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…

English 1311: Expository English Composition is the first semester course in a two-semester first-year composition (FYC) sequence. Both ENG 1311 and its second-semester counterpart, ENG 1312, are required for all students unless they have transfer credit covering this requirement or place out of one or both of the courses via the College-Level…

Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning 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…

Using a survey of 138 writing programs, I argue that we must be more explicit about what we think students should get out of analysis to make it more likely that students will transfer their analytical skills to different settings. To ensure our students take analytical skills with them at the end of the semester, we must simplify the task we…

This article points composition scholars toward two bodies of theory that are gaining attention in our discipline, performance studies and multimodal discourse theory. Each raises important questions about the ways we teach writing, the kinds of composition processes we value, and the means by which students construct authority in the university.…

This article presents a course design of English 450: Theories and Methods of Argument. The course is an upper level course in the Writing concentration of B. A. in English and American Language and Literature at the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga, a metropolitan university in the South. At the 400 level, Theories and Methods of Argument is…

In this essay, the author suggests that performance studies--a large and varied body of work that takes the fluidity of self and the relationship between word and action as its central concepts--offers theories and methodologies for writing teachers to use to help students construct discoursal identities. Although the performative screen offers…

The study of emotion as discourse not only eliminates objections about the individual psychology of students, it also connects researchers to methods that go beyond reflection and self-reporting. In this article, the author pursues these ideas within the context of a college composition course where students experienced a particularly high level…

This article describes the increasing pressures on those who teach graduate seminars in composition pedagogy to cover a broad range of texts, topics, and techniques. It argues that in response, pedagogy instructors may need to deliberately (re)design their courses in order to continue to help new writing instructors engage in inquiry and…

Considers how theories of writing grounded in cultural studies and ethnographic writing have explicitly taken up questions of writing students' relations to cultures and communities outside the academy. Considers disciplinary influences in ethnographic writing. Discusses the reenvisioning of the politics of postmodern ethnography. (SG)

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…

Considers how effective teacher feedback increases students' awareness of the choices they make in a piece of writing and enables them to discuss those choices with others. Describes the Comment to Comment assignment, an asynchronous written collaboration between teacher and student. Discusses the process of trial and error that the author went…

Describes writing assignments based on several readings on the ethical quagmire of pornography. Suggests that exploratory writing grounded in the texture of students' lives is an antidote to abstract, theoretical pronouncements. Urges returning to an ethics developed in a community of writers who begin with values already given but who form an…

Proposes an alternative pedagogy and curriculum to one implied by the text, "Ways of Reading," which provides a set of difficult, theoretical texts for writing classes. Suggests that teachers should learn something of the student's world as the student learns of the teacher's. (TB)