This article searches after more nuanced understandings of safe space pedagogies in writing classrooms. Drawing on experiences of teaching a first-year writing course on a campus that had been tagged with white supremacist graffiti, this article uses autoethnography and narrative to rethink the function of place in composition pedagogy and develop…

This article presents the National Day on Writing (NDOW) as an annual opportunity for writing programs to create program-supported thirdspaces (Burns; Mauk; Soja) that allow first-year writing students a laboratory in which to practice their developing rhetorical skills. The author proposes a contracted view of Ann Feldman's definition of…

By returning to the controversy created by the publication in 2002 of Marc Bousquet's "JAC" article ("Composition as a Management Science"), focusing on the labor issues attending composition teaching and the prospects of institutional critique, I examine how the conceptual indeterminacy of many of the field's key terms in…

Students often ask why technical writing and literature courses are in the same department. Many students also share that technical and professional communication (TPC) courses are new to them. They are more familiar with high school literature courses and first-year composition courses. And given these experiences, they are often unsure about why…

In Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM), undergraduate research experiences provide students with invaluable opportunities to improve scientific skills. However, less is known about its impact on higher-order thinking skills. Therefore, we sought to determine if engagement in undergraduate research would improve academic…

This article argues that composition studies' professional artifacts and pedagogical materials can perpetuate tacit ideologies about academic language that are in conflict with our field's larger goals toward social justice and inclusion in FYC. In order to exemplify a systematic analysis of our artifacts and materials for their tacit language…

Some students are entering college and graduating with the inability to write scholarly and professionally. The purpose of this instrumental case study was to examine the perceptions of college instructors and students about the essential writing skills of entering first-year college students within a Southwestern university. This study provided…

Acceleration reduces the time and/or course sequence in developmental education (DE), allowing students to enroll in gateway courses more quickly and/or co-enroll in the first college-level English course while taking the remedial course (Venezia & Hughes, 2013). Texarkana College (TC) piloted an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) with a 12:1…

Given that feedback from different sources is combined to ripple through the entire revision process, it is important to create a space where students can understand and interact with different modes of feedback in order to work through it. However, pedagogy for the use of multiple feedback sources from a practitioner's perspective has been rare.…

The authors designed an assignment for a writing class for late-secondary and early-college students, one with a central goal of giving students the opportunity to engage with a controversial topic by identifying and representing views other than their own. The authors called it a "not my opinion" assignment, and they piloted it in a…

Why are students silent in class? "Silence" refers to those who do not participate verbally in discussions or ask questions, those who attend classes and by the end of semester leave without having said a word. Janice Cools has always wanted to understand the culture of silent students in her writing classrooms but had never directly…

This study examines the student writer perspective of a first-year composition program's student learning outcomes. Student descriptions of learning are a valuable, yet often overlooked data source. The student voice broadens a first-year composition program's outcomes-based, student learning assessment process as program assessment data is often…

L2 writers likely perceive "good academic writing" as impersonal (Hyland, 2002; Shen, 1989; Tang & John, 1999). Yet research has shown that every linguistic and rhetorical choice that a writer makes--including, the presence/absence and different forms of self-mention--potentially reveals the writer's authorial identity (Ivanic,…

University educators have observed the concurrent problems of student attrition, higher than normal or desired failure rates and students struggling to complete assessable and non-assessable work, for instance, set readings. Recent public commentary has pointed to the widening participation agenda with its lowering of university entrance scores…

Tennessee's public community college system implemented corequisite remediation for underprepared students during the Fall 2015 semester. As a result of the Tennessee Board of Regents corequisite remediation initiative, students with academic placement scores determined to be below college level on an instrument such as the ACT often work in the…