While much of the work on increasing diversity of U.S. schools has focused on urban and suburban contexts, rural schools and communities have seen an influx of multilingual immigrant and migrant students. Using qualitative data collected in English classrooms at two different rural high schools as part of a larger study, this article profiles two rural ELA teachers who stood out as unique supporters of their multilingual students’ literacy development. These profiles are contextualized in broader debates in writing studies about valuating language diversity and avoiding form-based approaches in instruction. In concluding comments, the author explores how these teachers don’t neatly fit categorizations of effective writing teachers and argues that writing researchers need to work across increasingly polarized divides to help make rural schools more inclusive spaces for linguistically diverse students.

Student retention and persistence is increasingly prioritized by state and local policies as well as national scorecards and rankings—however, the policies that politicians and administrators undertake to improve university metrics tend to ignore the realities faced by students at the heart of our institutions. Drawing on a survey/interview project involving 67 students repeating first-year writing classes at a diverse institution in the Southwestern US, this article takes a student-centered approach to understand the reasons they drop first-year writing, such as health concerns, lack of engagement with the curriculum, and their incompatibility with online learning or poorly taught online classes. In making recommendations to address the challenges students face, the author calls on writing teachers and administrators to take a more activist stance in their roles, by engaging in actions such as pushing back against exploitative working conditions, recognizing the racism inherent in strict attendance policies, drawing on work from directed self-placement to better guide students when considering online writing classes, and advocating for readings and curricular choices that take into account the diversity of students in writing programs.

The increasing diversity of US higher education has brought greater language diversity to institutions nationwide. While writing studies researchers have increasingly paid attention to the linguistic diversity of student writers, little attention has been paid to the growing numbers of writing teachers who speak English as a second language. This article reports on a study in which we surveyed seventy-eight nonnative English-speaking instructors and conducted follow-up interviews with eleven of them. Following a presentation of the survey data and profiles of selected interviewees, we recommend ways of working with instructors and students in order to decrease language prejudices and better facilitate the professional development of nonnative English-speaking teachers in writing programs.

A concerned group of L2 professionals write an open letter to express their concern that the terms “L2 writing” and “translingual writing” have become almost interchangeable in—writing studies publications and conferences and further argue that much will be lost if “translingual writing” replaces “L2 writing.” Each are distinct areas of research and—pedagogy: L2 writing is a more technical description applied to writing in a language acquired later in life, while translingual writing describes an orientation to language—difference. Without attention to the distinct contributions made by each field, L2 scholarship becomes marginalized in publications, conferences, and hiring practices. The letter—authors and endorsers encourage writing studies editors and organization leaders to recognize and understand the difference between the fields so as to ensure a strong and—enduring future for L2 scholarship.—

Reporting on a year-and-a-half-long study of Latina/Latino multilingual students transitioning from high school to a community college or university on the US-Mexico border, this article explores how writing instruction was shaped across the three institutional locations by a variety of internal and external forces such as standardized testing pressures, resource disparities, and individual instructors. In concluding comments, the author suggests ways for composition teachers, researchers, and administrators to build connections between different locations of writing and facilitate student transitions between institutions.