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AbstractThis article uses narrative inquiry to examine one instructor's experiences teaching two first-year writing classes, each one marked by different pedagogical choices. Themed with the topic of place and foregrounding the recurring example of Appalachia, the classes were nonetheless taught outside the region usually called Appalachia and to college students coming from, and identifying with, places other than Appalachia. This resulting data lends support for easing non-Appalachian-identified students into studying Appalachia as a rhetorical case and for encouraging students to explore various ways that textual representations of Appalachia reveal social and economic patterns noticeable in some form elsewhere.

This paper uses interviews with five publicly engaged, university-employed sociologists or folklorists in Houston to illuminate ways that rhetoric and composition scholars studying composition history can connect our research projects to nonacademic communities near our campuses. Drawing from covenantal ethics, it argues that we stand to re-see our work’s significance if, starting with general education classes like first-year composition, we share our research with members of nearby nonacademic communities and allow members of those communities to give our research new interpretations and uses.

This article reviews insights from place-based education and ecological models of writing to show how these theories can work together to shape locally focused composition pedagogies. From place-based education, the researcher takes an emphasis on physical specificity, and from ecological models of writing, the researcher takes an emphasis on discursive constructions of places. Both orientations to place are applied to an undergraduate professional writing class in Houston, an environment that illustrates vividly how unique physical changes interact with competing discourses in the present moment. The researcher describes a revision to a major writing assignment and discusses a need for assessment criteria that allow instructors to see the value of place-based and ecological models of writing.