This article offers an example of how to use embodied learning effectively in online education. The discussed assignment is designed for classes in rhetoric, visual communication, or public memory, and places pedagogical research in conversation with scholarship in visual, aesthetic, and rhetorical communication. This type of digital aesthetic…

This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls "procedural feminism," or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will…

If, as I argue, student-to-student peer review is animated by "improvement imperatives" that make peer review a form of what Lauren Berlant calls "cruel optimism," then rhetoric and composition will need to imagine theories and structures for peer review that do not repeat cruel attachments. I offer slow peer review as a…

This essay describes a prison-university writing exchange that culminated in the collection of audio and written essays "Why I Write" (http://www.why-i-write.com) and offers "writing to listen" as a strategy for communicating and listening across institutional and social boundaries. I argue that sound reveals the material…

Epideictic rhetoric reifies and reshapes the shared values of a community, and in this article, I reread William E. Coles Jr.'s "The Plural I" as showing forth a classroom built upon epideictic rhetoric, his own epideictic pedagogy asking that teachers of writing engage student work not expecting to be persuaded but as observers of…

Building on studies of alternative rhetorics, this article envisions personal writing pedagogy as a relational endeavor that fosters rhetorical alliances among disparate communities. I detail a particular course design through which "personal reflection" becomes a means of enacting more radical forms of belonging.

Scholars and teachers often focus only on alphabetic texts in the classroom (Palmeri; Alexander and Rhodes; Jewitt; Selfe; Shipka); however, we do our students a disservice if we do not prepare them to compose with and understand the rhetorical consequences of using a variety of modes. In this article, I argue that we need to teach our students to…

This article advances film as worthy of rhetorical inquiry and deserving of more sustained attention in the advanced composition classroom. The first section identifies various approaches to the "language" of film, which can be adopted to navigate the technical, rhetorical, and cultural concerns needed to compose informed multimodal…

In first-year writing (FYW), instructors want students to understand how reading texts in particular ways affects how and what they learn and, in turn, how and what they might communicate to their own readers. Because students tend to come to FYW predisposed to notice more visual aspects (e.g., headings, bulleted lists) than verbal aspects (e.g.,…

This article outlines a three-part pedagogy capable of responding to the risks, rewards, and headaches associated with public rhetoric and writing. To demonstrate the purchase of this pedagogy, I revisit one of the oldest and most misunderstood public rhetoric and writing assignments: the letter-to-the-editor assignment.

This article explores how critical thinking activities and assignments can function to enhance students' ethical awareness and sense of civic responsibility. Employing Levinas's Other-centered theory of ethics, Burke's notion of "the paradox of substance", and Murray's concept of "a rhetoric of disruption", this article…

Just as WAC pedagogy and writing studies both stress the ways that writing and communication practices can act as both heuristics and products of genre-based, discipline- specific knowledge, in much the same way, performance, too, can be used as a heuristic and as a product and should be more fully explored in WAC theory and pedagogy. This article…

This article reviews the deeply conflicted literature on learning transfer, especially as it applies to rhetorical knowledge and skill. It then describes a study in which six students are followed through their first co-op work term to learn about which resources they draw on as they enter a new environment of professional writing. It suggests…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning to…