Following a brief introduction to problem-based learning (PBL) as one type of highly-engaged pedagogy, this article examines how PBL activities in a first-year writing class and an upper-level professional writing and rhetoric class led students to develop rhetorical subjectivities. We conclude that highly engaged pedagogies, like PBL, that…

For many writing faculty, electronic or digital literacies may not play an overtly significant role in their course designs and teaching practices, but these literacies still play a significant role in how students write. Whether or not writing teachers want to accept it, functional computer literacies are an important aspect of teaching writing.…

This article takes up the "special strangeness" of grading practices in the graduate creative writing workshop, based on the author's research, personal experience, and interviews with the faculty of her doctoral creative writing program. Using a structure of notes, the author attempts to make sense of the way grades are understood by both teacher…

Since Fall 2004, the Undergraduate Catalog at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville has listed a two-part "Communicating through Writing" (WC) requirement, which includes two first-year composition courses and an upper-division course in one of thirty-five majors. Most students fulfill the former by enrolling in English 101 and 102, a two-semester…

The feminized labor of composition studies is usually seen as being in service of, or subservient to, literary studies, ignoring composition's disaffective position against other fields, specifically creative writing. Viewing composition studies' complex labor histories in tandem with the meteoric rise of creative writing allows for a new way of…

That a successful professional life in Rhetoric and Composition depends on a PhD, a tenure line, and an extensive publication record is complicated by the demands that family makes on a professional life. The notion of "making it" in Rhetoric and Composition can also complicate how the field judges the contributions of its participants and the…

Although teacher feedback is vital in teaching students to write, and is a topic of interest and debate in L1 (native or first-language) and L2 (second language) composition theory, there are virtually no studies that analyze teacher commentary conducted in a linguistically diverse setting of L1 and L2 first-year composition students. This study,…

Over the past seven years, the 59 full-time faculty of Duke University's first-year writing faculty have birthed, fathered, or adopted 22 babies. What makes this faculty birth rate so staggering is not only that it nearly triples the United States' national average, but also that it differentiates their program from so many other spaces in…

Fayette County, once home to the Carnegies, the Mellons, and the Fricks, now punctuated by abandoned mines and coke ovens, is the second poorest county in Pennsylvania. Gay and lesbian students experience discrimination in this County. In this article, the author discusses her efforts to intervene in this complicated problem by deploying a…

In this article, the authors use two sets of terms--"chronos/kairos" and strategy/tactic--to frame the way they tell the story or the "case" of Professional Writing and Rhetoric's (PWR's) developing identity at Elon University. In doing so, they offer to the readers a framework for identity development that is portable across contexts. The authors…

In this article, the author argues that compartmentalization in the way that writing education tends to be discussed and therefore understood in the professional discourse of rhetoric and composition should be critically examined and transcended if the field is going to lead the development of undergraduate writing majors. Any new major should be…

The author never had a formal mentor. Indeed, when people ask her who was her mentor and she says "No one," they react with shock. How could that be? Yet neither the concept nor the reality were available to her as a grad student at Michigan 1957-62, territory largely off-limits to women at the time. Nevertheless, having snuck in under the cover…

In recent years, scholars and teachers in both the broad field of Composition Studies and the more specialized arena of Computers and Composition Studies have begun to recognize that the bandwidth of literacy practices and values on which their profession has focused during the last century may be overly narrow. In response, a number of educators…

This essay examines contradictory attitudes toward teaching and writing at a small college. Looking at her "private" experience as a teacher and "public" experience as a WPA, the author considers how assumptions about the privatization of teaching inhibit deep understanding of teaching and learning as intellectual work.