Writing about writing (WAW) pedagogy is becoming a dominant approach to teaching writing, yet lacks descriptive empirical studies. In response to this deficit, we surveyed postsecondary instructors using WAW in the US and Canada to discover how they define WAW conceptually (what they think) and operationally (what they do). We used grounded theory…

This essay illuminates adaptable and multimodal ways of teaching with etymology and idiomatic origin stories in the composition classroom. I model my pedagogical approach with a topic central to my rhetorical research--pigeons in histories of human communication--and the rich etymologically-linked concepts of homing in, pigeonholing, and…

Within the rhetoric and composition literature, liberal and liberalism often denote unsophisticated theory and insufficiently progressive practice. I argue that such a view distorts the liberal tradition. Liberalism is, in fact, a potent reform project deeply connected to university writing instruction. During our field's social turn of the 1980s,…

This article argues that we are living in a climate where trauma is taxing students and teachers alike. In order to teach and learn in this moment, we recommend and explore a variety of contemplative practices to help teach awareness and kind attention. Some of these practices involve writing and others don't, as writing itself can be a source of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the troubling fact that many students struggle to pay attention to literacy learning while they are in situations of extreme duress. This duress did not begin with pandemic, nor will it end with it. Neither is duress distributed at random; those negatively affected by the nation's prejudices, as a general rule,…

The medium of instruction is English in all universities in Singapore. Typically, in engineering, science, and technology degree programmes, academic writing is taught through one or two distinct or 'stand-alone' modules delivered in the first year of students' undergraduate programmes to help them cope with the writing needs of assignments in…

This article reports on findings from a hyperlocal programmatic survey on writing instructors' experiences in moving teaching online during the coronavirus pandemic. It highlights key challenges instructors reported, including a need for strategies addressing increased workload; a desire for greater experience with pedagogy- rather than…

This article develops a pedagogical approach to increase students' ability to locate and (re-)create publics for the issues about which they care most. By drawing Rhetorical Genre Studies into public sphere theories, this approach blurs the boundaries between widely-dispersed genres (those with large readerships across communities) and…

The concept 'literacy crisis' has framed ChatGPT's popularity, its rapid evolution, and its seemingly sophisticated language and knowledge performance. The concept helps scholars and teachers easily enter conversations about artificial intelligence (AI) text generation technologies and how they transform the notions of authorship, research, labor,…

While composition research recognizes the importance of the body and bodily knowledge, literacy instruction, especially as relayed in writing textbooks, often disembodies the material practice of reading. This move, in turn, contributes to normative assumptions about students' corporeal reading experiences. Drawing together scholarship on…

The Writing Program (WP) at Saint Louis University has striven to create a course that draws on a richer disciplinary understanding of writing and rhetoric. The standard course structure, from which instructors are asked to fashion their own syllabi, asks students to pursue a scaffolded semester-long project. As they pursue the scaffolded…

As writing pedagogy gains distinct footholds in university classrooms in India, it is worth retracing some of its steps to the shaping influence of composition pedagogies in the United States. In this article, the authors recount their experiences of using the concept of conversation to enable academic writing in their classrooms. Each narrative…

Arguing for teaching essay structure through slow writing and reading as a writer (RAAW), this article explains a measured-pace pedagogy. It offers a brief history of the concern about organization in writing instruction; defines slow writing and RAAW; details their components; offers a rationale for this guided workshop approach; and describes,…

Composition studies often permits the capacious use of terminology, wherein projects (or people) are defined in terms of a receptacle into which all multilingual, translingual, transnational, international, global, cultural/diversity/difference specialties are thrown and often conflated. Because terminological fuzziness can be confusing and is…

This essay proposes a pedagogy for food writing that is not dependent on decoding or interpretative practices. Instead, writers compose by juxtaposing personal writing with research around some item or issue that might seem insignificant or minor. A minor exigence--in this case, eating and cooking falafel--can be explored so that a larger…