Am I Ever Going to Use This Stuff? Transfer and College Writing

Adam R. Pope is the current interim director of Composition at the University of Arkansas, where he also directs the Graduate Certificate in Technical Writing and Public Rhetorics.  Adam PopeImage Credit: Adam Pope As a technical writer who also happens to currently be the director of Composition at an institution serving over 6,000 students annually in the…Am …

Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication: Book Review

By Cally Guerin Book Review: Lynn P. Nygaard & Kristin Solli (2021) Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Insider Guides to Success in Academia Series. Routledge. I was delighted to come across Lynn Nygaard and Kristin Solli’s Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences …

Audience Created

The concept of audience is a key composition concept. I love the series of Lunsford & Ede articles on audience and have been known to teach them as an example of how a concept in the field keeps being revised and re-examined. I think it’s time to re-look at “audience” again. Lundsford & Ede’s concept …

So You’re Going to Teach Composition

I wrote this originally for the composition TAs I am supervising, but the questions are relevant to anyone designing a university-level reading/writing course. In subsequent posts, I will expand on many of these ideas. These posts will be listed on the page, “Teaching First-Year Composition.” When I taught my first composition course, more than 30 …

Imagining Possibilities for Asynchronous Discussions: Multimodal Galleries

While not all aspects of the shift to online and hybrid instruction have been smooth—and many will be jettisoned or revamped significantly in future semesters—I have found one unexpected boon in the process: new possibilities for asynchronous discussions. I had taught composition online prior to the onset of the pandemic, but in 2020 I shifted my…Imagining …

Supporting Educational Equity

What role could course materials play in supporting more equitable learning environments? We sat down with Ann Shin, Norton’s editorial director for educational publishing, to discuss an ongoing initiative to create inclusive and equity-minded course materials. Ann ShinImage Credit: Justine Knight Photography First off, could you tell us a bit about your role at Norton?…Supporting …

“We Can’t Rush This Kind of Power”: An Educator on Teaching Poetry to High Schoolers During the Pandemic

“Poetry has a way of forcing one into recognition, or transformation, or both if we’re lucky.”“We Can’t Rush This Kind of Power”: An Educator on Teaching Poetry to High Schoolers During the Pandemic

How to Online Conference

Normally this is the time of year when I’d re-up previous posts: How to Plan for ConferencesHow to SlideshowHow to Conference We’re in a new era, however, thus How to Online Conference: Triple-check your time zones Turn your microphone off Put some pants on (This is still fairly new to all of us, I would …

A WPA Roundtable: Implementing Program-Wide Writing Studies-Based Composition Pedagogies

A WPA Roundtable: Implementing Program-Wide Writing Studies-Based Composition Pedagogies Abstract In this roundtable, five WPAs discuss how they implemented program-wide writing studies-based curricula, addressing concerns such as expertise, labor, resistance, and assessment. Introduction The history of so-called “writing about writing” approaches to teaching composition is well-documented (Downs and Wardle, “Teaching”; Wardle and Downs, “looking”; Bird, …

H5P – new tools to support student learning

By Aidan Johnston, Digital Learning Systems Developer As we navigate our way through the current COVID pandemic, Universities are making use of every tool at their disposal to support staff in offering the best student learning experience possible. When we think of the Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), in our case here at GCU, GCULearn (Blackboard …