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This case study examines factors that significantly affect student success in online first- and second-year composition at an open-access community college and, in doing so, contributes to scholarship on online composition and student success by empirically linking community and communication through high-context communication and students’ holistic contexts to indicators of academic outcomes and validating experiences. The study analyzes 175 participant responses to five low-stakes check-in assignments designed around the course-level concept of servingness. Eighty-one patterns identified in earlier research were grouped into 14 factors from which variables were derived. These, combined with check-in responses, course grades, course, sex, ethnicity, and race, yielded a total of 27 variables for quantitative analysis. Using chi-square tests (alpha = .10) and multiple correspondence analysis, 15 of 27 variables showed significant associations with course grades. Positive associations with academic growth, peer interaction, instructor engagement, inclusion, course design, and college resources aligned with higher check-in completion and higher grades; negative associations aligned with lower check-in completion and lower grades. Background characteristics, specifically course (English 1010/2010), ethnicity (Hispanic/Non-Hispanic), and race (White/Non-White), also showed significant associations with course grades. Results suggest that academic outcomes and validating experiences must be evaluated together to inform strategies that support both academic achievement and students’ racial and cultural ways of knowing. Future research should examine how targeted, low-stakes assignments and high-context communication practices operate across institutions and student groups, including longitudinal analyses that track how community, communication, and access to college resources interact with student success over time.

This study examines how design thinking (DT) can function as a conceptual and analytical framework for supporting students’ critical AI literacy practices in writing and technical communication classrooms. Drawing on focus group interviews, individual reflection essays, and design artifacts from undergraduate technical writing students who collaboratively designed and customized AI chatbots using Poe, the study explores how students enacted responsible and user-centered design practices through each stage of the DT process. Findings reveal that 1) the empathize and define stages helped students identify algorithmic biases and frame inclusivity as part of user-centered design; 2) the ideate and prototype stages translated critical awareness into design decisions around prompt engineering, knowledge base curation, and visual accessibility; and 3) the test stage allowed students to revise their chatbot design through iterative usability testing and user feedback. Collectively, the DT process positioned students as human-in-the-loop co-creators who exercised rhetorical agency through prompt design, knowledge curation, and bias mitigation while designing customized chatbots. The article ends with pedagogical implications for integrating DT into critical AI pedagogy, chatbot design, and composition instruction.

This qualitative study investigates the biographical factors that influence the professional identities and teaching practices of second language (L2) writing instructors. Previous L2 writing studies have tended to rely on teacher interviews to examine such identities and practices and have failed to include the important perspective of classroom observations. This study conducted teacher interviews and classroom observations with three graduate teaching assistants (GTAs) of a first-year writing course at a U.S. university. The findings suggest that although teachers’ disciplinary backgrounds, teaching philosophies, and prior experiences shape their professional identities and instructional approaches, their classroom practices in language instruction do not always align with their beliefs and stated values. Teacher education programs should integrate language pedagogy and grammar instruction into writing pedagogy, while encouraging teachers to engage in consistent self-evaluation and reflection on their practices.

This article focuses on teacher educators’ approaches to supporting discipline-specific undergraduate writing at the University of Strathclyde, the largest provider of initial teacher education (ITE) in Scotland. Although the Scottish Enlightenment had a substantial influence on positioning language, and therefore rhetoric, as a field of study ( Shieber, 2023 ), contemporary Scottish higher education—including teacher education—has no teaching of rhetoric or composition and no formalised general writing education (e.g., first-year composition). Yet, ITE students are expected to write in a variety of genres throughout postsecondary education. We position writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education. Our qualitative study investigates how university teacher educators conceive of student writing and enact these conceptualisations in practice. This study offers insight into how teacher educators evaluate the role of writing in teacher education and how they connect it to professional practice, positioning writing instruction as part of socially just teacher education.

• Year 7 students can learn to code engaging animated narratives with basic Scratch. • English teachers can learn to sufficient coding to support students coding stories. • Student animated narratives of 2 – 3 min can meet English curricula requirements. • Student multimodality use can be evaluated using a criterion-based framework. • Student coding proficiency can be extended through coding animated narratives. Coding animated stories in the English classroom has been advocated from over a decade ago as an integrated curriculum context for early teaching of computer programming while simultaneously developing students’ multimodal narrative authoring. However, related research has not adequately addressed English curriculum requirements for narrative creation. This article describes the development of a framework for analysing coded animated stories from the perspective of English curriculum expectations. Analysis of 23 stories showed substantial variation in the emphasis given to different multimodal resources among those stories with the most extensive use of such resources. Stories with limited use of these resources excluded those expressing characters’ emotions and positioning the audience to experience the story from a variety of points of view. Stories with extensive multimodal expression were at the upper, but not necessarily highest, coding proficiency levels, while some with high coding proficiency showed limited use of multimodal resources. Implications are drawn for coding as an engaging creative tool in English classrooms.

• Students reported better understanding of writing with screencast assignments. • Students reported technology gains from screencast and screen recording assignments. • Students reported screencast and screen recording assignments were not complicated. • Blending spontaneous speech with the writing process helped students. • Students may feel self conscious when recording their screens and voices. Inexperienced writers often resist meaningful revision, which underscores the need for pedagogical approaches that foster deeper engagement. This study explores the use of student-led screen recordings and screencasts as pedagogical tools to promote students’ ownership and confidence in their writing processes. Our study surveyed 76 student writers in First-Year Writing classrooms to investigate this approach. The findings suggest that these assignments are easy to use, focus writers’ attention on the writing process, and leverage learning opportunities afforded by the transmodal blends of writing, video, and speech. Specifically, students reported more benefits from screencast assignments that allowed them to blend spontaneous speech into the writing process. Additionally, students reported that their technology skills improved after completing either the screencast or screen recording assignment. One downside was that students tended to feel self-conscious when recording their screens and voices. Overall, these student-led assignments are worth exploring in composition classrooms as they can lead to a deeper, more hands-on understanding of the writing process.

This qualitative study investigates how writing instructors compose feedback in multimodal digital environments, focusing on the rhetorical and relational dimensions of their design choices. Drawing on social semiotics and multimodal composition theory, the study analyzes feedback artifacts, instructor interviews, and student surveys from six first-year writing courses. Findings reveal that instructors engage in complex feedback design work across communication modes, often without formal training or shared frameworks. Instructors tended to default to text-based habits shaped by genre memory but adapted their strategies in response to communicative breakdowns and student needs. The study identifies three core themes: reliance on print-era conventions, rhetorical problem-solving through modal layering, and ambiguity in feedback interpretation. Despite these challenges, instructors demonstrated creativity and care in their attempts to communicate clearly and relationally. The article calls for a rhetorical framework to support multimodal feedback design, emphasizing the need for pedagogical reflection, professional development, and student co-interpretation. As genAI and platform automation continue to evolve, the findings underscore the importance of feedback as a site of human judgment and presence. The article concludes with recommendations for instructors, writing programs, and institutions to better support feedback as intentional, relational work.

This Teaching Tip introduces the Feedback Menu, a flexible protocol designed to promote student agency and feedback literacy in writing instruction. By allowing students to select the focus and mode of feedback they receive, the Menu helps tailor response to individual learning needs and supports meaningful revision at any stage of the composition process. The protocol is adaptable for use in first-year composition, professional writing, multilingual, and upper-division courses, in both face-to-face and online formats. Concrete implementation steps, sample menu items, and considerations for different teaching contexts are provided.

Abstract This case study examines a first-year writing assignment that invites (but does not require) AI use alongside video reflections and video instructor feedback. Centering process over policing reframes AI as a tool, not a shortcut, fostering metacognition, revision practices, and ethical decision-making.

Abstract This article examines the integration of large language models (LLMs) into first-year writing instruction through a creative personal narrative assignment. Drawing on student reflection data, the study explores how LLMs can support iterative revision processes, genre awareness, and voice development when introduced with limited scope and attention to process-oriented pedagogy.

This study contributes to the emerging research on generative AI and writing pedagogy by exploring how college writing students make use of GAI when offered instruction in a range of responsible uses and latitude to integrate it into their writing process as they see fit. We analyzed chat log data and papers from participants recruited from six sections in which students were guided in experimenting with ChatGPT Plus and permitted to use it to produce up to 50% of submitted work. Through a combination of AI and human thematic content analysis of student chat logs, we found that in 18.6% of prompts, students asked ChatGPT to write for them. The rest of the prompts involved work leading up to or in support of the writing process. Human thematic content analysis of papers showed that students used ChatGPT to generate 8.2% of the writing they submitted. The most common rhetorical purpose of the AI-generated text they included was discussion/analysis/synthesis. English as a foreign language students (EFLs) in the sample prompted ChatGPT to clarify understanding less often than non-EFLs and integrated less AI-generated text into their papers, with a particularly notable difference in their use of AI-generated summaries. This unexpected finding merits further research, but it suggests that EFLs may use GAI for somewhat different purposes than non-EFL peers.

This study focuses on a generative AI approach to facilitate qualitative analysis in Writing Studies research. We gathered 13,336 one-sentence to one-paragraph responses written by 3,334 incoming students in a directed self-placement program administered at a large R1 U.S. university. In these responses, students describe their high school writing experience and college writing expectations. In stage one of the project, we pilot the use of Retrieval-Augmented Generation to expedite the selection of relevant responses for a topic—in this case, students’ positive self-assessments as writers. The selected responses were then compared to a random sample and rated by three faculty with writing expertise. In stage two, these faculty generated codes and themes from a subset of the responses, incorporating ChatGPT-4 through the stages of thematic analysis. Results show that the use of AI expedites and enhances qualitative analysis, but human participation in the process is still essential. We suggest a machine-in-the-loop framework with which Writing Studies researchers can more readily integrate generative AI to study large corpora of student writing.

The aphorism analysis assignment asks students in a first-year writing (FYW) course to respond critically to a microtext about writing. We argue that the brevity and content of these texts makes them especially well suited to help students work towards the goals of a FYW course, as well as to develop more general critical thinking skills.

This article explores factors influencing classroom assessment approaches by analyzing survey data from 326 U.S. college instructors teaching business, communication, and composition. Business and communication instructors adopt nontraditional grading methods far less than composition instructors. Departmental culture and disciplinary norms are major influences, along with constraints like class size, time, and technology. The article argues that instructors can and should question departmental grading norms to develop assessment methods that enhance learning in interdisciplinary courses like business communication.

Abstract Students in first-year composition are often asked to read multiple texts quickly and independently during the process of researching and writing research essays, yet reading is rarely an explicit pedagogical focus. Researchers in metacognition and readerly expertise agree that expert reading is purposeful, defined in part by agility in engaging with a text, its context and its embeddedness within larger conversations and with one's own intentions beyond or within such conversations. Drawing from these concepts of readerly purpose and source use, we propose a theory of mining reading — a way of reading for conversation. Mining reading is when readers mine a text to understand the text's message within a broader topic or disciplinary conversation and make a text mine by identifying its use for the reader's rhetorical purpose. We describe ways to scaffold mining reading from our writing classes and share findings from student reflections, gathered with IRB approval, about the affordances and constraints of this approach. We ultimately situate mining reading as one way to help students understand reading as an active meaning making process and develop a flexible sense of purpose and agency in their research essays.

This study responds to claims in the popular press and within everyday academic life about the effects of modality and the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning. We analyzed grade data from a semester (Fall 2021) in which the institution we studied had nearly all first-year writing (FYW) students randomized and evenly distributed among fully on-campus, fully online, and hybrid FYW sections. We also analyzed grade data prior to the pandemic (2015–2019) and during the pandemic (2020–2021). We used binary logistic regression to see if course modality and/or the pandemic timeframe influenced student grades. Results were mixed, with little evidence that modality had an effect and more evidence that the pandemic time period may have had an effect. A more consistent finding was that the grading history of instructors was nearly always significant and meaningful regardless of modality or time period. Race, gender, extra academic support, and section type also had significant effects.

This article seeks to present a model of critical factors that influence writing transfer by exploring and extending conversations happening in the field. The article identifies five critical and interconnected factors that support writing transfer: connection, perception, reflection, disposition, and fortification. These factors emerge from an integration of writing transfer scholarship and data from a longitudinal study of student writers. In that study, six participants were followed for seven years (from first-year composition past graduation and into the workforce) and asked to explain their experiences and perceptions of writing. I offer these five factors to spark a broader conversation about how multiple overlapping influences contribute to writing transfer and to encourage further research into how these factors interact and reinforce one another.

By Allison Gross and Jessica Lee. In the Fall of 2022, we set out with a handful of our colleagues in the English department to create an anti-racist writing curriculum. Of particular importance to us was crafting this curriculum for our specific context, not just as a two-year college, but also at Portland Community College (PCC) in particular, the largest higher education institution in Oregon, situated in the “whitest big city in America” (De Leon). Even though Portland itself is predominantly white, our students at PCC are far more diverse, with PCC itself situated on the traditional village site of the Multnomah, Kathlamet, and Clackamas bands of the Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other tribes who made their homes along the Columbia River. Specifically

By Taylor J. Wyatt. Any discussion about multimodal composition inevitably invites the question: “What counts as writing?” This question of what “counts” often reveals an underlying assumption that multimodality lacks adequate academic rigor. “What counts as writing” leads to further considerations, such as identifying pedagogical strategies to help students expand their knowledge in new writing contexts and genres. In their 2016 edited collection, Chris M. Anson and Jessie L. Moore define transfer “as the ability to repurpose or transform prior knowledge for a new context” (370). As they offer their definition of transfer, Anson and Moore note the complexity of the term and write, “for many scholars transfer functions as an umbrella term, encompassing an array of theories about the phenomenon” (370). Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lilian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd’s edited collection Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer considers writing transfer and what counts as writing within a multimodal context.

By Meghan Hancock. I came to Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships—as I think many of us would—with vivid memories of my first semester teaching first-year writing. I felt some panic and anxiety, of course, at the very idea of a teaching role, but I was also struggling to reconcile the conflicting roles I carried. As Laura R. Micciche puts it in the Foreword to this collection, I was “not-quite teacher and not-quite student,” but was, nevertheless, asked to take on the important role of introducing students to college-level writing (xii). The anxieties and learning moments brought about by these intersecting identities make graduate student instructors of composition a rich and vital population to study, and yet as this collection consistently argues, the field of Writing Studies needs more scholarship examining their experiences. It is this gap that Threshold Conscripts, edited by William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas, addresses in its collective works that closely analyze the lived experiences of graduate RCTAs (rhetoric and composition teaching assistants) as they attempt to balance their multiple roles as teachers and students.

Paige V. Banaji and Kathryn Comer Abstract The habits of mind (HOM) in the Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing offer a useful bridge between high school and college writing instruction. As the field evaluates the benefits and drawbacks of the HOM, we would be well served to listen to students’ perspectives. This article presents […]

Shane A. Wood, Nikolas Gardiakos, Matthew Bryan, Natalie Madruga, Pamela Baker, Joel Schneier, Joel Bergholtz, Emily Proulx, Vee Kennedy, Ricky Finch, Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson Abstract 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 […]

Yan Li Abstract Over the past two decades, writing transfer theories have significantly influenced curriculum development in first-year writing (FYW) programs across the United States (US). This study examines the theories shaping multilingual curriculum development in FYW by presenting findings from a national survey informed by a transfer-encouraging methodology. Despite the critical importance of this […]

Abstract Since March 2020, terms like resilient course design, resilient pedagogy, pandemic resilience, and keep teaching have become ubiquitous in higher education. In response to COVID-19, institutions have proselytized about bouncing back. However, what many may have internalized as a survival response to “the unprecedented” — resilience — is intrinsic to what many in English studies teach: the writing process. Writing is an exercise in resilience. To write is to think. To think is to reckon with complexity. And that reckoning requires that one abandons, however momentarily, the illusion of control for the possibility of creating something new. Building on a burgeoning body of scholarship on resilience in critical pedagogy and composition and rhetoric, this article works to normalize resilience in the writing process and in the teaching of First-Year Composition (FYC). In doing so, the article redefines resilience as a rhetorical tool: a flexibility of mindset and moves that student-writers may develop as they encounter different writing situations and reflect on how they navigate those situations, which can guide them in making strategic choices about languaging, in and beyond our classrooms.

Abstract Upon arrival at college, students often experience difficulty integrating themselves into the new space of a university classroom. They may wonder how their previous skills connect to present use or they may feel linguistic, social, gendered, racial-ethnic, or class-related barriers to inclusion — barriers that are all too frequently invisible to faculty members. Classroom Community Agreements (CCAs) can ameliorate these situations by helping students to express their needs to their classmates and to faculty. CCAs operate on principles of antiauthoritarian teaching embraced by bell hooks; they embody Krista Ratcliffe's “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship's “rhetorical empathy,” both of which offer strategies for orienting instructors’ and students’ awareness to others’ needs within a classroom environment. This article studies the processes and effects of CCAs in a first-year writing program at a large university. Five faculty members from the Expository Writing Program at New York University narrate their practices of creating CCAs, which they initiated both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives illuminate the ways CCAs build trust, clarify course values and expectations, and enhance experiences of presence and agency. Collectively, our findings demonstrate the potential that CCAs have to foster student belonging and learning in virtual and physical classroom spaces in first-year writing and other disciplines.

Jennifer L. Bay is professor of English at Purdue University, where she teaches undergraduate courses in the professional and technical writing major and graduate courses in technical and professional writing, community engagement, experiential learning, and rhetorical theory. Her work has appeared in journals such as the Journal of Business and Technical Communication, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, and Technical Communication Quarterly.Felisa Baynes-Ross is an assistant course director of English 1014 (writing seminars) and senior lecturer in English at Yale University where she teaches courses in expository writing, creative nonfiction, and pedagogy. Both in her teaching and writing, she is interested in aesthetics of dissent, which she explores in medieval polemical treatises and poetry and historical narratives on the Caribbean. Her published work appears in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Caribbean Quarterly, and The Caribbean Writer.Caitlin Cawley is the assistant director of the writing program and an advanced lecturer of English at Fordham University. She teaches courses in twentieth and twenty-first-century American literature, composition and rhetoric, critical theory, and film studies. Her scholarship has appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideas, Journal of American Studies, The Faulkner Journal, and The Oakland Review and has received generous support from the US Army Heritage Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.Tracy Clark is a senior lecturer in the Professional Writing program at Purdue University. Research interests include accessibility and usability, public health communication, multimodal content development, and the intersection of gender identity and neurodiversity in technology use.Garrett I. Colón is a doctoral candidate in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University and the assistant director of content development for the Purdue OWL. His research interests include technical and professional communication, user experience design, community engagement, and writing across the curriculum.Adrianna Deptula is a current doctoral student in the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue University. Her research interests include science, technology, and medicine (STM); patient advocacy; and new materialism.Shelley Garcia is associate professor of English at Biola University where she teaches courses on race, gender, and culture in American literature, as well as composition and rhetoric. She has published on Chicana feminist authors who write across genre, focusing on the intersections of form, identity, and resistance. Additional research interests that have emerged from her teaching include the role of literary studies in developing intercultural competence, the theme of abjection in Toni Morrison's novels, and representations of the femme fatale in American modernist fiction.Eliza Gellis is a recent graduate of the Rhetoric and Composition doctoral program at Purdue University. Her research interests include comparative rhetorics, public and cultural rhetorics, rhetorical theory, and pop culture.Caroline Hagood is an assistant professor of literature, writing, and publishing and director of Undergraduate Writing at St. Francis College in Brooklyn. Her scholarship has appeared in journals including Resources for American Literary Study, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and Caribbean Literature, Language, and Culture.Emily Rónay Johnston is an assistant teaching professor in writing studies at the University of California, Merced, and a New Directions Fellow through the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. She holds a PhD in English studies from Illinois State University, an MFA in creative writing from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and a BA in women's studies from the University of California, Davis. Prior to academia, she worked in a domestic violence shelter and an addiction recovery center for women. She has published articles on the relationship between writing and adversity, as well as the restorative promises of writing pedagogy in the face of adversity, in College Composition and Communication (2023), Writers: Craft & Context (2022), Rhetoric of Health and Medicine (2020), and elsewhere.Pamela B. June is associate professor of English at Ohio University Eastern, where she teaches women's literature, American literature, literature and social justice, and writing courses. She is the author of two books, Solidarity with the Other Beings on the Planet: Alice Walker, Ecofeminism, and Animals in Literature (2020) and The Fragmented Female Body and Identity: The Postmodern, Feminist, and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry, Gayl Jones, Emma Pérez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker (2010). In 2021, she earned the Ohio University Outstanding Professor Award in Regional Higher Education.Nate Mickelson is clinical associate professor and director of faculty development in the Expository Writing Program at New York University. He is author of City Poems and American Urban Crisis, 1945 – Present (2018) and editor of Writing as a Way of Staying Human in a Time That Isn't (2018). Nate's scholarly writing has appeared in Criticism; Journal of Modern Literature; Journal of Urban Cultural Studies; Learning Communities Research and Practice; and Journal of College Literacy and Learning.Ryan Michael Murphy is an assistant professor of business communication in the department of business information systems at Central Michigan University. He completed his PhD in rhetoric and composition at Purdue University in 2022. His current research focuses on the transfer of knowledge and skills between academic and nonacademic settings with a special interest in the ways business communication pedagogy can better recognize the experiences and knowledge students bring into the university.Jenni Quilter is executive director of the Expository Writing Program and assistant vice dean of general education in the College of Arts and Sciences at New York University (NYU). She is author of Hatching: Experiments in Motherhood and Technology (2022) and Painters and Poets of the New York School: Neon in Daylight (2014). She's currently writing and publishing about silent cinema, bodybuilding, Zeno's paradoxes, Afro-futurism, North African piracy, Norway, and animal migration. Quilter won NYU's Golden Dozen Teaching Award in 2014.Sahar Romani is a clinical assistant professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University (NYU), where she teaches in the College of Arts and Sciences. She has published poems and essays in Guernica, Poetry Society of America, Entropy, The Offing, The Margins and elsewhere. She's received fellowships from Poets House, Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and NYU's Creative Writing Program.Megan Shea is a clinical professor and faculty mentor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tisch School of the Arts. Shea is the author of Tragic Resistance: Feminist Agency in Performance (2025). Her articles have been published in Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism. Shea is also an actor, director, and playwright. Her gender-bending play Penelope and Those Dang Suitors was selected as a 2018 winner in Hudson Valley Shakespeare's ten-minute play contest.Christina Van Houten is a clinical associate professor in the Expository Writing Program at New York University, where she teaches in the Tandon School of Engineering. She is completing her first book Home Fronts: Modernism and the Regional Framework of the American Century. Her articles have been published in Comparative Literature Studies, Women's Studies, Politics and Culture, and Workplace: A Journal of Academic Labor.Bethany Williamson is associate professor of English at Biola University, where she teaches courses in British and global literatures, literary theory, and academic writing. Her current interests include ecocritical approaches to the long eighteenth century and articulating the humanities’ value in the age of artificial intelligence. She is the author of Orienting Virtue: Civic Identity and Orientalism in Britain's Global Eighteenth Century (2022), as well as articles in journals such as Eighteenth-Century Fiction, the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, South Atlantic Review, and ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830.Elisabeth Windle is senior lecturer of English and women, gender, and sexuality studies at Washington University in St. Louis, where she teaches advanced writing courses and introductory courses in gender and sexuality studies, as well as courses on queer US literature, true crime, and contemporary fiction. She formerly taught in the College Writing Program. Her work has been published in MELUS and Camera Obscura.Mira Zaman is an associate professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College, City University of New York. Her research centers on representations of the devil in eighteenth-century British literature, and she is also passionate about teaching composition and rhetoric. Her scholarship has appeared in Persuasions, ANQ, Marvell Studies, and Eighteenth-Century Life.

Abstract Drawing from new and foundational scholarship in the field and from our experiences as teachers at a range of institutions, the authors consider how multimodal learning can support antiracist classrooms. This article emphasizes the value of cross-institutional collaboration, as the authors make a collective case for remixing the essay in first-year composition. This term denotes a method for building on the traditional college essay through activities and assignments that allow students to reevaluate and repurpose this well-established genre. The authors offer four case studies for remixing the essay—“Multimodal Translation: Playing with Post-Its” (Borough of Manhattan Community College /City University of New York), “Remixing Activism: The Essay as Personal and Political Playlist” (St. Francis College), “NYC Graffiti Autoethnography” (Fordham University), and “‘Vernacularity and Translation Activity” (Yale University). All four narratives present practices that support critical agency and linguistic justice by addressing the conventions of college writing assignments. Together, the authors offer a useful practice for composition instructors seeking to implement antiracist and multimodal instruction as well as a generative concept for administrators developing new writing curricula.

Walter Lucken IV An adequate summation of Professor Ian Barnard’s career in and out of rhetoric and composition studies would require much more than the space allotted. Suffice it to say that from the early 1990s to the present, Barnard, Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Chapman University, has steadfastly explored […]

Effective source use is a critical skill for first-year writing students because it prepares them for academic, professional, and civic engagement; however, existing research demonstrates that selecting appropriate sources and engaging them insightfully remains a significant challenge. While students struggle with the combined pressures to read, evaluate, and synthesize scholarly sources, we argue that online media including news articles, opinion pieces, and social media posts are a potent but underutilized resource for building students’ competence and confidence with source use. In this article, we present the methods that we have collaboratively developed as an instruction librarian and a first-year writing instructor to propose a new approach to teaching undergraduate research using online media. We detail strategies for teaching advanced search skills using Google and social media platforms like Reddit and X (formerly Twitter), as well as a “reception study” writing assignment that requires students to develop source evaluation and synthesis skills for engaging these online sources. The success of our module highlights that enabling students to build their research skills in the context of these more familiar source formats can lead them to an enriched understanding of the research process—including formulating an authentic research inquiry and engaging meaningfully with real audiences—while also building their skills in accessing, evaluating, and synthesizing diverse sources. Furthermore, by developing research skills in the context of social media platforms and online popular media sources, students gain a practical sense of the relevance of academic research skills to their daily research habits.

From an unsettled, ambivalent middle between discourses of generative AI integration and refusal, we offer a critical-ethical stance for AI-engaged writing assignments. We apply a critical thinking framework to these assignments, assert critical AI literacy as a kind of critical thinking, and discuss how critical thinking and critical AI literacy can facilitate ethical discernment about generative AI use. This unsettled, critical-ethical stance positions scholars in our field to support context-sensitive pedagogical responses to generative AI across first-year writing, Writing Across the Curriculum, writing centers, and beyond.

Writing centers in Brazil emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English. Thus, they arise from local needs and contexts. Three articles about writing centers in Brazil have been published, and only one mentioned student tutors’ views. This research aims to understand their views on being part of a Brazilian writing center while pursuing their majors and graduate courses. Through narratives, four participants have voiced challenges regarding dealing with texts from a diversity of fields, handling technical terms, and expressed varying degrees of self-confidence when working with a text written by an individual in a scholarly higher position. Regarding growth opportunities, the student tutors mentioned the development of soft skills and teamwork, improvement in performing reading and writing tasks in their undergraduate programs, and opportunities to increase their knowledge in other fields. The discussions presented in this paper contribute to tutors’ training and to other research on student tutors, as well as to the landscape of what writing centers do in the domain of international publishing. In the U.S., writing centers emerged from labs and clinics (Carino, 1995) and were a resource for college writing assistance for undergraduate students from the 1970s on. However, this is not a common scenario in Brazilian high schools or higher education institutions. Universities in Brazil originated in the 1900s, meaning that higher education is a relatively recent phenomenon. The Brazilian educational system was established based on a “banking model of education” (Freire, 1970/2007), a metaphor used to describe students as containers into which educators must deposit knowledge, reinforcing that knowledge came from outside. Students were not encouraged as creators of new ideas and little was done to develop students’ critical thinking and writing skills, bearing resemblance to the observations made by Mora (2022) on her Mexican context. In this regard, writing centers are not a national reality and are not found in high schools or universities, as most of the writing practice is devoted to the essay students need to write to be accepted in the university entrance exam (Cons & Rezende, 2024; Martinez, 2023). Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students struggle to meet the demands of higher education, accomplishing academic tasks such as an undergraduate thesis and writing for publication without the help or the culture of pursuing the assistance of a writing center. Additionally, the pressure to publish internationally is an obstacle that faculty and graduate students must face, especially since high-impact journals publish in English and the Brazilian population is not bilingual. English language schools are profitable businesses in Brazil as compulsory education does not provide proper conditions for learning foreign languages. Thus, to cope with this demand, most graduate departments are applying part of their budgets to pay for translation and editing services (Martinez & Graf, 2016). Prof. Ron Martinez observed this scenario at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR) and proposed the creation of the first Brazilian writing center – CAPA – Centro de Assessoria de Publicação Acadêmica (Academic Publishing Advisory Center) in 2016 to offer both translation and tutoring services (Martinez, 2023). Through this action, he aimed to apply resources inside the institution and provide academic and professional development to the students and faculty. Following the creation of CAPA, seven other writing centers were established in the state universities of Paraná, Brazil in the second semester of 2021. The writing center at our university is one of them. Since its creation, our center has offered tutoring and translation services, with its staff comprised of a university lecturer as a coordinator and graduate and undergraduate students as tutors and translators. These student tutors use English as a second language and are majoring mainly in English Language and Literature; however, students from other areas are welcome and have been part of the center. The increasing popularity of paid editorial services (Hartwood, 2019; Martinez, 2023) underscores the importance of writing centers offering sophisticated machine learning (ML) editing assistance, ensuring that all individuals may benefit from these services irrespective of financial circumstances. These two realities demonstrate that globalization and internationalization initiatives have influenced the tasks performed by some writing centers. In Brazil, student tutors are mainly involved in translation services from Portuguese to English, editing manuscripts in Portuguese and English, and tutoring undergraduate students in their academic tasks in Portuguese or in English. Performing these responsibilities involves challenges, and as a result, we want to explore the challenges and benefits of working as a tutor. Though inspired by aspects of American models, writing centers in Brazil arise from local needs and contexts that display their distinct histories (Martinez, 2023). They emerge from an internationalization initiative that combines tutoring students on academic assignments and translating Portuguese articles written by faculty and graduate students into English (Cons & Rezende, 2024). There are only three international publications about Brazilian writing centers: Martinez (2023), Cons and Rezende (2024), and Cons et al. (2025). Martinez (2023) explores the emergence and development of writing centers in Brazil, using the author’s experience as the founder of the Academic Publishing Advisory Center (CAPA) at the Federal University of Paraná. Cons and Rezende (2024) conducted their research at CAPA and focused on one particular consultation as a case study. Cons et al. (2025) discuss preliminary tutor impressions about Generative AI and evaluate how formal training on the use of Generative AI has impacted the translation and tutoring practices at CAPA. Even though these three articles present the Brazilian reality, none of them look at student tutors’ perspectives on working at a writing center in Brazil. International publications that focus on tutors (Thompson et al., 2009; Thonus, 2001, for example) have centered their research on the North American context. The current research presents the tutors’ voices on being part of a Brazilian writing center and advances the discussion about how writing centers in Brazil create situated practices with transnational applications (Mora, 2022). To contribute to the landscape of what writing centers do (Jackson & McKinney, 2012), this article addresses the following questions: What are the challenges faced by these student tutors? To what extent do student tutors at one Brazilian writing center perceive their work at the center as beneficial for their individual growth?

This article looks at the practice of having first-year writing students write abstracts to prepare for drafting a research essay. Abstract writing grounds students at a moment when they may be struggling to identify a clear context for their object of analysis. The assignment asks them to read and critique sample abstracts, sourced from journals and their peers, and then write one of their own using the research assembled from an annotated bibliography. Through sharing the abstracts, students notice opportunities for expanding claims, applying evidence, and clarifying argument in their essays. In this way, the assignment enables students to develop more confidence in their ideas; it also sharpens their genre awareness, as they recognize how abstracts service both readers and writers during the research process.

This progression of assignments from Advanced Writing and Research for Artists, a seminar for Tisch School of the Arts students, presents a model for professors seeking to incorporate multimodal composition into their pedagogy. Culminating in a video essay, students explore films, television series, documentaries, stand-up comedy, interviews, TED Talks, and blog posts representing a multiplicity of perspectives related to a chosen controversy. After sharing their initial impressions in a vlog pitch, students dive into the research process with a comprehensive annotated bibliography of the most thought-provoking and challenging videos and articles they encounter online. Throughout the process, they keep a viewing journal, a bullet-point catalogue of gut reactions and thoughts that emerge while watching the narrative art that will ultimately form the basis of their arguments. The final video essay allows students to highlight the individual nature of spectatorship and to commit to the ongoing and evolving process of situated thinking. This article examines how the playful integration of audio and visual components in a video essay can foster authentic student thinking, present a holistic sense of the student, increase attention to academic integrity, and dissuade the use of AI-writing tools.

This study addresses faculty perceptions of multimodality and multimodal assignments across the majority of community colleges in Tennessee and Virginia. Our sample size was 117 English instructors/professors; of those, eight participants were interviewed. We found that the definition itself causes confusion, though 70 percent of respondents do implement at least one multimodal assignment in both Composition I and II. Also, we found great variation in the value that instructors place on multimodality, indicating a significant need for more shared resources, examples, and professional development training for English community college faculty.

Sandie Friedman Reznizki, Michal, and David T. Coad, editors. Dynamic Activities for First-Year Composition: 96 Ways to Immerse, Inspire, and Captivate Students. National Council of Teachers of English, 2023. A May 2022 New York Times article featured a graphic with the instantly recognizable design of the Harvard crest, but in place of the Latin “Veritas” […]

Manny Piña and Susan Wolff-Murphy Abstract This article examines the complexity with teaching for transfer (TFT) as curricular content through a qualitative study of how TFT was experienced by first-year writing (FYW) students at a regional, Hispanic-Serving public institution. Our analysis of reflective student writing supports previous studies that show that the curriculum supports the […]

To meet the current trends in higher education, there is accountability on EAP programmes to prepare and assess students’ access to higher education. Thus, multimodal tasks including integrated writing (IW) assessments have seen a resurgence because they arguably closely mirror academic writing. However, test practicality constraints and variability in the use and format of these assessments mean rating scales often fall short in substantiating the central claims of IW assessment. We developed an integrated reading-writing scale taking into account reading-writing requirements and empirical research on IW tests designed to assess readiness for first-year humanities and social science courses. We approached test development as part of the ongoing validation efforts, detailing the considerations involved in the scale development process. We argue that alignment with academic writing requirements should guide the development of IW tests, thereby acknowledging and comprehending nuances of academic writing. The paper demonstrates considerations and decisions in scale design as the validation process from the start, which is a reminder that assessment is not just a quantitative exercise but a multifaceted process. • The design of a rating scale for first-year undergraduate academic writing is detailed. • Emphasis is placed on the role of reading in integrated writing scales. • Academic argumentation, rather than solely source-use mechanics, is considered. • Implications for construct operationalisation in academic evaluations are offered.

Abstract This article proposes the value hip-hop based education can add to the first-year composition classroom. It provides a framework for using hip-hop based education to scaffold traditional writing assignments, including rhetorical analysis assignments and argumentative essays using concepts like zines, cyphers, and song analysis. Drawing from culturally relevant pedagogy, linguistic justice, and Black feminist pedagogy, this article offers the genre of hip-hop to define and solidify its usefulness in composition studies and its relevance to the Black community, asserting that centering pedagogy relevant to Black students is beneficial for all students. Based on culturally relevant pedagogy's tenets, this article highlights ways culturally relevant materials can be implemented to recognize and value students’ diverse cultures and lived experiences to increase student engagement, agency, and academic success. The concepts presented here promote antiracism and multimodal learning in the classroom contributing to pedagogical research and praxis looking to disrupt hegemonic teaching and learning.

Stephanie Bower is a professor of teaching at the University of Southern California, where she teaches upper- and lower-division writing classes as well as a seminar on climate fiction for first-year students. Her publications have included research on integrating community engagement into composition classrooms as well as reflections on a writing workshop she has cofacilitated with the formerly incarcerated.Elizabeth Brockman earned an undergraduate degree in English from Michigan State University and an MA and PhD in English from the Ohio State University. Before her tenure began in the English Department at Central Michigan University in 1996, Brockman taught middle and high school English. Upon retirement from CMU, she earned emerita status. Brockman is the founding FTC editor for Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, and she is a founding codirector of the Chippewa River Writing Project.Carly Braxton is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching instructor studying English with a concentration in rhetoric and writing studies. As a teacher of writing, Carly assists students in developing their writing skills by leaning on key pedagogical concepts that reinforce the rhetorical and situated nature of writing. However, Carly also does this by dismantling preconceived notions of what writing is and what writing should look like at the college level. Antiracist pedagogy and linguistic justice is integral to Carly's research and teaching practice.Roger Chao is the Campus Director for the Art of Problem Solving Academy in Bellevue, WA. He specializes in community literacy projects.Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday is an assistant professor of English at University of Minnesota. Her research, teaching, and service are situated at the intersection of composition studies, feminism, and critical race theory.Olivia Hernández is an English instructor at Yakima Valley Community College. Her research, teaching, and service work toward culturally responsive, punk-teaching pedagogy.Betsy Klima is professor of English at the University of Massachusetts Boston, where she teaches courses on American literature and pedagogy. Her books include Urban Rehearsals and Novel Plots in the Early American City (2023), At Home in the City: Urban Domesticity in American Literature and Culture, 1850 – 1930 (2005), the Broadview edition of Kelroy (2016), and Exploring Lost Borders: Critical Essays on Mary Austin (1999), with coeditor Melody Graulich. She serves as associate editor of the New England Quarterly. Her current research explores the surprising role women played in Boston's early theater scene.Chloe Leavings is a PhD student studying rhetoric and composition. She is also an adjunct English professor and former middle school English teacher. With a bachelor's in English and a master's in English and African American Literature, she prioritizes using culturally relevant pedagogy through Hip- Hop Based Education. Her research interests include rhetoric of health and medicine, Black feminist theory, and linguistic justice.Claire Lutkewitte is a professor of writing in the Department of Communication, Media, and the Arts at Nova Southern University. She teaches a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses including basic writing, college writing, writing with technologies, teaching writing, research methods, and teaching writing online. Lutkewitte's research interests include writing technologies, first-year composition (FYC) pedagogy, writing center research, and graduate programs. She has published five books including Stories of Becoming, Writing in a Technological World, Mobile Technologies and the Writing Classroom, Multimodal Composition: A Critical Sourcebook, and Web 2.0: Applications for Composition Classrooms.Janet C. Myers is professor of English at Elon University, where she teaches courses on Victorian literature and culture, British women writers, and first-year writing. She is the author of Antipodal England: Emigration and Portable Domesticity in the Victorian Imagination (2009) and coeditor of The Objects and Textures of Everyday Life in Imperial Britain (2016). Her current research explores the role of women's fashion in fin-de-siècle literature and culture and has been published in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies and Victorians Institute Journal.Scott Oldenburg is professor of English at Tulane University, where he specializes in early modern literary and cultural studies and critical pedagogy. He is the author of Alien Albion: Literature and Immigration in Early Modern England (2014) and A Weaver-Poet and the Plague: Labor, Poverty and the Household in Shakespeare's London (2020). He is coeditor with Kristin M. S. Bezio of Religion and the Medieval and Early Modern Global Marketplace (2021) and Religion and the Early Modern British Marketplace (2022); and with Matteo Pangallo of None a Stranger There: England and/in Europe on the Early Modern Stage (2024).Michael Pennell is an associate professor of writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of Kentucky. He regularly teaches courses on social media, rhetorical theory, ethics and technical writing, and professions in writing.Jessica Ridgeway is a licensed 6 – 12 English/Language Arts teacher, with a wealth of experience in alternative, charter, magnet, and public schools. Currently, she works as a graduate teaching assistant, where she instructs Basic Writing, First-Year Composition, Intermediate Composition, and Intro to African American Literature. As an English teacher for eleven years, her passion for African American literature has flourished, including for her favorite writers Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, William Shakespeare, Maya Angelou, and James Baldwin. She recently completed an English and African American Literature Master of Arts program, and she is currently working toward achieving a PhD in rhetoric and composition. Her research interests include cultural rhetorics, African American rhetoric, Black digital rhetoric, culturally relevant pedagogy, composition pedagogy, and Black feminist pedagogy.Fernando Sánchez is an associate professor in technical and professional communication (TPC) at the University of Minnesota. He currently serves as the coeditor of Rhetoric of Health and Medicine. His current book-length project examines participation in TPC.Tom Sura is associate professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI, as well as the director of college writing and director of general education. His most recent scholarship on writing-teacher development appears in Violence in the Work of Composition.Kristin VanEyk is assistant professor of English at Hope College in Holland, MI. Her most recent scholarship has been published in American Speech and Daedalus.