Topics and resources from honors education are used to teach argumentation in writing composition. The author discusses efficacies for increasing student awareness of, and reflection on, issues in honors education while engaging first-year students in honors issues that directly affect their lives.

This program profile focuses on the collective work and beginning stages of moving a very large writing program from default orientations of predominantly white institutions (PWI) to practices responsive to Hispanic-serving institution (HSI) opportunities over a five-year period. Throughout this profile, I narrate how faculty of all ranks within…

This paper examines the use of ChatGPT as an educational tool to teach writing and revision in a first-semester writing course in Fall 2023 at a regional university. The course used ChatGPT as a classroom model to show students how to ethically use generative AI as part of their writing and revision process. One-on-one conferences about student…

The two-year institution where I teach first-year composition serves multilingual students who excel, keep pace, or fall behind. In addition to these students, there are one or two whom I identify as "promising but struggling multilinguals." While this small but everpresent contingent attend regularly, submit work somewhat consistently,…

Authors describe course-embedded research experiences at a diverse, rural, regional university. Emphasizing the capacity for conventional teaching and learning in first-year honors composition, these experiences provide relationship-rich education through faculty and peer mentorships. Positing that first-year honors composition is undervalued as a…

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…

In this article, the author describes the curriculum of a freshman composition class for socially marginalized students that uses an imaginative service-learning component to nurture agency and voice.

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…

Student writers labeled "underprepared" by colleges often have trouble imagining themselves as scholars. Challenges these students routinely encounter include difficulty forming original insights and translating ideas to the page. Although the usage of the term "underprepared" varies across institutional contexts, the…

This essay describes writing and conversations that took place in my First Year Writing class at St. John's University in Queens, New York. I analyze student responses to my invitation to consider more deeply--and wield more consciously--the language resources they bring into classrooms. I seek to understand the potential for their often deeply…

The course described in this article is a contextualized version of ENGL 1100 Composition I, a first year writing (FYW) course, designed specifically for students who declare majors in business and hospitality services programs to study composition in the context of their majors and future professions. This version of ENGL 1100 counts for FYW…

The author argues that significant inroads in the destigmatization of basic writing courses and students can be made when students are asked to choose not only which FYW course they believe best meets their needs (directed self-placement, or DSP) but also to choose from among a variety of courses (including corequisite courses, particularly those…

The first year writing "jumbo" is a large enrollment composition course with ninety students and nine embedded writing mentors. The "jumbo" structure "emerged from an 'entanglement' of the institutional environment and intentional innovation" (Jaxon). Currently taught with a human rights focus, but with other…

While Writing Studies scholars have embraced research on multilingualism, writing scholars have not developed program assessment methods that are informed by that scholarship. This profile describes a program assessment design that was informed by research on multilingualism, super-diversity, and consequential validity. This design included…

This article describes the pilot year of a new model for information literacy instruction in first-year composition classes at the University of New Mexico. The flipped classroom model, the Association of College and Research Libraries "Framework for Information Literacy in Higher Education," and challenges to library staffing sparked…