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Category Archives: First-Year Writing


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Hassel and Giordano. Assessment and Remediation in the Placement Process. CE, Sept. 2015. Posted 10/19/2015.

Hassel, Holly, and Joanne Baird Giordano. “The Blurry Borders of College Writing: Remediation and the Assessment of Student Readiness.” College English 78.1 (2015): 56-80. Print.

Holly Hassel and Joanne Baird Giordano advocate for the use of multiple assessment measures rather than standardized test scores in decisions about placing entering college students in remedial or developmental courses. Their concern results from the “widespread desire” evident in current national conversations to reduce the number of students taking non-credit-bearing courses in preparation for college work (57). While acknowledging the view of critics like Ira Shor that such courses can increase time-to-graduation, they argue that for some students, proper placement into coursework that supplies them with missing components of successful college writing can make the difference between completing a degree and leaving college altogether (61-62).

Sorting students based on their ability to meet academic outcomes, Hassel and Giordano maintain, is inherent in composition as a discipline. What’s needed, they contend, is more comprehensive analysis that can capture the “complicated academic profiles” of individual students, particularly in open-access institutions where students vary widely and where the admissions process has not already identified and acted on predictors of failure (61).

They cite an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education stating that at two-year colleges, “about 60 percent of high-school graduates . . . have to take remedial courses” (Jennifer Gonzalez, qtd. in Hassel and Giordano 57). Similar statistics from other university systems, as well as pushes from organizations like Complete College America to do away with remedial education in the hope of raising graduation rates, lead Hassel and Giordano to argue that better methods are needed to document what competences college writing requires and whether students possess them before placement decisions are made (57). The inability to make accurate decisions affects not only the students, but also the instructors who must alter curriculum to accommodate misplaced students, the support staff who must deal with the disruption to students’ academic progress (57), and ultimately the discipline of composition itself:

Our discipline is also affected negatively by not clearly and accurately identifying what markers of knowledge and skills are required for precollege, first-semester, second-semester, and more advanced writing courses in a consistent way that we can adequately measure. (76)

In the authors’ view, the failure of placement to correctly identify students in need of extra preparation can be largely attributed to the use of “stand-alone” test scores, for example ACT and SAT scores and, in the Wisconsin system where they conducted their research, scores from the Wisconsin English Placement Test (WEPT) (60, 64). They cite data demonstrating that reliance on such single measures is widespread; in Wisconsin, such scores “[h]istorically” drove placement decisions, but concerns about student success and retention led to specific examinations of the placement process. The authors’ pilot process using multiple measures is now in place at nine of the two-year colleges in the system, and the article details a “large-scale scholarship of teaching and learning project , , , to assess the changes to [the] placement process” (62).

The scholarship project comprised two sets of data. The first set involved tracking the records of 911 students, including information about their high school achievements; their test scores; their placement, both recommended and actual; and their grades and academic standing during their first year. The “second prong” was a more detailed examination of the first-year writing and in some cases writing during the second year of fifty-four students who consented to participate. In all, the researchers examined an average of 6.6 pieces of writing per student and a total of 359 samples (62-63). The purpose of this closer study was to determine “whether a student’s placement information accurately and sufficiently allowed that student to be placed into an appropriate first-semester composition course with or without developmental reading and studio writing support” (63).

From their sample, Hassel and Giordano conclude that standardized test scores alone do not provide a usable picture of the abilities students bring to college with regard to such areas as rhetorical knowledge, knowledge of the writing process, familiarity with academic writing, and critical reading skills (66).

To assess each student individually, the researchers considered not just their ACT and WEPT scores and writing samples but also their overall academic success, including “any reflective writing” from instructors, and a survey (66). They note that WEPT scores more often overplaced students, while the ACT underplaced them, although the two tests were “about equally accurate” (66-67).

The authors provide a number of case studies to indicate how relying on test scores alone would misrepresent students’ abilities and specific needs. For example, the “strong high school grades and motivation levels” (68) of one student would have gone unmeasured in an assessment process using only her test scores, which would have placed her in a developmental course. More careful consideration of her materials and history revealed that she could succeed in a credit-bearing first-year writing course if provided with a support course in reading (67). Similarly, a Hmong-speaking student would have been placed into developmental courses based on test-scores alone, which ignored his success in a “challenging senior year curriculum” and the considerable higher-level abilities his actual writing demonstrated (69).

Interventions from the placement team using multiple measures to correct the test-score indications resulted in a 90% success rate. Hassel and Giordano point out that such interventions enabled the students in question to move more quickly toward their degrees (70).

Additional case studies illustrate the effects of overplacement. An online registration system relying on WEPT scores allowed one student to move into a non-developmental course despite his weak preparation in high school and his problematic writing sample; this student left college after his second semester (71-72). Other problems arose because of discrepancies between reading and writing scores. The use of multiple measures permitted the placement team to fine-tune such students’ coursework through detailed analysis of the actual strengths and weaknesses in the writing samples and high-school curricula and grades. In particular, the authors note that students entering college with weak higher-order cognitive and rhetorical skills require extra time to build these abilities; providing this extra time through additional semesters of writing moves students more quickly and reliably toward degree completion than the stress of a single inappropriate course (74-76).

The authors offer four recommendations (78-79): the use of multiple measures, use of assessment data to design a curriculum that meets actual needs; creation of well-thought-out “acceleration” options through pinpointing individual needs; and a commitment to the value of developmental support “for students who truly need it”: “Methods that accelerate or eliminate remediation will not magically make such students prepared for college work” (79).


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T. Bourelle et al. Using Instructional Assistants in Online Classes. C&C, Sept. 2015. Posted 10/13/2015.

Bourelle, Tiffany, Andrew Bourelle, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson. “Teaching with Instructional Assistants: Enhancing Student Learning in Online Classes.” Computers and Composition 37 (2015): 90-103. Web. 6 Oct. 2015.

Tiffany Bourelle, Andrew Bourelle, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson discuss the “Writers’ Studio,” a pilot program at Arizona State University that utilized upper-level English and education majors as “instructional assistants” (IAs) in online first-year writing classes. The program was initiated in response to a request from the provost to cut budgets without affecting student learning or increasing faculty workload (90).

A solution was an “increased student-to-teacher ratio” (90). To ensure that the creation of larger sections met the goal of maintaining teacher workloads and respected the guiding principles put forward by the Conference on College Composition and Communication Committee for Best Practices in Online Writing Instruction in its March 2013 Position Statement, the team of faculty charged with developing the cost-saving measures supplemented “existing pedagogical strategies” with several innovations (91).

The writers note that one available cost-saving step was to avoid staffing underenrolled sections. To meet this goal, the team created “mega-sections” in which one teacher was assigned per each 96 students, the equivalent of a full-time load. Once the enrollment reached 96, a second teacher was assigned to the section, and the two teachers team-taught. T. Bourelle et al. give the example of a section of the second semester of the first-year sequence that enrolled at 120 students and was taught by two instructors. These 120 students were assigned to 15-student subsections (91).

T. Bourelle et al. note several reasons why the new structure potentially increased faculty workload. They cite research by David Reinheimer to the effect that teaching writing online is inherently more time-intensive than instructors may expect (91). Second, the planned curriculum included more drafts of each paper, requiring more feedback. In addition, the course design required multimodal projects. Finally, students also composed “metacognitive reflections” to gauge their own learning on each project (92).

These factors prompted the inclusion of the IAs. One IA was assigned to each 15-student group. These upper-level students contributed to the feedback process. First-year students wrote four drafts of each paper: a rough draft that received peer feedback, a revised draft that received comments from the IAs, an “editing” draft students could complete using the writing center or online resources, and finally a submission to the instructor, who would respond by either accepting the draft for a portfolio or returning it with directions to “revise and resubmit” (92). Assigning portfolio grades fell to the instructor. The authors contend that “in online classes where students write multiple drafts for each project, instructor feedback on every draft is simply not possible with the number of students assigned to any teacher, no matter how she manages her time” (93).

T. Bourelle et al. provide extensive discussion of the ways the IAs prepared for their roles in the Writers’ Studio. A first component was an eight-hour orientation in which the assistants were introduced to important teaching practices and concepts, in particular the process of providing feedback. Various interactive exercises and discussions allowed the IAs to develop their abilities to respond to the multimodal projects required by the Studio, such as blogs, websites, or “sound portraits” (94). The instruction for IAs also covered the distinction between “directive” and “facilitative” feedback, with the latter designed to encourage “an author to make decisions and [give] the writer freedom to make choices” (94).

Continuing support throughout the semester included a “portfolio workshop” that enabled the IAs to guide students in their production of the culminating eportfolio requirement, which required methods of assessment unique to electronic texts (95). Bi-weekly meetings with the instructors of the larger sections to which their cohorts belonged also provided the IAs with the support needed to manage their own coursework while facilitating first-year students’ writing (95).

In addition, IAs enrolled in an online internship that functioned as a practicum comparable to practica taken by graduate teaching assistants at many institutions (95-97). The practicum for the Writers’ Studio internship reinforced work on providing facilitative feedback but especially incorporated the theory and practice of online instruction (96). T. Bourelle et al. argue that the effectiveness of the practicum experience was enhanced by the degree to which it “mirror[ed]” much of what the undergraduate students were experiencing in their first-year classes: “[B]oth groups of beginners are working within initially uncomfortable but ultimately developmentally positive levels of ambiguity, multiplicity, and open-endedness” (Barb Blakely Duffelmeyer, qtd. in T. Bourelle et al. 96). Still quoting Duffelmeyer, the authors contend that adding computers “both enriched and problematized” the pedagogical experience of the coursework for both groups (96), imposing the need for special attention to online environments.

Internship assignments also gave the IAs a sense of what their own students would be experiencing by requiring an eportfolio featuring what they considered their best examples of feedback to student writing as well as reflective papers documenting their learning (98).

The IAs in the practicum critiqued the first-year curriculum, for example suggesting stronger scaffolding for peer review and better timing of assignments. They wrote various instructional materials to support the first-year course activities (97).

Their contributions to the first-year course included “[f]aciliting discussion groups” (98) and “[d]eveloping supportive relationships with first-year writers” (100), but especially “[r]esponding to revised drafts” (99). T. Bourelle et al. note that the IAs’ feedback differed from that of peer reviewers in that the IAs had acquired background in composition and rhetorical theory; unlike writing-center tutors, the IAs were more versed in the philosophy and expectations embedded in the course itself (99). IAs were particularly helpful to students who had misread the assignments, and they were able to identify and mentor students who were falling behind (98, 99).

The authors respond to the critique that the IAs represented uncompensated labor by arguing that the Writers’ Studio offered a pedagogically valuable opportunity that would serve the students well if they pursued graduate or professional careers as educators, emphasizing the importance of designing such programs to benefit the students as well as the university (101). They present student and faculty testimony on the effectiveness of the IAs as a means of “supplement[ing] teacher interaction” rather than replacing it (102). While they characterize the “monetary benefit” to the university as “small” (101), they consider the project “successful” and urge other “teacher-scholars to build on what we have tried to do” (102).


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Hartwig, David W. Student Understanding of Plagiarism. TETYC, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/22/2015.

Hartwig, David W. “Student Plagiarism and First-Year Composition: A Study.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 43.1 (2015): 38-56. Web. 10 Sept. 2015.

David W. Hartwig studied students’ comprehension of plagiarism after encountering it in various forms during his first appointment as a writing teacher at a community college. Of sixty-four students in his first-year classes, eight (12.5%) had committed “some form of apparent plagiarism”; only two were “egregious” and “intentional” (38). These experiences led Hartwig to examine attitudes and approaches to plagiarism in the composition literature and to design a study to better understand what students at his institution knew about plagiarism and how well they were able to apply their knowledge.

One student’s comment, on being told his paper had come from an online paper mill, that he didn’t “know how [his] paper got there” led Hartwig to examine contentions that students bring deliberate strategies for plagiarism from high school. This charge did not resonate with Hartwig’s experiences, which suggested that “lack of knowledge and skill” were more to blame (38), and inspired his concern that his teaching methods, although in line with those of his colleagues, might not be adequately informing students about the legitimate use of research materials (38-39).

Hartwig recounts claims that students participate in a culture in which writing and the standards for use of material are much different from those promoted by their college teachers. According to this view, students see public instances of plagiarism treated “light[ly]” and are more likely to be influenced by peer culture than by academic perceptions and rules (39). To gauge the prevalence of plagiarism, Hartwig presents studies encompassing the 1990s by Donald L. McCabe, Linda Klebe Treviño, and Kenneth D. Butterfield that show student mishandling of source material to be “a persistent problem” that can be somewhat ameliorated with honor codes (40).

Hartwig suggests that challenging the concept of the individual author has burdened scholars who hope to help students understand this abstract idea while simultaneously discouraging what continues to be seen as academic dishonesty (40-41). His review of current attitudes toward plagiarism among composition scholars focuses on the question of “intention” (41; emphasis original) as incorporated into the definition of plagiarism by the Council of Writing Program Administrators (41). Noting the WPA claim that many discussions of plagiarism fail to observe the distinctions in its definition and arguing that intention can be hard to discern in actual student behavior, Hartwig addresses Rebecca Moore Howard’s concept of “patchwriting,” in which students incompletely translate source material into their own words. Hartwig reports that Howard encourages compositionists to see patchwriting as “an essential part of the learning process” and to develop pedagogies that “strive to move [students] beyond” the practice rather than to punish it (41).

Concluding that students are confused about the correct use of sources and that faculty often “do not understand what students are attempting when they exhibit plagiarism-like writing,” Hartwig conducted a study to compare what students know about plagiarism upon entering a first-year-writing class with what they know after completing the class (42).

For the study, students anonymously completed a ten-question quiz at the beginning and end of the term. The quiz assessed “objective” knowledge by asking students to identify specific actions as plagiarism and to demonstrate a basic knowledge of what and how to cite. The final three questions addressed knowledge applied “in practice” by asking students to determine whether actual examples did exhibit plagiarism (42-45, 49). Clarifying that the results were not used to evaluate individual teaching and that data were not attached to individuals or sections, Hartwig notes that the questions included the “admittedly problematic” issue of “common knowledge,” but states that the question was refined through piloting so that only one correct answer was possible (43-44). Similarly, some participants noted that students might be confused by a question about citation format because many Internet sources do not include page numbers; Hartwig points to the widespread availability of pdfs with original pagination but urges future consideration of this concern (44).

Limitations included a drop-off in enrollment from students taking the pre-test, with only 68% taking the post-test. Technological limitations also prevented fine-grained demographic analysis and tracking of individual student improvement (45-46). Finally, faculty freedom in course design meant that “pedagogies varied widely,” and it was not possible to link any performance measure to particular teaching strategies (46). However, the results indicated very little divergence from the mean despite this diversity.

Hartwig’s findings reject claims that students come into college knowing little about plagiarism and that ongoing plagiarism can be attributed to “flawed teaching” in college classes (48). However, his study did support the contention that “student plagiarism was the result of students’ failure to fully understand the conventions of citing sources” (48). Students did quite well on the “objective” portions of the test both before and after the first-year classes, recognizing, for example, that working with tutors in the Writing Center is sanctioned but that providing a paper to another student to turn in as her own is not (43). Similarly, they knew that quotations, paraphrases, and other forms of borrowing were to be cited and knew basic MLA format (43). They had much more difficulty recognizing patchwriting and incorrect citation in actual passages; results showed inconsistent improvement on this portion across the terms tested (47-48).

Hartwig traces many problems to issues of reading. Quoting Shelley Angelie-Carter, Hartwig contends that students “‘trying on’ academic discourse” struggle with jargon and basic comprehension (49). In fact, he concludes, the three questions that asked students to apply their objective knowledge to actual passages “tested students almost as much on their close reading skills as on their knowledge of plagiarism” (50).

Hartwig recommends continuing to refine definitions, in particular involving students more actively in these discussions (51). He also urges “decriminaliz[ing] patchwriting” (51) because it is an indication of students’ comprehension, not their honesty. He argues for foregrounding critical reading in conjunction with writing and developing strategies for instructors to pay closer attention to students’ actual handling of sources while respecting that most writing instructors have massive workloads that preclude such practices as reading all sources (52-53). In Hartwig’s view, asking that faculty across campus share in helping students recognize best citation and synthesis practices as well as encouraging administrative efforts to treat instances of plagiarism as individual cases will also help writing instructors take a more proactive approach to the steps students must take—including patchwriting—toward effective use of sources (53-54).


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Sullivan, Patrick. Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Class. CCC, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/15/2015.

Sullivan, Patrick. “The UnEssay: Making Room for Creativity in the Composition Classroom.” College Composition and Communication 67.1 (2015): 6-34. Print.

Patrick Sullivan urges composition scholars to embrace creativity as a fundamental component of an enriched writing curriculum. In Sullivan’s view, although researchers and scholars outside of composition have steadily moved creativity to the core of their models of cognition and of the kinds of thinking they feel are needed to meet 21st-century challenges, writing scholars have tended to isolate “creativity” in creative-writing courses. Sullivan presents a “most essential question”: “Might there be some value in embracing creativity as an integral part of how we theorize writing?” (7).

A subset of questions includes such issues as current definitions of creativity, emerging views of its contribution in myriad contexts, and the relationship between creativity and important capacities like critical thinking (7).

Sullivan surveys works by educators, psychologists, neuroscientists, and others on the value of creativity and the ways it can be fostered. This work challenges the view that creativity is the special domain of a limited number of special people; rather, the research Sullivan presents considers it a “common and shared intellectual capacity” (12) responsible for the development of culture through ongoing innovation (9) as well as essential to the flexible thinking and problem-solving ability needed beyond the classroom (8-9, 15).

Scholars Sullivan cites position creativity as an antidote to the current focus on testing and accountability that promotes what Douglas Hesse calls the “extraordinarily narrow view of writing” that results from such initiatives as the Common Core Standards (qtd. in Sullivan 18). Sullivan draws on Ken Robinson, who contends that current models of schooling have “educated out” our natural creativity: “[M]ost children think they’re highly creative; most adults think they’re not” (qtd. in Sullivan 9).

Other scholars urging the elevation of creativity as central to cognition include intelligence researcher Robert J. Sternberg, for whom creativity entails three components: “synthetic ability (generating ideas), analytical ability (evaluating ideas, critical thinking), and practical ability (translating ideas into practice and products)” (10). Sullivan compares models of “habits of mind” developed by other scholars with the habits of mind incorporated into the “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” collaboratively generated by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, the National Council of Teachers of English, and the National Writing Project; he notes that many such models, including the “Framework,” consider creativity “an essential twenty-first-century cognitive aptitude” (12). He recommends to composition scholars the international view that creativity is equal in importance to literacy, a view embodied in the Finnish educational system and in the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), which would replace testing for memorization with testing for students’ ability “to think for themselves” (Amanda Ripley, qtd. in Sullivan 13).

Importantly, Sullivan argues, incorporating creativity into classrooms has crucial implications for overall cognitive development. According to the researchers Sullivan cites, expanding the kinds of activities and the kinds of writing students do enhances overall mental function (14), leading to the “rhetorical dexterity” (Shannon Carter, qtd. in Sullivan 20) essential to negotiating today’s rapidly changing rhetorical environments (21).

As further evidence of the consensus on the centrality of creativity to learning and cognition, Sullivan presents the 2001 revision of Bloom’s 1956 Taxonomy. This revision replaces “synthesis and evaluation” at the pinnacle of cognitive growth with “creating” (19). Discussing the revised Taxonomy to which they contributed, Lorin Anderson and David Krathwohl note that the acquisition of the “deep understanding” necessary to “construction and insight” demands the components inherent in “Create” (qtd. in Sullivan 19-20).

Such deep understanding, Sullivan argues, is the goal of the writing classroom: “[I]ts connection here to creativity links this luminous human capacity to our students’ cognitive development” (20). Similarly, concern about students’ transfer of the intellectual work of academic writing to other domains and a recognition of the importance of metacognition to deep learning link the work of creativity scholars to recent composition theory and applications (20). Sullivan suggests shifting from “critical thinking” to “creative and critical thinking” because “[a]ll good thinking . . . is creative in some way” (16).

Sullivan sees the increased focus within writing studies on multimodal and other diverse uses of writing as a move toward reframing public conceptions of academic writing; he presents “desegregat[ing] creative writing” as one way of “actively expanding our definition of academic writing” (21). He lists many ways of incorporating creativity into classrooms, then provides the unit on creativity that he has embedded in his first-year writing class (22). His goal is to “provide students with an authentic experience of the joys, challenges, and rewards of college-level reading, writing, and thinking” (22-23). To this end, the course explores what Paul Hirst calls “knowledge domains,” specifically, in Sullivan’s class, “traditional assignments” examining how knowledge functions in history and the human sciences (23-24), with the unit on creativity “[s]andwiched” between them (24).

In this unit, students consider the definition of creativity and then write poems and stories. The centerpiece is an individual project in which students produce “their own work of art” such as “a sculpture, a painting, a drawing, a photograph, a collage, or a song” (24). Sullivan furnishes examples of student work, including quotes illustrating the metacognitive understanding he hopes to inculcate: “that creativity, and the arts in particular, provide a unique and important way of looking at the world and producing knowledge” (25).

The final assignment is an “unessay,” which bans standard formats and invites students to “[i]nvent a new form!” (26). Sullivan shares examples of student responses to this assignment, many involving multimodal components that gesture toward a more inclusive embrace of what Kathleen Blake Yancey calls “what our students know as writing” (qtd. in Sullivan 28). Ultimately, Sullivan contends, such diverse, creatively rich pedagogy will realize David Russell’s hope of casting writing not as “a single elementary skill” but rather “as a complex rhetorical activity embedded in the differentiated practices of academic discourse communities” (qtd. in Sullivan 29), and, importantly, Douglas Hesse’s hope of communicating to students that writing is not an isolated academic exercise but rather “a life activity with many interconnected manifestations” (qtd. in Sullivan 18).


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VanHaitsma, Pamela. Student Inquiry through Archives. CE, Sept. 2015. Posted 09/08/2015.

VanHaitsma, Pamela. “New Pedagogical Engagements with Archives: Student Inquiry and Composing in Digital Spaces.” College English 78.1 (2015): 34-55. Web. 2 Sept. 2015.

Pamela VanHaitsma discusses an approach to involving students in archival research that she developed in first-year-writing classes at the University of Pittsburgh. Maintaining that students explore as well as create archives throughout their activities both in and outside of class, VanHaitsma hopes to connect the kinds of inquiry that archives make possible with the focus on student interest and lives that informs writing pedagogy. She also investigates how digital collection and dissemination options affect the process of using and building an archive (36).

She notes that the term “archives” might designate a range of collections, such as databases students use in research for classwork, broader collocations of information like Wikipedia, and even sites housing student material for plagiarism detection. VanHaitsma chooses to avoid resolving this definitional debate that, on the one hand, recognizes any collection of information as an archive, but on the other, insists on specific content and formal organization. Instead, she wants to “work between the . . . extremes of broad and narrow definitions” (35), drawing on the relationship between collections “from the past” as well as “present-day spaces” where archives might exist or be created (35). The specific assignment she presents calls on students to use collections that fit the traditional model while also developing their own collections in order to ground inquiry in their writing classes (36).

In VanHaitsma’s view and that of other scholars she cites, archival methods and research inherently encourage inquiry, simultaneously evoking critical attention to methodology (36-37). Practicing these methodologies has the added effect, VanHaitsma argues, of drawing both undergraduates and graduate students into the kind of scholarly work done and valued beyond the classroom: Students can “transform from thinking of themselves as students to seeing their insights and their work have value to an academic field” (Wendy Hayden, qtd. in VanHaitsma 37).

In her view, exploring digital archives has added benefits. She cites the collaborative work across areas of scholarly emphasis enabled by access to many different digital collections (37); she quotes James P. Purdy to stress that digital archives “eliminate many temporal and spatial obstacles” as students explore connections across disciplines (qtd. in VanHaitsma 38).

In particular, VanHaitsma points to scholarship that argues for the value of digital tools in helping students contribute their own collections to the growing universe of archives. Daniel Anderson contends that students’ ability to gather and store materials without expert technical knowledge makes them “producers and consumers, or ‘prosumers'” (qtd. in VanHaitsma 38). VanHaitsma provides examples of such “prosumer” behavior across communities and within classrooms, for instance the use of MediaWiki software to generate collaborative collections (38).

Her students explored the topic of “language use in romantic relationships” (40) through two traditional archives of nineteenth-century letter-writing instructions and then through materials available to them today that offered similar instruction. Her goals included encouraging comparison of these rhetorics while also asking students to consider how new technologies affected the dissemination and effects of the information they were examining (40, 42). Students concluded the project with an essay analyzing similarities and differences. Thus, for VanHaitsma, the assignment led to substantive inquiry at many levels. The students’ archives were collected in the Blackboard Course Management system in use at the university; the results were not made public 40-41).

VanHaitsma stresses that substantial learning resulted from her decision to allow students to develop their own archives rather than provide them with present-day materials of her choosing. Teachers, she argues, may not clearly anticipate what students will find useful or relevant; moreover, pre-empting students’ agency in choosing what to include in the archive stifles the kind of active inquiry the assignment is intended to promote.

VanHaitsma notes that students’ choices were not all “overtly instructional” like the letter-writing manuals; although how-to articles were included, students added other diverse options such as YouTube music videos, excerpts from novels, and film clips (43). She provides five examples of essay topics, for example, a comparison of a letter-writing manual to “present-day Chinese TV dating shows” that noted how both “focus on a man’s ‘wealth’ and a woman’s ‘appearance'” (student, qtd. in VanHaitsma 44); and an examination of the manuals through the lens of Jersey Shore, noting the shift from “courtesy” to “language and tactics . . . for hooking up” (student, qtd. in VanHaitsma 44). Two students noted that the earlier manuals did not admit the possibility of gay relationships (44-45).

VanHaitsma illustrates the critical analysis encouraged by the assignment: Students explored both the advantages and limits of both rhetorics as well as the effects of the media used. For example, a student analyzing a clip from the film He’s Just Not That Into You used the term “bombarded” to describe current-day techniques for creating relationships while other students noted that relationships today have been made “too easy” as people turn to online media to convey thoughts that were once written out with great care (46-47). Students also noted the limitations of the nineteenth-century process, contending that there are virtues to today’s more expansive options (47).

However, VanHaitsma’s ultimate focus is not on the content of the archives and essays themselves; rather, she hopes to foreground the degree to which the work of examining traditional archives while simultaneously creating related archives from materials of interest to students promotes “the sort of scholarly inquiry that teacher-scholars have emphasized as a potential for pedagogical engagements with brick-and-mortar archives. . . . ” (48).

VanHaitsma recommends that despite the ease of use of familiar platforms like Blackboard, students will benefit from trying out other systems, especially those like Archive-It and Omeka, which are specifically intended for the generation and dissemination of archives (49). While encouraging the option of taking student-created archives public, VanHaitsma cautions that teachers will need to address “questions about the audiences, purposes, and effects of such publication, as well as copyright issues relevant to archiving artifacts” (49).

Her final caution is for teachers to remember that when they provide archival materials for student study, they may come with “preconceived ideas” about how the materials should be valued. Again, she believes that student agency in selecting and evaluating collected material is paramount to the learning such assignments foster (50).


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Hansen et al. Effectiveness of Dual Credit Courses. WPA Journal, Spring 2015. Posted 08/12/15.

Hansen, Kristine, Brian Jackson, Brett C. McInelly, and Dennis Eggett. “How Do Dual Credit Students Perform on College Writing Tasks After They Arrive on Campus? Empirical Data from a Large-Scale Study.” Journal of the Council of Writing Program Administrators 38.2 (2015): 56-92). Print.

Kristine Hansen, Brian Jackson, Brett C. McInelly, and Dennis Eggett conducted a study at Brigham Young University (BYU) to determine whether students who took a dual-credit/concurrent-enrollment writing course (DC/CE) fared as well on the writing assigned in a subsequent required general-education course as students who took or were taking the university’s first-year-writing course. With few exceptions, Hansen et al. concluded that the students who had taken the earlier courses for their college credit performed similarly to students who had not. However, the study raised questions about the degree to which taking college writing in high school, or for that matter, in any single class, adequately meets the needs of maturing student writers (79).

The exigence for the study was the proliferation of efforts to move college work into high schools, presumably to allow students to graduate faster and thus lower the cost of college, with some jurisdictions allowing students as young as fourteen to earn college credit in high school (58). Local, state, and federal policy makers all support and even “mandate” such opportunities (57), with rhetorical and financial backing from organizations and non-profits promoting college credit as a boon to the overall economy (81). Hansen et al. express concern that no uniform standards or qualifications govern these initiatives (58).

The study examined writing in BYU’s “American Heritage” (AH) course. In this course, which in September 2012 enrolled approximately half of the first-year class, students wrote two 900-word papers involving argument and research. They wrote the first paper in stages with grades and TA feedback throughout, while they relied on peer feedback and their understanding of an effective writing process, which they had presumably learned in the first assignment, for the second paper (64). Hansen et al. provide the prompts for both assignments (84-87).

The study consisted of several components. Students in the AH course were asked to sign a consent form; those who did so were emailed a survey about their prior writing instruction. Of these, 713 took the survey. From these 713 students,189 were selected (60-61). Trained raters using a holistic rubric with a 6-point scale read both essays submitted by these 189 students. The rubric pinpointed seven traits: “thesis, critical awareness, evidence, counter-arguments, organization, grammar and style, sources and citations” (65). A follow-up survey assessed students’ experiences writing the second paper, while focus groups provided additional qualitative information. Hansen et al. note that although only eleven students participated in the focus groups, the discussion provided “valuable insights into students’ motivations for taking pre-college credit options and the learning experiences they had” (65).

The 189 participants fell into five groups: those whose “Path to FYW Credit” consisted of AP scores; those who received credit for a DC/CE option; those planning to take FYW in the future; those taking it concurrently with AH; and those who had taken BYU’s course, many of them in the preceding summer (61, 63). Analysis reveals that the students studied were a good match in such categories as high-school GPA and ACT scores for the full BYU first-year population (62). However, strong high-school GPAs and ACT scores and evidence of regular one-on-one interaction with instructors (71), coupled with the description of BYU as a “private institution” with “very selective admission standards” (63) indicate that the students studied, while coming from many geographic regions, were especially strong students whose experiences could not be generalized to different populations (63, 82).

Qualitative results indicated that, for the small sample of students who participated in the focus group, the need to “get FYW out of the way” was not the main reason for choosing AP or DC/CE options. Rather, the students wanted “a more challenging curriculum” (69). These students reported good teaching practices; in contrast to the larger group taking the earlier survey, who reported writing a variety of papers, the students in the focus group reported a “literature[-]based” curriculum with an emphasis on timed essays and fewer research papers (69). Quotes from the focus-group students who took the FYW course from BYU reveal that they found it “repetitive” and “a good refresher,” not substantially different despite their having reported an emphasis on literary analysis in the high-school courses (72). The students attested that the earlier courses had prepared them well, although some expressed concerns about their comfort coping with various aspects of the first-year experience (71-72).

Three findings invited particular discussion (73):

  • Regardless of the writing instruction they had received, the students differed very little in their performance in the American Heritage class;
  • In general, although their GPAs and test scores indicated that they should be superior writers, the students scored in the center of the 6-point rubric scale, below expectations;
  • Scores were generally higher for the first essay than for the second.

The researchers argue that the first finding does not provide definitive evidence as to whether “FYW even matters” (73). They cite research by numerous scholars that indicates that the immediate effects of a writing experience are difficult to measure because the learning of growing writers does not exhibit a “tidy linear trajectory” (74). The FYW experience may trigger “steps backward” (Nancy Sommers, qtd. in Hansen et al. 72). The accumulation of new knowledge, they posit, can interfere with performance. Therefore, students taking FYW concurrently with AH might have been affected by taking in so much new material (74), while those who had taken the course in the summer had significantly lower GPAs and ACT scores (63). The authors suggest that these factors may have skewed the performance of students with FYW experience.

The second finding, the authors posit, similarly indicates students in the early-to-middle stages of becoming versatile, effective writers across a range of genres. Hansen et al. cite research on the need for a “significant apprenticeship period” in writing maturation (76). Students in their first year of college are only beginning to negotiate this developmental stage.

The third finding may indicate a difference in the demands of the two prompts, a difference in the time and energy students could devote to later assignments, or, the authors suggest, the difference in the feedback built into the two papers (76-77).

Hansen et al. recommend support for the NCTE position that taking a single course, especially at an early developmental stage, does not provide students an adequate opportunity for the kind of sustained practice across multiple genres required for meaningful growth in writing (77-80). Decisions about DC/CE options should be based on individual students’ qualifications (78); programs should work to include additional writing courses in the overall curriculum, designing these courses to allow students to build on skills initiated in AP, DC/CE, and FYW courses (79).

They further recommend that writing programs shift from promising something “new” and “different” to an emphasis on the recursive, nonlinear nature of writing, clarifying to students and other stakeholders the value of ongoing practice (80). Additionally, they recommend attention to the motives and forces of the “growth industry” encouraging the transfer of more and more college credit to high schools (80). The organizations sustaining this industry, they write, hope to foster a more literate, capable workforce. But the authors contend that speeding up and truncating the learning process, particularly with regard to a complex cognitive task like writing, undercut this aim (81-82) and do not, in fact, guarantee faster graduation (79). Finally, citing Richard Haswell, they call for more empirical, replicable studies of phenomena like the effects of DC/CE courses in order to document their impact across broad demographics (82).


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Walters, Shannon. Valuing ASD Students. RTE, May 2015. Posted 06/23/15.

Walters, Shannon. “Toward a Critical ASD Pedagogy of Insight: Teaching, Researching, and Valuing the Social Literacies of Neurodiverse Students.” Research in the Teaching of English 49.4 (2015): 340-60. Print.

Shannon Walters examines the experiences of students with Asperger’s Syndrome (AS students) and students on the Autism Spectrum (ASD students) in college writing classes. (She notes that many autistic people prefer the “identity-first rather than person-first language” [357n4] and uses this nomenclature throughout her article.) Walters argues that many of the difficulties these students face derive from the failure of educators to listen to them and incorporate their insights about themselves into classroom practice. A more productive learning environment for these students, Walters contends, will involve rejecting stereotypes, not least by redefining what is accepted as “social.”

Walters sees current research on the effects of autism on college students’ experiences as sparse, with what does exist seldom including the points of view of the AS and ASD individuals being studied (340-41). Problematic approaches in the education literature include a tendency for teachers who believe they have encountered autistic students to engage in diagnosis and discussion of the students without engaging the students themselves in exploring their needs and perceptions (341):

Discussions about ASD become stories about how teachers heroically accommodate students perceived as on the spectrum, rather than about how self-identified ASD students navigate largely neurotypical writing classrooms in the face of unacknowledged challenges. (341)

To address the lack of research that takes into account the actual voices of these students, Walters conducted a case study of two self-identified AS students enrolled in first-year writing classes in the program in which Walters taught. Walters provides a detailed account of her study design, including semi-structured interviews and coding, and her role as a researcher guided by the tenets of critical disability studies, which recognizes disability as a source of possibility and requires the recognition of people with disabilities as crucial agents in policies and conversations about them (342, 345). Such an approach, Walters argues, can lead teachers to “value writing practices and pedagogies that encourage socially neurodiverse ways of writing” (342). Valuing neurodiversity, in turn, leads to a recognition of disability as a source of “insight” (342). In service of this goal, the case studies asked how the students “characterized themselves as writers inside and outside of the classroom,” how they perceived their first-year courses, and what the decision to foreground their insights could tell educators about pedagogical best practices (343).

Although Walters’s student participants, Jen and Jon, both enjoyed writing extensively outside of the classroom. they “struggled” in their first-year writing courses (347). Jen took her course in a summer session, while Jon, who had been homeschooled since third-grade, took his individually in a modified format with a university teacher (345). Walters records each student’s definitions of “language” and “normal,” as well as their definitions of AS, which they consciously chose in contrast to what Walters describes as the tendency of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) to “subsume AS into the broader category of ASD” (346). The definition of neurodiversity as “social acceptance of neurological difference as part of the broad landscape of human diversity,” from the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), highlights the view that adhering to rigid definitions of “normal” that define difference as deficit precludes valuing the possibilities inherent in difference (346).

In Walters’s view, the “process or stage writing model” accepted widely by composition teachers did not serve the two students well. Jen found the pace of the summer course troubling and fell behind, although she ultimately passed. Jon resisted writing about issues that did not interest him and “just filling in details” as required by mandated revision (347-49). Walters argues that the process model labels different ways that individual students work as abnormal (349). She posits that her participants’ difficulties “differed not necessarily in kind but in degree” from those most students face (349).

To emphasize the degree to which the process model affects neurodiverse students’ activities as writers, Walters contrasts their struggles in the courses with the writing they enthusiastically pursue outside of the classroom. In each case, Walters explores how the students’ preferred writing activities functioned as the kinds of critical and social literacies composition teachers hope to encourage. Jen hosted both a private and a public blog addressing different audiences, wrote extensive fan fiction, and had made considerable progress on a novel (351, 354). Jon, who planned to major in geography, developed diverse community contacts “on his own terms” in order to create a local history and branch into a piece of historical fiction (352). Walters finds that the kinds of writing in which these students chose to invest their efforts and at which they succeeded did not meet what she views as the limited definitions of “social” and “critical” that governed classroom assignments (353-54). For example, Jen did not feel as if topics like anime, science fiction, and fantasy in which she was interested qualified as suitable for a rhetorical analysis of popular culture (354). Jon’s “lists of dates and maps” inspired his more extensive writing but, in Walters’s view, would not have been accepted as valid activities in a first-year writing class (355).

Both students, she argues, lived in rich social worlds that simply differed from those built into a process-model classroom. Thus, the perception that ASD students are “unconnected and asocial” did not capture these students’ achievements or personas (354). Not only did the students’ activities define them as good writers and demonstrate that they could interact with a range of audiences, recognizing the different uses of writing in different situations, their work also revealed their critical engagement with the power relationships embedded in the public conversation about AS and ASD, the kind of engagement called for by writing pedagogy (354). Walters recommends supporting the diverse ways that neurodiverse students meet the expectations of college writing courses, for example by a range of adjustments to the typical curriculum and scheduling of process pedagogy. Writing communities like Jen’s fan-fiction communities can become topics of discussion and study for students for whom they offer a more receptive writing environment (356). Instead of assuming that ASD students are limited in their abilities to respond socially, teachers can develop their own social responsiveness through activities like “rhetorical listening” (Ratcliffe, cited in Walters 357), which will foster the “social acceptance of neurological difference” (ASAN, qtd. in Walters 351), valuing rather than reshaping the particular forms of interaction and creativity that such students bring to writing classes.


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Horner, Bruce. Rewriting Composition. CE, May 2015. Posted 05/28/15.

Horner, Bruce. “Rewriting Composition: Moving beyond a Discourse of Need.” College English 77.5 (2015): 450-79. Print.

Bruce Horner responds to recent calls for composition to shift its focus in ways that are presented as radical departures but that Horner believes ignore composition’s history, endorsing and perpetuating reductionist dominant views of the field. Among Horner’s principal concerns is that these calls remove composition from the “material social practice” in which it is embedded (457). These calls, in his view, constitute a “discourse of need,” depicting composition as deficient, thus requiring “abandonment or supplement” (451).

Horner critiques David Smit’s The End of Composition Studies and Sidney Dobrin’s Postcomposition. Horner presents Smit as arguing that the goal of composition courses—providing “general writing skills” that will allow students to succeed in varied contexts—is unachievable because people learn to write only in the specific environments with which they engage. As a result, Horner writes, Smit recommends that composition should relinquish its focus on general writing skills and replace that focus with a writing-in-the-disciplines approach that will result in “real writing” that will be judged successful or unsuccessful by publics, editors, and employers (455-56).

Horner objects to this call because it accepts an inadequate definition of “writing” that reduces the content of composition to “a single, codified and fixed set of skills and knowledge.” This definition accords with the definition promoted by the market place, to which, in Horner’s view, Smit yields the right to define writing and to which he assigns the right to determine what good writing is (454-55). For Horner, this view leads to what Anthony Giddens has called a “normative functionalist reading of institutions and social practices: things are as they are and operate as they do because that is what their appropriate function is” (455). In such an endorsement of what is, Horner contends, students are cast as making rational, unitary choices about what kinds of writing will best serve their goals “as (simply, only) future employees” (454-55, 457). In Smit, according to Horner, this ascendancy of the free market is contrasted with the failure of the academy as an institution assumed to exist primarily to meet the market’s needs (455)

Horner argues that Dobrin’s Postcomposition similarly accepts dominant definitions of the work of composition despite the book’s claims to promote a rethinking of the field (458-59). According to Horner, Dobrin’s “debased view of the work of composition” (459) echoes dominant reductionist definitions of what writing pedagogy and practice ought to be. Dobrin sees that work as constrained by issues of “training” and “management”; unlike Smit, he rejects a doubling down on more effective pedagogy, choosing instead to call for an escape from pedagogical concerns by reframing the field as “writing studies” (459). Horner expresses dismay that Dobriin does not examine myriad previous work on what “writing studies” might entail (459); he is particularly concerned with Dobrin’s reduction of “writing” to an “abstraction” that Horner contends he does not define or recognize in its material contexts (460). Thus, in Horner’s view, Dobrin accepts capitalism’s expectations for what writing pedagogy should be and replaces this inadequate and inaccurate definition with an “idealist” alternative that is not anchored in material practice (459). Horner writes that Dobrin particularly accedes to the dominant view by accepting the technological demands of “fast capitalist ideals” (461) as the preferred focus of writing studies; Dobrin argues that composition must follows this lead, subjecting its “outmoded” past to “creative destruction,” or be left behind (Dobrin, qtd. in Horner 462). In Horner’s view, composition is seen as lacking by these writers because they allow it to be defined through the consumerist lens of the dominant culture.

Horner acknowledges that composition faces challenges like those Smit and Dobrin outline, but contrasts their handling of these challenges with the approaches of an economist team, J. K. Gibson-Graham, and a sociolinguist, Theresa Lillis. He illustrates his view of how theory might function productively in composition by discussing how these theorists do not choose to overturn their fields’ missions but rather seek to understand what prevents these fields from achieving their desired ends. Gibson-Graham rewrite capitalism to deny it the kind of power dominant views assign it; Horner compares this “hegemonic” view of capitalism to the way reductive views of composition take on hegemonic force in critiques like Smit’s and Dobrin’s. Lillis addresses the way writing is positioned in sociolinguistics by tackling a longstanding binary between speech and writing posited by the field (462-64).

To his critique of Smit’s and Dobrin’s calls for “a prospective future beyond, or following the end of, composition” (469), Horner adds responses to three efforts to supplement composition with what are presented as new or extended content: the call to reframe it as rhetoric, to expand coursework to include “multimodal” approaches, and to rename the field “writing studies” (469). Horner is concerned that these proposed responses to composition’s apparent need ignore the history in which these approaches have long been integral to composition; moreover, in his view, these proposals do not challenge the reductive views of composition that portray it as lacking: for Horner, the field must continue the difficult

efforts to retrieve what the hegemonic denies and to learn to recognize, in forms and practices we are predisposed to understand in limited ways, the accomplishment of more and other than what is claimed. (469)

Horner’s conclusion calls for a recognition of the value of what is seen by the dominant as inconsequential or useless, for example to recognize the learning that occurs even in small student gains. He endorses David Bartholomae’s exhortation to “pay attention to common things” (qtd. in Horner 472). His project resists the tendency to designate academic settings as “something from which students (and others) need protection” (472); on the contrary, he argues, the composition classroom offers a unique space where teachers and students can experiment precisely by exploring what the dominant is likely to see as beneath its notice (472-73). Rather than search for the new and the other, he contends, the field will be well served by recognizing its difference from standard academic disciplines and by re-examining constituent terms like “writing, pedagogy, theory, rhetoric, modality, and composition itself” (473; emphasis original).


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Brearey, Oliver. Two-semester Sequence for FYW. TETYC, March 2015. Posted 05/12/15.

Brearey, Oliver. “Understanding the Relationship between First- and Second-Semester College Writing Courses.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 42.3 (2015): 244-63. Web. 23 Apr. 2015.

Oliver Brearey contends that escalating pressures from such initiatives as competency-based education and the Common Core State Standards risk putting composition scholars and instructors in a “reactionary position” (245); proponents of such initiatives propose standardizing college writing and linking it with outcomes developed outside the university, forcing writing professionals to defend the diverse practices and structures that currently characterize college writing curricula (244-45). For Brearey, clarifying the relationship between first-year writing and writing at other academic levels can allow compositionists to demonstrate the coherence of and need for college writing curricula designed in the service of a rhetorical education as imagined by David Fleming in his 2003 essay, “Becoming Rhetorical: An Education in the Topics” (257).

Brearey especially focuses on the two-semester first-year sequence. His article examines the relationship between these two courses, culminating in proposed “composite description and competency documents” for first- and second-semester writing courses that can serve as “a set of reference materials” for faculty and administrators who may find that broad guidelines help them locate their own local curricula in a broader context (247). This need is particularly intense, he contends, for two-year colleges, which may feel especially strong pressure to streamline their curricula in the name of efficiency (245).

Brearey sees the NCTE/NWP “Framework for Success in Postsecondary Writing” and the “WPA Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition” as initial steps in responding to such pressures, but feels that they, as well as the extant literature on outcomes and writing curricula, fall short of providing the necessary guidance for programs developing a two-course FY sequence and needing to demonstrate the efficacy of such a sequence. Such documents, Brearey contends, see responsibility for designing and articulating the courses as a local responsibility and thus fail to specify how the outcomes can be effectively achieved through choices in course design (248). Other sources similarly fail to offer adequate blueprints for how concepts and learning activities can be ordered and articulated (248). A comprehensive overview of how the two first-year courses can complement each other, moreover, allows educators to tie such introductory courses into “vertical curricula” of writing courses beyond first-year writing. Brearey finds that extant literature on “advanced writing courses” fails to account for the relationship of these later courses to the first-year sequence (249). The literature he examines promotes “theoriz[ing] the design of composition course sequences” but provides no “practical approaches” to doing so (249).

In moving toward his recommendations, Brearey proposes that the terms “horizontal expertise” and “generalization” supplement the idea of a vertical curriculum (250). He argues that, while a second-semester first-year courses is often seen as more advanced or more difficult than the earlier course, the reality is that the relationship between the content of the two courses functions more nearly in “parallel,” with similar abilities developed at different levels of priority through different sets of applications. He writes that generalization does not mean that students “transfer” skills from semester 1 to semester 2; rather, they apply them in new contexts that broaden the concepts’ meaning and rhetorical usefulness (250-51).

To develop his composite curricula for first- and second-semester first-year sequences, Brearey gathered course descriptions, competency documents, and syllabi from “the six highest-enrollment two-year colleges in the U.S.” (252). He coded the language in these documents by comparing it to the language of the NCTE “Framework,” and the “WPA Outcomes Statement,” as well as to language delineating the structure and outcomes of two “vertical curricula”: Appalachian State’s award-winning “WAC Vertical Model for Writing Skills” and IUPUI’s “Goals for the IUPUI’s Writing Courses” (252). Four tables result. Table 1 compares the course materials from the community colleges to the Framework/Outcomes Statement. One finding from this comparison is that the outcomes are similar in the two courses, but vary in the priority the two courses assign to them. Brearey calculates how often an outcome appears in the course materials; he finds that, while the outcome of “[d]eveloping critical thinking through writing, reading, and research” is mentioned most often in both the S1 and S2 course, it is mentioned much more often (39.2 to 62.1%) in the S2 course. In the S1 course, the next most frequently cited outcome is “[d]eveloping flexible writing process,” while in the S2 course this outcome is mentioned by only 6.1% of the documents, and “[d]eveloping rhetorical knowledge” becomes the primary means by which the critical thinking outcome is met. These data ground Brearey’s claim that the tasks of the two courses are not different in kind but rather are practiced and reinforced with different emphases and applications (253-54).

Tables 2 and 3 examine the relationship between outcomes for first-year courses and those for upper-level writing curricula at Appalachian State and IUPUI, respectively. Brearey argues that the outcomes in these “vertical curricula” closely parallel those in the Framework/Outcomes Statement documents; the upper-level courses mirror the S2 curricula he finds in the course materials in significant ways. This finding again demonstrates that more advanced writing classes expand on the range of contexts and the level of detail included in course activities (255-56). Drawing on Fleming, Brearey contends that showing how students’ facility with the concepts develops through the extended practice afforded by a two-course sequence helps to

justify two-year colleges’ S1 and S2 FYW courses not only as discrete entities but also as a two-semester curriculum that emphasizes the development of novice students’ writing and rhetorical abilities. (257-58)

Such justification, he writes, is needed to sustain the authority of writing professionals to design effective writing curricula (257). His composite models include outcomes, methods for achieving those outcomes, and a framework of goals for each part of a two-semester first-year sequence (258-60).