I retired from teaching in August, 2018. In the fall semester of that academic year, I taught a section of Basic Writing (now called "Workshop in Composition"), one of the courses I taught in the fall of 1975, my first year at the University of Pittsburgh. This essay is a documentary account of that course, including writing assignments…

Many first-year students struggle with the transition from high school writing to college writing as higher-order demands are made and new discipline-specific genres are added. Previous writing training can provide a "mental set effect," old habits of mind, which inhibits growth. Additionally, students receive writing training in courses…

This article describes an innovative pedagogical technique for multimodal composition courses: the use of storyboarding as an invention tool across multiple composition platforms. Student response data and our textual analysis of their multimodal texts over a two-year period reveal some challenges when new media projects are taught alongside…

This article presents the results of three comparative analyses on forty-seven student papers in order to examine the effectiveness of a basic writing course in developing students' academic writer identity. The course curriculum, grounded in social identity theory, focuses on the core writing concepts and dispositions that promote writer…

This article reports on my attempt to use storytelling as an entry point into academic discourse in a learning community designed to meet the learning needs of ESL students who recently emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Based on research suggesting a correlation between academic success in a second language and first language literacy skills,…

Previous ethnographic pedagogical approaches in basic writing classrooms emphasized students' acculturation into academic discourse; however, teachers' critical reflection should also consider how exposure to students' experiences intervenes in and informs pedagogical practices. In this article, I argue that teachers should listen to their…

Recounts the rationale, development, construction, and design of an essay examination format that accounts for teacher differences and provides some objectivity in observation and measurement that is usually lacking in such writing examinations. Notes that one of the features of the format is computer readable scoring. (RL)