Focusing on a large study of the implementation of secondary English Language Arts curriculum in California and Washington, we assess how teachers use learning goals to support students developing expert learning practices. Highlighting the value of goal setting to support students' agency in learning to write, we describe teachers' reasons for…

California legislation (AB705, signed 2017) mandated accelerated community college writing education and implementation to begin just before the COVID-19 pandemic. This study captures faculty experiences with mandated pandemic-era acceleration via analysis of 131 open-ended faculty survey responses representing 60 of the 116 California community…

This article investigates a Basic Writing program shared between a University of California campus and a local community college in which the curriculum, assessment practices, and larger programmatic structures were heavily influenced by an exit exam modeled after the UC system's Analytical Writing Placement Exam (AWPE). Drawing from scholarship…

This study had a dual focus. First, the study sought to understand the impact of policy on praxis. This was achieved through a Critical Policy Analysis of Assembly Bill 705 (AB705), a California law that attempts to reduce the number of non-credit courses required to earn required courses in college composition and mathematics. Second, the study…

This article considers a pedagogical approach that centralizes student-led archival retrieval of rhetorics. The precise context of the author's inquiry is situated in a Californian classroom wherein the author teaches writing in a Latinx Studies department, serving predominately Chicanx first-generation demographics. In that context, the article…

Today's college and career-ready standards emphasize developing students' ability to interpret and analyze complex texts and to assert and defend claims relating to those texts in extended pieces of writing. By providing secondary English language arts teachers with professional development and instructional materials, the UC Irvine Writing…

The purpose of this study was to measure to what extent an experimental method of teaching argument incorporating elements from both Toulmin's (2004) structural approach and Walton's (2013) dialectical approach effects first-year college students' ability to write strong arguments. This experimental instruction used critical questioning as a…

This article discusses "Rhetoric of Storytelling," a course that looks at the purposes of storytelling across different rhetorical traditions, beginning with Ancient Greek and Roman traditions and traversing African American, Indigenous Latin American, American Indian, feminist, and Latinx rhetorical traditions. The course operates from…

Engaging second language (L2) students in multimodal academic writing that leverages multiple semiotic resources has the potential to foster their awareness of audience, purpose, and other rhetorical features. This case study explores L2 students' engagement in a multimodal digital storytelling (DST) project. The study reports on how DST was…

This paper explores the ways ESOL writing instructors implement and assess participatory writing practices in the classroom using digital technologies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participatory writing practices are largely sociocultural in nature and thereby resist the notion of standardized and individualized practices to focus on co-creating a…

Background: Overall, high rates of American high school seniors lack writing proficiency (75%) and historically underrepresented minority (URM) populations fare even worse (91% of African American, 89% of Latinx) (U.S. Dept of Education, 2011), which suggests that URM college students enter college with lower writing abilities (Bracco et al.,…

The much-criticized Reading Instruction Competence Assessment (RICA) is not aligned with current Common Core literacy standards, is expensive, has a low pass rate on the first try of 66%, and keeps People of Color from joining the profession (California Commission on Teacher Credentialing, 2019). The test maybe replaced with coursework. Critics…

The traditional remedial, stand-alone reading and writing courses at one community college were redesigned to create a single integrated reading and writing developmental course (IRW). Unlike a truly accelerated course, this IRW course combined two courses at the same level and therefore highlights the impact of integrating reading and writing.…

In the last few years, college and university systems nationwide have implemented sweeping reforms to placement and course sequences to rectify systemic inequities affecting incoming students. Many of these reforms acknowledge that standardized placement tests create false distinctions between "prepared" and "underprepared"…

This article details a classroom-based study designed to provide agency and voice to first and second grade emergent bilinguals as they processed the COVID-19 pandemic. Two California teachers created a narrative writing unit not only to teach specific writing skills, but also to challenge pervasive deficit assumptions that young children…