Composition Forum 53, Spring 2024
http://compositionforum.com/issue/53/

From the Editors: Volume 53

Christian Weisser, Rachel Daugherty, and Jackie Hoermann-Elliot

Composition Forum has published scholarly work for more than three decades, and one of the journal’s ongoing goals is to stay on the forefront of new conversations, topics, and issues in the field of writing studies. We have had many editors over the years who have helped the journal fulfill this goal, and we owe them all a huge debt of gratitude. This volume marks a significant influx of new editors in the Composition Forum team. Rather than list them all here, we encourage readers to visit our Editors and Editorial Board page to become familiar with our current team. We mention this new crop of editors in part to welcome them to the team, but also to suggest how this might benefit our readers and contributors. New editors often bring with them new ideas, new approaches, and an openness to exploring new topics, and this is a great time to submit scholarly work that extends writing studies in new and innovative ways. We hope scholars in writing studies will continue to propose cutting-edge interviews, retrospectives, articles, program profiles, reviews, and even special issues for consideration.

Volume 53 offers many new insights into the field of writing studies, beginning with a Retrospective Article from Allison D. Carr. In this retrospective entitled Following Failure, the author reflects on her 2013 Composition Forum article In Support of Failure. Here the author re-envisions the slippery term “failure,” suggesting that it is “a term that we have to accept as unsettled, partial, limited, even while feeling drawn to its tactical possibilities.” 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 engage the intersections of theory and pedagogy in writing studies. Nurturing Distributed Expertise with Social Media in First Year Composition Pedagogy by Jacob D. Richter examines how social media pedagogies can help support the development of distributed expertise in writing classrooms. Toward a Pedagogy of Linguistic Justice Through Empathy in OWI by Marcela Hebbard, Janine Morris, and Catrina Mitchum argues that in the teaching of writing online, incidents of linguistic discrimination can be (in)directly caused by faculty unfamiliarity with online teaching best practices, lack of critical linguistic awareness, and the prevalent legacy of racist and monolingual ideologies. Oksana Moroz and Krista Speicher Sarraf’s Hybrid Contract Grading in Online and HyFlex First-Year Composition Courses during the COVID-19 Pandemic presents students’ experiences with hybrid grading contracts through a thematic analysis of data, focusing on students’ perceptions of the grading contract’s role in improving their writing skills. In Instructor Motives and Disciplinary Identity: Reconciling the Theme Course with Teaching for Transfer, Michal Horton addresses the tensions between teaching for transfer scholarship and theme courses to reposition the theme course as a method for teaching writing as subject matter. Fostering Sustainable Student Revision Practices: A Call to Reimagine Revision’s Place in the Composition Classroom by Jayne E. O. Stone argues for centralizing revision in FYC classrooms, aiming to re-invigorate the conversation surrounding revision pedagogy. And Terminology Matters: Taking Back Outcomes and Objectives in Composition Studies by Alyssa Devey argues that composition studies needs to study definitions of outcomes terminology and then clearly define those terms in the materials programs, teachers, and students use. If you have questions or comments about the articles in this volume, or wish to propose an article, contact our Managing Editors.

The Reviews section includes two timely reviews, including a Review of Leigh Gruwell’s Making Matters: Craft, Ethics, and New Materialist Rhetorics
by Jillian Viveiros and a Review of Charles N. Lesh’s The Writing of Where: Graffiti and the Production of Writing Spaces by Jonathan Marine. Please send review queries—not unsolicited manuscripts—to our review editors.

Please follow us on 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 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 Website Editors. General inquiries about the journal can be sent to Editor Christian Weisser.