Writing programs in institutions of higher education work to prepare students for real-world writing within any field of study. The composition of "Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing" offers an open-source text for students, teachers, and policy-makers at all levels. Exposure to an open space for learning encourages access to information,…

Despite widespread interest in the reintegration of Post-9/11 military veterans into civilian life, the literacies of Post-9/11 veterans, both academic and professional, remain largely untheorized. This paper addresses this dearth of information by examining the induction processes and resulting workplace literacies of soldiers, airmen/women,…

In this article, I summarize an interview-based, qualitative research study conducted with ten Marine student veterans on their experiences with college composition courses, focusing particularly on the how the participants' previous interactions with teaching, learning, and writing in the Marine Corps have impacted their perceptions and…

Considering veterans in the context of research on adult and nontraditional students in college writing classes, this article proposes Malcolm Knowles's six principles for adult learning as an asset-based heuristic for investigating how writing programs and writing teachers might build upon existing resources to support veteran students.

This article provides an analysis of the growing phenomenon of community writing groups for military veterans. Drawing on the scholarship on literacy studies, community literacy, and veterans' writing groups, the author profiles three veterans' writing groups and provides strategies for starting up, conducting, and sustaining such…

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…

Technological and economic change within the business and social function of journalism are moving civic literacy practices ever closer to those of citizen journalism. In this article, I survey the changes underway as journalism becomes less a profession and more a practice, a way of reading and writing about society. I draw from journalism…

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,…

The one-on-one format of tutoring, which is the norm for "writing" centers, can foster the much-maligned view of a "writing center" as a fix-it shop and undermine the role of the tutor as a co-learner and facilitator of peer-to-peer interactions. The peer-interactive "writing center approach", presented here, moves away from the one-on-one model…

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…