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…

Graduate Student Instructors (GSIs) are often framed as resistant to Writing Pedagogy Education (WPE) (Grouling; Hesse; Reed). Yet, these moments of resistance can (and should be) reframed as acts of well-being, where GSIs are establishing boundaries and identifying their own self-care and needs. I draw on the experiences of five different GSIs in…

This article argues that we are living in a climate where trauma is taxing students and teachers alike. In order to teach and learn in this moment, we recommend and explore a variety of contemplative practices to help teach awareness and kind attention. Some of these practices involve writing and others don't, as writing itself can be a source of…

The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the troubling fact that many students struggle to pay attention to literacy learning while they are in situations of extreme duress. This duress did not begin with pandemic, nor will it end with it. Neither is duress distributed at random; those negatively affected by the nation's prejudices, as a general rule,…

We have observed a change in students, graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), and instructors as more Gen Z members enter the university. Many are facing mental health issues and sharing about them in ways prior students, GTAs, and instructors did not. Knowing in general that Gen Z students have more anxiety and depression, we argue that empathic…

The Global Society of Online Literacy Educators (GSOLE) Basic Online Literacy Instruction (OLI) Certification is open to GSOLE members and is designed to help online literacy instructors, tutors, and writing program administrators learn foundational principles, theories, and practices of teaching and tutoring writing online and apply those to the…

Despite much attention given to visual rhetoric in Composition, there is evidence that most first-year writing instructors overlook document design, both in their instruction and in the documents they produce for their students. These instructors may be underestimating the role that visually informative prose (that uses document design features…

This article applies the neuroscientific concept of embodied simulation--the process of understanding language through visual, motor, and spatial modalities of the body--to rhetorical grammar and sentence-style pedagogies. Embodied simulation invigorates rhetorical grammar instruction by attuning writers to the felt effects of written language,…

David F. Green writes that while he is more than pleased by the decision made by "Composition Studies" to provide increased attention to work done at historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), his aim is to provide a clarion call for the types of collective approaches to writing at HBCUs that might yield the most value to…

In this article, we detail our findings from a case study of three instructors as they newly implemented service-learning pedagogies into their first year writing classes. Drawing on the instructors' perspectives as part of a larger programmatic assessment, we demonstrate that a service-learning curriculum can broadly foster learning outcomes for…

Using her own experiences of keeping a journal while learning advanced Spanish creative writing and beginning Chinese during the same semester, the author illustrates that composition teachers' second language learning experiences--intimate and challenging encounters with a second language that multilingual composition students experience every…

Researchers in the field of composition studies have spent a great deal of time, energy, and scholarship proposing and debating strategies for collaborative pedagogy. While these discussions can be generative, many overlook what should have been central all along: the student collaborators. With this in mind, this essay seeks to focus our…

Process-based composition pedagogy has ignored the question of "doneness": the criteria used to decide when a piece of writing is complete. This article uses survey results from first- and second-year composition courses to challenge common beliefs about how students determine when writing assignments are sufficiently completed. We find…

English 3820: Scientific Writing, a writing-intensive (WI) course offered by the Department of English at East Carolina University (ECU), serves primarily science majors. According to the course catalog, it provides students with "practice in assimilation and written presentation of scientific information." The course asks students to…

As second language (L2) writing teacher educators and researchers, we have seen how powerful the image of an unsympathetic future audience for students' writing is in teachers' responses to language difference. In this essay, we trace how beliefs about these future audiences influence the pedagogical decision-making of two L2 writing instructors:…