This position statement reflects the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) members' growing commitment to undergraduate research. It also supports members' efforts to foster undergraduate research in writing at their home institutions, whether two- or four-year colleges or universities. This statement affirms undergraduate…

This document first identifies multiple assets student veterans often bring to writing classrooms and then acknowledges some of the special considerations that writing instructors and writing program administrators (WPAs) should take into account when working with student veterans. After presenting these generalizations, the document offers…

This brief commentary first clarifies Brandt's concept of sponsors of literacy in light of the way the concept has been taken up in writing studies. Then it treats Brandt's methods for handling accounts of literacy learning in comparison with other ways of analyzing biographical material. Finally it takes up Lawrence's argument about literacy…

This article describes Sondra Perl's retrospective review of the composing processes of unskilled college writers and whether her assumptions and values in the designing of research projects have changed over her long teaching career. She uses her college dissertation "Five Writers Writing" as the basis to reflect on the authors and…

Michael W. Smith, a professor in Temple University's College of Education, focuses his research on how experienced readers read and talk about texts as well as what motivates adolescents' reading and writing in and out of school. He sees the recent research on adolescents' out-of-school literacies as a challenge to literacy educators to look at…

In this essay, the author aims to show how a specific focus on interactionally emergent and rhetorically negotiated elements of a communicative situation can enrich the study of difference in composition research. She develops this argument by first identifying two strategies used by writing researchers when forwarding new understandings of…

In this article I discuss some problems concerning the truth value of narratives; more specifically as this problematic is played out in empirical, narrative research. My point of departure is Jane O'Dea's critique of Denis Phillips' views of the topic. While Phillips thinks that truth (in the correspondence sense) definitely should be a concern…

In this paper, I speculate on the work "usefulness" does to regulate the research and writing of the scholarship of academic development project. My argument is not that academic developers ought to repudiate a fidelity to usefulness; rather, I want to expand our ideas for the possibilities of research and writing beyond purposes of…

Because of the way it prioritizes "interruption" and calls into question the very possibility of producing coherent, self-contained narratives, the deconstructive work of Jacques Derrida is often thought to be intrinsically anti-narrative in its very structure; and yet there are those who insist that, to the contrary, deconstruction is a narrative…

The author has never been good at math. When he was in 9th grade, he found gripping joy in Shakespeare, the wives of Henry VIII, the psychosis of Poe, the heroes of various revolutions, the perpetual pillaging of Alsace and Lorraine. However, his interests changed when he enrolled in the Central Virginia Governor's School (CVGS) for Science and…

This essay argues for the value of an ecological metaphor in conceptualizing, designing, and enacting research in writing studies. Such a metaphor conceives of activities, actors, situations, and phenomena as interdependent, diverse, and fused through feedback. This ecological orientation invites composition scholars to research rhetorically: to…

Describes two strategies chosen to guide the authors' writing research and presents four of these strategies in a process model of composition. (HOD)

Expresses concern by the facility with which ethnographic research on writing passes into articles, textbooks, and pedagogy. Examines the rhetorical and textual practices that organize ethnographic accounts. Regards ethnography as a professional activity in which ethnographers and their texts engage the ideological through the material conditions…

Ponders the definition of "composition research." Discusses research, inquiry paradigms, teacher research, meta-analysis, and other forms. Debates whether, from an agonistic standpoint, the conflicting meanings of composition research can be reduced to competing ways of knowing or competing modes of inquiry. (PRA)

Offers the responses of the subject of a case study of composing processes. (FL)