Transformations: Change Work across Writing Programs, Pedagogies, and Practices

As teaching practices adapt to changing technologies, budgetary constraints, new student populations, and changing employment practices, writing programs remain full of people dedicated to helping students improve their writing. This edited volume offers strategies for implementing large- and small-scale changes in writing programs by focusing on transformations­—the institutional, programmatic, curricular, and labor practices that work together to shape our teaching and learning experiences of writing and rhetoric in higher education.
 
The collection includes chapters from multiple award-winning writing programs, including the recipients of the Two-Year College Association’s Outstanding Programs in English Award and the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Writing Program Certificate of Excellence. These authors offer perspectives that demonstrate the deep work of transformation in writing programs and practices writ large, confirm the ways in which writing programs are connected to and situated within larger institutional and disciplinary contexts, and outline successful methods for navigating these contexts in order to transform the work.
 
In using the prism of transformation as the organizing principle for the collection, Transformations offers a range of strategies for adapting writing programs so that they meet the needs of students and teachers in service of creating equitable, ethical literacy instruction in a range of postsecondary contexts.
 
 Contributors: Leah Anderst, Cynthia Baer, Ruth Benander, Mwangi Alex Chege, Jaclyn Fiscus-Cannaday, Joanne Giordano, Rachel Hall Buck, Sarah Henderson Lee, Allison Hutchinson, Lynee Lewis Gaillet, Jennifer Maloy, Neil Meyer, Susan Miller-Cochran, Ruth Osorio, Lori Ostergaard, Shyam Pandey, Cassie Phillips, Brenda Refaei, Heather Robinson, Shelley Rodrigo, Julia Romberger, Tiffany Rousculp, Megan Schoen, Paulette Stevenson
 
 

Holly Hassel joined the faculty at North Dakota State University as professor of English after sixteen years as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Marathon County, a two-year college in Wisconsin. She has served as editor of the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College and as program chair of the 2021 Conference on College Composition and Communication. She has published work in College Composition and Communication, College English, the Journal of Writing Assessment, Pedagogy, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, among other venues. Her work has been recognized through national awards from the National Council of Teachers of English, Council of Writing Program Administrators, and the Two-Year College English Association.

Kirsti Cole is professor of rhetoric, composition, and literature and faculty chair of the Teaching Writing Graduate Certificate and Masters of Communication and Composition programs at Minnesota State University. She has published articles in Women’s Studies in Communication, Feminist Media Studies, College English, Harlot, and Thirdspace. She is the author of Feminist Challenges or Feminist Rhetorics and coeditor of Surviving Sexism in the Academy and Academic Labor beyond the Classroom.