ENG 7980: History and Theories of Composition (HTC) is a course required for all MA and PhD students in rhetoric and composition at Ohio University. This section of HTC was designed with two specific goals in mind. The first was to introduce students to multiple theories of composition, and the second was to not only teach but also to facilitate…

Students in a course on the psychology of language and thought first wrote flash fiction stories and analyzed them using course concepts. As an experiential learning exercise, they subsequently analyzed those stories for a number of psycholinguistic variables using the discourse technology Coh-Metrix. Their assignment was to change a number of…

This article recounts the experiences of a team of faculty, graduate students, and instructional technologists facilitating Rhetorical Composing, a writing-focused Massive Open Online Course (MOOC). When first offering the MOOC, we recognized quickly that we needed to emphasize the global makeup of our learning cohort to foster a stronger sense of…

Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains involved in community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are being filtered into digital contexts as instructors begin to realize the opportunities made available by online writing venues. This presentation describes a specific…

How can writing instructors prepare students for informed and engaged civic discourse when opportunities for such discourse are seemingly limited and ineffective? This essay examines this question by reporting on a case study that explored civic discourse and civic participation at the local level of government. The aims of the case study were to…

To help students meet higher standards, all academic and career/technical teachers need to be willing and prepared to use reading, writing and mathematics as tools for learning across the curriculum. To do so, they must have access to ongoing professional development, literacy and numeracy coaching, shared strategies, and teamwork to make literacy…

Enhancing critical thinking skills for undergraduate students is important across the curriculum and between disciplines. We report on a method of improving critical thinking skills, which was studied through an Ethics and Science First-Year Seminar course. We used full cycle assessment over a three-year period to assess students' development and…

For several years a number of instructors at the University of Cincinnati have experimented with the concept of problem-based learning (PBL) in their composition courses. The concept, rooted as it is in Socratic method and the hands-on problem-solving advocated by John Dewey, is not new, and though some of its applications may call for adjustments…

Using popular culture in my developmental writing course has prompted me to reconsider what it means to create successful developmental writing assignments. Having slipped into the questionable habit of assuming that removing complexity makes an assignment appropriate for developing writers, I pared down a fairly open-ended "media…

This conference proceedings reflects the substance of the 3-day Conference on Written Communication, sponsored by the Ohio Department of Education and designed to provide professional growth opportunities for more than 350 school administrators, teachers, and university and state department personnel. The papers in the proceedings present a review…