A thriving body of literature has identified student voice as being vital to education and literacy development. However, the understanding of multimodal student voice representation is still modest in literacy-based pedagogical practices. Thus, this article presents a study that examined the development of students' multimodal authoring through…

A growing body of academic literacies research has enhanced our understanding of university writing as contested, institutionally situated practice with important consequences, particularly for students as they learn to negotiate the writing demands of university study. Less empirical attention has been paid to the practices of subject academics…

While "transfer" has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how…

The author integrates work from cognitive and developmental psychology with studies in writing in order to explain why the quality of student writing sometimes appears to regress to earlier or less proficient levels. Insights from this combined analysis are applied to explain how and why to use specific Writing Across the Curriculum strategies to…

Forced to cope with a growing population of students under-prepared for college writing, a large community college in northern Texas engaged in a transformative redesign of its developmental writing sequence, streamlining two courses, various student support services, and technology applications to boost student success, retention, and…

As students increasingly rely on digital media to locate information, composition instructors must incorporate into writing instruction critical evaluation of and reflection on students' use of Web content. A growing problem in the composition class is underdeveloped critical digital literacy skills. To become fully literate, students need more…

The current higher education climate seems to be demanding increasing levels of written output from doctoral researchers during candidature. In this context this study employed an online questionnaire, individual interviews and focus group discussions to collect information on the challenges and successes of doctoral writing. It was found that…

In this paper I consider one aspect of how student writing is supported in the university. I focus on the use of the "writing frame", questioning its status as a vehicle for facilitating student voice, and in the process questioning how that notion is itself understood. I illustrate this by using examples from the story of the 1944 Hollywood film…

This article builds on the author's previous research on student learning journals to explore how their use can give students a "space" to engage meaningfully and in their own way with their university work. Drawing on the psychoanalytical concept of transitional space and on notions of narrative, it is argued that the student learning journal can…

This article addresses the issue of basic writing, demonstrating how one university's basic writing program acts as a steward of writing. The assumption that basic writers only consume resources rather than contribute to academic excellence is rejected. What links the author responses to this issue is a publication of student writing entitled…

This paper defines the concept of "improvement infrastructure" and "educational capital" for education, and it uses the case of the National Writing Project to develop an extended, data-based illustration of the design and generativeness of an improvement infrastructure. Since 1983 there have been multiple "waves" of…

Raises questions about the epistemology inherent in composition studies, especially with regard to the issue of modeling. Investigates the usefulness and implications of modeling theory for contemporary composition study. Provides a context for discovering what it means to construct models of writing processes. (HB)

Describes a writing assignment useful for high school and college students in which students ponder, discuss, and write about collecting, collectors, and the human impulse to collect. Includes some samples of student writing. (SR)

Describes a teaching method which can be used in college level sociology classes to improve student writing. The teacher provides students with concrete examples of well-written work by other students in the class to compare with their own. The example clearly illustrates what the teacher expects from the students. (AM)

Considers how over 10 years of teaching first-year composition, more than two-thirds of the authors' students have elected to write about things that have caused them sorrow, about the deaths of loved ones, about the deaths of neighbors, even of hope itself. Composes a set of "meditations" - brief essays in which the authors try to understand…