During the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, students at a land-grant university in the southeast region of the United States transitioned to online learning. After transitioning online, faculty noticed a lack of student engagement in online courses that reduced retention rates and increased failure rates. Although prior research showed the benefits of…

While automated feedback is becoming readily accessible to student writers, how students employ resources and strategies to use such feedback remains largely unexplored. Informed by activity theory and the construct of appropriation, this study conceptualizes students' use of automated feedback as social appropriation mediated by resources and…

In this article, we argue that using students' reflective writing to understand specific aspects of their classroom experience requires that researchers systematically integrate into the curriculum reflections that responsibly attend to both students' learning and the focus of classroom research. Informed by recently published articles on…

Purpose: This paper aims to explore recent research (2007-2017) on the implementation of multimodal writing instruction in secondary English courses. It seeks to highlight the varied ways in which theoretical conceptions of multimodality have been implemented in writing instruction and the impacts of these implementations on students' experiences…

Using Mariolina Salvatori's "difficulty paper" assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students' difficulties with reading in the composition classroom. The authors argue that examining difficulty can provide an entry point for understanding how students experience the (dis)connections…

Multigenre writing projects contribute to the use of out-of-school literacies, multiple modes of meaning, and writing from several perspectives to aid their audience in comprehending the material being presented. Students are able to write using real-world examples of writing pieces and are required to think critically when melding the pieces of…

The Real/Ideal Research Project is comprised of three components, ordered in purposeful succession, designed to emphasize the interconnectedness of emotion, reason, and action. In the first component, students compose a personal narrative focused on a specific inequity they (have) experience(d) or witnessed. Here, students are encouraged to…

In the field of rhetoric and composition, literacy narratives are sometimes framed through the idea of "inventing the university"; this, unfortunately, creates a trope of literacy as success. I argue that the success trope limits student expression of "outlaw" emotions in literacy narratives--like loss, pain, and anxiety--and…

This article draws on the experiences of two young adults, Sean and Jerome, who participated in a writing workshop at a juvenile detention center. The young adults composed screenplays to explore how writing could call on their unique perspectives and life experiences to amplify their beliefs. While some educators emphasize a skills-based…

According to the authors, teachers often read about inspiring lessons in which historically marginalized students find their voices through assignments and projects that centralize issues of importance to the student. This article describes the authors' revision of a persuasive writing unit to scaffold not only writing skills but also students'…

This qualitative research study was aimed at examining the experiences and perceptions of students at a four-year college in New York City who were enrolled in an integrated reading and writing course designed to help students connect the literacy skills learned in the course to other contexts. Focusing on three students enrolled in the course,…

Students moving from high school writing to college writing are, from a sociocultural perspective, transitioning from one "community of practice" to another, from one "Discourse" to another (Gee, 1992; Wenger, 1998). This process can be difficult, not only for basic writers (Bartholomae, 1985; Shaughnessy, 1977) but also for…

Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains involved in community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are being filtered into digital contexts as instructors begin to realize the opportunities made available by online writing venues. This presentation describes a specific…

This study compares students' experiences of two types of criteria-based assessment: in-text commentary and rubric-articulated feedback, in an assessment design combining the two feedback channels. The main aim is to use students' responses to shed light on how feedback strategies for formative assessment can be optimised. Following action…

Because Dominique (or D-Mon, as he liked to be called) had drill before class, he would sometimes come in late in the author's class, his army boots silently moving across the tile as though he were trying to sneak by a sentry. The army fatigues that he wore were supposed to help him blend into a desert landscape, a tan-and-brown world of sand. In…