This article argues that rhetoric-focused first-year composition curricula may effectively use feminist revisions to rhetoric by employing a method the author calls "procedural feminism," or the distillation of feminist rhetorical practices and theory within curricular development that does not make feminism a topic students will…

Integrating design thinking methodology into writing courses can help students to develop creative approaches to problem definition and solution development. Tracing how students work with and through written genres common to design thinking reveals the possibilities and potential of learning new patterns of inquiry and argumentation. Developing…

For different reasons, composition studies and creative writing have resisted one another. Despite a historically thin discourse about creative writing within "College Composition and Communication," the relationship now merits attention. The two fields' common interest should link them in a richer, more coherent view of writing for each other,…

This article is a pragmatic, classroom-focused conversation about the teaching of writing among three teachers living in the United States and China, separated by many thousands of miles and many centuries of tradition and culture. Our focus here is on classroom concerns: actual student writing, assignment design, and assessment. We seek to…

With the "counterhegemonic figured communities" of HBCUs as our lens, our idea(l)s are shaped within specific rewritings of race, access, and education that move us toward a new framework. Alongside teaching narratives, we foreground collaborative revisions of identity, critical mentoring, and coalition-work as an alternative theory of pedagogy…

If college writing faculty wish to prepare students to engage in civic forums, then how might we prepare students to write and speak amid racial politics on our campuses? This article explores the college student discourse that shaped an interracial conflict at a public California university in 2002 and questions the "rhetoric of injury"…

This article presents the address given by Valenino at the sixty-first convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) held in Louisville on March 18, 2010. In her address, the author discusses the fourth "C" and how the last part of the title was inherited. As a teacher of composition and oral communication, the…

This article explores the literacy narratives of two "gamers" to demonstrate the kinds of literacy skills that many students actively involved in computer and video gaming are developing during their play. This analysis becomes part of a larger claim about the necessity of re-visioning the place of gaming in composition curricula.…

This article argues for and models an approach to writing program assessment that relies on study of the writing practices of program graduates as a way to inform revisions in curriculum and teaching practices. The article also examines how conducting such assessments can help nondisciplinary publics understand the nature of composition …

This article explores the need for alternative rhetorics that address systemic marginalization in American society and in the practice of rhetoric and composition. Specifically, three concepts from queer theory--"intersectionality," "copresence," and "disidentification"--are used as a basis for defining an alternative rhetoric. Then, in the bulk…

While writing pedagogy instructors assign their students a range of writing tasks, often as central or repeated features of the course, a crucial question has not yet been addressed: does it matter what new teachers write? If pedagogy students are being assigned writing in part to further develop their attitudes and practices related to teaching…

Academic institutions mediate online literacy practices in meaningful and significant ways. This essay explores the nature of that mediational process, using a visual-spatial method to map out and conceptualize dynamics and structures that have a bearing on the work of composition. A key argument is that composition teachers are intellectually…

This historical exploration tracks changes in rules concerning figurative language in nineteenth-century composition-rhetoric textbooks. The century's lessening of millennium-long restriction of the poetic allowed not only creative writing into academia but composition as well, as composition at its beginning was intertwined with creative writing.…

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…

After reading Kathryn Valentine's article that talked about her interaction with a Chinese student accused of plagiarism, the author was reminded of the effectiveness of student judicial boards. In this article, the author describes the benefits of having a student judicial board in fighting off plagiarism among students. She relates that although…