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June 2026

  1. Writing Across the “French Immersion” Curriculum: An Instructional Model for Writing Instruction ↗
    Abstract

    French immersion (FI) programs have continued to grow in popularity across Canada and around the world ( García et al., 2017 ; Johnson & Swain, 1997 ). With its unique content-based language pedagogy, teachers use the target language to teach most subjects of the school curriculum ( Cammarata & Tedick, 2012 ). Research has found that FI students’ language production skills (including writing) are not as strong as their comprehension skills ( Erdos, et al., 2014 ). Questions remain about how to support students’ L2 writing across the FI curriculum. Grounded in a theoretical understanding that recognizes language as a critical tool for the development of complex concepts ( Wertsch & Tulviste, 1994 ), we set out to explore how immersion teachers can better support students’ L2 writing development across the French immersion curriculum and which pedagogies show promise in doing so. Specifically, we examined how elementary immersion teachers can capitalize on the communication opportunities offered in content courses to further strengthen writing instruction. To do so, we analyzed different types of writing tasks designed to bring together language and writing outcomes. The study was developed using Action Research cycles of planning, acting, observing, and reflecting (Kemmis & McTaggant, 2000). Through qualitative data analysis of writing tasks and samples of students’ writing, we identified various types of “writing across the curriculum” tasks that support the learning of language, literacy, and content. We then created an instructional framework highlighting pedagogical shifts and pathways that teachers can use to weave writing instruction across the French immersion curriculum. This framework allows for newly learned language and writing skills to be transferred and reinvested into writing tasks in content courses and enables teachers to develop reciprocity between “learning to write” and “writing to learn.”

    doi:10.3138/wap-2025-0010

May 2026

  1. Artificial Infrastructures: by Michael J. Salvo and John T. Sherrill, University of Colorado Press in conjunction with The WAC Clearinghouse, 2025, 179 pp., $0.00 (e-book). https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/practice/artificial/ ↗
    doi:10.1080/10572252.2026.2672392

March 2026

  1. Book Review: Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change by Knight, Aimée KnightAimée. (2022). Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change. WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado. 141 pp. Open-Access Resource. ISBN: 978-1-64215-148-0. ↗
    doi:10.1177/10506519261433030
  2. Review of "Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication by Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts," Carradini, S., & Swarts, J. (2023). Text at scale: Corpus analysis in technical communication. The WAC Clearinghouse/University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2023.2104 ↗
    Abstract

    After decades of proliferating digital texts, technical communication scholars and practitioners find themselves with no shortage of documents to examine. These exist in public and private repositories across a gamut of genres and used by varied audiences, communities, and organizations. As Stephen Carradini and Jason Swarts (2023) argue in Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication , the "immense amount of text created by the various arms of the field of technical communication" (p. 6) makes the field ripe for a method like corpus analysis. Carradini and Swarts's efficient and approachable book acts as a timely primer on corpus analysis—the systematic study of a collection of texts—that illustrates how the method can support, complement, and extend existing research agendas and professional practices in technical communication. Assuming no prior knowledge about corpus linguistics on the part of readers, Carradini and Swarts's highly useable book may well find uptake in adjacent scholarly areas invested in the study of writing, such as composition studies or the rhetoric of science, technology, and medicine. But the chosen examples and suggested applications squarely situate Text at Scale as an indispensable volume for technical communication academics and practitioners alike.

    doi:10.1145/3794916.3794923

January 2026

  1. “Review of Rethinking Peer Review: Critical Reflections on a Pedagogical Practice”: Rethinking Peer Review: Critical Reflections on a Critical Practice , by P. Jackson and C. Weaver ‎ Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse and Denver, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2024, 270 pp., $32.95 (paperback) Publisher website: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/peer/ ↗
    doi:10.1080/10572252.2025.2467041
  2. From the AWAC Chair: Stewardship, Visibility, and Writing Across the Curriculum ↗
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2026.22.3-4.06
  3. Parallel Surveys of GenAI and Writing: Students’ Perspectives and Instructors’ Perception of Student Perspectives in Writing-Intensive Courses ↗
    Abstract

    Our questionnaire-based study explored the perceptions and reported practices of students about using GenAI in writing-intensive (WI) courses and instructors’ perceptions of those student-held perceptions and reported practices. The data were collected from a large state university in the Southeastern United States. We administered two parallel versions of a questionnaire to 6,000 student emails and 390 instructor emails across two semesters. Using SPSS 29, we analyzed the data to calculate descriptive statistics, multivariate analyses of variance, post hoc analyses, and factor analyses. Our analysis revealed numerous significant differences between the students and instructors in how students use GenAI as a writing assistance tool and as a source of feedback, among others. Our results provide important insights into the divergent perspectives students and instructors hold about the role of GenAI in writing-intensive classes and recommend increased communication between instructors and students to achieve common understanding about GenAI’s applicability to writing processes.

    doi:10.1177/07410883251372207

December 2025

  1. Book Review: Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication CarradiniS.SwartsJ. (2024). Text at Scale: Corpus Analysis in Technical Communication. Denver, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse, University Press of Colorado. 152 pp. ↗
    doi:10.1177/23294906251345592

October 2025

  1. Better Practices: Exploring the Teaching of Writing in Online and Hybrid Spaces: by Amy Cicchino and Troy Hicks, Eds. Denver, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2024, 500 pp., $53.95 (paperback). ISBN: 9781646426225 Publisher’s webpage: https://upcolorado.com/wac-clearinghouse/item/6675-better-practices ↗
    doi:10.1080/10572252.2025.2539523
  2. Learning from the Mess: Method/ological Praxis in Rhetoric and Writing Studies: Ashley J. Holmes & Elise Verzosa Hurley, Eds., Fort Collins, CO: The WAC Clearinghouse, 2024, 200 pp., ISBN: 978-1-64215-218-0 (PDF), 978-1-64215-219-7 (ePub), 978-1-64642-618-8 (pbk.). Publisher webpage:https://wac.colostate.edu/books/perspectives/mess/ ↗
    doi:10.1080/10572252.2025.2533410
  3. Contributors ↗
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-12199147

September 2025

  1. Booksprints as a Learning Format for Students in Higher Education ↗
    Abstract

    This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v15i1.1114
  2. From an Unsettled Middle: A Critical-Ethical Stance for GenAI-Engaged Writing Assignments ↗
    Abstract

    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.

    doi:10.58680/ccc202577162

May 2025

  1. "Kids Don't Come with Instruction Manuals": A Mother Writing to Learn Across Her Lifespan ↗
    Abstract

    In this article, I focus on an everyday writer, my mother, engaging in self-sponsored writing to learn (WTL) activities across her lifespan. Focusing specifically on her personal journals and her accounts of her longitudinal WTL trajectory, I trace the learning pathways she took to develop her identity as a mother across her life. Writing was a benefit to her everyday life given, as she puts it, there is no set “instruction manual” for how to parent. Additionally, I trace the “multidirectional” nature of her literacy by investigating how literacy learning circulates given Jane’s intent to pass her WTL journals down to her children as a text to learn from when they become parents (Lee). In making my argument, I extend conversations happening in our field about writing and learning as a lifewide activity. I emphasize the importance writing has on identity development and learning across one’s life and, as such, this article helps literacy studies, lifespan development of writing studies, and motherhood rhetorical studies gauge the vast ways writers write to learn outside of formal schooling. 

    doi:10.21623/1.12.1.2

April 2025

  1. Review of Annette Vee, Tim Laquintano, and Carly Schnitzler’s TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies ↗
    Abstract

    Hua Wang Vee, Annette, Tim Laquintano, and Carly Schnitzler, editors. TextGenEd: Teaching with Text Generation Technologies. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2023. https://doi.org/10.37514/TWR-J.2023.1.1.02. The rapid rise of AI, especially since the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022, has intensified debates about the role of AI tools in higher education. While some educators reject AI’s use—particularly in writing […]

  2. A Career-Span Writing Program for Researchers: CSU Writes Program Description—Why and How CSU Writes ↗
    Abstract

    Kristina Quynn Abstract CSU Writes supports researchers as writers across their career span at Colorado State University. The program emerged in an already rich writing ecosystem that includes a Writing Center and the WAC Clearinghouse. Since 2015, CSU Writes has helped thousands of faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students write more regularly, skillfully, and with […]

  3. Curricular Success Amid Labor Instability: A WAC Program’s First Five Years ↗
    Abstract

    Kimberly K. Gunter, Lindy E. Briggette, Mary Laughlin, Tiffany Wilgar, and Nadia Francine Zamin Abstract 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 […]

  4. Corpus Integration in L2 Discipline-Specific Writing Courses ↗
    Abstract

    This study evaluates the effectiveness of corpus-based interventions for enhancing writing skills in English L2 and French L2 among Romanian-speaking students. Following established intervention models, the study involved five stages: initial essay writing, corpus tool training, introduction to target language corpora, essay revision using corpora, and a satisfaction survey. Analysis of linguistic data (e.g., frequency lists, n-grams, and error correction rates) and survey responses from 40 participants reveals improvements in writing accuracy and diversity. Specifically, English L2 students demonstrated enhanced lexical accuracy and varied phraseology, while French L2 students improved syntactic precision and contextual use of academic terms. Both groups showed increased grammatical accuracy, especially in prepositions and articles, through corpus consultation. The findings underscore the pedagogical potential of corpora in writing instruction and the necessity of expanding corpus resources for under-resourced languages like French.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v15is2.1119
  5. Critical Incidents in the Expansive-by-Design Classroom ↗
    Abstract

    Drawing upon scholarship on cultural-historical activity theory and writing across difference, this study investigated how students reflect on critical incidents in writing-intensive courses that are expansive by design, that is, spanning courses, semesters, communities, and cultures, and seeking to orient students toward critical incidents as catalysts for expansive learning. Findings indicate that students who reported valuing/understanding critical incidents in developing more expansive conceptualizations of literate activity tended to be further along in their studies, to be enrolled in courses with more reflective writing and semester-long community-engagement projects, and to have assumed significant team responsibilities. Students most frequently reported finding helpful concepts and design elements associated with the expansive-by-design classroom, and least helpful prior knowledge, skills, and experience (or lack thereof). The authors recommend more research into designing and assessing curricula bolstered by a writing across difference framework to illuminate the relationship between agency, sociocritical literacy, critical incidents, and expansive learning.

    doi:10.1177/07410883241312736

2025

  1. Th e New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum: Diversity and Inclusion, Collaborative Partnerships, and Faculty Developmen t, by Staci M. Perryman-Clark ↗

December 2024

  1. Authorial Voice in Academic Articles ↗
    Abstract

    Authorial voice plays a key role in helping writers establish themselves as experts in their field as well as demonstrate their individual style (e.g., Tardy, 2012). Citation usage has an important impact on authorial voice in academic writing and can be implemented in various ways; namely, through citation types (e.g., integral, non-integral) and citation presentation (e.g., direct quotes, summaries, generalizations). While many researchers have examined citation type among novice and experienced writers, researchers have largely overlooked citation presentation across disciplines – that is, how experienced authors balance the use of quotations, summaries, and generalization to index authorial voice. Beginning academic writers may be encouraged to use quotations to prevent plagiarism, but it is unclear if this advice reflects patterns in published writing across disciplines. In this study, we examine the background sections (i.e., introductions and/or literature reviews) of 270 academic research papers to evaluate the extent to which various citation types and presentations are used in background sections across six disciplines. Findings which can inform disciplinary writing guides and educational materials indicate disciplinary variation in citation type, with applied linguistics using the most citations overall and physics and biology using the fewest integral citations. Disciplines also differed in their citation presentation, with some favoring summaries and others favoring generalizations while quotation was rare overall. These results have important implications for teachers and material developers who can use these patterns of source usage to compare and contrast disciplinary norms and provide direct instruction on features of academic voice. Cross-disciplinary awareness of voice features can also highlight disciplinary patterns for students, allowing them to write more like experts in their fields.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v14i2.1041
  2. Developing a Learner-Centered Response to Writing through a Graduate Course in Writing-Across-the-Curriculum ↗
    Abstract

    Although writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) programs have been commonplace since the 1970s, the focus has largely been at the level of assessment and programmatic development and less on the instructors, particularly graduate teaching assistants (TAs) who adopt these practices. In this article, we describe a pilot WAC graduate-level course in writing pedagogy that our institution developed as part of our recent membership in the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching, and Learning (CIRTL). We also share how one science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) graduate student revised her approach to assignment design, feedback, and assessment for a general education course and deepened her understanding of herself as an instructor as well as her students. We end by reflecting on how training in writing pedagogy can support graduate student identity development and improve student learning.

October 2024

  1. Contributors ↗
    Abstract

    Aaron Bruenger (he/they) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester where he teaches writing and communication courses. He is interested in rhetorical criticism and theory, multimodal literacy and composition, and relational pedagogy.Ellen C. Carillo (she/her) is professor of English at the University of Connecticut and the writing coordinator at its Waterbury campus. She is the author of Securing a Place for Reading in Composition: The Importance of Teaching for Transfer (2014), Teaching Readers in Post-Truth America (2018), and The Hidden Inequities in Labor-Based Contract Grading (2021). Ellen is also the editor or coeditor of several textbooks, handbooks, and collections.Esther M. Gabay (she/her) is a PhD student at The Ohio State University, focusing on writing, literacy, disability studies, and writing assessment. She has over a decade of experience teaching first-year writing in the two-year college, and was a collaborative member of the Faculty Initiative of Teaching Reading at Kingsborough Community College. Esther has published articles in TETYC and has chapters in the forthcoming edited collections What Is College-Level Writing (vol. 3) and College Teachers Teaching Reading: Practical Strategies for Supporting Postsecondary Readers.Catherine Gabor (she/her) is professor of rhetoric and acting associate dean for the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of San Francisco. Her professional interests are digital authorship, the scholarship of administration, and ungrading. Her work appears in the Journal of Writing Program Administration, Reflections: Writing, Service-Learning, and Community Literacy, the Journal of Basic Writing, and several edited collections.Kara K. Larson (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Hillsborough Community College–SouthShore, Florida. She was a Conference on College Composition and Communication Scholars for the Dream Award recipient in 2021. A former middle school English language arts and reading teacher for ESL students, Kara has enjoyed taking learner-centered engagement and collaborative learning strategies into the college classroom.Bronson Lemer (he/him) is a senior lecturer at the University of Minnesota Rochester. He is the author of The Last Deployment: How a Gay, Hammer-Swinging Twentysomething Survived a Year in Iraq (2011). He is a 2019 McKnight Writing Fellow and lives in St. Paul.Jessica Nastal (she/they) is assistant professor of English at College of DuPage. With Mya Poe and Christie Toth, her edited collection Writing Placement in Two-Year Colleges: The Pursuit of Equity in Postsecondary Education won the CWPA Best Book Award for 2022. Jessica serves on the editorial boards of Assessing Writing, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and Composition Studies.Katherine Daily O'Meara (she/her) is assistant professor of English and director of Writing across the Curriculum at St. Norbert College. Her work has been published in the Journal of Response to Writing, The WAC Journal, and multiple edited collections. Kat's current research focuses on accessible assessment and contract grading, student self-placement, equitable/antiracist pedagogies, WAC/WID, and writing program administration.Cheryl Hogue Smith (she/her) is a professor of English, WRAC coordinator, and liberal arts coordinator at Kingsborough Community College, CUNY. She is a past chair of the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA) and a Fellow of the National Writing Project. Her work appears in TETYC, JBW, JAAL, English Journal, JTW, and in several edited collections.Jesse Stommel (he/him) is a faculty member in the Writing Program at University of Denver. He is also cofounder of Hybrid Pedagogy: the journal of critical digital pedagogy and Digital Pedagogy Lab. He has a PhD from University of Colorado Boulder. He is author of Undoing the Grade: Why We Grade, and How to Stop (2023) and coauthor of An Urgency of Teachers: The Work of Critical Digital Pedagogy (2018).Molly E. Ubbesen (she/they) is assistant professor and director of Writing at University of Minnesota Rochester. She applies critical disability studies to writing studies to support accessible and effective teaching and learning. Her work has been published in Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy and Composition Forum. Additionally, she is an editor for the forthcoming collection Disability, Access, and the Teaching of Writing.Megan K. Von Bergen (she/her) is an assistant professor of English at Murray State University, where she teaches first-year and upper-division composition courses. She is interested in inclusive, student-centered assessment practices and the programmatic structures needed to support them. Her work has appeared in Composition Studies and enculturation. In her spare time, she likes running (really) long distances.Griffin Xander Zimmerman (they/he) recently graduated with a PhD in rhetoric, composition, and the teaching of English from University of Arizona. Griffin's work appears in the Journal of Writing Assessment and the Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics. An interdisciplinary disability scholar, Griffin focuses his work on pedagogical approaches to neurodiversity, teacher training, disability rhetorics, and relationality through communities of care.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-11527421

April 2024

  1. Practical Perspectives for The New Work of Writing Across the Curriculum: Diversity and Inclusion, Collaborative Partnerships, and Faculty Development : A Review ↗

March 2024

  1. Fostering philosophy teachers' disciplinary writing practice: A multiple-case design study ↗
    Abstract

    In this design study, we designed an instructional unit open to contextual modifications with the aim of fostering secondary school students' philosophical writing. Three philosophy teachers developed innovative source-based writing tasks and provided discipline-specific writing strategy instruction in their 10th grade class. In this study, we focused on change. We explored teachers' interaction with the instructional design and studied teachers' views on how the intervention had changed their practice since a change of beliefs is crucial to successful, durable innovation of teaching. Moreover, we studied the effects of the changed practice, by exploring change in students' writing. An external jury analyzed students' texts to determine students' actual learning achievements. Teachers' insights into student progress were obtained from reflective interviews that featured comparisons between the observed and expected results. The results showed that teachers judged the design to be feasible, valid, and effective for students' philosophical writing development. After the intervention, students' texts showed similar or even more independent philosophical thinking than before, while the tasks became more complex. Implementation drove teachers to contemplate writing instruction, indicating a change in their belief system, which is necessary for genuine improvement in teacher practice.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2024.16.01.02

January 2024

  1. Cross-Disciplinary Solidarity Through Labor-Oriented Research in WAC ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.06
  2. Leveraging Institutional Circuits to Rethink Writing Across the Curriculum at Two-Year Colleges ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.01
  3. Surviving as Switzerland: WAC, SLW, and the Literacy Myth of Linguistic Homogeneity ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.03
  4. Resumers in and beyond a Writing-Intensive Preparatory Course: Challenges, Assets, and Opportunities ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.09
  5. Introduction: Adulting with WAC: Adult Learners in the Composition Classroom Macy Dunklin ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2024.35.1.07
  6. Biliteracy Agendas for WAC/WID Research and Teaching � On Mundane Genres, Translation, and Systemic Change ↗
    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2024.21.2-3.07
  7. History and the Teaching of Dialect and Slang in Screenwriting ↗
    Abstract

    This article explores academic and industry perspectives on the use of dialect, slang, and historical language in screenwriting. It offers a chronological overview of major screenwriting manuals’ treatment of dialect and slang (or lack thereof) 1946-2020. It then presents survey data of 53 currently-practicing screenwriters’ views on working with dialect and historical language in scripts, as well as their sense of possible changes in the industry regarding attitudes towards diverse voice representation on the page. It concludes with examples from a teaching sequence that illustrates strategies for writing with dialect, researching it, and ethically considering its usage in scripts. Situating this work as an important intervention in historical English language studies as well as writing across the curriculum/writing in the disciplines, the article advocates for a focus on teaching concrete, actionable steps that align academic practices with industry norms. It also encourages students to critically engage with those practices and norms.

    doi:10.37514/atd-j.2024.21.2-3.13
  8. Tracing Discursive Turbulence as Intra-active Pedagogical Change and Becoming ↗
    Abstract

    This article reports on a mentoring case from a transdisciplinary, longitudinal writing-across-the-curriculum (WAC) initiative in which the situated complexities of integrating new writing pedagogies were observed and supported. Considering this case through an agential realist lens, we introduce the concept of “discursive turbulence”: an emergent quality of situated semiotic activity produced from the continual mixing of discourses. Discursive turbulence can emerge in myriad and complex ways, including fits-and-starts of pedagogical development, mismatched discursive alignments, affective signs of struggle and intensity, and nonlinear patterns of change. Through a series of four vignettes, we illustrate discursive turbulence as it emerged while pedagogical changes around writing were being implemented by an environmental sciences professor. We suggest that discursive turbulence is to be expected in heterodisciplinary spaces, and we argue that attention to discursive turbulence will lead to more robust accounts of learning, becoming, and literate activity, as well as new ways of supporting pedagogical becoming.

    doi:10.1177/07410883231207105

2024

  1. Preparing Professional Writing Center Staff to Work with STEM Populations: A Training Model ↗
    Abstract

    In this article, we describe a two-day, intensive STEM training that we piloted in summer of 2022 to prepare newly hired professional staff to support STEM writers. The training was created by the director and associate director and was offered to two professional consultants and two graduate assistant consultants in-person over a two-day period before the start of the fall semester. Staff training should always be responsive to local contexts, and we are aware our model may not transfer to other university settings. However, we do hope that our pilot offers a model that other universities can adapt to meet local needs and implement when training professional and graduate staff. Although we focus on professional staff, our model may also be useful for supplementing a generalist approach to training graduate and undergraduate peer tutors who work closely with STEM writers or as a primary form of training for embedded consultants working within STEM courses. As we discuss our model, we turn to writing in the disciplines scholarship to explain our choices and ground our pedagogy. We also turn to research on tutor training and writing center staff professional development. As we describe our training activities, we also identify areas for improvement based on our own perspective and that of our professional and graduate staff attendees.

October 2023

  1. Contributors ↗
    Abstract

    Tiffany Diana Ball is a lecturer at the University of Michigan. She has held academic positions at Kalamazoo College and Tsinghua University where she was a postdoctoral scholar in the Tsinghua Society of Fellows. She published a chapter in The Routledge Companion to Literature and Emotion.Sheila T. Cavanagh is professor of English at Emory University and director of the World Shakespeare Project. Author of Wanton Eyes and Chaste Desires: Female Sexuality in The Faerie Queene and Cherished Torment: The Emotional Geography of Lady Mary Wroth's Urania, she has also written many articles on early modern literature and pedagogy, among other topics. She is currently writing a monograph entitled “Multisensory Shakespeare for Specialized Communities.”Aaron Colton is an associate teaching professor and the director of first-year writing in the Department of English at Emory University. His current research examines the critical and pedagogical dimensions of writer's block in post-1945 US fiction. His scholarship has appeared previously in Arizona Quarterly, Studies in American Fiction, College Literature, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, and Postmodern Culture.Matthew Dischinger is a program advisor for the National Institute for Student Success at Georgia State University.Alexander Fyfe is an assistant professor of comparative literature and African studies at the University of Georgia, where he teaches courses on modern African literatures, postcolonial theory, and world literature. He previously taught at the American University of Beirut and the University of Edinburgh. He is particularly concerned with designing courses and curricula that introduce students to the powerful conceptual and theoretical work that is carried out by literary forms from the global south.Amy Kahrmann Huseby is an associate teaching professor, media director, and online literature program coordinator in the English Department, affiliated faculty in gender and women's studies, and honors college fellow at Florida International University. Huseby's work has appeared or is forthcoming in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Periodicals Review, Women's Writing, South Atlantic Review, and several edited collections. Her own poetry has been published and anthologized by the Atlanta Review, Wilderness House Literary Review, and Pearl, among others. Together with Heather Bozant Witcher (Auburn University), she is coeditor of Defining Pre-Raphaelite Poetics (2020). She also serves as editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Anna Ioanes is assistant professor of English at the University of St. Francis (Illinois). A scholar of post-1945 American literature and culture, her research interests include affect studies, aesthetics, and theories of race, gender, and sexuality. Her scholarship appears in American Literature, Journal of Modern Literature, the minnesota review, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, and ASAP/J, where she is also a contributing editor.Heather McAlpine is an associate professor of English at the University of the Fraser Valley in British Columbia, where she teaches nineteenth-century British literature.Lauren Silber is the assistant director of academic writing and an assistant professor of the practice at Wesleyan University. She received her PhD in English and American studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her scholarship emerges at the intersection of migration studies, comparative race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and affect theory, with interests in narrativity and storytelling.Jennifer Stewart is an associate professor of English and director of composition at University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She teaches graduate and undergraduate courses, including teaching college writing, workplace literacies and project management, and the rhetoric of popular culture heroines. Much of her scholarship draws from her work in the writing program and in the classroom. Recent projects discuss incorporating diversity-themed common readers and multimodal composition into writing programs as well as the use of institutional ethnographic methods to investigate standard writing program practices.Doreen Thierauf is assistant professor of English at North Carolina Wesleyan University where she teaches courses in composition and literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Her work on pedagogy, sexuality, and gender-based violence has appeared in Victorian Studies, Victorian Literature and Culture, Women's Writing, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, and the Journal of Popular Culture, among others. With Erin Spampinato and Michael Dango, she is preparing an edited collection for SUNY Press entitled New Rape Studies: Humanistic Interventions, slated for publication in 2024. She also serves as Reviews editor for the scholarly journal Victoriographies.Theresa Tinkle pursues a broad range of interests in the humanities. She holds a BS in elementary education from Oregon College of Education, an MA in English literature from Arizona State University, and a PhD in English literature (medieval) from UCLA. Since 1989, when she joined the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, she has researched and taught in the fields of medieval literature and drama, manuscript and textual studies, writing studies, writing placement, and disability studies. She is currently director of the Gayle Morris Sweetland Center for Writing. In this capacity, she leads collaborative research in writing placement, writing in the disciplines, and community college transfer. She has published in a number of journals, including ELH, JEGP, Chaucer Review, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, Speculum, and Assessing Writing.

    doi:10.1215/15314200-10708078

September 2023

  1. Review of "User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice by Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook," Crane, K., & Cargile Cook, K. (Eds.). (2022). User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice. The WAC Clearinghouse; University Press of Colorado. https://doi.org/10.37514/TPC-B.2022.1367 ↗
    Abstract

    In User Experience as Innovative Academic Practice , editors Kate Crane and Kelli Cargile Cook present and curate fresh perspectives for instructional and curriculum design by arguing that technical and professional communication (TPC) programs will benefit if user experience (UX) methodologies are applied in pedagogical settings to gain greater insight into the student user's needs, challenges, and environments, thereby not only making student users the center of the course design process, but also co-creators of instructional materials and strategies. To support the effectiveness of UX methodologies in learning about student needs and assessing program success, Crane and Cargile Cook bring together authors who present case studies where UX methods such as user profiles, journey maps, usability studies, diary entries, affinity diagramming, and so on were applied in various aspects of pedagogic design and re-design.

    doi:10.1145/3592367.3592376

July 2023

  1. The Teaching of Writing Across the Curriculum in School Years 4-6 in Sweden ↗
    Abstract

    This study explored disciplinary writing in grades 4-6 and the potential of writing to learn and learning to write across the curriculum to prepare the pupils for their future writing. Using Ivanič’s discourses of writing as an analytical framework, observation protocols from 104 observers in 374 lessons in 76 Swedish schools were analyzed exploring school writing in the different curriculum subjects. Analysis of the data reveals that in most lessons the teachers required their pupils to write with a single focus on reinforcing learning, enacting three of Ivanič’s seven discourses of writing: thinking and learning discourse, skills discourse, and social practices discourse. Much less frequently overall but commonly in language lessons, teachers required their pupils to write with a dual focus, developing writing proficiency while reinforcing learning. In these cases, all of Ivanič’s discourses were enacted. The results suggest potential for a dual focus on writing to learn and learning to write to further develop the pupils’ writing across the curriculum.

    doi:10.1177/07410883231169505

June 2023

  1. Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change ↗
    Abstract

    Review of Community Is the Way: Engaged Writing and Designing for Transformative Change by Aimée Knight. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2022; 125 pp.: 9781646423149, $19.95 (pbk)

    doi:10.59236/rjv22i2pp152-156
  2. Developing Writing across and in School Subjects: Introduction to Special Issue ↗
    Abstract

    Within the sociocultural theory of writing, texts are seen to result from cultural and social practices that affect the structure, content, and production of them in different knowledge communities. Accordingly, writing is not the same across subjects or contexts. Focusing on writing in subjects other than Language arts, this special contributes to understanding subject-specific writing involving both discipline specific knowledge, knowledge of representation, and production of knowledge in different, subject specific writing contexts. The issue advocates that disciplinary writing can start at an early age in primary school, that students have a range of preparedness for it, and that writing skills can be developed to support the learning objectives of the subject. The introduction considers the perspectives of writing to learn and learning to write as the underpinnings of writing across and in subjects. Consequently, the studies in the issue are related to these perspectives. The content areas scrutinized are Craft Education, Civics, Environmental studies, Science and Science orientation. This issue reflects the multifaceted, contextual, and hybrid forms writing can take, and, how writing can support learning in changing contexts and with different contents.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2023.15.01.01
  3. Advancing Civics-specific Disciplinary Writing in the Elementary Grades issue ↗
    Abstract

    Students need support through intentional writing instruction to develop their discipline-specific writing skills outside of Language Arts. Yet, we argue not all writing instruction provides the same opportunities for student learning. In this study, with the support of professional development, teachers engaged students in civic perspective-taking through writing, focusing on locally relevant public issues. Drawing from disciplinary literacy and genre pedagogy, our research team conducted a descriptive study where thematic analysis was applied to examine second and third graders’ civics writing samples. Our findings indicate that students’ engagement with key civic concepts became more complex and purposeful as they practiced argumentative writing. Development continued from second to third grade in both the sophistication of their civic perspective-taking as well as their writing. Additionally, we found that student motivation to engage in argumentative writing increased in all classrooms across both grade levels when engaging with locally relevant public issues. This article provides details about the elementary civics writing curriculum and the students’ writing outcomes as well as includes the two graphic organizers used in the curriculum.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2023.15.01.03

April 2023

  1. Resisting the Deficit Model: Embedding Writing Center Tutors during Peer Review in Writing-Intensive Courses ↗
    Abstract

    For many students, peer review can be muddled or frustrating. They can feel uncomfortable with the process if they do not feel confident with their own writing, and many believe poor past performances disqualify them from offering constructive feedback. Because writing center tutors are trained in sharing feedback in a kind and helpful manner, they are positioned to be excellent models for students inexperienced with or damaged by feedback. Learning how to participate in effective peer review can remove the emotional baggage attached to writing and create a respectful community of writers in the classroom. In this teaching tip, we explain how to embed writing center tutors in writing-intensive courses to improve peer review practices.

February 2023

  1. Book Review of "The Expanding Universe of Writing Studies: Higher Education Writing Research" ↗
    Abstract

    In 1966, more than 50 scholars from the UK, US, and Canada convened at Dartmouth College to discuss the state of the profession of English teaching, ultimately proposing a “growth” model of language learning which contrasted with the skills-based models of curriculum sequencing prevalent at the time. While debates about the impact of the 1966 Dartmouth conference on the teaching of English continue to ebb and flow, from contrasting early accounts by seminar participants (Muller, 1967; Dixon, 1969) to more modern work which situates the conference as a harbinger of the process movement (Trimbur, 2008) or Writing Across the Curriculum (Palmquist et al., 2020), its continued provocation of scholarly discussion has become a legacy in its own right. Even if the Dartmouth Seminar didn't change anything happening in the classrooms of its era and thereafter, which is unlikely (Harris, 1991), it would remain a rare moment of international, professional collaboration and consideration virtually unparalleled in our field's history.

    doi:10.17239/jowr-2023.14.03.06

January 2023

  1. A Citation Analysis of The WAC Journal, 1989-2022 ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.03
  2. Beyond WAC: Transforming Institutions, Transforming WAC through Deep Change ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.02
  3. Potential of WAC in Graduate Writing Support: Helping Faculty Improve Systems of Graduate Writing ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.10
  4. The State and Future of WAC Faculty Development Scholarship: A Citation Analysis of Publications, 2012�2022 ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.11
  5. The Future of WAC Is Multimodal and Transfer-Supporting ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.09
  6. Race, Writing, and Research: Leveraging WAC to Reduce Disparities in Research Funding and Publication ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.07
  7. (Re)Defining WAC to Guide a Linguistic Justice Ideological Change Across Campuses ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.05
  8. Mapping the Present to Shape the Future: An Interactive, Inclusive e-Map Supporting Diverse WAC Practices and Writing Sites ↗
    doi:10.37514/wac-j.2023.34.1.12