College English - Volume 78, Issue 1, 2015

This article uses data from a study of college students’ digital reading and writing to examine the influence of interface on literacy activity within participatory online spaces. While most existing work treats activity within these spaces largely as a function of individual interest in a space’s content, students’ firsthand accounts suggest that interface features and design play a significant role as well, particularly as students transition from one form of engagement or activity to another. Using Teena Carnegie’s framing of the interface as digital exordium, the author argues that, since participatory interfaces and the composition classroom share several central goals, students’ experiences with interface offer important lessons for translating that engagement to an academic setting.

This essay advances a new pedagogical approach to engaging with archives in undergraduate courses. Through this approach, students not only examine traditional archival materials from the past, but also create new online archives of present-day sources they identify as related. Rather than training undergraduate students to become archival specialists, this pedagogy invites them to inquire into the relevance of archival materials to their own everyday lives and composing practices in digital spaces.

The essay reports the findings of a study of 911 students’ academic outcomes in relation to their placement profiles and a closer, qualitative analysis of 54 participating

Current historical research is shifting its gaze away from metalevel studies of the field that examine the discipline’s history on the national level toward archival histories and case studies of underrepresented individuals, groups, and movements that aim to shine a light on the darkened corners of our past and provide alternative or parallel narratives of the field’s development while also hinting at the expanse of rhetorical and disciplinary history yet to be uncovered. With this observational frame in mind, the author launches into a rich and detailed review of three recent books on the history of localized populations. Each of these books adds to the field literature on the idea of microhistories; on histories of rhetoric and public voice; on the education and professional preparation of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century women; and on race and racism during this same time period.