This is a time of extreme change. While we know that the world and our lives are defined by constant flux, it is hard to attribute the changes we see every day to the natural ebb and flow of the universe. Even so, it is how we acknowledge and, ultimately, address these changes that will determine how we continue to make our own change in the world.
At Composition Forum we have experienced significant change over the last few years. As we announced in our previous volume, our website was updated to present the excellent research entrusted to us in a modern and accessible way. We—especially our amazing Digital Editor Mark Pedretti and his team—are continuing to experiment with this new design, and we hope it makes your reading experience more pleasurable and engaging. Our managing editors team has also changed. We want to thank Daniel Ernst for his time and labor as well as Jillian Viveiros for her work as an editorial assistant. Now, Gavin Johnson is joined by Eric House (Associate Professor at New Mexico State University) as Managing Editor and Katy Adams (MA student at Texas Christian University) as Editorial Assistant. Gavin, Eric, and Katy are working hard to reimagine, streamline, and make more transparent the editorial process behind the scenes, and we expect more good change soon. We encourage readers to visit our Editorial Board page to become familiar with our current team.
As a result of our recent changes, we have an exceptionally full offering of features in Volume 56, beginning with an Interview with Ian Barnard, a Professor of Rhetoric and Composition in the English Department at Chapman University. In this interview conducted by Walter Lucken IV, Bernard reflects on his research, teaching and service addressing rhetoric, social justice, and the capacity of communication to inhibit or promote human freedom and intellectual inquiry. We are thrilled to publish this new and insightful interview. If you have an idea for an interview, reach out to our Interviews Editors.
Volume 56 also includes a unique retrospective entitled “‘The New Illiteracy’: ‘Why Johnny Can’t Write’ at 50.” In it, Carl Schlachte reflects on the fifty-year anniversary of a watershed moment in the centuries-long debate over students’ writing abilities, one that kicking off “years of argument and recriminations among academics and popular media commentators.” We are thrilled to publish this new perspective on a previous Composition Forum article. If you have an idea for a Retrospective article, reach out to our Retrospectives Editor.
The volume features six articles that address a range of approaches to teaching, assessing, and researching writing and how we might (re)consider our theories and approaches in order to pursue impactful change. We kick off this volume with Kathleen Lyon’s “Rhetorical Strategies of Access-Making: A Technē of Access in Writing Pedagogy,” which calls on teachers to “make sense,” “make space,” and “make sure” that their writing pedagogies offer flexibility and invite inclusive participation from all students. Next, we have a pair of articles that call our attention to the research process. Michael Rifenburg, Jenn Mallette, and Rebecca Nowacek’s “Adding to the Qualitative Research Method Toolkit: Eliciting and Coding Participant Drawing” offers a guide for those interested in visual research methods. Joseph Forte, then, encourages readers, “Let’s Do the Math” by arguing that the field’s lacking engagement with quantitative “construct-focused RAD research” creates a gap in our ability to fully understand and defend how we teach writing in an age of misinformation. From here, three articles present data from empirical studies. Kate Comer and Paige Banaji, in “Habits of Mind as Heuristic for Asset-Based Reflection in First-Year Writing: Students’ Perspectives,” present the results from a study of 330 first-year students at an HSI that “make a strong case for the [Habits of Mind] as a heuristic for asset-based reflection, one that validates background-based strengths while challenging deficit narratives.” Yan Li’s article “Tracing Transfer: Curriculum Development for Multilingual Writers in First-Year Composition” seeks to call attention to the ways in which writing programs do (or do not) support international multilingual writers through transfer-informed curricula. Finally, Megan McIntyre’s “Collaborative and Equitable Assessment: Graduate Student Responses to Co-Creating Feedback Guidelines in a Graduate Composition Pedagogy Course” turns our attention to the work of collaborative and equitable assessment. McIntyre’s article details her work with graduate students to develop an equitable assessment framework while also highlighting how such collaborative efforts must go further. If you have questions or comments about the articles in this volume, or wish to propose an article, contact our Managing Editors.
This volume offers four program profiles addressing the intersection between writing theory and pedagogy. Maria Eleftheriou and Sana Sayed’s “Supporting Multilingual Writers: Insights from the American University of Sharjah Writing Center” describes one of the first writing centers in the Gulf region, giving an account of the Center’s history, peer-tutoring program, tutor-training course, and Writing Fellows initiative. In “Lab Notes as Disciplinary Literacy: Developing an Integrated, Genre-based, Writing Curriculum in a First-year Engineering Physics Program,” Raffaella Negretti, Hans Malmström, and Jonathan Weidow address the development of an integrated, genre-based writing curriculum in first-year engineering physics at a technical university in Sweden. Rebekah Sims and Sharon Hunter’s “Bloom Where You’re Planted: Integrating Writing Knowledge into a Scottish Initial Teacher Education Programme” describes the development of embedded writing instruction within a Scottish initial teacher education course: the Professional Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE). And Shane A. Wood, Nikolas Gardiakos, Matthew Bryan, Natalia Madruga, Pamela Baker, Joel Schneier, Joel Bergholtz, Emily Proulx, Vee Kennedy, Ricky Finch, Mya Poe, Norbert Elliot, and Sherry Rankins-Robertson’s “Sustaining Collective Actions: Program Assessment During Transitional Moments” addresses how the University of Central Florida’s First-Year Composition Program has sustained its commitment to values-based sustainable development despite a series of significant changes from 2020–2025. 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 four timely reviews, including a review of Multimodal Composing and Writing Transfer, edited by Kara Poe Alexander, Matthew Davis, Lilian W. Mina, and Ryan P. Shepherd, by Taylor Wyatt; a review of William Macauley, Jr., Leslie R. Anglesey, Brady Edwards, Kathryn M. Lambrecht, and Phillip K. Lovas’s Threshold Conscripts: Rhetoric and Composition Teaching Assistantships, by Meghan Hancock; a review of Julia Kiernan, Alanna Frost, and Suzanne Blum Malley’s Translingual Pedagogical Perspectives: Engaging Domestic and International Students in the Composition Classroom, by Gitte Frandsen; and a review of Mentorship/Methodology: Reflections, Praxis, and Futures, edited by Leigh Gruwell and Charles N. Lesh, by Molly Ryan. Please send review queries—not unsolicited manuscripts—to our review editors.
This volume concludes with a special symposium on Critical Race Theory in Writing Studies coordinated by Aja Y. Martinez. As Andrea A. Lunsford outlines in her Forward, CRT has always been needed in our classrooms but never more so than in our current political climate. As we witness direct attacks on higher education––including explicit demands to expunge any study of race, ethnicity, gender, and sexuality––the three articles and book review included in this symposium offer unique interventions into the teaching of writing. First, Allison Gross and Jessica Lee’s “Counterstory and Genre Praxis in the First-Year Writing Classroom: A Prospective Analysis” presents a correspondence between the authors as they imagine how students at their community college might engage in “transformational resistance” in writing courses. Second, Paul Corrigan outlines a critical race reading theory (CRRT) that counters “the damaging reductive understandings of race and of reading on display in attacks against books and against antiracism in the US.” Third, in “‘Traitor as Teacher’: Interest Convergence in Rhetoric and Writing Studies,” Natalie Shellenberger unpacks Derrick Bell’s important theory of interest convergence as it has been and can be taken up in writing studies, especially in pedagogical development, writing administration, and academic scholarship. Finally, Erin Green and Ruby Mendoza review Aja Y. Martinez and Robert O. Smith’s recently published book The Origins of Critical Race Theory: The People and Ideas That Created a Movement and, through their review, make clear that “compositionists, too, must fight back against dominant discourses that dehumanize marginalized communities and delegitimize our values.”
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