Composition Studies

During the pandemic, a first-year writing student named Ann picked up Animal Crossing and found something there her writing class wasn't giving her. She kept running into the gap a lot of multilingual writers know, between what she wanted to say and what landed on the page. In the game, that pressure lifted, and she found room to, in her words, "freely express" herself. She called it "a reset button."

That feeling is what Charissa Che built a whole course around. She designed Writing for Intercultural Communicative Competence for English 101 at Queensborough Community College, where students come from more than a hundred countries. T

he course runs on an idea from Claire Kramsch: the third place, a real, imagined, or online space you enter out of desire, where you stand both inside and outside other people's ways of speaking. Che takes those worlds seriously, as places where writing and identity are already happening, and asks what a first-year writing class looks like when it starts there.

Over four assignments, Che's students pick one of their own and write their way through it. The course aims at something before proficiency: whether a student can say who they are and feel like they belong. Desire, she argues, is what moves a writer.

The full course design: https://bit.ly/53-2_09
The syllabus: https://bit.ly/53-2_09_Syllabus

Laura J. Panning Davies and Kate Navickas sketched the first draft of this course at an airport gate, waiting for flights home from CCCC. They'd just watched a conference panel make the case that students using AI weren't valuing the writing process. Naturally, they wondered what would happen if they built a whole first-year course around that question instead of spending a single unit on it.

The course pairs weekly hands-on experiments with AI tools against writing-studies reading on process, revision, failure, and authorship. Students write their own writing philosophies, then analyze the full class set as data: who finds AI ethical, who doesn't, and why. First-year writers become the researchers of a conversation that usually leaves them out.

What they found didn't add up to a tidy success story. A course built largely on critical readings made it easy to turn the room against AI, and they kept working to complicate that reflex. Reflection, the move the field reaches for first, didn't by itself push students toward deeper revision. And the high-achieving students, the ones who'd never had to revise, found the prospect of failing most "disturbing and distressing."

Panning Davies teaches at SUNY Cortland; Navickas directs the Cornell Writing Centers. Twenty miles apart, Ivy and regional public, the two classrooms differed less than they expected. Their contribution is an honest account of teaching AI as a writing question instead of a tech one.

Read the full course design and view the syllabus at the link: https://bit.ly/53-2_08

In 53.2, Brigida Blasi reviews Erin Clark's Feminist Technical Communication: Apparent Feminisms, Slow Crisis, and the Deepwater Horizon Disaster (Utah State University Press, 2023).

Clark's case study is the technical communication surrounding the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster: what the official reports made fast and easy to access, and what fell out along the way. Blasi writes that Clark's case studies "show how lost information in overly efficient systems benefits the powerful while harming those most affected." From there the book argues for what Clark calls "apparent feminisms," a methodology for making feminist perspectives conspicuous in fields that claim neutrality.

The book moves between feminist historiography, personal narrative, and applied theory in under 200 pages, and Clark herself calls it "messy." But "Clark is not offering concrete solutions, likely on purpose," Blasi writes. She is asking readers to weigh their own positionality and to deliberate on how information is "used, manipulated, and absorbed."

Read the full review:https://bit.ly/53-2_15

On Monday we gave you the numbers from Jennifer Sheppard's study of pandemic-era workload: the extra hours, and the instructors who would still choose online teaching anyway. This week we asked Sheppard what the article looked like from the inside.

Some of what she told us stayed close to the findings. "Instructors are often doing significantly more behind-the-scenes work," she said, "from course design to emotional support to ongoing professional development." The argument follows from there: she makes the case that institutions need to recognize and support the work that makes good online instruction possible.

The rest was about the writing itself. Her survey gathered 98 instructors across 19 campuses, and the hardest part of drafting was the cutting. "The hardest part to cut was, without a doubt, the range of participant voices." Narrowing them down while still doing justice to their experiences was, she said, one of the most difficult parts of the writing process.

The study behind the article took more than two years. Reading it takes one sitting.

Link: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

Most of the writing instructors Jennifer Sheppard surveyed said they would still choose to teach online or hybrid if they had the option. They also described work that had become hard to sustain.

Sheppard surveyed 98 instructors across 19 campuses in one large public university system, over the first two years of pandemic teaching. The benefits were concrete. Schedules grew more flexible, and students who'd been quiet in person finally spoke up in a chat box. So were the costs. The hours added up: 85% reported at least four extra hours a week, and nearly half put it at seven to eleven.

Three kinds of work rose at once. The course design of rebuilding writing instruction for a screen. The emotional labor of carrying students through what one instructor called teaching through trauma. And professional development to keep current, much of it uncompensated. As one participant put it: "I have worked harder than I ever have before. The amount of resources I had to shell out for instructional triage during the first year online is astronomical."

About a quarter of respondents said their best support came from colleagues, through department and writing-program presentations and regular online meetings to share experiences, approaches, and materials. Sheppard's final section argues for collaborative models that keep the same few people from carrying everything, for counting care work in how faculty are evaluated, for paying instructors for the training they're asked to complete, and for giving them real say in how they teach. The goal, she writes, is to keep what online writing instruction makes possible "without overburdening the instructors who sustain it."

What part of your teaching load has never shown up in the official record? Tell us how you're thinking about it.

Read the full article: https://bit.ly/CS_53-2

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.