Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing these creative habits of mind empowers students to explore and invent solutions to complex, multidimensional problems across the broad range of their disciplinary, professional, and civic lives.

The Rise of Writing: Redefining Mass Literacy, by Deborah Brandt. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2015. 196 pages. $29.99 (paper).Literacy, Economy, and Power: Writing and Research after Literacy in Ameri...

The pages of Technical Communication Quarterly are devoted to exploring literacy activities and knowledge production in 21st-century organizations and to suggesting what technical communication edu...

President Bush’s National Security Language Initiative focuses narrowly on gearing language education to security and military needs. English educators should work with their counterparts in foreign language departments to promote a broader view, one that encourages study of the multiple language groups that currently exist within the United States.

Kenneth Burke claimed in 1952 that he viewed his rhetorical theory and critical method as a "Bennington Project," a sign that he attributed a measure of his intellectual success to teaching at pragmatist-inspired Bennington College. Studying Burke's teaching at Bennington can help scholars to better understand his theory and method because Burke taught undergraduates his own critical reading practices, ones that he believed heightened students' awareness of terministic screens and deepened their appreciation for the consequences of human symbol-use. Burke's teaching practices and his comments on student essays reveal that he taught indexing and charting to his undergraduates because he believed everyone can and should use them throughout their lives to examine—and, when necessary, revise—the often unexpressed assumptions that propel so much human activity toward competition and, ultimately, physical and social destruction.

This essay examines a Brooklyn College–based research collective that placed African American languages and cultures at the center of the composition curriculum. Recovering such pedagogies challenges the perception of the CCCC’s 1974 “Students’ Right to Their Own Language” resolution as a progressive theory divorced from the everyday practices and politics of the composition classroom.