Discussions about the relationship between theory and pedagogy have long been foundational to composition studies, shaping how scholars conceptualize writing, teaching, and the work of the field itself. Rather than treating theory and practice as discrete domains, Composition Forum has consistently emphasized their reciprocity: pedagogical approaches both emerge from and generate theoretical frameworks, while classroom practices, institutional contexts, and student experiences continually press against and refine our theories of writing. Composition Forum is committed to sustaining this dynamic exchange. Its central aim is not simply to showcase scholarship, but to cultivate an ongoing, critical dialogue about how theory and pedagogy inform—and at times challenge—one another across diverse contexts. The current volume takes up that charge with particular energy and range. Bringing together thirteen scholarly texts organized across four sections, it offers a multifaceted exploration of composition theory and pedagogy as lived, contested, and evolving practices.
Curating these diverse texts involves a lot of work, and we have a great team of editors involved in the process. We thank Katy Adams for her time as an editorial assistant over the past two years, and we wish her the best as she furthers her education in the field. We welcome Kiera Troy as incoming editorial assistant for the 2026-2027 year, and we look forward to working with her as she takes up this important role. We encourage readers to visit our Editorial Board page to become familiar with our current team.
Volume 57 begins with an Interview with Wendy Hayden, an Associate Professor of English and Director of First-Year Composition at Hunter College, CUNY. In this interview conducted by Sarah E. S. Carter, Hayden discusses her important work in archival research, provides her advice to others considering implementing changes to their classes or programs, and describes how the current climate is impacting her work, students, and the archives in general. We are excited to publish this new and insightful interview and hope that our readers find it informative. If you have an idea for an interview, reach out to our Interviews Editors.
The volume features eight articles that explore a range of perspectives on the intersections of theory and pedagogy. We lead this volume with several articles addressing Artificial Intelligence and the authenticity of student work, beginning with Jason Tham’s “Whose Time Is It Anyway? Writing, Labor, and the Illusion of Efficiency,” which examines how generative AI tools transform writing pedagogy by creating an “illusion of efficiency” that masks deeper concerns around labor, equity, and embodied cognition. Lillian Campbell and Elizabeth L. Miller’s “Mice in the House, a Sense of Dread, and Magic: Accounting for Teachers’ Visceral Rhetorics in AI Literacy Narratives” argues for attending to writing instructors’ visceral rhetorics in AI Literacy Narratives, where teachers narrate their histories with writing and reading as former students, as writing teachers, and now as writing teachers facing AI-produced writing. And Andrea McCrary, Stephanie Conner, Jennifer Daniel, and Jennifer Gray’s “Faculty Emotional Response to Plagiarism: Inviting a Stance of Not-Yetness as a Way to Humanize the Classroom” investigates faculty feelings about student plagiarism and teaching citation practices based on data from multiple institutions, concluding that institutional support through professional development can assist faculty and students by addressing citation practices that invite resistance to a stance of mastery.
The next two articles investigate our shifting understandings of participation and assessment. Daniel Libertz, Constantin Schreiber, and Kamal Belmihoub’s “Is Teaching Writing Different Now? An Analysis of First-Year Writing Grades in Different Modalities and During the COVID-19 Pandemic” responds to claims in the popular press and within everyday academic life about the effects of modality and the COVID-19 pandemic on student learning, demonstrating that that the grading history of instructors was nearly always significant and meaningful regardless of modality or time period. And Mathew Gomes’s “Embodying Class Participation: An Intersectional Self-Study of How and Why Students Participate” reports the results of an exploratory study of student participation disaggregated by race, gender, disability, and their intersections.
The two articles that follow explore mentoring and supporting student writers. Antonio Byrd and Virginia M. Schwarz’s “Horizontal Mentorship and Dialogic Reflection: Methods for Supporting Early-Career Faculty Transitions to New English Programs” describes two early career tenure-track faculty’s approach to horizontal mentorship and dialogic reflection to adapt their teaching to the needs of Research II graduate writing programs. Diana Lin Awad Scrocco’s “A Study of Tutors’ Pedagogical Talk in Read/Plan-Ahead Writing Center Consultations.” The articles section concludes with Sara Biggs Chaney’s “What’s in a Word? Using Etymology to Contest Neoliberal Discourses of Failure,” which proposes etymology as a mode of critical investigation and rhetorical invention that can be employed to historicize and critique neoliberal discourses of failure in composition programs and classrooms. If you have questions or comments about the articles in this volume, or wish to propose an article, contact our Managing Editors.
This volume includes one program profile: Dan Lawson and Genie Nicole Giaimo’s “Tutor Training Matters: Writing Center Administrators’ Self-Sponsorship into the Field and Its Impact on Tutor Training Interventions,” which describes how cross-institutional research and administrative expertise can and should influence writing center program design, particularly tutor training. The research study explores how and why writing center administrators (WCAs) trained their tutors at Central Michigan and Hofstra University. If you’d like to propose a profile of your institution’s program, please send a query to our program profile editors Joseph Wilson and Holland Prior.
The Reviews section includes three relevant and timely reviews, including an audio Review of Stephanie West-Puckett, Nicole I. Caswell, and William P. Banks’s Failing Sideways: Queer Possibilities for Writing Assessment by Jacob Herrmann; a Review of Donna LeCourt’s Social Mediations: Writing for Digital Public Spheres by Tymoteusz Chajdas; and a Review of Chris Anson and Pamela Flash’s Writing-Enriched Curricula: Models of Faculty-Driven and Departmental Transformation by Nathan Sullivan. Please send review queries—not unsolicited manuscripts—to our review editors.
Please follow us on X/Twitter @Comp_Forum for news and updates about the journal. We will continue to use Composition Forum’s Weblog as another source of information about the journal, and we encourage readers to contribute timely and pertinent information to our X/Twitter feed and to our blog. Add our feed to your newsreader to receive alerts about new volumes of Composition Forum and other news from the field of rhetoric and composition. Please send questions or comments about the Composition Forum website to our Digital Editor. General inquiries about the journal can be sent to Editor Christian Weisser.