Research across disciplines in recent years has demonstrated a number of gains involved in community engagement and service-learning pedagogies. More recently, these pedagogies are being filtered into digital contexts as instructors begin to realize the opportunities made available by online writing venues. This presentation describes a specific…

This paper considers the use of a simple assignment, the personal narrative, in teaching students the discursive issues involved in doing academic history. Focusing on autobiography, I present the results of a survey of Canadian university students into their experiences with writing personal histories. Specifically, the survey asked students to…

Participation, a commonly graded component of composition classrooms, is rarely the focus of current research studies. While some discussions have addressed grading practices or ways to increase participation, student and instructor voices have yet to be included in studies of classroom participation in composition courses. Yet these voices are…

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,…

In this article, the author focuses on John Rechy's debut novel, "City of Night," to consider how cultural pressures, and later disciplinary pressures in Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/Transsexual/queer (LGBT/q) studies, affect the acquisition of critical literacies, particularly among students and scholars who follow the moment of gay…

Calls for Composition Studies to move beyond the "universal requirement" of first-year writing, and toward "a sequenced curriculum of courses that introduce students to discipline-specific principles and practices" have been partially realized by the growing number of writing majors. Public descriptions of these programs have traditionally focused…

Only a few instances of empirical research examine what the students themselves think of their participation in peer review. Perhaps because peer response is practically instinctive to those who teach writing, few have felt the need to study the student perspective. Instead, studies have focused on the quality of peer comments, their effect on the…

This article presents a study on how students experience grading contracts. Data were collected from students at a mid-western four-year university campus, where the population consists of middle- to working-class students. Patterns from the data revealed considerable resistance, verifying the teacher-researcher's ongoing sense of these students'…

"Integrating Writing, Academic Discourses, and Service Learning: Project Renaissance and School/College Literacy Collaborations" discusses a year-long general education program for first-year students that integrated disciplinary learning with a pen pal project in light of the goals of critical pedagogy and service-learning. The program aimed at…

Considers how over 10 years of teaching first-year composition, more than two-thirds of the authors' students have elected to write about things that have caused them sorrow, about the deaths of loved ones, about the deaths of neighbors, even of hope itself. Composes a set of "meditations" - brief essays in which the authors try to understand…

Explores the tendency to deny embodiment in scholarly and pedagogical sites and the related tendency to conflate disembodiment with authority and freedom. Argues that while feminism has a long tradition of examining the body as a material, political site, "new" postmodernist scholarship has tended to "textualize" the body. Examines critical…

Argues that writing teachers need to expand their conception of the response situation to encompass all the interchanges about evaluation (valuing of writing and writers) that go on in writing classes. Suggests two ways of complicating how the response situation is constructed in research about teacher commentary. Presents a study asking students…

Describes the contending rhetorics of two basic objectives for assigning students the task of writing research papers. Considers the assigning of research papers a problematic exercise. Provides student responses concerning their conceptions of research writing. Considers what teachers might do to change student perception of research assignments.…