This narrative study explored the ways in which two Black male undergraduate students experienced and situated their identity in their first-year composition (FYC) courses. The study sought to reveal how the participants experienced stereotype threat in both the classroom and larger community and the ways in which this perceived threat impacted…

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic required shifting information literacy instruction from face-to-face to online formats at the University Libraries of the University of South Dakota. This case study narrates how the instructional team there introduced innovations into a Freshman Writing course that enabled instrumental (that is, goal-oriented)…

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…

Over the past few decades, standards-based educational reforms in the U.S. have sought to enhance students' college and career readiness. The most recent wave of such reforms has emphasized writing as an essential aspect of college readiness and a 21st century skill necessary for success in the workplace. A common feature of these conversations…

Despite decades of increasing assessment activity in higher education, the literature provides few examples of assessment leading to improved student learning (Banta & Blaich, 2011). The simple model for learning improvement provides an avenue for linking assessment efforts with faculty development and pedagogical changes in order to increase…

Researchers have examined many strategies for instructor preparation, but the role of common textbooks has received little attention, despite Yancey listing them as an essential feature to consider in developing instructor preparation. This case study examines the impact of the custom common textbook on graduate and professional instructors in a…

This article proposes a pedagogy of well-being derived from the design of a high-impact practice (HIP) ePortfolio assignment. Research findings from a two-year pilot study revealed a recurrent trend that raised attention to the socio-psychological dimension that ePortfolios have on student learning and development. Teaching and researching during…

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…

This dissertation has a couple of purposes: (1) to examine what writing knowledge and digital experiences are transferred/fail to be transferred to digital writing in a first-year writing class, and (2) to explore how writing knowledge, digital literacy, and students' prior writing experiences impact students' transfer between different activity…

This dissertation is motivated by the limits of current conceptualizations of college transition-- the metaphorical bridges, pathways, and tracks to college that represent a linear trajectory upheld by normative educational progress narratives often oriented toward Eurocentric, English-dominant, text-based standards for academic writing and…

This paper addresses the pedagogical implications of incorporating ChatGPT into the college English classroom specifically and, more broadly, into any college course with a focus on writing and research. Historically, advances in technology in the college classroom have characteristically promoted two juxtaposed reactions: relief and anxiety.…

This case study reflects on a long-term collaborative partnership between librarians and writing program administrators to plan, build, implement, and significantly revise two course-specific online learning modules. Of particular interest are contrasts between phase-delineated instructional systems design frameworks, such as ADDIE, and the often…

A perennial problem for many first-year composition (FYC) instructors is deciding what curricular materials to use to teach their students about rhetoric and composition and how to use those resources to enable their students to practice and hone their writing skills. This dissertation argues that humor writing is a viable option as it offers…

Metadiscourse comprises the linguistic resources used by writers to organize texts, engage readers, project stances towards their texts or readers, or position themselves in relation to readers (e.g. "I suggest," "however," "for example," "perhaps," "it is clear that," "interesting").…

This study explores the relationship between the dispositions toward research that writing teachers convey through their assignments and those that their students express in their reflective writing. We applied the term "problem-exploring" to a set of dispositions described by the ACRL Framework and coded each clause of instructor…