By incorporating visual mapping into students' thinking and writing processes, a narrative assignment in geo-literacy creates a reflective and agency-based learning experience for student writers in a first-year honors seminar.

Responding to pervasive mental and physical stresses of the COVID-19 crisis, the author assigns first-year students various routine wellness practices for one hour each week along with requisite reflective writing exercises. Student expectations, experiences, and outcomes are presented.

Students who understand their writing process and see themselves as writers are more likely to successfully tackle unfamiliar genres and writing tasks. In this self-study, a college English professor and two first-year college students make a case for an extended-metaphor assignment that helps students build stronger identities as writers.…

Student writers labeled "underprepared" by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term "underprepared" varies across institutional contexts, the…

The Xreading website provides students with access to an extensive virtual library of graded readers. Teachers can then use it to keep track of which titles the students access, the total number of words they read, their reading speed, and also whether they have completed post-reading quizzes. However, an overreliance on monitoring student…

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university's…

For over four years, students enrolled in remedial writing classes who attended eight writing center tutorials directly linked to their assignments had an average pass rate of 95.6 percent, whereas students who did not attend any writing center tutorials had an average pass rate of 39.4 percent. These correlations are just that--correlations that…

In a world that is fraught with a troubling political climate, Lu believes it is especially important that teachers provide guidance to students not only for their academic endeavors but also for their understanding of the complexities in language and the social implications of language varieties. With such belief in mind, she asks: How can…

Leading scientific organizations, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science, have called for innovative approaches to student learning that incorporate "real-world examples". Drawing on writing-to-learn theory, innovative writing projects can be used when they build upon writing skills acquired from other disciplines…

We describe a pair of fully integrated courses designed to teach biology to non-majors in a manner that connects authentically to the liberal arts. The co-taught courses were organized around the question: What does it mean to be human? Students investigated this question in the context of three topics: dis/ability, race, and sex and gender. In…

In this paper, a practical course for listening, speaking, reading and writing was designed using authentic video material. The aim of this paper is to offer tools to the TEFL teacher in order to design new course materials using video material. The development procedure is explained in detail, and the underpinning main theories are also…

Whether novice or experienced, writers must come to terms with the daunting task of filling up a blank page, or screen, in an effort to produce writing. Student writers are no different. They enter teachers' classes having confronted similar difficulties with discovering what it is they want to say. In seeking to help students, they devote…

Students often enter community college with little proficiency in writing. The authors of this paper share a series of writing assignments designed to help students develop writing and critical thinking abilities throughout their community college experience. The first is a series of relatively low-stakes exercises aimed at helping beginning…

This article presents a pedagogical model for a sequence of first-year composition (FYC) assignments that encourages students' first-hand interpretations as insiders into the workings of educational meritocracy. I focus on how students negotiate the personal statement, an institutionally privileged genre for the discovery and definition of…

In "Funds of Knowledge: Theorizing Practices in Households, Communities, and Classrooms" (Gonzalez, Moll, and Amanti x), a group of K-12 educators conducted ethnographic work on the home lives of their working-class students. With the premise that people are "competent, they have knowledge and their life experiences have given them…