During this era of high-stakes testing, technology-based instruction, and increased control over students' expression due to school violence, students' right to write must be protected. Censorship of writing not only stifles student voices but denies students important opportunities to grow as both writers and thinkers. Through the often messy…

Approaching definitions (and the act of defining) as inherently political and ideological, this article argues that there is a lack of definitional precision surrounding "critical pedagogy" and its core terms (e.g., "student empowerment"). This lack of precision can impede the successful and ethical implementation of critical…

This article describes Sondra Perl's retrospective review of the composing processes of unskilled college writers and whether her assumptions and values in the designing of research projects have changed over her long teaching career. She uses her college dissertation "Five Writers Writing" as the basis to reflect on the authors and…

In this reflective essay, Alberto Ledesma explores how being undocumented can produce a particular form of writer's block. He argues that there is a pattern of predictable silences and obfuscations inherent in all undocumented immigrant autobiographies that cannot be easily negotiated when undocumented students are asked to write about "their…

In his later lectures, published as "The Hermeneutics of the Subject," Michel Foucault surveys different modalities of obtaining "truth" about one's self and the world: from Socrates to the Cynics, Stoics, Epicureans and early church writers. Genealogically tracing this opposition between knowing "self and…

The essay examines the ethical tensions surrounding the common cultural and disciplinary demand that writers write "clearly." The essay seeks to advance the discipline's engagement with Linda Kintz's and Sharon Crowley's separate critiques of the "ideology of clarity," arguing that clarity potentially manipulates audiences primarily through either…

This article provides essential strategies to be more successful in one of the major roles in academia: writing. Most academics struggle with roadblocks in their writing process. We are forever battling to complete research articles, manuscripts, grant proposals or other documents. The strategies and perspective shared here help overcome several…

In this essay, I propose a concerted effort to begin devising a theory and pedagogy of failure. I review the discourse of failure in Western culture as well as in composition pedagogy, ultimately suggesting that failure is not simply a judgement or indication of rank but is a relational, affect-bearing concept with tremendous relevance to…

A multiliteracies pedagogy has renewed our interest in materiality, or how the physical text interacts with the author's choices and the context to contribute to the message, yet little attention has been paid to materiality in analog texts, such as the scrapbook, even though this medium contains affordances (capabilities and limitations) that…

In this essay, I develop a pedagogical stance called the "free exercise of rhetoric" as a way to approach teaching and student writing at the intersection of LGBT and religious discourses. Through this stance, I work with students' personal commitments and build their rhetorical competence using a process that involves encountering uncommon…

This Commentary posits the need to analyze how the energy/transportation, agricultural/food, and economic/political systems influence climate change through responding to literary "cli-fi" texts, place-based writing, visual representation of the effects of climate change, and drama activities.

This commentary is in response to the article "Effects of Verbal and Written Performance Feedback on Treatment Adherence" (Kaufman, Codding, Markus, Tryon, & Kyse, this issue). The overall recommendation to those who study treatment integrity using performance feedback methods is to incorporate theories and research on social…

In this article the author responds to Jonathan Silin's article "At a Loss: Scared and Excited", and in doing so, takes up his ideas around the generative potential of loss. She uses these notions of loss to illuminate how, in one diverse school community in Australia, loss, failure and an "awful reputation" have opened up…

When instructing reading and composition, teachers should have students write down dictated vocabulary, short phrases, simple sentences, etc., occasionally modifying these, in order to deepen their understanding of how "kana" (i.e., phonetic characters) and vocabulary are used. This can be broken down into the following four activities: (1)…

In experimental disciplinary fields such as medicine, the writing up of a research paper in English may represent a major hurdle, especially for inexperienced writers and users of EAL (English as an Additional Language), mainly due to a lack of familiarity with international discourse conventions. Despite the efforts of many EAP (English for…