This article presents an exploratory study that examines how 11 first-year writing instructors' conceptualizations of information literacy evolved over the course of their participation in an inquiry group co-developed and co-facilitated by the Libraries' teaching faculty and the Director of Composition & Rhetoric at a public university in the…

For first year writing instructors, the teaching practicum is vital for navigating both the writing classroom and the institutions in which the classroom is embedded. The composition teaching practicum, or the often-required training course for new writing instructors, is where new instructors are typically first introduced to their institutional…

During the COVID-19 pandemic, institutional parameters shifted unexpectedly, which influenced how writing instructors took up and taught their courses. This article reflects on an instructor's experience teaching a corequisite support course during the pandemic, utilizing the concept of liminality, as basic writing scholarship draws on various…

Metadiscourse comprises the linguistic resources used by writers to organize texts, engage readers, project stances towards their texts or readers, or position themselves in relation to readers (e.g. "I suggest," "however," "for example," "perhaps," "it is clear that," "interesting").…

Instructors often use text-based methods when giving feedback to students on their papers. With the development of audio recording technologies, audio feedback has become an increasingly popular alternative to written feedback. This study analyzed five instructors' commenting patterns of both written and audio feedback. The five instructors, who…

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…

In this qualitative methods study, I draw on Paul Kei Matsuda's 1999 article "Composition Studies and ESL Writing: A Disciplinary Division of Labor" to examine if, more than 20 years after its publication, there is still a significant disciplinary division between ESL writing and first-year college composition. I surveyed writing…

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…

Imagine spending six or more years diligently training in a particular subject to only apply for a job in an unrelated field. Most everything you know will never be used; your education remains for your own edification, locked in a dusty wardrobe of the mind. Add to this a lack of awareness of how to do your new job. This is the picture of the…

This study examined the faculty perspectives towards the use of electronic rubrics and their rating behavior in a freshman composition course. A mixed-methods approach has been employed for data collection and analysis. The data for faculty perspectives were collected from nine instructors through semi-structured interviews and for their behavior,…

Nearly all first-year composition learning objectives state that writing instructors will help each student to improve their knowledge of written conventions, like punctuation, spelling, and grammar. Historically, it has been difficult to achieve significant learning gains in writing mechanics. This teaching failure disproportionately damages the…

This narrative essay describes a basic writing instructor's engagement with student confusion in a hybrid Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) course. The story examines the ways confusion can mark sites of engagement for students and teachers and how ALP courses, in particular, might mediate effective (and ineffective) forms of confusion.

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…

Multimodality is recognized as a useful pedagogical tool, but it is often difficult to apply in real-life curricula. Further, expectations on educators and various campus units are increasingly complex and require nimble and innovative partnerships. In this article, Christina, a first-year composition instructor, and Lucie, the university's…

Composition Studies teacher-scholars who are committed to working with multicultural student populations are trained to value writing from marginalized groups, recognize the intelligence that lies within "non-standard" forms, and encourage student writers to find and use their own voices. Too often, however, our thinking and writing…