Drawing from a network case study, this article traces enactments of a letter writing enquiry in one Kindergarten public school classroom in New York City, and in doing so, explores both the affordances and limitations of sociomaterial approaches employed by the researcher towards school literacies. Looking down at one morning meeting revealed…

Letters of recommendation from school counselors are required to apply to many selective colleges and universities. Still, relatively little is known about how this non-standardized component may affect equity in admissions. We use cutting-edge natural language processing techniques to algorithmically analyze a national dataset of over 600,000…

Best practices in mail survey design advise personalizing correspondence, but most research predates the use of address-based sampling (ABS) in which a householder's name either cannot be matched to an address or may be matched incorrectly. Further, recent evidence casts doubt on the effectiveness of personalization. The current study examines the…

In response to ongoing expansion of neoliberal ideology in democratic education, this essay details a classroom experiment that attempts to "redo," or "recraft" democracy. Recrafting democracy, in this context, takes shape in active efforts to compose an agonistic public sphere through a specific kind of "lettering a…

This article reports on assessments of business letters assigned to students in a business communication course. Assessments were performed by faculty in other disciplines and local business professionals, with each sampled assignment evaluated by one faculty and one business professional. Overall, the assessments by the two groups were similar in…

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827-1891) was an English educationist, artist, philanthropist, and feminist. Her personal correspondence is quite extensive, containing letters exchanged with her family, friends, and acquaintances. The bulk of her epistolary archive though consists of letters sent to her. Instead of viewing this fragmentation and…

This paper presents a practice-based enquiry exploring how photovoice methods can be adapted to visualise caring behaviours in multi-sited contexts, within an environment and peace education context. Photovoice methods typically have an exclusively single-sited focus that can neglect opportunities for empathy and cross-cultural engagement that…

As preparation for the rhetoric and composition job market becomes more readily available through multiple sources, some cover letter writers may need clarification on the well-meaning but perhaps conflicting responses to writing given to them by mentors from differing backgrounds, statuses, and epistemes. This article seeks to illuminate the…

This article shares three main lessons the author learned from her correspondence with Vivian Gussin Paley. Early on, the author wrote Mrs. Paley about how she discovered the meaning of story acting for visually impaired children. The act of sharing her thoughts with Mrs. Paley showed her the power of writing to promote thinking. Equally important…

Faculty receive requests for recommendations from their students every year. They want to support their students as they apply for internships, full time jobs, and graduate school, but often struggle with how to do this in an efficient and effective manner. This is especially challenging given the number of students they have and the late and…

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.

Since 2012, many Title IV institutions of higher education have sent their students debt letters to inform them of their outstanding loan amounts, estimated or real monthly payments, and other loan-related information. However, no extant research has analyzed whether these letters are written at an appropriate level for college students, nor has…

Responding to mathematical problems is a core activity in classrooms. The problems that teachers select determine the mathematical content, processes and nature of mathematical inquiry occurring in classrooms and thereby contribute to the development of mathematical skills and dispositions. Selecting, designing or reformulating mathematical…

As a growing base of evidence links student success with attendance, many states have chosen to include measures of student absenteeism in their accountability systems under ESSA. Consequently, school districts face strong incentives to improve attendance. We report on a randomized field experiment in which parents of early elementary students…

In this paper, we utilize poetic methods that seek to surface, but not overdetermine, the unanticipated relational excess produced through literacy practices. Karen, a queer white woman, and Jordan, a cis-gendered heterosexual Black man, wrote a series of letters to one another throughout the Spring 2020 semester. We turned to critical poetic…