Crossing the threshold from high school to college-level writing expectations constitutes a challenge for many students since secondary and post-secondary composition instructors often work under different constraints and are guided by different curricular philosophies. Dual enrollment classrooms provide a space where these differences can be…

This article describes analyses of three contexts (civic, business, and military) in which understandings of intellectual property differ from those taught in the schools. In each of these contexts, it is possible to document specific examples of unattributed material that would be considered to violate most academic plagiarism policies. Yet in…

This article examines Donald M. Murray's ideas about what he considered the essential solitude of all writing and what happens within that solitude. Murray, a pioneer of the process and modern expressivism movements in composition, identified a number of forces that he felt were at work within his mind whenever he wrote; this complicated aloneness…

In this interview-based project, the author examines the post-secondary transition of six predominantly home-schooled students who profess the importance of their Christian faith. The author analyzes their writing for hints about how they negotiate the ideologies of post-secondary education. He shows how home schooling has been characterized,…

As a service-learning teacher, the author advocates for both teachers' understanding of how activist literacy helps students to change as well as students' understanding of how it helps them to make change. Educators need to be aware of students' initial fears and be reminded of the risks they take to engage in these projects. In this article, the…

In this article the author introduces a concept she calls "Thirdspace identity construction," which instructors can use to understand what happens in students' texts when such ever-open possibilities for identity exploration are allowed. This concept borrows from the work of critical geographer Edward Soja. Soja's "Thirdspace" represents a dynamic…

In an experimental writing course we taught at a northeastern state university, we explored "queer" and "writing," hoping to discover what students could create by merging these terms. How might queer theory help students use writing to reimagine and rearticulate various identity categories in ways that allowed them to reconfigure the mental map…

Examines why the relationship between plagiarism and collaboration seems so inherently problematic and suggests that it may have a great deal to do with the concept of "voice." (TB)

Contends that both the unproblematized conception of student voice in expressionism as privileged, authentic, and free, and the erasure of voice suggested by social constructionist view of student voice as the ventriloquism of a discourse community, are disabling extremes. Proposes a means by which a reasonable course can be negotiated through…

Presents a defense of the use of collaborative writing projects in writing classrooms, particularly in creative writing courses. Considers the issues involved in the use of such practices. Suggests ways to use collaborative writing in English classes. (HB)

Describes the disconcerting travails of the postmodern subject in the midst of today's boundary-violating, border-crossing, late capitalistic era. (HB)

Describes the crisis of the humanities at the present time as an effect of the demise of the traditional, modern concept of the subject or self. Provides an analysis of views of the postmodern subject, as described by theorists such as Gianni Vattimo and Charles Pierce, and how these views might help redefine rhetoric in a postmodern age. (HB)

Describes the dominant discourses regarding modern and postmodern selfhood in the light of empirical observation. Speculates about trends in post-postmodern conceptualizations of the self as it might conceivably be lived in the future. (HB)