This article reviews and responds to recent (re)turns to and reconceptualizations of contract grading in the teaching of writing. I reflect on my own experience using contract grading in a variety of pedagogical contexts, and how this experience complicates scholarship on contract grading (now rebranded as labor-based grading and engagement-based…

In 2018, we received state funding for 'curriculum reform' to design an academic literacy course that would orient students to legitimate ways of reading and writing in the academy while fostering critical citizenship. Thus, drawing on the view of literacy as a social practice, the course design was shaped around relatable content, in this case,…

This article presents the findings of a study in which college freshman reflected on the process of writing a literacy narrative and considered the impact of such writing on their narrative identities. The author synthesizes existing scholarship on literacy narratives, discusses the methodology of interpretive phenomenological analysis utilized,…

This article explores hospitality as a theoretical framework for valuing emotional engagement and rhetorical listening in writing center consultations, challenging traditional views that prioritize rationality and detachment. Anchored in a university writing center, the study investigates how writing tutors engage with writers, adopting…

This article presents a constructivist writing placement framework, developed from the study of two pilot iterations of a local writing placement mechanism at a large public research university. Through preliminary analysis of data from these pilots, we present a model of constructivist writing placement and demonstrate how it helps move…

Through surveys and focus group conversations, we studied students' experiences with instruction in writing-intensive (WI) courses at our urban R1 university and their awareness of and attitudes about linguistic diversity. Specifically, we have explored discrepancies between students' experiences with languaging, language judgment, and our…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) models are increasingly able to produce and combine sophisticated text, image, and audio. These advancements are challenging composers and teachers, as they work to reimagine and resist ways that composition and creative work are changing. This paper reports on one analysis in a larger study on multimodal…

This study aims to understand how bilingual college students constructed literacy spaces across their lives rather than an in-school/out-of-school dichotomy. Drawing on Lefebvre's (1991) spatial triad as a lens to examine the participants' spatial literacy practices, the findings show that some participants repurposed planned spaces into literacy…

Expository writing is a highly valued employability skill (Finley, 2023) and a necessary competency for college students to master due to its often-used format within college assignments (Schillings et al., 2023). As students in postsecondary education programs for students with intellectual and developmental disabilities attend traditional…

We propose inviting the body into the university writing process through somatic pedagogical practices. This study investigates an effort to write from our body and through our body in a course where students used the body as a site of creation. Challenging mind-body dualism and the erasure of bodily ways of knowing, students participated in…

This mixed-methods study sought to better understand how confidence in writing and race interact as factors within writing centers. Students utilizing our writing center were asked to provide data about racial identity and writing confidence both when registering with the writing center and when completing postsession surveys. From this data, we…

This article reports the findings and implications of a qualitative exploratory study of writing composition instructors' approaches to teaching research skills and designing research assignments. The authors present the common learning goals, instructional approaches, and research teaching challenges that surfaced through semi-structured,…

Background: A common approach to assessing students' integrated understanding of multiple documents is to analyse their post-reading written reports. This study investigated to what extent writing self-efficacy directly and indirectly (via integrative processing) contributed to multiple-document comprehension as assessed with an integrative…

This article presents a curated collection of nine teaching innovations presented at the Association for Business Communication 89th conference in the "oil capital of the world," Tulsa, Oklahoma, as well as online, in October 2024. Many of the MFA presenters demonstrated how AI can be used, integrated, and analyzed in business…

What if, instead of viewing legislators as distant or indirect audiences for public writing, we shifted to engage them as community partners, collaborating in a mutually beneficial relationship to develop fresh policy ideas from voices that are often missing in lawmaking? This article tells the story of a partnership between a college composition…