College Composition & Communication - Volume 76, Issue 1, 2024

We report our qualitative study on two graduate student instructors’ experiences teaching alongside an experienced professor in an experimental super-sized first-year writing class. Using the framework of wobble (Fecho et al), we explore how mentors can help novice teachers navigate moments of destabilization and uncertainty.

This article argues that a focus on racialized emotional economies is crucial to cultivating antiracist programs and an antiracist field. This study is framed around a racist fuck-up. We provide a framework and recommendations for ways that administrators, scholars, and educators can attend to emotions more directly within academic spaces.

Composition studies seems relatively unified in the belief that “active,” “rhetorical,” and “conversational” modes of reading are students’ best hope for facing the challenges of college reading and writing tasks. As commonplaces, however, these descriptors mask both reading outcomes and the specific practices presumed to support them. Through an analysis of three popular composition textbooks, we disentangle and reveal some of the reading axiologies most fundamental to the field and which we contend these commonplaces gesture toward but leave vastly undertheorized. We argue that more precise explications of these distinct reading axiologies ultimately provide a contextualist framework for reading, helping students approach their reading-writing tasks with greater clarity, flexibility, and purpose.

This article uses the results of a five-year study of job seekers to argue for improving job search preparation. Graduate students entering the job market want advice that is knowledgeable, realistic, and honest and that goes beyond emphasizing tenure-track research jobs to include a consideration of their needs and interests.

This research team sought to gauge potential changes in the composition landscape by replicating, diversifying, and extending Bergmann and Zepernick’s 2007 study. To potentially measure the impact of years of transfer-focused work, we examined participants’ perceptions of first-year writing (FYW) classes at multiple institutions and in multiple fields at four diverse institutions. Gathering data from thirteen focus groups and sixteen interviews, the study included sixty-four total participants at four universities across the United States. Our findings diverged from the original study. The results indicated students felt that FYW was both personal and academic; that FYW taught students how to write; that FYW instructors were experts in their field; that FYW teaches best writing processes and practices; that personally relevant writing is important to writing transfer; and that for writing, there is “no box under the bed.” These findings suggest that transfer curricula may be working in tandem with other approaches, such as Writing about Writing, to shift students’ perceptions of the importance of FYW.