Tinkering is a longstanding material practice that has gained popularity in recent years as a learning strategy at numerous schools, camps, and makerspaces. This article seeks to establish in composition pedagogy tinkering's playful, exploratory ethos by introducing a practice called "critical-creative tinkering." In critical-creative…

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail…