For almost 40 years, our university's first year writing program has included a shared outcome: "Students will appreciate the capacity of writing to change oneself and the world." This outcome, unlike our more typical composition goals concerning writing processes, rhetorical acumen, and critical research abilities, had never been…

In this article, University of Maryland writing program administrators Alexis Walston and Jessica Enoch explore the "Composition Studies" archive and its trove of articles from 1972 to the present with a focus on the emotive dimension of teaching and administration. As Walston and Enoch have worked to support a large community of…

Writing about writing (WAW) pedagogy is becoming a dominant approach to teaching writing, yet lacks descriptive empirical studies. In response to this deficit, we surveyed postsecondary instructors using WAW in the US and Canada to discover how they define WAW conceptually (what they think) and operationally (what they do). We used grounded theory…

This article explores how the racialized discursive and behavioral norms of pseudocommunity interfere with faculty professional development toward antiracist writing pedagogy. The author draws upon original research into a faculty learning community of first year composition instructors to highlight how, without explicit acknowledgment and…

This essay illuminates adaptable and multimodal ways of teaching with etymology and idiomatic origin stories in the composition classroom. I model my pedagogical approach with a topic central to my rhetorical research--pigeons in histories of human communication--and the rich etymologically-linked concepts of homing in, pigeonholing, and…

The common arguments about potential student use of these technologies suggest artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted writing will damage student learning by shortcutting the writing process. There is a further worry that AI-based pedagogy will de-skill students by reducing writing to a mere editing practice. Additionally, some suggest that…

In this article, we describe the process of revising our writing program's teaching observation forms and processes over the last several years, drawing from descriptions of best practices in conducting teaching observations in writing programs (Comer; Jackson). We analyze the teaching observation form as it functions in a structurational nexus to…

Learning to teach writing remains challenging for both student instructors and the experienced faculty, staff, and other professionals who mentor them. Many institutions have created local repositories of teaching-related materials such as syllabi and assignments, and some national efforts have also attempted to facilitate sharing resources to…

Often, composition instructors struggle to encourage STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students to see the relevance of writing courses to their personal goals. Students' lack of recognition of the importance of literacy skills can lead to disengagement in required college writing courses compared to their so-called…

This article details the challenges and possibilities of assigning first year students writing assignments that require engagement with emotions and memories during the COVID-19 pandemic (Fall 2021). Using one first year writing class as a case study, the author describes the challenges that arose in writing conferences. Noting the rise in mental…

Within the rhetoric and composition literature, liberal and liberalism often denote unsophisticated theory and insufficiently progressive practice. I argue that such a view distorts the liberal tradition. Liberalism is, in fact, a potent reform project deeply connected to university writing instruction. During our field's social turn of the 1980s,…

During the last 20 years, the teaching of writing has grown worldwide as a dynamic field of international academic practice and research, as attested to by the emergence of disciplinary societies, conferences, and publications. This paper builds on common nodes that have shaped the original contributions to Latin America's university-level…

Rhetoric and composition has made immeasurable strides in the design of undergraduate writing major programs, but the discipline lacks a clear picture of the culminating capstone course that serves as an end point for the writing major. This article reports on a content analysis of 54 writing capstone syllabi from 44 different institutions,…

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…

Since the sovereignty of Hong Kong was returned to China in 1997, English has remained an official language and been formally referred to as a second language, though in reality it has, arguably, the status of a foreign language. This is especially true for writing because students do not have to write in English outside the classroom.…