In the best of times, students training to be writing center consultants are empowered to work creatively with writers and professors as part of an integrated enterprise that contributes to teaching and learning on their campuses. In the worst of times, students training to be writing center consultants are disempowered, caught between faculty and…

In her recent "Teaching English in the Two-Year College" ("TETYC") article, Denise Marchionda argues for a grading system in her first-year writing course that turns over responsibility to students for earning grades. The approach, which she calls "the point-by-point grading system," is a variation on a contract grading approach in which each…

Andrea Lunsford and Karen Lunsford conclude "Mistakes Are a Fact of Life: A National Comparative Study," a discussion of their research project exploring patterns of formal grammar and usage error in first-year writing, with an invitation to "conduct a local version of this study." The author was eager to accept their invitation; learning and…

An emphasis on visual rhetoric can be incorporated into a variety of classrooms. This article illustrates teaching visual rhetoric to first-year composition students via interpretation and analysis through a trip to a local art museum for the first essay assignment and through an exploration of photography for the second essay assignment. In the…

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…

Each semester the author asks her first-year composition students to write a profile essay. The assignment, based on one in "St Martin's Guide to Writing," requires that students develop a thesis ("dominant impression" or "angle") about a place that they visit. The author is convinced that this essay is one of the most valuable and challenging…

In this article, the author shares how efficient and effective Google Documents is for faculty seeking to engage students in inquiry-based, emergent, and primary research in first-year composition courses. The specific appeal of Google Documents is that it occupies a space between "open source"--defined by the Open Source Initiative as "free,…

Given the current emphasis on disciplinary discourses, it's not surprising that so little recent attention has been devoted to identifying conventions that are universal in academic discourse. In this essay, the author argues that there are shared features that unite academic writing, and that by introducing these features to first-year students…

While many freshman composition textbooks offer cursory instruction on how to conduct field research, very little information exists on teaching undergraduates field research methods. Such instruction often occurs during graduate school. However, in order to become polished writers and researchers, and to see firsthand how research enhances…

In this article, the authors discuss what works for them in their first-year composition classes. In order to promote critical thinking and goal setting within her developmental writing and first-year composition classes, Susan Plachta begins their first class session by completing the standard introductions and syllabus discussions and finishes…

Although students must understand the rhetorical medium that they use to present their proposals to their fellow classmates, they must also understand how audiences shape the rhetorical medium and shape how they create texts. Surveying audience members can help students figure out the best strategies to present their proposals and, in doing so,…

This article presents a consideration of how students' existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools. It addresses one aspect of the ongoing pedagogical struggle with new…

Rhetorically challenging literature can be made to serve the purposes of first-year composition in new ways. Excerpts from the novels of Marcel Proust that focus on the author's characteristic scrutinizing, reflexive attention to style work successfully as models for assisting writers in acquiring the habits of reading and re-reading, and of…

This article describes how the author applied principles of universal design to hybrid course materials to increase student understanding and, ultimately, success. Pulling the three principles of universal design--consistency, color, and icon representation--into the author's Blackboard course allowed her to change the types of reading skills…

This article presents the techniques used by six teachers for their writing classes. To help her students get their topics on paper, Carrie DuPre instructs her students to call themselves on their cellphones and leave themselves a message on voice mail. Samm Erickson asks his students with laptops to be "the researchers" in their literature class.…