College Composition & Communication - Volume 73, Issue 2, 2021

I examined the online representation of the ninety existing PhD programs in rhetoric and composition in the United States and collected information on the courses offered in the programs, their home departments, and the programs’ mission statements. The findings expose issues with clarity and transparency of the information presented and suggest that further investigation of these programs’ curricula is needed.

Through a longitudinal analysis of fourteen students’ writing development over five years, we explore how transfer of learning happens and fails to happen. Key findings include that while transfer occurs frequently in our study, 78% of it is invisible to students, and when knowledge is reinforced or expanded, students are more likely to transfer. This study affirms the critical importance of teaching first-year writing but also calls into question how we study, teach, and understand writing transfer.

Drawing on my own experience, theories of rhetoric, and queer composition, I suggest frameworks for a first-year writing classroom responsive to the possibility that a trans, gender non-conforming, or gender-questioning student might be present without requiring that student’s self-disclosure; gender transition is imagined as a distinct and positive learning outcome.

Drawing on survey and interview data, we describe a form of bullying of writing program administrators (WPAs) that disregards disciplinary expertise and results in violations of academic freedom. We argue that writing program administration as scholarly work is subject to the same protections of academic freedom as outlined by the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Here, I analyze how working as a part-time rock drummer and full-time professor can generate “resonant literacy” through three intra-acting pursuits: 1) emergent intensity, 2) enworlded practice, and 3) hybrid identity. I further explain positive impacts of resonant literacy on writers, including those in first-year composition.

Building on cultural rhetorics, queer composition, and new materialist scholarship, this article argues for the practice of “Thing” writing, which uses the performative qualities of matter itself in non-anthropocentric compositions that assemble various discourses, perspectives, and scales of thought to arrange Burkean parlors and counteract the logic of “apocalyptic critique.”