The WPA Outcomes Statement—A Decade Later examines the ways that the Council of Writing Program Administrators’ Outcomes Statement for First-Year Composition has informed curricula, generated programmatic, institutional, and disciplinary change, and affected a disciplinary understanding of best practices in first-year composition.

Making Progress is an empirical investigation into the strategies and processes first-year composition programs can use to center multimodal work in their curricula. Logan Bearden makes a unique contribution to the field, presenting a series of flexible strategies, evolving considerations, and best practices that can be taken up, adapted, and implemented by programs and directors that want to achieve what Bearden brands “multimodal curricular transformation,” or MCT, at their own institutions. MCT can be achieved at the intersection of program documents and practices. Bearden details ten composition programs that have undergone MCT, offering interview data from the directors who oversaw and/or participated within the processes. He analyzes a corpus of outcomes statements to discover ways we can “make space” for multimodality and gives instructors and programs a broader understanding of the programmatic values for which they should strive if they wish to make space for multimodal composition in curricula. Making Progress also presents how other program documents like syllabi and program websites can bring those outcomes to life and make multimodal composing a meaningful part of first-year composition curricula. First-year composition programs that do not help their students learn to compose multimodal texts are limiting their rhetorical possibilities. The strategies in Making Progress will assist writing program directors and faculty who are interested in using multimodality to align programs with current trends in disciplinary scholarship and deal with resistance to curricular revision to ultimately help students become more effective communicators in a digital-global age.

Writing at the State U presents a comprehensive, empirical examination of writing programs at 106 universities. Rather than using open survey calls and self-reporting, Emily Isaacs uses statistical analysis to show the extent to which established principles of writing instruction and administration have been implemented at state comprehensive universities, the ways in which writing at those institutions has differed from writing at other institutions over time, and how state institutions have responded to major scholarly debates concerning first-year composition and writing program administration. Isaacs’s findings are surprising: state university writing programs give lip service to important principles of writing research, but many still emphasize grammar instruction and a skills-based approach, classes continue to be outsized, faculty development is optional, and orientation toward basic writing is generally remedial. As such, she considers where a closer match between writing research and writing instruction might help to expose and remedy these difficulties and identifies strategies and areas where faculty or writing program administrators are empowered to enact change. Unique in its wide scope and methodology, Writing at the State U sheds much-needed light on the true state of the writing discipline at state universities and demonstrates the advantages of more frequent and rigorous quantitative studies of the field.

In Reformers, Teachers, Writers, Neal Lerner explores the distinction between curriculum and pedagogy in writing studies—and the ways in which failing to attend to that distinction results in the failure of educational reform. Lerner’s mixed-methods approach—quantitative, qualitative, textual, historical, narrative, and theoretical—reflects the importance and effects of curriculum in a wide variety of settings, whether in writing centers, writing classrooms, or students’ out-of-school lives, as well as the many methodological approaches available to understand curriculum in writing studies. The richness of this approach allows for multiple considerations of the distinction and relationship between pedagogy and curriculum. Chapters are grouped into three parts: disciplinary inquiries, experiential inquiries, and empirical inquiries, exploring the presence and effect of curriculum and its relationship to pedagogy in multiple sites, both historical and contemporary, and for multiple stakeholders. Reformers, Teachers, Writers calls out writing studies’ inattention to curriculum, which hampers efforts to enact meaningful reform and to have an impact on larger conversations about education and writing. The book will be invaluable to scholars, teachers, and administrators interested in rhetoric and composition, writing studies, and education.

This reference guide provides a comprehensive review of the literature on all the issues, responsibilities, and opportunities that writing program administrators need to understand, manage, and enact, including budgets, personnel, curriculum, assessment, teacher training and supervision, and more. Writing Program Administration also provides the first comprehensive history of writing program administration in U.S. higher education. Writing Program Administration includes a helpful glossary of terms and an annotated bibliography for further reading.

Our Body of Work invites administrators and teachers to consider how physical bodies inform everyday work and labor as well as research and administrative practices in writing programs. Combining academic and personal essays from a wide array of voices, it opens a meaningful discussion about the physicality of bodily experiences in the academy. Open exchanges enable complex and nuanced conversations about intersectionality and how racism, sexism, classism, and ableism (among other “isms”) create systems of power. Contributors examine how these conversations are framed around work, practices, policies, and research and identify ways to create inclusive, embodied practices in writing programs and classrooms. The collection is organized to maximize representation in the areas of race, gender, identity, ability, and class by featuring scholarly chapters followed by narratively focused interchapters that respond to and engage with the scholarly work. The honest and emotionally powerful stories in Our Body of Work expose problematic and normalizing policies, practices, and procedures and offer diverse theories and methodologies that provide multiple paths for individuals to follow to make the academy more inclusive and welcoming for all bodies. It will be an important resource for researchers, as well a valuable addition to graduate and undergraduate syllabi on embodiment, writing instruction/pedagogy, and WPA work. Contributors: Dena Arendall, Janel Atlas, Hayat Bedaiwi, Elizabeth Boquet, Lauren Brentnell, Triauna Carey, Denise Comer, Joshua Daniel, Michael Faris, Rebecca Gerdes-McClain, Morgan Gross, Nabila Hijazi, Jacquelyn Hoermann-Elliott, Maureen Johnson, Jasmine Kar Tang, Elitza Kotzeva, Michelle LaFrance, Jasmine Lee, Lynn C. Lewis, Mary Lourdes Silva, Rita Malenczyk, Anna Rita Napoleone, Julie Prebel, Rebecca Rodriguez Carey, Ryan Skinnell, Trixie Smith, Stacey Waite, Kelsey Walker, Shannon Walters, Isaac Wang, Jennie Young

Writing the Classroom explores how faculty compose and use pedagogical documents to establish classroom expectations and teaching practices, as well as to articulate the professional identities they perform both inside and outside the classroom. The contributors to this unique collection employ a wide range of methodological frameworks to demonstrate how pedagogical genres—even ones as seemingly straightforward as the class syllabus—have lives extending well beyond the classroom as they become part of how college teachers represent their own academic identities, advocate for pedagogical values, and negotiate the many external forces that influence the act of teaching. Writing the Classroom shines a light on genres that are often treated as two-dimensional, with purely functional purposes, arguing instead that genres like assignment prompts, course proposals, teaching statements, and policy documents play a fundamental role in constructing the classroom and the broader pedagogical enterprise within academia. Writing the Classroom calls on experienced teachers and faculty administrators to critically consider their own engagement with pedagogical genres and offers graduate students and newer faculty insight into the genres that they may only now be learning to inhabit as they seek to establish their personal teacherly identities. It showcases the rhetorical complexity of the genres written in the service of pedagogy not only for students but also for the many other audiences within academia that have a role in shaping the experience of teaching. Contributors: Michael Albright, Lora Arduser, Lesley Erin Bartlett, Logan Bearden, Lindsay Clark, Dana Comi, Zack K. De Piero, Matt Dowell, Amy Ferdinandt Stolley, Mark A. Hannah, Megan Knight, Laura R. Micciche, Cindy Mooty, Dustin Morris, Kate Navickas, Kate Nesbit, Jim Nugent, Lori A. Ostergaard, Cynthia Pengilly, Jessica Rivera-Mueller, Christina Saidy, Megan Schoen, Virginia Schwarz, Christopher Toth