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…

In this article, University of Maryland writing program administrators Alexis Walston and Jessica Enoch explore the "Composition Studies" archive and its trove of articles from 1972 to the present with a focus on the emotive dimension of teaching and administration. As Walston and Enoch have worked to support a large community of…

The author reflects on receiving the entire archival history of "Composition Studies" upon becoming editor of the journal in 2013. This caused the realization that the growth of the field and the livelihoods of those within it is not as stable as it would seem from the outside, and that it is heavily dependent on individuals to preserve…

When pondering how to contribute to this special issue, the author was startled to realize that their career, the journal's history, and the development of the discipline--rhetoric and composition/writing studies (RCWS)--had run in parallel for 50 years. This essay tells a story of how "generation" came to matter in rhetoric and…

The common arguments about potential student use of these technologies suggest artificial intelligence (AI)-assisted writing will damage student learning by shortcutting the writing process. There is a further worry that AI-based pedagogy will de-skill students by reducing writing to a mere editing practice. Additionally, some suggest that…

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…

A unique line of WPA scholarship highlights the bodily, mental, and emotional toll of administering writing programs, which has prompted analysis of the institutional mechanisms that produce frustration in WPA work. Writing programs are comprised of a wide range of (non)human institutional forces in often incoherent and unsustainable ways, which…

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 shows how the annotation practices in an archival text entitled "Progress and Achievement: A History of the Massachusetts State Federation of Women's Clubs: 1893-1931" anticipate key feminist rhetorical research commitments and in doing so present a unique pedagogical approach to creating multivocal stories in the writing…

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…