Supplying an insightful introduction to current trends in general education reform, this second edition of "General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty" gives an important, timely overview of general education curricular design. General education curricula provide students with the intellectual flexibility they need to…

As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty…

The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly changed the way of life for people and businesses around the world. Institutions of higher education and their constituents are no exception. As the pandemic began, colleges and universities moved their operations and teaching modalities online. The emergency shift to remote learning and operating has put a…

Design-based learning is often promoted as a way for students to practice the skills essential for their future success; however, little research in this area has been conducted in the field of dance. One aim of this research is to contribute to the literature by examining the process through which undergraduate students from multiple disciplines…

Subject specialists' knowledge of academic and disciplinary literacy is often tacit. We tackle the issue of how to elicit subject specialists' tacit knowledge in order to develop their pedagogical practices and enable them to communicate this knowledge to students. Drawing on theories of genre and metacognition, a professional development activity…

Where academic literacies are understood as situated social practices, effective academic literacy support needs to reflect the disciplinary and institutional specificity of the practices. However, the institutional separation of academic literacy teaching from disciplinary subject teaching, typical of UK universities, creates significant…

Writing transfer research often illuminates the writing abilities, attitudes, and assumptions college writers bring to a writing assignment, but faculty members across the disciplines may not have the tools for understanding what the students in their particular classes bring to their particular writing assignments. In this proposed model,…

This qualitative case study explored preservice teachers' (PSTs) beliefs about disciplinary literacy as they engaged in a blog project with middle-school students to discuss historical texts. Twenty-eight PSTs, enrolled in a semester-long social studies methods course and participating in the blog project as a course assignment, constituted the…

Knowing how to use sources effectively often poses considerable challenges for first year undergraduate students for whom English is a second language (L2). In this longitudinal case study we investigated the selection and self-reported use of source materials by thirteen first year L2 undergraduate students from a range of disciplines enrolled at…

Concerns about adolescent literacy continue to be highlighted in regards to the challenges of reading and learning from academic text. Recent efforts to address these concerns have led to an examination of the disciplines and their specialized ways of thinking and using language. In this article I discusses a metalinguistic protocol in a…

This article focuses on describing the interplay between teaching and learning practices in Higher Education and the disciplinary context of such practices. In particular, it aims to address the question of how course design, teaching, and learning activities take place within a particular academic culture and how those activities mutually shape…

The following dissertation explores how higher education faculty members' memories of learning content and learning to write influence their pedagogical practices and examines how disciplinary and departmental contexts intersect with those pedagogical practices. The research was designed as a nested case study that draws on interview data,…

Because of the recent revolutionary developments brought about by Web 2.0, the emergence and popularity of blogs as learning tools represent an important area of consideration by the higher education sector. Indeed, while many researchers have acknowledged the advantages of using blogs in this environment, it is clear that more investigation is…

This essay presents results from a comprehensive study of writing in the undergraduate curriculum at the University of Pittsburgh. It is in two sections. The first section reports on interviews with faculty from across the disciplines in the School of Arts and Sciences; the second reports finding from student focus groups and from an extensive…

In this essay I present the results of a national study of over 2,000 writing assignments from college courses across disciplines. Drawing on James Britton's multidimensional discourse taxonomy and recent work in genre studies, I analyze the rhetorical features and genres of the assignments and consider the significance of my findings through the…