This program profile describes a restructure of the PhD exam intended to enhance graduate-level instruction and advisement within the Rhetoric and Composition program at Georgia State University. We explain how a mix of institutional constraints and mentorship opportunities drove revisions to our doctoral exams and processes of doctoral advisement. Shifting away from a gatekeeping model to a heuristic-based approach, the revised exam is intended to decrease time-to-degree and to better support students’ job preparedness. Our reflections on these programmatic changes speak to the necessity of graduate programs in Rhetoric and Composition to not simply replicate the models of doctoral studies through which we were educated and to instead imagine new possibilities.

Honorable Mention for the 2019 Computers and Composition Distinguished Book Award Since its public launch in 2008, the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN) has collected approximately 7500 unique contributions of people’s literacy experiences from across the globe and from a variety of backgrounds. The Archive as Classroom: Pedagogical Approaches to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives showcases the variety of innovative ways educators have used this resource in classroom practice.

This article calls for the fields of literacy and composition studies to develop more progressive understandings of the aging process as not only biological, but as culturally and socially situated. Drawing from age studies, we investigate a contribution to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (www.thedaln.org) as an approach that complicates prevailing notions of aging and literacy. We argue that an age studies approach to literacy provides teacher-researchers and students a language to conceptualize aging together. The article concludes with specific recommendations for composition teacher-researchers to conduct oral history collection events with students and older adults.

This essay revisits two proposals for the abolition of compulsory freshman English: Thomas Lounsbury’s “Compulsory Composition in Colleges” in 1911 and Oscar James Campbell’s “The Failure of Freshman English” in 1939. It demonstrates how the New Literacy Studies provides a generative theoretical perspective from which to make more visible the assumptions, definitions, and attitudes about literacy that perpetuate the compulsory composition debate.

This study challenges the prevailing interpretations of the Greek rhetorical principle of kairos “saying the right thing at the right time” and attempts to draw on a more nuanced understanding of the term in order to provide generative re-readings of three Braddock Award–winning essays.