Results by title

Reconceptualizing Response reframes instructor feedback, one of the most consequential practices in rhetoric and writing studies, as a site of linguistic justice. Instructor response is not merely technical commentary; it is contested terrain where students’ identities, experiences, and language varieties must be named, supported, and celebrated.

Contributors represent a wide range of institutional contexts—including two-year colleges, four-year universities, HBCUs, HSIs, SLACs, and PWIs—and write from diverse positionalities, amplifying current debates and productive tensions in the field. Organized around four key moves—looking back, looking within, looking up, and looking around—the book invites readers to critically examine the ideologies underlying feedback practices; recognize how instructors' positionality, values, and beliefs are communicated through feedback; align feedback with students’ needs; and reconsider the broader classroom ecology required for justice. Bridging linguistic justice and feedback studies, this collection provides concrete tools and frameworks, as well as sample rubrics, course policies, and fresh approaches to assessment.

Ideal for graduate students, writing program administrators, faculty teaching future writing instructors, and anyone seeking to transform classroom practice, Reconceptualizing Response offers guiding questions for reflection and practical strategies for change. This volume reimagines instructor response as a catalyst for equity, consciousness-raising, and transformation, calling instructors not only to comment on writing but also to use feedback to dismantle oppressive logics and foster linguistic justice.

Responding to Writing brings together practical, cutting-edge ideas from teachers who spend their days working with student writers and trying to make feedback genuinely useful. The book shares classroom approaches that have been tested in real courses, from high school settings to college and graduate programs. It shows how teachers, peers, and students themselves can make feedback a more collaborative and manageable part of writing instruction.

Each chapter presents a student‑centered approach that helps writers feel supported and more in control of their own writing and revision process. In addition to a summary of the approach with light background and context, readers will find straightforward examples, tools, and routines they can adapt to their own classrooms, including ways to use technology, build reflection into assignments, and support writers with varied backgrounds and needs. This book offers working instructors a set of dependable methods for helping students improve as writers while keeping feedback purposeful and humane.

This is the final volume in a trilogy of works that examine the impact of writing and reading about traumatic subjects. Diaries to an English Professor (1994) explores the ways in which undergraduate students use psychoanalytic diaries to probe conflicted issues in their lives. Surviving Literary Suicide (1999) investigates how graduate students respond to suicidal literature—novels and poems that portray and sometimes glorify self-inflicted death. 

In Risky Writing, Jeffrey Berman builds on those earlier studies, describing ways teachers can encourage college students to write safely on a wide range of subjects often deemed too personal or too dangerous for the classroom: grieving the loss of a beloved relative or friend, falling into depression, coping with the breakup of one's family, confronting sexual abuse, depicting a drug or alcohol problem, encountering racial prejudice. Berman points out that nearly everyone has difficulty talking or writing about such issues because they arouse shame and tend to be enshrouded in secrecy and silence. This is especially true for college students, who are just emerging from adolescence and find themselves at institutions that rarely promote self-disclosure.

Recognizing the controversial nature of his subject, Berman confronts academic opposition to personal writing head on. He also discusses the similarities between the “writing cure” and the “talking cure,” the role of the teacher and audience in the self-disclosing classroom, and the pedagogical strategies necessary to minimize risk, including the importance of empathy and other befriending skills.

As workloads and work responsibilities continue to increase, assessment often causes teachers anxiety. Rubrics: What Every Teacher Needs to Know is a handbook that combines theory and pragmatism in clear language to help pre- and in-service teachers and teacher trainers obtain assessment information quickly and efficiently. While many teachers do not realize that creating an assignment is creating an assessment, they should go hand in hand. This book highlights both the value of rubrics and the value of assessment literacy, which is the knowledge, skills, and abilities needed to create, administer, and understand the results of assessments to improve student learning.

Rubrics provides new and experienced teachers with the tools to become more transparent assessors of their students’ writing, reading, listening, speaking, grammar, and vocabulary. Deborah Crusan and Robyn Brinks Lockwood bring their expertise in assessment and English for academic purposes to address the challenges teachers face in writing clear assignments and grading them fairly. They emphasize that teachers need to think about what they want their students to be able to do, clarify their expectations to their students, and convey those expectations on a rubric/scoring guide. While transparent, step-by-step instructions are included in the book to help teachers create their own assignments and assessments, the appendix materials containing ready-made assignments and their accompanying rubrics will be sure to delight busy teachers.