College Composition & Communication - Volume 68, Issue 3, 2017

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that early approach to writing and writers.

This article uses rhetorical genre theory to discuss methods for writing studies research in light of increasing participation of Indigenous scholars and students in disciplines throughout the academy. Like genres, research methods are embedded in systems of interaction that create subject positions and social relations. Using rhetorical genre theory to understand methods as the cultural tools of research communities, we argue that methods can be enacted as flexible resources in the interest of advancing ethical knowledge. In the context of Indigenous epistemological activism, researchers can then take a contingent stance toward method, a stance we name “principled uncertainty.”

This article theorizes teaching as accommodation and argues for a centering of disability in writing pedagogy. It examines how universal design can improve composition classrooms, applying inclusive principles to the syllabus in particular.

This project explores the dynamic impact of student employment on classroom discourse and on students “long-term academic and professional success. Using student surveys, institutional data, and scholarly research, I demonstrate that students” everyday workplace experiences play an integral (and potentially integrated) role in their liberal arts education and in their ability to negotiate future workplace literacies.

This article uses systems and complexity theory to illustrate key characteristics of writing as a complex system. This illustration reveals how writing works on multiple levels of scale, and adds to the body of theoretical knowledge that can be taught within the discipline of writing studies. In so doing, it shows how a complex systems writing pedagogy can benefit both researchers and students.