This article will explore the potential of recent neuroscience to inform a writing pedagogy aimed at a habitus of plasticity and emotional intelligence. Arguing that our field has never fully realized the embodied pedagogy called for decades ago by compositionists such as Brand and McLeod by placing affect theory in our field in conversation with neuroscience the article theorizes the value of understanding the plasticity of embodied affects as meaningful in writing processes. It demonstrates that neuroscience offers advances in our understanding of the emotions involved in learning while providing practical resources to “recategorize” emotional experiences in ways that will enable students to persist in writing-related tasks and to better realize their rhetorical and social goals. Ultimately addressing the limits of reason and metacognition the article claims that our pedagogies must confront the new forms of woundedness and ossification that pose increasing challenges to learning today.

This dialogue between a first-year composition (FYC) instructor and administrator proposes listening-oriented curricula to cultivate actionable empathy in FYC: an attempt at understanding and acceptance when engaging across difference that results in naming how power shapes engagement. Actionable empathy can help students become introspective flexible communicators and help instructors develop pedagogical agency.

This essay investigates the relationship between academic writing and the rhetorical awareness that college students gain from evangelical backgrounds. We interviewed thirty-seven students about their experiences with reading writing and debate in religious contexts and how those practices informed their work in first-year writing. Interviews revealed that students observed or practiced rhetorical skills that found parallels in writing courses. Some critiqued evangelical rhetoric at times because of skills they learned in first-year writing. These findings call for pedagogical practices attuned to the knowledge writers bring from evangelical backgrounds.

This article examines the role that syllabi play in the current system of disability accommodations and how disabled students use syllabi as a rhetorical tool in their approach to disability disclosure. I offer strategies for teachers to gauge how their syllabi encourage or discourage agentive disclosure of disability accommodations.