The contextual nature of literacy is a threshold concept that one must move through to better understand composition as a discipline. A nuanced understanding of this concept enables students to critique dominant literacy ideologies and appreciate the diverse literacies present in everyday life. The literacy narrative, a genre that sometimes…

This action research case study on a Common Read Program (CRP) includes analysis of learning management system-mediated student writing and research writing connected to a Common Read selection in First-Year Writing courses. A priori codes drawn from the literature on desired learning goals and outcomes for CRPs and Writing Program Administrators…

Dual enrollment has become an embedded aspect of our writing programs yet is still an under-researched area within rhetoric and composition. One reason for this research gap is that many DE students experience their FYC courses on secondary campuses, liminal spaces that are more difficult to access for research. DE students within these spaces…

Dual-credit programs, also known in the state of Ohio as the College-Credit-Plus program, is an initiative across the United States to provide another method for high school students--and sometimes even younger students--to earn postsecondary credit before graduating from high school. This project investigates the experience of dual-credit…

This research attempted to determine whether faculty instructors' employment status played a role in the success of students who are not college ready. The purpose of this study was to determine whether developmental English faculty instructors' employment status had an effect on grades in a freshman composition course (English 101) among…

The purpose of this study was to measure to what extent an experimental method of teaching argument incorporating elements from both Toulmin's (2004) structural approach and Walton's (2013) dialectical approach effects first-year college students' ability to write strong arguments. This experimental instruction used critical questioning as a…

As labor-based grading contracts gain momentum in first-year writing classrooms, new kinds of response to writing take center stage. We explore how session notes composed by embedded peer tutors and students become rich tools in a writing process and create a gateway to the writing center for first-year students. By reading session notes in…

With sustainability becoming a familiar concept in society, higher education institutions have also started playing a more active role in this field, showing an increasing interest in students' comprehension of sustainability. This interest has led to the need for developing methods of assessing students' sustainability knowledge, as observed in…

Research in feedback literacy (Carless & Boud, 2018; Molloy et al., 2020; Yu & Liu, 2021; Zhang & Mao, 2023) explores student use of written feedback and barriers to feedback uptake; the role of faculty in designing contextually appropriate feedback has been termed teacher feedback literacy (Carless & Winstone, 2020). When feedback…

Instructors of first-year composition (FYC) face the challenge of crafting rhetorically diverse opportunities for student writers within a classroom setting. As a result, many have embraced service-learning or community-engaged pedagogy. Oral history projects may be incorporated into curricula by faculty who embrace this approach to teaching, but…

In this article, the author describes the curriculum of a freshman composition class for socially marginalized students that uses an imaginative service-learning component to nurture agency and voice.

The University of Central Florida's First-Year Composition Program has sustained its commitment to values-based sustainable development despite a series of significant changes from 2020-2025. In this program profile, we offer four elements of sustainability--social justice, collective action, sociocultural empiricism, and strategic planning--that…

This article applies the Community of Inquiry (CoI) framework to a particular disciplinary context: first-year writing (FYW). Students enrolled in online FYW courses across three institutions (n = 272) completed a version of the CoI survey that was slightly modified to fit the disciplinary context of writing studies. A factor analysis was…

This study explores how the construct of interest may influence first-year community college students' willingness to engage with academic text assignments. Research on interest theory as presented by Renninger (2009) suggests that students, even those with low self-efficacy or regulation, are more likely to make gains in engagement and/or…

What do writers do with the feedback they receive? While the answer will vary depending on the writer's experience and the rhetorical situation, understanding what writers do can provide important information for course redesign and professional development of tutors and instructors. In this first of two manuscripts, the authors examine how…