Composition Studies

We put three Composition Studies pieces side by side this week to follow one question across twelve years: who gets asked to absorb the difficulty when a writing class runs on less than it should.

In 2013, Christine Denecker studied three dual enrollment setups in Ohio and asked the people in them, high school teachers, college instructors, and students, to name what counts as good writing. The definitions split along the line between high school and college, and the student is the one who has to cross it.

By 2022, and had moved the question off the student. They argue that the labor of resilience falls hardest on disabled, q***r, and BIPOC students who are, as they put it, resilient as hell, and that the fix belongs in the design of the course. Put the weight in the syllabus and the assignment sheets. A syllabus, they write, is a community manifesto.

In 53.2, , , and Hermansen put it on the institution. Their account of co-teaching first-year writing across the high school and college line turns on the relationship between two teachers, and on the support that paid for their planning time, until that support ended in 2019.

Read in order, the three trace the same difficulty changing hands. It doesn't go away. It moves, from the student, to the design, to the institution.

All three are at the link in our bio. Which version of the difficulty is closest to the room you teach in?

Dual enrollment usually gets pitched to administrators as access and credits. Courchesne, DiGrazia, and Hermansen make a different case: a co-taught writing course runs on resources a budget rarely protects. Their account of co-teaching first-year writing in a local high school points to three things worth funding, if you want the model to last.

First, fund the planning time. Hermansen's first pairing failed for lack of time to build the partnership; the one that lasted had that time, and held through the pandemic and years of institutional churn. The relationship between co-teachers is the infrastructure, and infrastructure has to be funded.

Second, keep funding the development after the first year. The sessions that built the program's culture ended in 2019 with administrative turnover and never came back. Sustained development is what lets a co-teaching program outlast the people who start it.

Third, pay everyone for the work. While the development ran, high school and part-time instructors were paid for that time; tenure-track faculty folded it into salaried work. Co-teaching depends on labor that is easy to leave uncompensated, so pay for it wherever it happens, and whoever does it.

Save for your next dual enrollment planning meeting. Share with your WPA.

A college professor sat on the floor of a high school hallway, running writing conferences one student at a time, while her co-teacher kept the rest of the class going inside. Joe Courchesne, Jennifer DiGrazia, and Wyatt Hermansen kept inventing arrangements like that one.

For years the three co-taught first-year writing in a dual enrollment program where a college instructor travels to a local high school and shares the room with an ELA teacher for a full year. Same students, same curriculum, two teachers from different institutions. They wrote the article together to mirror the collaboration it describes, and they refused to romanticize it. The title says fumbling, and they mean it.

Their argument is that co-teaching asks you to give up something instructors are trained to guard, sole authority over your own classroom, and that you earn back a shared authority more powerful than what you traded. Courchesne became an interpreter for DiGrazia's college-level feedback. Peer review that worked at the university, where strangers took risks together, fell apart in a high school where students had known each other for most of their lives. Hermansen's first pairing failed for lack of time to build the relationship; the second held through the pandemic and years of institutional churn. The difference was never the curriculum. It was whether the partnership had the support to last, and that support, the professional development that once held these programs together, stopped in 2019.

Read the full article at the link in our bio.

If you've been sitting on a piece about teaching writing, summer is a good time to write it. FEN Blog—a subset of Composition Studies, by writing teachers, for writing teachers—is open for submissions.

Editors Emily Brier and Daniel Libertz publish short articles (1,000–2,000 words, MLA format) on praxis and research in the writing classroom. They're open to any topic related to teaching composition, with particular interest in the areas listed in the slides. They especially encourage work from graduate students, non-tenure-track instructors, early career researchers, and historically marginalized writers.

Send full drafts or pitches to [email protected]. Browse recent FEN Blog posts at the link in our bio.

Three books on AI and writing appeared between 2023 and 2024. Each was written from a different moment in the field's response. Each sees something the others couldn't.

Ann Hill Duin and Isabel Pedersen finished their book before ChatGPT launched. Their framework treats AI as one among a wider range of augmentation technologies and asks what happens ten years out, not ten months. Writing before the AI turn gave them room to define the questions later authors would inherit.

Sidney Dobrin published nine months after the launch, when instructors needed both a way to think about AI and something to do with it on Monday morning. He situates AI within the longer history of technological change—the printing press, word processors—to give a field in transition some historical footing.

Beth Buyserie and Travis Thurston's 2024 collection arrived with something the earlier books couldn't offer: a full year of classroom evidence. Contributors across disciplines can report what worked, what didn't, and why.

In a review essay in Issue 53.2, Jason Tham reads all three in sequence. His argument: the response grew more grounded over time, but none of the three questions whether integration itself should be the default. He proposes slow pedagogy as the counter-position.

Where do you see the field going from here? Read the full review essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_14.

The composition studies field built itself on the idea that writing takes time. Process pedagogy. Recursive revision. The discipline's commitments have always, in some way, been arguments for slowing down.

In a review essay in Issue 53.2, Jason Tham reads three recent books on AI and writing as a chronological record of how the field responded to generative AI. Duin and Pedersen built ethical frameworks before ChatGPT launched, with room to think carefully about what technological adoption would mean. Dobrin published practical guidance nine months after, when instructors were rewriting syllabi mid-semester. Buyserie and Thurston's 2024 collection draws on a full year of classroom experimentation. Its contributors can report what they tried and what happened.

Each book gets more grounded in what actually happens when AI enters the classroom. Tham's argument is that all three accept the same premise: pedagogy should accommodate AI's capabilities. None asks whether the accommodation itself runs counter to what writing instruction was built to do. He calls this "acceleration culture" and proposes slow pedagogy as the counter-position: extended prewriting and revision that can't be compressed. Time with difficult ideas long enough for them to change shape.

His claim is specific: critical thinking depends on confusion, struggle, and gradual understanding. Those are the processes AI is designed to skip. And as the editor of Computers and Composition, he isn’t writing from the margins either. Tham is writing from the center of the technology-and-writing conversation.

Read the full review essay: https://bit.ly/53-2_14 .

The question running through Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer is one most writing teachers have asked in some version: when students compose in a new medium, what do they bring with them?

In a review for 53.2, Abigail Robinson walks through the collection's ten chapters, edited by Alexander, Davis, Mina, and Shepherd. She reads the book's structure as an expanding lens: the first section stays inside first-year writing, the second follows students across curricula, and the third tracks composing knowledge across careers and lifetimes.

Robinson also notes that the research methods widen along with the scope. VanKooten uses editing software itself to study transfer across audio-visual formats. Wilson and Portz follow a student in East Kazakhstan using translation as a transfer method. Roozen traces one writer's drawing practice across decades.

Robinson flags a finding from Shepherd that underlies much of the collection: students' awareness of multimodal transfer actually declines over time, fading as they move further from their early writing courses. She reads the collection as treating that as a design problem, one that revised program outcomes, expanded writing center services, and reflective assignments can begin to address.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_19 .

What happens when writing gets physical? Danielle Koupf's essay on "scrap writing" sends students hunting for anonymous, discarded handwriting in the wild. Two pieces from the Composition Studies archive share its attention to the physical, material side of composing.

Koupf asked students to hunt for anonymous, discarded handwriting. They found tutor notes covered in doodled snails, genre-bending scraps in grocery stores, and notes they'd once have called trash. Each find looked like luck. Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of who the student already was. (53.2, Fall 2025)

Cydney Alexis interviewed three writers about their relationships with the Moleskine notebook. One bought purses with Moleskine-sized pockets. Another fetishized the notebook as a college freshman reading Camus, then felt angst that his own writing—to-do lists, not fiction—wasn't worthy of it. Alexis argues that the objects we write with are tangled up in who we think we are as writers. (45.2, Fall 2017)

Hannah J. Rule couldn't explain "flow" to a student in office hours until she started miming the sentences—gesturing, sweeping her hand to show how far the second sentence had traveled from the first. Her students named the approach the "grammera." Rule argues that writing can't be severed from the act of composing with our senses. (45.1, Spring 2017)

Save this pathway. All three are available at the link in our bio.

Danielle Koupf has been picking up other people's discarded handwriting since 2009. A sidewalk in Wichita. A hotel outside Kansas City. A shopping cart in Winston-Salem. She calls these fragments "scrap writing" — anonymous, handwritten, decontextualized bits of text that have drifted loose from whatever they once belonged to.

In a new article in our Fall 2025 issue, Koupf describes what happened when she brought scrap writing into her handcrafted rhetorics classroom and asked students to hunt for their own. One student collected tutor notes from the Writing Center — scraps covered in doodled snails and decontextualized phrases like "European colonial meddling." Another set out to find scraps in specific locations, came back empty-handed, and shifted to something more open: "I just kind of went about my usual day and kept an eye out for scraps rather than going out to find them." A third found her worldview changing: "Before taking on this project, I only considered other people's notes as trash that had very little significance to me."

Each project looked, on the surface, like it was driven by luck. But Koupf traces how every discovery grew out of each student's existing interests, coursework, and daily life. Juliana's familiarity with the Writing Center led her there. Charity's concurrent genre studies course shaped how she categorized her finds. Amarah's existing love of handwriting and doodling made scrap writing feel like an extension of her own practice.

Koupf's contribution is a concrete, classroom-tested picture of what invention looks like when it's distributed across people, environments, and happenstance rather than contained inside a single mind.

Read the full article at the link in our bio.

Shawna Shapiro's Cultivating Critical Language Awareness in the Writing Classroom starts from a question most grammar instruction sidesteps: whose language norms are we teaching, and what does enforcing them cost students who don't already speak them?

In a review for 53.2, Ananta Khanal walks through Shapiro's framework: a Critical Language Awareness pedagogy built around four pathways. The sociolinguistics pathway treats language variation as a lens for identity and injustice. The critical academic literacies pathway challenges deficit-based models of academic writing. A media and discourse analysis pathway asks students to become critical consumers and ethical producers of public language. And a communicating-across-difference pathway draws on psychology and conflict resolution to build more dialogic classrooms.

Each pathway comes with unit structures, essential questions, and assignments—"Media Show-and-Tell," "Linguistic Sleuthing," "News Media Autobiography"—for bringing abstract concepts into the classroom. Khanal notes that the book's feedback guidelines ask instructors to respond to rhetorical clarity and intentionality rather than correctness.

Read the full review: https://bit.ly/53-2_16.