College Composition Weekly – Virginia S. Anderson

INTERESTED IN RESEARCH ON WRITING? CHECK OUT 3 NEW POSTS AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY!

H. Bernard Hall, in the new Research in the Teaching of English, says we no longer need to ask why to use hip-hop in English classes; we need more models for how to use it well.

Rob McAlear and Mark Pedretti, writing in Composition Studies, ask students how they decide if a paper is “done.” The answer isn’t what you think.

John Duffy, in the January College English, explores “virtue ethics” as a possible replacement for consequentialist, deontological, and poststructuralist ethics in college writing classrooms.

AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: Digital Badging as Assessment

In the November College English, Stephanie West-Puckett argues for “digital badges” as a means of encouraging participation among teachers and students as they design writing assessment practices that work toward social justice.

THIS WEEK’S POST AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: “Devilish Smartphones”

Jenae Cohn, writing in the December Computers and Composition, provides case studies of student digital literacy narratives to study how the “addiction trope” influences student views of their social-media use.

THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY! Privatization in Higher Ed

In the September 2016 issue of College Composition and Communication, Tony Scott argues that composition scholarship has little impact on the “neoliberal” privatization of writing instruction because it fails to “see” the disconnect between innovative scholarly ideas and the material environments in which they will be enacted.

NEW AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY!

Writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, Leah Anderst, Jennifer Maloy, and Jed Shahar assess the Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) at Queensborough Community College, part of the City University of New York system. They argue that ALP is especially helpful for English Language Learners.

THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY! AUTOMATED ESSAY SCORING!

Noreen S. Moore and Charles A. MacArthur, writing in the Journal of Writing Research, explore how 7th- and 8th-graders respond to computer feedback and scoring when they revise their writing.

THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY! Instructional Assistants in FYW.

In the Fall 2015 issue of Computers and Composition, Tiffany Bourelle, Andrew Bourelle, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson discuss a pilot program at Arizona State University that incorporates undergraduate instructional assistants into online “mega-sections” of first-year writing in order to decrease costs without diminishing student learning or increasing faculty workload. http://tinyurl.com/pqtv4k2

NEW AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: ESSAYS FROM FORUM ON CONTINGENT FACULTY ISSUES

Forum: Issues About Part-Time and Contingent Faculty, appears in College Composition and Communication twice a year. This Fall’s issue features three essays, by Patricia Davies Pytleski, Natalie M. Dorfeld, and Michelle LaFrance, that discuss, respectively, conversion to tenure-track for contingent faculty; National Adjunct Walkout Day (‪#‎NAWD‬); and the lack of research on contingent labor issues in Writing Across the Curriculum Programs. http://tinyurl.com/qy8rhus

NEW AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: ONLINE INTERFACE AS EXORDIUM

New at College Composition Weekly: In the September College English, Rebecca Tarsa proposes strategies for creating an effective “exordium” for writing classrooms by examining how the digital interface works as an exordium in online participatory sites in which students voluntarily contribute writing. She draws on Teena Carnegie’s work to argue that the interface of an online site meets Cicero’s definition of the exordium as an appeal designed to “make the listener ‘well-disposed, attentive, and receptive’ to the ensuring speech.” In the case of an online site, the interface as exordium accomplishes this goal by “project[ing] to users the potential for interactivity within the site that matches their desired engagement while also supporting the ends of the site itself.” Adopting some features of online interfaces can trigger more voluntary and spontaneous writing in composition classes.

THIS WEEK AT COLLEGE COMPOSITION WEEKLY: Student Understanding of Plagiarism

This week at College Composition Weekly: David W. Hartwig, writing in Teaching English in the Two-Year College, argues that students come to college with good “objective” knowledge about what constitutes plagiarism but struggle to identify it in actual passages. He agrees with Rebecca Moore Howard that practices like “patchwriting” are steps toward effective academic discourse; these instances of apparent plagiarism, he argues, measure students’ ability to read and understand complex scholarly writing rather than their honesty. He urges that work on critical reading be coordinated with writing and that faculty across campus share the task of teaching the correct use of sources. http://tinyurl.com/q9aod2l