Once controversial or cutting-edge, freewriting has recently become "part of every writing teacher's repertoire" (Bizzell and Herzberg in Elbow 393). On par with outlining or webbing, freewriting seems to be a go-to practice in a writing teacher's tool kit. This downshift into uncritical acceptance presents an apt moment to reconsider how we…

In light of recent enthusiasm in composition studies (and in the social sciences more broadly) for complexity theory and ecology, this article revisits the debate over how much composition studies can or should align itself with the natural sciences. For many in the discipline, the science debate--which was ignited in the 1970s, both by the…

The treatment of a research paper as an isolated utterance within a composition classroom is problematic in that such papers may fail to encourage transfer of writing knowledge. In this essay, I argue that a research paper's failure to work as a utterance situated within a conversation--as critiqued through a framework constructed by Mikhail…

This article addresses two central research questions: (1) Are there possible detrimental implications to teaching multimodal composition in first-year composition? (2) If so, what is pedagogy's role in mediating these outcomes? Guided by these questions and focused on the responses of eighty seven first-year composition students, a mixed-methods…

The literature on public writing and community literacy has generally focused on "how" to get students to go public in effective and ethical ways. This article instead addresses a prior concern, the problem of "why" to go public. I argue that students (and Americans generally) are immersed within a cultural ecology of civic disengagement that…

This article discusses our university's attempt to analyze whether our system of First Year Writing placement serves the needs of our diverse student body. The theory behind Directed Self Placement (DSP) is appealing, so our program adopted a modified version of it, and after several years, decided to evaluate it quantitatively. The authors, a…

Writing program administrators need to be as concerned about sustaining the cultural ecologies of our communities as we are about the material economies of our institutions--we need to attend to the diverse linguistic and rhetorical ecologies within which twenty-first century student writers are exercising agency. In order to respond productively,…

Higher education has become increasingly concerned in recent years with its role in sustainability studies, both in the sustainability of the physical environments of its institutions and in the education of students as citizens and experts in a world facing complex environmental, economic, and social challenges. This review essay discusses the…

The following article maps the questions, methods, contexts, and theories presented in published scholarship on writing-related transfer. While not exhaustive, this review attempts to capture representative samples with a focus on recent publications. The article then highlights a multi-institutional research initiative that aims to flesh out the…

Within composition studies, transfer and rhetorical genre studies have found an especially productive partnership for exploring together whether and in what ways students transfer writing-related knowledge from one context to another. This article continues this synthesis by turning to Anne Freadman's notion of uptake to suggest a more robust…

In this article we consider the ways in which college writers make use of prior knowledge as they take up new writing tasks. Drawing on two studies of transfer, both connected to a Teaching for Transfer composition curriculum for first-year students, we articulate a theory of prior knowledge and document how the use of prior knowledge can detract…

In this essay, I examine the problems I now see with the sample curriculum I proposed in "College Writing and Beyond: A New Framework for Writing Instruction" in 2007. There are numerous factors that must be considered in designing a writing course: choice of subject matter, choice of genres to assign, sequencing of writing assignments, number of…

While "transfer" has become, in recent years, a subject of great research interest to our field, we still have much to learn about how we can best use this research knowledge to inform local efforts in program development. In this profile, we describe the foundations of the Dartmouth Institute for Writing and Rhetoric and explain how transfer…

Writing centers are like organisms, performing in and living in an educational environment: evolving, altering, adapting. Given this organic quality, a key way to understand how writing centers handle the teaching of writing is to examine them through the lens of ecocomposition. Focusing on the organic nature of writing, ecocompositionists borrow…

Since 2003, the International Writing Centers Association has held a Summer Institute for Writing Center Directors and Professionals. Encouragement of scholarship, writing, and publication are important aspects of the institute. We have compiled a bibliography of scholarly works emerging from the first seven institutes. These works include web…