

Drawing on three cases from a larger (N=169) longitudinal study of student writing development, this article shows how STEM students “rewrote” disciplines to suit their writerly purposes as they moved through their undergraduate years. Students made it clear that the institutional dimensions of disciplines, visible in administrative units or departments that control resources and records, remained visible in their mental landscapes, but they had a much more flexible view of the epistemological dimensions of disciplines. Rather than entering a field as novices aiming to emulate the writing of its experts, they drew on the intellectual resources of multiple disciplines in order to carry out their own projects. The goals and choices of these students suggest that the term new disciplinarity has implications for the ways WID is conceptualized. As theorized by Markovitch and Shinn (2011, 2012), new disciplinarity posits elasticity as a central feature of disciplines, calls the spaces between disciplines borderlands, and affirms the dynamic nature of projects and borderlands with the term temporality. As such, new disciplinarity offers terms and a theoretical framework that conceptualize the intellectual negotiations of students.

Transfer student writers, who comprise more than one-third of all college students, are simultaneously experienced writers and first-year students at their new institutions. Despite their complicated positions, these students have received very little attention from composition specialists. This article responds to the paucity of attention to transfer student writers by reporting on a multiyear study that alternated between investigations of the experiences of these students and programmatic changes designed to address their expressed needs and concerns. The guiding principle of this work, and of the advice offered to colleagues interested in supporting transfer student writers on their own campuses, is a combination of institutional and student changes or mutual adjustments.

In this webtext, we add to the conversation of best practices, focusing on training graduate students to teach online courses and develop pedagogically sound curricula. By training these students in online writing instruction (OWI), we not only encourage best practices in our institution, but we also prepare these graduate students to enter new jobs and programs with a comprehensive understanding of OWI pedagogy.