"Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching" takes an expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, arguing for the centering of the field's research and service on first-year writing, particularly the "new majority" of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who…

A subcommittee of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) Executive Committee wrote the "NCTE Beliefs about the Teaching of Writing" in 2004. In over a decade since, the everyday experience of writing in people's lives has expanded dramatically. Increasingly, handheld devices are important instruments for people's writing,…

The term "standardized" tests is often heard along with "high-stakes." Standardized tests are administered, scored, and interpreted in a consistent way, so that the performances of large groups of students can be compared. They are not in themselves high-stakes, but they are often used for high-stakes purposes such as…

The Common Core State Standards (CCSS) for English Language Arts (ELA), designed to make students college and career ready, were released in June 2010, and have since been adopted by 45 states seeking to be eligible for Race to the Top funds offered by the US Department of Education. The states that signed on with the CCSS agreed to fully…

The recent pedagogical "boom" in English studies and the seeming omnipresence of the term pedagogy have not been matched by a correspondingly radical shift in how educators prepare professors of English. Instead, Shari J. Stenberg argues, "professing" remains primarily defined by conceptions of research. Stenberg insists that pedagogy will not be…