For almost 40 years, our university's first year writing program has included a shared outcome: "Students will appreciate the capacity of writing to change oneself and the world." This outcome, unlike our more typical composition goals concerning writing processes, rhetorical acumen, and critical research abilities, had never been…

Often, composition instructors struggle to encourage STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students to see the relevance of writing courses to their personal goals. Students' lack of recognition of the importance of literacy skills can lead to disengagement in required college writing courses compared to their so-called…

This article details the challenges and possibilities of assigning first year students writing assignments that require engagement with emotions and memories during the COVID-19 pandemic (Fall 2021). Using one first year writing class as a case study, the author describes the challenges that arose in writing conferences. Noting the rise in mental…

Asian American Rhetoric and Representation was a graduate-level course taught at Virginia Tech in 2019. The course overviewed disciplinary conversations and concerns in and around Asian American rhetorical studies over time, with a focus on the affordances of Asian American rhetorical theory for the study of rhetoric and writing more broadly.…

During the last 20 years, the teaching of writing has grown worldwide as a dynamic field of international academic practice and research, as attested to by the emergence of disciplinary societies, conferences, and publications. This paper builds on common nodes that have shaped the original contributions to Latin America's university-level…

In this article, we theorize the disciplinary lifecycle as an alternative to the limited metaphor of the "career arc." We argue that theorizing career trajectories as lifecycles resonates more fully with the experiences that are common to careers in rhetoric, composition, and writing studies (RCWS), thereby providing more possibilities…

This article examines academic job market experiences as an embodied performance, considering how different bodies must navigate that performance in different ways. Engaging with the critical race theory methodology of counterstory developed by Aja Martinez and the social justice heuristic developed by Rebecca Walton, Kristen R. Moore, and Natasha…

This article argues for a Deweyan "democratic design" approach to program leadership that builds programmatic ideals into leadership practices. To illustrate democratic design in practice, we draw from case studies of two partnership programs based in writing studies--a writing partnership between the University of Arizona and area high…

This article discusses "Rhetoric of Storytelling," a course that looks at the purposes of storytelling across different rhetorical traditions, beginning with Ancient Greek and Roman traditions and traversing African American, Indigenous Latin American, American Indian, feminist, and Latinx rhetorical traditions. The course operates from…

In the fifty-some years that "Composition Studies" [formerly "Freshman English News"] has been mapping the composition and writing field, much attention has been given to so-called minoritized writers. The initial analysis of minoritized writers in "Freshman English News," for instance, was almost entirely framed by…

Writing researchers know relatively little about the needs and experiences of faculty writers. As a result, institutional approaches to improving scholarly productivity fail to account for vital components of writerly development and in doing so limit access to the academic enterprise. Drawing on an interview-based longitudinal study of faculty…

College students continue to navigate powerful literacy myths that impact their writing education, especially the belief systems that uphold standard, monolingual uses of language. In this article, the authors describe "English 391ml: Multilingualism and Literacy in Western Mass," a course that raises students' critical awareness of…

ENG 712: Theories in Public Rhetoric & Community Engagement is a required course for MA and PhD students concentrating in Rhetoric, Writing, and Community Engagement at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM). The topic for this course rotates depending upon the teaching faculty member's area of expertise. In the 2020 rotation, Maria opted…

Drawing its title from Nas's 1994 "The World Is Yours," the seminar detailed in this article specifically investigates hip-hop writing, performance, and culture within a US context across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As a medium, hip hop remains an intentional, experimental exploration of survival. The course offers an…

Circulated documents, like mission statements, demarcate normative boundaries related to student and instructor identities, behaviors, and experiences. In attempting to create inclusive documentation, universities frequently use standardizing language. While promoting standardization, however, such documents may prove exclusive by disregarding a…