Writing studies scholarship lauds reflection’s capacity for building metacognitive understanding and facilitating transfer. Meanwhile, feminist and antiracist pedagogy scholarship highlights reflection’s ability to create spiritual and societal change. By contextualizing reflection within institutional and programmatic contexts, we argue that writing scholars can revise assignments to account for reflection’s contributions to civic and spiritual identity development. This cross-institutional case study analyzes patterns in first-year students’ reflective writing across three writing programs. Drawing on five codes for reflective identities—scholarly, writerly, professional, civic, and spiritual—we found that scholarly and writerly identities were emphasized regardless of context. However, students often had an “excess” in reflection, writing about civic and spiritual growth when prompts did not invite it. In conversation with university and program mission statements, we argue that instructors and WPAs can leverage reflection to expand beyond a single classroom context, ultimately tapping into its potential to create individual and social change.

Since successful healthcare relies heavily on a practitioner’s ability to empathize with the patient, the allied health professions—like nursing and speech therapy—have long considered the possibilities and limitations of a pedagogical practice that centers empathy. In this essay, we analyze two such pedagogies: role playing with simulated patients in nursing and story sharing in a multimodal memoir group with aphasic clients in communicative sciences and disorders (CSD). Comparing theories of empathy in these fields as well as interviews with the future nurses and speech therapists participating in these experiences, we show how students engage in what we call “empathy-in-action” through both reflection and enactment and what rhetorical scholarship can gain from attending to these practices. Ultimately, we argue that putting rhetoric, nursing, and CSD in conversation deepens each field’s understanding of how empathy can be taught and learned.

With its publication date in April 2020, contemporaneous with the initial waves of both COVID-19 and COVID-19 misinformation sweeping across America, Jenny Rice’s Awful Archives: Conspiracy Theory,...

This article introduces “rhetorical body work” as a framework for understanding professional embodiment in health provider education and technical and professional communication (TPC) pedagogy. Using the case study of clinical nursing simulations and drawing on sociological theory, I provide a detailed analysis of three components of rhetorical body work as they manifest in three simulation scenarios: physical, emotional, and discursive. I conclude by considering the implications of these findings for the embodied teaching of TPC.

Although healthcare providers’ decision-making is informed by data and proto­cols for care, recent research suggests that individuals’ intuition—which integrates previous experiences with situational awareness and sensory knowledge—also plays a large role in directing action. Drawing on two different datasets from research on EMS providers and nurses in clinical nursing simulations, this article intro­duces a taxonomy for the various cues that trigger intuitive action and unpacks how intuition manifests at different stages of care. We argue that healthcare providers rhetorically navigate a wide range of both external and internal intuitive cues, and that external cues draw on sensory engagement with bodies, technology, and the environment as well as collaborative interpersonal exchanges. Intuition, then, is more than an unconscious ability to inform action—it is a type of intelligence that develops from experience, and from the ability to be attuned to the surrounding environment and material conditions of a workplace. By creating a taxonomy for articulating intuition’s complex and diverse cues, this article aims to provide both rhetoricians of health and medicine and healthcare providers with an impetus for recognizing and valuing its key role in patient care.

The rhetoric of health and medicine has only begun to intervene in health pedagogy. In contrast, the medical humanities has spearheaded curriculum to address dehumanizing trends in medicine. This article argues that rhetorical scholars can align with medical humanities’ initiatives and uniquely contribute to health curriculum. Drawing on the author’s research on clinical simulation, the article discusses rhetorical methodologies, genre theory, and critical lenses as areas for pedagogical collaboration between rhetoricians and health practitioners.

Although compositionists recognize that student talk plays an important role in learning to write, there is limited understanding of how students use conversational moves to collaboratively build knowledge about writing across contexts. This article reports on a study of focus group conversations involving first-year students in a cohort program. Our analysis identified two patterns of group conversation among students: “co-telling” and “co-constructing,” with the latter leading to more complex writing knowledge. We also used Beaufort’s domains of writing knowledge to examine how co-constructing conversations supported students in abstracting knowledge beyond a single classroom context and in negotiating local constraints. Our findings suggest that co-constructing is a valuable process that invites students to do the necessary work of remaking their knowledge for local use. Ultimately, our analysis of the role of student conversation in the construction of writing knowledge contributes to our understanding of the myriad activities that surround transfer of learning.