A veteran writing teacher asks the question—What keeps teaching fresh and new?—and discovers, in the process of writing a teaching narrative, how her teaching voice and writing voice intertwine, both in the classroom and on the page.

By examining in turn a son’s craft project, a family photograph, and an image of tectonic plates, the authors demonstrate how objects can elicit rhetorical invention.

Contributors to this symposium recall and reflect on changes of mind they have experienced, noting the relationship of these to larger concerns of English studies as a profession.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series “an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

This is the second installment in the Re-Visions series’ an occasional series for which I invite essays that reconsider important work previously published in the pages of CCC. The full text of Nancy Sommers’s “Responding to Student Writing” (CCC, May 1982, 148–56) is available at www.inventio.us/ccc.

These essays are based on a session called “Stories from the Field” at the 2004 meetings of the Conference on College Composition and Communication.

Why do some students prosper as college writers, moving forward with their writing, while others lose interest? In this essay we explore some of the paradoxes of writing development by focusing on the central role the freshman year plays in this development. We argue that students who make the greatest gains as writers throughout college (1) initially accept their status as novices and (2) see in writing a larger purpose than fulfilling an assignment. Based on the evidence of our longitudinal study, we conclude that the story of the freshman year is not one of dramatic changes on paper; it is the story of changes within the writers themselves.

Compares 20 years of teaching college writing (and reading countless drafts of student papers) to an immigrant father’s working 40 years in the family store in Terre Haute, Indiana (and selling 350,000 coats).

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