front cover of Decisions, Agency, and Advising
Decisions, Agency, and Advising
Key Issues in the Placement of Multilingual Writers into First-Year Composition Courses
Tanita Saenkhum
Utah State University Press, 2016
Decisions, Agency, and Advising considers the role of students’ own agency in the placement of multilingual writers—including international students and US residents or citizens who are nonnative users of English—in US college composition programs. Grounded in qualitative research and concerned equally with theory and practice, the book explores how multilingual students exercise agency in their placement decisions and how student agency can inform the overall programmatic placement of multilingual students into first-year composition courses.
 
Tanita Saenkhum follows eleven multilingual students who made their decisions about placement into first-year composition courses during one academic year at a large public university. She identifies the need for the process of making placement decisions to be understood more clearly, describes how to use that knowledge to improve placement practices for these students—particularly in advising—and offers hands-on recommendations for writing programs.
 
Decisions, Agency, and Advising is a significant contribution to the field and particularly valuable to writing program administrators, academic advisors, writing teachers, researchers investigating second language writing and writing program administration, composition and second language writing scholars, and graduate students.
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Desegregation State
College Writing Programs after the Civil Rights Movement
Annie S. Mendenhall
Utah State University Press, 2021
The only book-length study of the ways that postsecondary desegregation litigation and policy affected writing instruction and assessment in US colleges, Desegregation State provides a history of federal enforcement of higher education desegregation and its impact on writing programs from 1970 to 1988. Focusing on the University System of Georgia and two of its public colleges in Savannah, one a historically segregated white college and the other a historically Black college, Annie S. Mendenhall shows how desegregation enforcement promoted and shaped writing programs by presenting literacy remediation and testing as critical to desegregation efforts in southern and border states.
 
Formerly segregated state university systems crafted desegregation plans that gave them more control over policies for admissions, remediation, and retention. These plans created literacy requirements—admissions and graduation tests, remedial classes, and even writing centers and writing across the curriculum programs—that reshaped the landscape of college writing instruction and denied the demands of Black students, civil rights activists, and historically Black colleges and universities for major changes to university systems. This history details the profound influence of desegregation—and resistance to desegregation—on the ways that writing is taught and assessed in colleges today.
 
Desegregation State provides WPAs and writing teachers with a disciplinary history for understanding racism in writing assessment and writing programs. Mendenhall brings emerging scholarship on the racialization of institutions into the field, showing why writing studies must pay more attention to how writing programs have institutionalized racist literacy ideologies through arguments about student placement, individualized writing instruction, and writing assessment.
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Disability Services in Higher Education
An Insider's Guide
Kirsten T. Behling, Eileen H. Bellemore, Lisa B. Bibeau, Andrew S. Cioffi, and Bridget A. McNamee
Temple University Press, 2023
Disability Services in Higher Education is the first comprehensive guide for people working in the field of ADA compliance in higher education. The authors examine how disabilities are supported to ensure students receive appropriate accommodations throughout their collegiate experience as well as provide guidance on overall campus accessibility. 

This volume provides an overview of the responsibilities of a Disabilities Service professional through an examination of relevant literature, laws and regulatory language, case law, and narrative on established practices. It also offers resources that current professionals can modify for use in their day-to-day practice immediately. The authors explore the complexities of accessibility, paying careful attention to the nuances of disability evaluation, accommodation decisions, management of a disability service office, advocating for resources and collaboration within and outside of higher education institutions. 

This practitioner-friendly book will help newcomers and seasoned professionals explore and evaluate best practices in the field through questions, examples, and functional job aids available for immediate use.  
 
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Diverse by Design
Literacy Education within Multicultural Institutions
Christopher Schroeder
Utah State University Press, 2011

Diversity, despite what we say, disturbs us. In the U.S., we debate linguistic rights, the need for an official language, and educational policies for language minority students. On the one hand, we believe in the rights of individuals, including (at least in the academy) the right to one’s own language. On the other hand, we sponsor a single common language, monolingual and standard, for full participation and communication in both the academy and in U.S. society.

In Diverse by Design, Christopher Schroeder reports on an institutional case study conducted at an officially designated Hispanic-Serving Institution. He gives particular attention to a cohort of Latino students in a special admissions program, to document their experience of a program designed to help students surmount the “obstacle” that ethnolinguistic diversity is perceived to be.

Ultimately, Schroeder argues for reframing multilingualism and multiculturalism, not as obstacles, but as intellectual resources to exploit. While diversity might disturb us, we can overcome its challenges by a more expansive sense of social identity. In an increasingly globalized society, literacy ideologies are ever more critical to educational equity, and to human lives.

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Doing Difference Differently
Chinese International Students’ Literacy Practices and Affordances
Zhaozhe Wang
Utah State University Press, 2024
Doing Difference Differently ethnographically recounts the stories of four Chinese international students navigating the complex socio-academic environment of a North American institution for higher education. Author Zhaozhe Wang traces the ecologically situated and distributed literacy practices of these individuals across rhetorical contexts, both on and off campus, and reconstructs the digitally networked, spatiotemporally emerging, rhetorically potent, and ecologically afforded literacy worlds of Chinese international students.
 
Doing Difference Differently provides an in-depth, nuanced understanding of the multifaceted literate lives of this often-marginalized cultural group, highlighting their diverse aspirations, personas, communities, challenges, and strategies. The book reconceptualizes the linguistic and cultural differences of Chinese international students as active processes of embracing, performing, resisting, negotiating, and redefining the identities that institutions impose on them through everyday literacy practices. Wang offers an analytical heuristic for researchers and educators to better understand these students’ backgrounds and to more effectively and ethically support and advocate for them. This case study critically engages broad and interconnected concepts that are essential to educators’ collective understanding of Generation Z students brought up in cultural and educational contexts outside of the European-American sphere.
 
This book appeals to scholars, researchers, teachers, and administrators working in North American higher education and English-speaking countries, particularly those in the fields of writing studies, second language studies, applied linguistics, multilingual education, literacy studies, and international education. Educators across disciplines seeking to better understand the growing population of Chinese international students in North America will likewise benefit.
 
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Doing the Word
Southern Baptists' Carver School of Church Social Work and Its Predecessors, 1907–1997
T. Laine Scales
University of Tennessee Press, 2019
In the pantheon of publications related to women’s educational history, there is little research concerning women’s education in the context of the Baptist church. In Doing the Word: Southern Baptists’ Carver School of Church Social Work and Its Predecessors, 1907–1997, T. Laine Scales and Melody Maxwell provide a complete history of this unique institution. By exploring the dynamic evolution of women’s education through the lens of the women’s training program for missions and social work at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the authors show how the institution both expanded women’s education and leadership and also came into tension with changes in the Southern Baptist Convention, ultimately resulting in its closing in 1997. A touchstone for women’s studies and church history alike, Doing the Word reopens a lost chapter in the evolution of women’s leadership during the twentieth century—a tumultuous period in which the Carver School, under significant pressure to reverse course, sought to expand the roles of women in leading the church.
 
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Doing Time, Writing Lives
Refiguring Literacy and Higher Education in Prison
Patrick W. Berry
Southern Illinois University Press, 2018
Winner, Coalition for Community Writing Outstanding Book Award 2019

Doing Time, Writing Lives
offers a much-needed analysis of the teaching of college writing in U.S. prisons, a racialized space that—despite housing more than 2 million people—remains nearly invisible to the general public. Through the examination of a college-in-prison program that promotes the belief that higher education in prison can reduce recidivism and improve life prospects for the incarcerated and their families, author Patrick W. Berry exposes not only incarcerated students’ hopes and dreams for their futures but also their anxieties about whether education will help them.
 
Combining case studies and interviews with the author’s own personal experience of teaching writing in prison, this book chronicles the attempts of incarcerated students to write themselves back into a society that has erased their lived histories. It challenges polarizing rhetoric often used to describe what literacy can and cannot deliver, suggesting more nuanced and ethical ways of understanding literacy and possibility in an age of mass incarceration.
 
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Dreams of Flight
The Lives of Chinese Women Students in the West
Fran Martin
Duke University Press, 2022
In Dreams of Flight, Fran Martin explores how young Chinese women negotiate competing pressures on their identity while studying abroad. On one hand, unmarried middle-class women in the single-child generations are encouraged to develop themselves as professional human capital through international education, molding themselves into independent, cosmopolitan, career-oriented individuals. On the other, strong neotraditionalist state, social, and familial pressures of the post-Mao era push them back toward marriage and family by age thirty. Martin examines these women’s motivations for studying in Australia and traces their embodied and emotional experiences of urban life, social media worlds, work in low-skilled and professional jobs, romantic relationships, religion, Chinese patriotism, and changed self-understanding after study abroad. Martin illustrates how emerging forms of gender, class, and mobility fundamentally transform the basis of identity for a whole generation of Chinese women.
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Drilled to Write
Becoming a Cadet Writer at a Senior Military College
by J. Michael Rifenburg
Utah State University Press, 2022

Drilled to Write offers a rich account of US Army cadets navigating the unique demands of Army writing at a senior military college. In this longitudinal case study, J. Michael Rifenburg follows one cadet, Logan Blackwell, for four years and traces how he conceptualizes Army writing and Army genres through immersion in military science classes, tactical exercises in the Appalachian Mountains, and specialized programs like Airborne School.

Drawing from research on rhetorical genre studies, writing transfer, and materiality, Drilled to Write speaks to scholars in writing studies committed to capturing how students understand their own writing development. Collectively, these chapters articulate four ways Blackwell leveraged resources through ROTC to become a cadet writer at this military college. Each chapter is dedicated to one year of his undergraduate experience with focus on curricular writing for his business management major and military science classes as well as his extracurricular writing, like his Ballroom Dance Club bylaws and a three-thousand-word short story.

In Drilled to Write, Rifenburg invites readers to see how cadets are positioned between civilian and military life—a curiously liminal space where they develop as writers. Using Army ROTC as an entry into genre theory and larger conversations about the role higher education plays in developing Army officers, he shows how writing students develop genre awareness and flexibility while forging a personal identity.

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The Dual Enrollment Kaleidoscope
Reconfiguring Perceptions of First-Year Writing and Composition Studies
Christine Denecker
Utah State University Press, 2022
The Dual Enrollment Kaleidoscope serves as a starting point for elevating the voices of those who do dual enrollment (DE) work—those who historicize, legitimize, scrutinize, critically analyze, align, and assess it—pushing readers beyond unique, singular views of DE first-year composition and positioning DE’s impact on composition instruction as one that shifts dependent upon perspective. Just as kaleidoscopes reconfigure images, DE provides writing studies with reflecting images of what FYC was, is, and could be.
 
DE disrupts long-held beliefs of who should take and who should teach college writing. Giving higher education pause about the place of writing instruction within the academy, DE force those in the field to reflect upon the purposes and value of FYC and its pedagogical approaches. Featuring seventeen chapters written by a wide and diverse range of authors, this collection includes the voices of prominent scholars in rhetoric and composition at two- and four-year public and private institutions, as well as emerging scholars in the field. It also features a variety of methodologies, including archival research, quantitative and qualitative data collection, and autoethnography.

Few texts have been published on dual enrollment writing in rhetoric and composition studies. The Dual Enrollment Kaleidoscope should be mandatory reading for anyone interested in or tasked with doing the work of DE writing instruction, administration, mentoring, or assessment.
 
 
Contributors: Dominic Ashby, Anna Bogen, Tyler Branson, Melanie Burdick, Scott Campbell, Christine R. Farris, David Gehler, Leigh Graziano, Jane Greer, Jennifer Hadley, Jacquelyn Hoermann-Elliott, Joseph Jones, Nancy Knowles, Amy Lueck, Miles McCrimmon, Katie McWain, Annie S. Mendenhall, Keith Miller, Brice Nordquist, Cornelia Paraskevas, Jill Parrot, Shirley K Rose, Barbara Schneider, Erin Scott-Stewart
 
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