A Form of Phronesis (2021)
Transgenerational and intergenerational memory relies on the voices of those who precede us. I crave the insights and wisdom of those voices.
Archives: Scholarship
This page serves as a database for OWC-related scholarship. You can filter results by using the tags below or the search bar to the right.
Have corrections or scholarship suggestions? Contact mentoring@onlinewritingcenters.org
Where Would We Be?: Legacies, Roll Calls, and the Teaching of Writing in HBCUs (2021)
In their article “We are Family: I Got All My (HBCU) Sisters with Me” in the 2016 “Where We Are: Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Writing Programs” section of Composition Studies, Hope Jackson and Karen Keaton Jackson state, “It is our hope that the HBCU experience will one day be fully integrated in composition studies . . . without the designation of ‘special issue’” (157). While their article focused on writing center studies, their call echoes that of Jacqueline Jones Royster and Jean C. Williams in “History in the Spaces Left: African American Presence and Narratives of Composition Studies.”
Intergenerational Knowledge, Social Media, and the Composition Community: Insights and Inquiries (2021)
Social media has been a cornerstone of my professional life since before I formally entered my doctoral studies, but I never rushed to sign up for new platforms. I didn’t use Facebook until 2007, when I joined because a friend encouraged me to. I took even longer to create a Twitter account; in March 2016, I joined, once again because a professional peer highlighted its networking and informal professional development uses. I still maintain both accounts: Twitter as a mostly professional online space, Facebook as a hybrid space showing professional and personal interests. During my doctoral studies, my interest in social media deepened: such media became something I both researched and practiced in multiple contexts and capacities.
On Podcasting, Program Development, and Intergenerational Thinking (2021)
I spent my first year of college as a music business major, a wannabe audio engineer. Thanks to two main factors, that major didn’t take. First, I learned audio engineering wasn’t just being present while cool music happened. Second, I took first year writing, which convinced me to become an English major (more on that in a bit). Despite the major switch, my audio experience proved an unexpected asset when I began pursuing a PhD in English at The University of Texas at Austin in 2011.
Retention and Persistence in Writing Programs: A Survey of Students Repeating First-Year Writing (2021)
Student retention and persistence is increasingly prioritized by state and local policies as well as national scorecards and rankings—however, the policies that politicians and administrators undertake to improve university metrics tend to ignore the realities faced by students at the heart of our institutions. Drawing on a survey/interview project involving 67 students repeating first-year writing classes at a diverse institution in the Southwestern US, this article takes a student-centered approach to understand the reasons they drop first-year writing, such as health concerns, lack of engagement with the curriculum, and their incompatibility with online learning or poorly taught online classes.
Revising Reflection for Results in Teacher Research (2021)
In this article, we argue that using students’ reflective writing to understand specific aspects of their classroom experience requires that researchers systematically integrate into the curriculum reflections that responsibly attend to both students’ learning and the focus of classroom research. Informed by recently published articles on reflection and collaborative writing and learning, this argument contributes to recent Composition Forum discussions (e.g. VanKooten; Fiscus; Winzenreid et al.; Jankens, Learning How to Ask).
Assignments and Expectations: The Role of Genre and Faculty Expectations in Transfer (2021)
As WPAs at a research institution without a WAC program, we embarked on this project to learn about the types of writing prompts faculty across the disciplines assign and their expectations for student writing. Although our first-year composition program is genre-based and focuses on teaching for transfer, we did not know what genres other faculty assigned nor which writing skills they hoped students could apply to their assignments.
Student-teacher conferencing in zoom: Asymmetrical collaboration in a digital space/(non)place (2021)
I present two case studies of student–teacher Zoom conferences, examining the ways the digital space impacts the student–teacher relationship. I ground my analysis in current online writing instruction and writing center conversations about digital space/place and asymmetrical collaboration.
Writing center blogs project (2021)
The original purpose of this project was to gather in one place a comprehensive list of writing center blogs that could be shared with tutors and writing center professionals. We made this list publicly available on the blog of the San José State University Writing Center, The Write Attitude.
What do first-year students find reliable in online sources? (2021)
It has become almost rote to say that now, more than ever, students need to understand how to navigate web content to find verifiable and reliable information sources. While the data-collection portion of this study took place in the aftermath of the 2016 American presidential election, with students and the public increasingly confused about #fakenews and what media sources to trust to disseminate information (Rainie & Anderson, 2017), structural revisions of this article took place during the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing racial protests in the United States.