This dissertation contributed to ongoing conversations about reflection and writing transfer. This study was guided by a main research question: How might asking students to reflect collaboratively, rather than individually, about their writing, help them make connections between first-year writing and other contexts? While other scholars have…

While templates for academic writing, like those offered in the popular textbook "They Say/I Say," have been embraced by some, others still question the extent to which an emphasis on form comes at the expense of substance. But ancient rhetoricians offer a theory of rhetoric that unites style and substance, and Jeanne Fahnestock's modern…

In identifying ways to create inclusive spaces in the classroom, instructors should not be limited by singular modes of discourse to engage students. Particularly when teaching first-year students who seek to invent the university and claim their intellectual space within it, these considerations must be deeply integrated into the course…

Since the release of ChatGPT, there has been considerable debate regarding whether and how L2 writing instructors might integrate GenAI tools and teaching toward AI literacy development into their instructional practices. A recent body of research has identified possible affordances and limitations of GenAI for L2 writing teaching and learning,…

This dissertation project began with the development of a Design-Focused Approach (DFA) to First-Year Composition (FYC) curriculum largely informed by multimodal pedagogical theory. In the DFA to FYC curriculum, I highlighted the importance of multiliteracy and the demand for multiple modalities for students to effectively communicate in various…

In response to a charge from the University Senate, a task force examined the influence of class size on student success in first-year composition courses that satisfy general education composition requirements. Using pre-existing data on first-time, first-year students with the entry cohort ranging from 2004 to 2015, a random forest analysis…

While understanding the concept of audience is an important step in learning to write, few studies have explored how student writers conceptualize audience in academic and nonacademic settings. This dissertation explores how college students enrolled in a first-year composition course conceptualize and operationalize audience and examines how the…

Calls for research in multimodality and multiliteracies have provided the field of writing studies with theories and outcomes suggesting that more research is necessary in FYC students' multimodal composing processes and literacy practices. Much of the research in New Literacies Studies (NLS) focuses on students' final products. This dissertation…

Extracting a writer's profile from a broader literacy study aimed at documenting extracurricular literacy practices among the Latinx population in Northwest Arkansas, this article presents a case study of a Peruvian woman's lifelong use of literacy to enhance her personal agency in the face of personal, social, and civic demands. The article…

In this program profile, we recount the development of Fairfield University's award-winning WAC/WID program. We specifically describe the roles of labor and disciplinarity in building "shock-absorbent" WAC program architectures that enable WAC programs to persist. Arguing that labor resources are a central concern of WAC programs, we…

There is valuable scholarship on the importance of teaching narratives in the FYC classroom, but none does so through the frame of vulnerability. This paper explores, through an IRB approved case study, how composition teachers can best guide students to write powerful and well-crafted personal narratives to ignite students' own voices, histories,…

Library instruction is predicated on the assumption that transfer learning can take place, but how do librarians determine whether transfer is occurring? This study examines the use of reflection as a learning theory within the one-shot library instruction classroom to facilitate metacognition and transfer learning. Through the analysis of student…

The instructors of undergraduate writing courses are very often graduate students who exist in a space between student and teacher, subsequently shouldering a dual burden of responsibility. This is particularly the case in freshman writing and composition classes. Graduate students that hold assistantships and work in writing programs have a…

In response to (1) studies finding that essay feedback generated by ChatGPT might be useful for student writers and (2) studies observing ChatGPT's tendency to adhere to narrow genre definitions when producing writing, our study seeks to examine whether ChatGPT can provide useful feedback in a first-year writing learning environment that targets a…

This paper reports the findings of a study of student writing that assessed the skill needs of a cohort of developmental writing students enrolled in a co-requisite composition course at a community college that is part of the City University of New York (CUNY). This credit-bearing course fulfills the first half of the required composition…