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.

Those of us who work at universities are accustomed to the way diversity and inclusion initiatives become institutionalized. Internal grant applications ask how the proposed research is relevant to a university's mission in relation to diversity; required online surveys are distributed to assure that faculty and staff understand accessibility guidelines; task forces, committees, and planning groups articulate goals related to diversity and inclusion. The application of these rhetorical acts in daily academic life undulates, sometimes visible and meaningful, other times fading into the scenery, becoming background to seemingly more pressing matters. We address these questions as they relate to scholarly publishing in rhetoric and composition journals, questions that affect editors and authors as well as those who teach and study in the field. As editorial team members of Composition Studies, a biannual independent print journal, we detail strategies for creating a home for diversity in our field.

While reading research often collapses or creates a binary between print and digital reading, this article argues that this approach ignores the overlap between the reading strategies we use when reading both print and digital texts. Using a genre-based approach to digital reading, this article proposes that greater attention to students' reading practices and to the genres (including conventions and contexts) students read will help them become more purposeful readers in our classrooms.

Within community literacy scholarship, ecological perspectives are used to characterize the literacy and language practices of various groups.Director of the Lancaster Literacy Research Centre, David Barton draws from biology to theorize ecology as the study of "the interrelationship of an area of human activity and its environment.It is concerned with how the activity-literacy in this case-is part of the environment and at the same time influences and is influenced by the environment" (29).The reciprocal nature of ecologies, and the way they account for the distribution, influence, and movement of organisms within and between environments makes ecology an ideal term for characterizing the relationships among groups, technologies, and cultures that influence the ways individuals learn, communicate, and interact with one another.In this keyword essay, I will highlight the appropriateness of ecology for describing networked communication and literacy practices, as well as offer an overview of how compositionists and community literacy practitioners have used ecological approaches in the work they do.It is necessary here to distinguish an ecological approach from one that is exclusively environmental.In 1989, environmentalist David Orr defined ecological literacy as "the demanding capacity to distinguish between health and disease in natural systems and to understand their relation to health and disease in human ones; knowledge of this sort is best acquired out of doors" (334).Ecological literacy in this respect is concerned with reading the natural environment.Orr's call for increased environmental awareness and attention to the ways humans impact environments remains increasingly urgent.However, this keyword essay focuses instead on how scholars and practitioners have adopted ecological metaphors to characterize literacy environments.The ecological approach I examine aligns more closely with that of ecocomposition theories than those of the ecological literacy Orr defines.In their Natural Discourse: Toward Ecocomposition, Sid Dobrin and Christian Weisser define ecocomposition as "the study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (seeking, writing, and thinking)" (6).Dobrin and Weisser's approach does not exclude environmental concerns but instead makes the role of language and discourse central in making those concerns visible.As Rhonda Davis suggests in her discussion of ecocomposition and community literacy, "while ecological literacy and the pedagogical approaches that result do not focus exclusively on environmental concerns, they have the potential to expand participants' awareness of such concerns" (80).