Looking to the possibility that interdisciplinary, thematic courses can build student confidence in the writing process, this essay argues that a first-year writing course that combines close attention to rhetorical skills, readings about an interdisciplinary field, and a carefully scaffolded assignment sequence enhances the potential transfer of…

Information literacy has become one of the most essential skills we teach undergraduates. One highly effective way of teaching this skill is to put students in the active role of the mediator by asking them to produce a critical edition of an existing, open-access text. The process of inserting explanatory footnotes, writing introductory material,…

This is not another tired lament for a Golden Age when all students were brilliantly prepared for college, but rather an elaboration of a central pedagogical reality the authors had each separately faced--it is not easy to teach the complex set of skills subsumed under the heading "research," that organic, contingent, messy, recursive…