The four essays in this first section examine the ways the value of students’ texts is established, or (more often) is simply allotted with little deliberation or reflection. They also describe ways students and teachers can participate in and critique the process of valuing, thus moving this usually unexamined process toward something like an “informed” practice for both students and teachers.

Bruce Horner’s “Re-Valuing Student Writing” identifies perhaps the most significant motivation for teaching with student texts: placing student texts in the center of a class makes student writing matter by making the issue of student writing—and writing generally...

There is now a well-established tradition of complaint about student writing in composition. I refer here not to the much longer-standing tradition of complaint that students today can’t write, or write poorly, and/or don’t write as well as they used to. That tradition, a robust one, continues apace, part of a larger tendency to displace onto literacy what are, in fact, social anxieties—what John Trimbur has argued is a “discourse of crisis” (1991). Those of us in the field of composition studies, in combination with our colleagues in the broader field of literacy studies, have been assiduous in using...

Scholars in composition and writing studies are demonstrating a growing interest in how students transfer what they learn about writing from one educational setting to another. Recent longitudinal studies examine the degree to which students apply knowledge and skills from first-year composition classes to their upper-level, discipline-based courses (Beaufort 2007; Bergmann and Zepernick 2007; Sommers 2008; Wardle 2007). However, in professional development workshops for teachers, we tend to overlook one of the most fraught educational territories: where our expectations for high-school student writing meet those for college writing. In this essay I argue not only that there is a need...

When students are asked to read and discuss each others’ drafts in progress or review and revise their own drafts, they often work in a rhetorical vacuum, not really knowing what makes a successful response and guessing at whatever (often implicit or unexplained) criteria the instructor will use to judge their papers. Even when students use revision prompts or guides, or descriptive criteria against which they are supposed to judge their developing texts, they usually have little opportunity to understand, work with, or internalize those criteria. Instead, they continue to labor under a trial-and-error model of learning that fails to...

As writing teachers, all of us want our students to be able to assess their own writing in order to respond effectively to future contexts and form reflective and critical practices. Many of us have also heard a familiar refrain from students, often after we have evaluated or responded to their writing: “Just tell me what you want me to do,” they beg us. These are assessment problems that Peter Elbow attempts to solve by arguing that we do “less ranking and more evaluation,” (1999, 176); however, too much evaluation “harms the climate for learning and teaching,” so he suggests...

The essays in the second section of our book discuss the ways student texts circulate in classrooms, in publications, and in textbooks. In the first piece in this section, “Ethics, Student Writers, and the Use of Student Texts,” Paul Anderson and Heidi McKee investigate the ethical dimensions of teaching with student texts and offer advice to teachers on how to ethically and responsibly circulate those texts in the classroom.

Following these ethical concerns, in “Reframing Student Writing in Writing Studies Composition Classes,” Patrick Bruch and Thomas Reynolds discuss how ideas about student texts and student writing circulate in their department,...

While their contexts, pedagogies, and theoretical approaches differ widely, most instructors who use student texts in their teaching share an acute awareness that the benefits of this practice are accompanied by potential harms. By sharing student texts inside or outside the classroom, these instructors recognize students as authors whose work is worthy of study and vest authority in their words and expertise. But this practice also exposes students (and the persons whom they may represent in their writing) to potential, albeit unintended, embarrassment, ridicule, and hurt. For example,

a student sits uncomfortably while his biology teacher projects his lab...

In this chapter, we hope to extend and develop the discussion, initiated in part by Douglas Downs and Elizabeth Wardle, of a writing studies approach to first-year writing (FYW). As Downs and Wardle suggest in their 2007 article, “Teaching about Writing, Righting Misconceptions: (Re)Envisioning ‘First-Year Composition’ as ‘Introduction to Writing Studies,’” the term writing studies signals the grounding of FYW classes in the scholarly knowledge of the field of composition studies. As such, writing studies names approaches that seek to transform the current situation in which the goals of learning about writing as a cultural practice and learning how to...

Writing tends to improve when students internalize effective habits, and such internalization is more likely to happen when students are positioned as student-scholars or “experts” who can teach others about writing. At the same time, students are often likely to trust ideas about writing when these ideas come from their peers, especially when peer writing instruction avoids didacticism in favor of a friendly, somewhat informal tone. One way to simultaneously take advantage of both these principles is to have students write to other students about their writing practices. Such a strategy creates a strong sense of community and conversation among...

In this chapter I focus on using one digital learning tool, message boards, to help us reconceive how students create and disseminate texts in our courses. We can use message-board texts as a significant component of our courses, building them into our syllabi as many low-stakes, informal opportunities for students to take intellectual risks and develop their writing. The message board is a versatile, easy-to-use technology—all learning-management systems (LMS) have some type of message-board application—that requires little training for teachers or students. Basically, a message board is a Web-based discussion forum in which participants post written (although they...

Teachers in our discipline talk a good game about publication. Painfully aware of what Peter Elbow calls the “damagingly restricted, teacher-and evaluation-haunted context” of the classroom (2002, 2), we ask our students to think beyond the grade, to define a purpose, a persona, and an audience with someone—anyone—other than us in mind. At many of our institutions, we can point our students toward accessible audiences. Here’s our contest for first-year writers, we say, or our journal of first-year writing. Here’s our campus newspaper, or a club newsletter, desperately in need of contributors. Even more immediately, here’s how to...

The student texts that center a writing course should include not only those written by students in that course but also those circulated texts that other students have written in other times and places. In this volume, McDonnell and Jefferson describe using student texts from first-year composition courses in a publishing course, and here we examine “closing the loop” by bringing published, scholarly student writing into FYC. In this case, we focus on articles in Young Scholars in Writing (YSW), a peer-reviewed journal of undergraduate research in composition and rhetoric. Reading published student research in comp/rhet lets writing students explore...

In this essay, we examine the ways in which students and student writing are represented and positioned within composition textbooks and consider the pedagogical, theoretical, and ethical implications of such practices. Let us state at the outset that our process of textbook selection was rather haphazard (no “canon” of textbooks exists, and perhaps that is a good thing). We looked at textbooks on our shelves and those on the shelves of our colleagues. Since we teach at different kinds of institutions—a research university and a small liberal arts college—this afforded some range. We asked colleagues for recommendations. This...

The essays in this final section of our book show how bringing student texts to the table can invigorate the kinds of work that go on in writing courses. The first several pieces describe specific strategies for working with and talking about student texts. In "Workshop and Seminar," Joseph Harris distinguishes between two classroom formats. In a workshop, students offer each other practical advice towards revising their work in progress. In a seminar, a teacher leads a discussion of a student text in order to pose a more general lesson about writing for the entire class. Harris does not argue...

Fall 2008. Towards the middle of the semester. I am sitting with a group of four students in a coffee shop on the Duke campus. (I had cancelled our regular full class session so we could meet instead in small groups.) Each of the four students had written a first full draft of an essay and posted it to the course web site the day before. All of them had then read and commented on those drafts. Each student thus came to our meeting with four printouts—one of each of the three drafts they had read and written comments...

The writing workshop, one of the most ubiquitous techniques in college writing courses, has lately received some bad press. Lynn Freed argues against the tyranny of workshops in “Doing Time: My Years in the Creative-Writing Gulag,” in the July 2005 Harper’s. In a reprisal of the old blind-leading-the-blind argument, she claims untalented writers learn nothing from talking to each other and that trying to teach them is torturous, apparently equivalent to human rights abuses. David Sedaris sees torture for the participants, claiming that “the template for the standard writing workshop” strikes “the perfect balance between sadism and masochism” (2000, 91)....

This essay will discuss a workshop I conduct with first-year writing students to encourage them to think of their ideas and their writing as theoretical. My impetus for getting students to appreciate the theoretical value of their work relates to my belief that first-year composition courses should provoke students to examine what it means to think like, read like, write like—to in fact be—an intellectual and participate in real intellectual debates, both within and beyond the classroom. In making this claim, I do not wish to suggest that all intellectual work is necessarily theoretical, nor do I wish...

As the essays in this collection make clear, there are many ways to work with student texts in a writing course. But unless the course is structured to feature each student’s work in rotation, the teacher must make choices about which student texts should be brought into the class at any given moment. Such decisions are informed by the course objectives, requirements of current and upcoming assignments, and evidence of student learning. Choosing texts requires the ability to read a class set of papers to identify patterns and the creativity to design class work to foster learning for the entire...

Contributing to this collection of essays on the importance of student texts as pedagogical tools places me in an uncomfortable position. I’ve spent my entire teaching career as a director and tutor in a writing center, and as such, I have tried never to consider the text as a sufficient pedagogical tool in itself. In my tutorials with student writers, and when training new tutors, I’ve emphasized the connection, the intertwining, of student and text—the combination so tightly bound together that we can’t consider one without the other. Perhaps too often, I’ve invoked the tired metaphor of the golf...

Since our first coauthored paper in graduate school, we have written articles, chapters, a book, conference presentations, and edited a journal together. In addition, each of our dissertations studied coauthors. Collaboration is central to our pedagogies, and in a collaborative classroom, students are continuously learning from their own and their peers’ texts. In fact, the most important text is the students’ writing. One element of collaborative work is coauthoring, which can be defined in a number of ways, especially across disciplines. However, we define coauthoring in our writing courses as “face-to-face, word-by-word collaborative writing” (Day and Eodice 2001, 31). We...

To teach with student texts is to acknowledge that students are savvy and experienced enough to collaboratively shape and enact productive classrooms. It seems only natural that these same students recognize what scholars in our field have been arguing for more than a decade: that “what counts as a text and what constitutes reading and writing are changing” (Hull and Nelson 2005, 224). If we’re going to ask our students to work closely with their classmates’ texts, it is important to remain sensitive to their perceptions about what count as texts.

Students are often skeptical about genres and modes of...

Over the years, it became apparent that our students in Scientific Inquiry: Environmental Sciences-Honors 2700C (for nonscience majors) were having a great deal of difficulty critiquing the content of popular scientific articles in various magazines and newspapers. Scientific Inquiry is a required core class at St. John’s University, a private Catholic university with approximately 14,000 undergraduate students. Students were generally not able to identify scientific concepts and terminology within a wide range of articles. Our initial approach to address this concern involved traditional lectures on scientific terminology using Jeffrey Lee’s 2000 The Scientific Endeavor: A Primer on Scientific Principles and...

Reading a text not just for what it says but for how it responds to the challenges of a particular rhetorical situation is a powerful ability to have and not an easy one to acquire. It is the core of what I try to help my students toward through my teaching. This statement sounds obvious and straightforward. But as I reflect on the fifteen-plus years I have taught writing, I realize my growth as a teacher has centered around my increasing understanding of the gap between how I perceive model texts and how my students perceive them—and my ability...

With new technologies making it easier to get student texts into the undergraduate writing classroom, student writing is making an appearance not just as an occasional example, but as the ongoing focus of instruction. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, students’ own writing can now serve in a variety of ways as the classroom text. Yet the centrality of student writing offers fresh challenges even to the veteran teacher, to say nothing of the risks it presents to those new to the class-room. With student texts at the forefront, what we gain in relevance we also reap in uncertainty....