The writing process has helped define students as autonomous writers within the composition classroom. Yet, our writing identities are not stable and shift throughout the writing process. I argue that composition instructors should enhance students' awareness to their own dynamic, writing subjectivities through a more expansive view of rhetorical…

Teachers' identities as writers and language users can have an important impact on their pedagogical practices. As the population of writing teachers becomes increasingly diverse, the development of teachers' identities is an important but under-researched topic. This study examines how three prospective teachers from varied linguistic and…

This article reports survey and interview research on how graduate student instructors (GSIs) across the United States navigate the boundaries of disciplinary expertise that define their work as students and teachers. The disciplinary backgrounds of GSIs in this study influenced their experiences with formal writing pedagogy education and their…

Empirical methods to evaluate undergraduate pedagogy have become quite common in the field of composition studies. Reflection on and evaluation of graduate pedagogy in the field is much less common, however. In this article, the authors suggest that scholars in the field endeavor to develop pedagogical methods for graduate education, while also…

The theme course has not held a distinct place in scholarship, despite being a longstanding practice in the field; meanwhile, it has come under scrutiny in teaching for transfer (TFT) scholarship, which perceives the practice as conflicting with writing-centered approaches. In contrast, scholarship on theme courses suggests that a resilient motive…

This article seeks to answer two questions: what kinds of expertise are needed to lead an effective dissertation boot camp; and how can those outside the graduate student's discipline support their writing? Drawing on four years of application data and post-camp interviews, I reveal how writing process knowledge--similar to that described in the…

This article threads together multilingualism and disability studies research in writing studies, and introduces composition pedagogies that embrace multilingualism, multimodality, and accessibility simultaneously. We argue that writing teachers can work toward social justice in writing courses by considering accessibility through intersectional…

In this Retrospective I revisit Donald Murray's "A Writer Teaches Writing," fifty years old this year, and argue for a reconsideration of Murray's legacy within composition and rhetoric by claiming that the frame with which scholars and teachers of writing have tended to understand Murray (i.e. Donald Murray = Expressivist) is limiting…

In this interview Dr. Bruce Ballenger and I discuss his career, his many textbooks on writing, his recent collaboration on an extensive study of the revision processes of advanced writers, and the challenges of balancing a career with a foot in multiple academic fields (i.e. composition and rhetoric and creative writing). Dr. Ballenger retired…

Drawing on qualitative data gathered from interviews with twelve doctoral students in a composition program at a mid-size public university in the Northeast United States, this article documents graduate teacher-scholars' conceptual understanding of translingual pedagogy in the context of college writing instruction. I analyze and describe the…

Drawing on results from a survey distributed nationally through the WPA and WCenter listservs, we examine the affective aspect of failure in teachers' responses to student writing, aiming to pinpoint teachers' perceptions of why students fail. Overall, we posit that writing studies needs to pay closer attention to teachers' emotional responses to…

This multimedia article shares five short video-recorded stories that highlight specific moments of struggling to practice antiracist and linguistic justice values within different disciplinary situations: giving feedback on student writing, training tutors in the writing center, working with pre-service teachers, debating learning objectives in…

Attention to stories compositionists tell about teaching and learning reveals some of the ways that teachers orient to disability in the classroom. This article argues that these "anecdotal relations"--relations that are created and disseminated through narratives people share about disability--can frustrate productive negotiations with…

Genre has emerged as a central concept in writing studies, with numerous scholars advocating for its prominent role in writing instruction. Despite this interest in genre, however, research has not explored teachers' understanding of the concept, which is critical to how they address genre in their classrooms. This study traces the evolving…

In this essay, the author reflects on her experiences while researching composition instructors' emotional responses to plagiarism. The research found that instructors faced a variety of complex and competing feelings when students plagiarized, and those responses threatened to upset relationships, power structures, and professional identities in…