Offering immediate subject expertise, personal narratives and sharing personal experiences are commonly encouraged in first-year college writing and adult ESL. However, quantitative research found a negative correlation between oversharing and student learning (Frisby & Sidelinger, 2013). Through investment theory (Norton, 2013), this paper…

Classroom teachers are urged to seamlessly integrate technology in all subject areas in order to meet the needs of the learner and the rigor of standardized testing. This multiple case study examined the levels of integration and the individual experiences of four elementary writing teachers. Participants' Stages of Concern were described and…

Background: The need for improvement in writing instruction in schools is dependent on teachers being aware of evidence-based procedures in writing and implementing them on a regular basis in their classrooms. Purpose: The purpose of this study was to explore the frequency with which teachers in Western Canada employed evidence-based procedures in…

This article presents the text of the author's address at the fifty-ninth annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) in March 2008. In her address, the author picks up strands of previous Chairs' addresses and weaves them through the fabric of her remarks. What she hopes will give sheen to the fabric is her…

Teachers of composition are modernists because the teaching of composition has been, and continues to be, a modernist enterprise in American colleges and universities. The question explored in this paper is, why? Why do practitioners of composition remain mired in the modern? Since the 1980s writing teachers have had a sense as a profession that…

Even a quick tour through the professional literature of composition and rhetoric reveals that the profession has failed to bring about any real change in first-year college composition. The truth is that today the political and material conditions of first-year composition programs are not much different from that they were over a half century…

The Conference on College Communication and Composition brings together a potpourri of theoretical outlooks and approaches to teaching writing, but in fact many of the participants have much in common. They are all developing theoretical projects that, while they are not completely compatible, are all manifestations of a desire to innovate, to…

Reading the speeches each year of the program chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication gives the reader a concrete notion of how the field has been perceived and constructed by these leaders in composition. The more recent articles also construct a surprisingly unified and stable identity for the field which is premised on…

Presents a revised version of a talk given at the 2001 meeting of the City University of New York Association of Writing Supervisors. Offers a critique of current use of metaphors of community in teaching writing as both utopian and confining. Suggests alternate ways of imagining writing and teaching. Proposes three counter-concepts to community:…

In 1994, the situation of one writing teacher changed when she joined others at her institution to collaborate on the design and follow through of the Portfolio Composition Program for first-year writing students. Today, the collaboration continues as volunteer full-time faculty, graduate teaching assistants, and other part-time teachers try out…

Research suggests that basic writers are willing to edit but reluctant to revise their writing. In other words, they make surface-level changes to grammar, spelling, and punctuation but tend not to re-conceive content, structure, style, and cohesion. This paper argues that we need more instructional strategies that will help students understand…

Politics has always made strange bedfellows, but now the public and the traditional academy are collaborating in an attack on the site of their uneasiness--what they label "political correctness as neo-fascism" and what one composition teacher calls "political correctness as challenge to ideological assumptions." In their…

A study examined working conditions for writing teachers in postsecondary writing programs in Louisiana. The Louisiana Association for College Composition (LACC) sent surveys to LACC member schools in 21 writing programs, and 15 responded. The first part of the survey asked for responses to the February 1989 draft of the Conference on College…

For instructors in college writing centers, doing research is crucial, both for understanding what they do and authorizing who they are. A dialogic relationship between the research undertaken and current theory is particularly crucial. The goal of this research needs to be understanding the relationship between the writing center and the larger…

Believing that the objective, analytical, and competitive modes have already been overemphasized in educational institutions, many feminist teachers stress the subjective, contextual, and collaborative. Such changes involve not only a commitment of energy and time, but also an important shift in a teacher's perception of what counts as knowledge,…