Librarians and teachers encourage students to include expert perspectives in their research, but recent public discourse includes high-profile examples of experts being inconsistent or wrong, and recent studies suggest that public trust in experts is declining. Waning trust makes it difficult to teach information literacy: I can push students to…

English 299 is a two-unit credit/no credit elective, capped at fifteen students per section, intended to help first year composition students become more effective editors of their own writing. The class provides a hands-on environment to help students with sentence-level editing since the writing center on campus traditionally focuses on more…

This article describes the development and iterations of the English 0111 Composition Workshop-the Texas Success Initiative (TSI), at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). The TSI is a program that determines college-readiness standards in reading, writing, and math. The initial structure of English 0111 was similar to the structure used in…

Students often ask why technical writing and literature courses are in the same department. Many students also share that technical and professional communication (TPC) courses are new to them. They are more familiar with high school literature courses and first-year composition courses. And given these experiences, they are often unsure about why…

Acceleration reduces the time and/or course sequence in developmental education (DE), allowing students to enroll in gateway courses more quickly and/or co-enroll in the first college-level English course while taking the remedial course (Venezia & Hughes, 2013). Texarkana College (TC) piloted an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) with a 12:1…

Required first-year English courses present instructors with a challenge common in the humanities: How do we motivate students to engage in active reading rather than passively scroll down online guides? Introductory literature courses aim to develop students' critical thinking through close reading, analysis, and argumentation--skills demanding…

An essay's motive or research problem consists of the rhetorical moves illuminating why that essay matters--what puzzling elements of a primary source it resolves, which contradictions in the data it explains, or what gaps in the literature it fills. This article invites college instructors to dedicate some of their classroom time to teaching…

The search for a common model of instruction in first-year composition began in the 1960s when composition first began to separate from literature in college English departments. Because writing is essentially a methods course with no standard curriculum as one might find in physics or economics, common model has been elusive. A sign that…

In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract…

This author organized and taught the new ENG 09/111 classes at her college, as well as authoring the course text and workbook. English 09/111 offers a unique opportunity for students who are not quite ready for freshmen composition, but more than likely do not need an entire semester of developmental English. In this article, she details the…

Following a brief introduction to problem-based learning (PBL) as one type of highly-engaged pedagogy, this article examines how PBL activities in a first-year writing class and an upper-level professional writing and rhetoric class led students to develop rhetorical subjectivities. We conclude that highly engaged pedagogies, like PBL, that…

"Primary research counts, but we don't teach it." This was the sentiment, if these were not the actual words, of Lynee Lewis Gaillet in her critique of the traditional composition curriculum at the spring 2011 annual meeting of the College English Association in St. Petersburg. Gaillet proposes an alternative to furthering students' sometimes…

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…

If I can show my literature students how Nabokov can take them from familiar representations of experience to representations of less familiar experiences, from a knowledge of the given world to an understanding of the world of the imagination, then, it seems to me, I ought to be able find some way of showing my composition students how to do it…

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…