Despite a rapid growth in student interest, the Rhetoric and Composition minor at the College of the Holy Cross faces staffing challenges due to its placement in an interdisciplinary center but reliance on faculty lines in English. In an attempt to address these challenges, we sought to develop a new gateway course to the minor that was deeply…

Learning to teach writing remains challenging for both student instructors and the experienced faculty, staff, and other professionals who mentor them. Many institutions have created local repositories of teaching-related materials such as syllabi and assignments, and some national efforts have also attempted to facilitate sharing resources to…

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,…

Higher education has witnessed a rapid increase in conversations about how AI text generators will impact teaching and learning. To begin this conversation in the pages of JFD, we have curated initial perspectives here focused on how to approach faculty development as we enter another new era of higher education. [Note: The page range (3-8) shown…

Like many of its contemporaries across the state, North Central Texas College's (NCTC) English and math faculty were committed to the promise of corequisite education and its students' success as outlined by the Dana Center, but they also understood the obstacles to implementing, assessing, and scaling its corequisite courses. NCTC's English and…

The Accessibility Working Group (AWG) aims to create a collaborative culture of access within our group, our composition program, and our larger professional and pedagogical communities. To create a culture of access, participants need to be collaborative members of a community to continuously negotiate access needs that change over time. The AWG…

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…

Gateway courses are foundational, college-level courses that apply to a student's program of study or to a college's general education requirements. These courses are typically considered first-year or lower-division courses and serve as a basis for more advanced studies. Research has demonstrated that completing gateway courses in two key…