This essay proposes a pedagogical approach to writing instruction in universities facing familiar institutional goals and barriers alongside the heightened emotional complexities of students post-pandemic. Students at these universities often pursue vocational paths, yet since spring 2020, their interpersonal and cultural challenges have deepened,…

In this article, two transnational scholars of English studies engage in a collaborative autoethnography to illustrate the generative potential of translingualism as a scholarly common ground for writing studies and the history of English language studies. The argument hinges on the notion that translingualism's open-endedness to, and welcoming…

Little is known about literacy autobiography (LA) in the English as a foreign language (EFL) context. Using the triad of translingualism, transnationalism, and investment as a lens to examine the classroom writing ecology (which is composed of the participants, process, artifacts, and structure), the present ethnographic case study explores a…

Academic writing is an essential aspect of graduate school, as students' academic writing is the primary basis for assessment. The high-stakes nature of academic writing is magnified for plurilingual students, whose attendance at English-medium universities is growing exponentially. However, a small amount of research addresses how faculty support…

This paper provides concrete suggestions for teaching two Holocaust testimonies, Irene Hauser's diary and Ruth Klüger's memoir "Still Alive." Hauser's and Klüger's texts effectively illustrate the differences between diaries and memoirs while recounting similar experiences. Such a comparative analysis, I argue, achieves two goals: First,…

Teachers' identities as writers and language users can have an important impact on their pedagogical practices. As the population of writing teachers becomes increasingly diverse, the development of teachers' identities is an important but under-researched topic. This study examines how three prospective teachers from varied linguistic and…

In this reflective essay, Andrea Avery considers how teaching Lucy Grealy's 1994 Autobiography of a Face in a memoir class functions to cultivate embodied vulnerability among high school seniors. She discusses her own identity as a disabled/chronically ill teacher and how her positioning of and interaction with Grealy's text invites her students…

This article describes a teacher's willingness to perform an autobiographical spoken word poem in his classroom, which provided an important model for students as they composed and shared their own slam-style poems.

This embedded case study leveraged Rendón's (1994) validation theory as well as theories connecting self-reflection and transformative learning (e.g., Mezirow, 1990, 1997) to examine an autobiographical reading and writing course designed for low-income, first-year students in a comprehensive college transition program at an institution in the…

Deficiency-oriented attitudes are still common occurrences despite growing emphasis on linguistic and cultural diversity. Promoting inclusivity in learning, Herrera (2016) proposed "biography-driven instruction" emphasizing the power of students' assets. Though her work was intended for young learners' biliteracy, I argue that the tenets…

This article presents an approach to reading like a digital writer to support adolescents' narrative writing in digital formats. By providing digital mentor texts for students to read like digital writers, a more comprehensive and perhaps deeper understanding of digital writing and the memoir genre can emerge.

In this chapter, the author describes her experience teaching in a women's prison in New York, the challenges that arose with teaching autobiography, and the distinct situation of women behind bars.

Expressivism lost status and respect in composition and rhetoric during the 1990s, despite attempts by some to defend its insights. Few in the field call themselves expressivists today, and yet we can recognize traces of this movement in work by contemporary scholars and theorists. Indeed, the field itself still retains commitments that echo that…

This study is an examination of the outcomes of practicing autoethnography, specifically in the context of first-year undergraduate, writing-intensive courses. The researcher recounts his initial, inspiring encounter with autoethnography and explores the possibility of its pedagogical application in composition instruction. Autoethnography is a…

Many students matriculate into college feeling confident in their abilities to make meaning when using digital devices, though recent research suggests these students are not necessarily digitally literate. Still, 20% of incoming freshmen are required to enroll in Developmental Literacy Education, suggesting some of these students are not…