Reaching All Writers: A Pedagogical Guide for Evolving College Writing Classrooms

Reaching All Writers brings together decades of writing studies experience, research, and scholarship to help organize first-year writing courses around inclusive teaching practices and foundational concepts that support disciplinary learning for all college writers, including students who have been excluded from more selective higher-education institutions.

Using threshold concepts and transfer as a foundation, the authors provide an invaluable resource for multiple contexts: instructors working off the tenure track and/or at multiple institutions; two-year college programs without a writing program administrator; and writing program graduate teaching assistant training courses. Each chapter includes an overview of a threshold concept, disciplinary background readings, practical teaching strategies, assignment and learning activity ideas, assessment principles, examples from student and instructor perspectives, and questions for reflection and discussion.

Reaching All Writers describes effective teaching practices to help all college writing instructors, regardless of their institutional contexts, make changes that support equitable and inclusive learning opportunities-with a focus on teaching students whose backgrounds and learning experiences are different from those with more educational or economic privilege. Both new and experienced teachers adapting first-year college writing courses will find the book’s blend of practical strategies and disciplinary knowledge a useful companion for facilitating new classroom and program needs or designing new teaching assistant training courses.

Joanne Baird Giordano is chair of the Two-Year College English Association and associate professor of English, linguistics, and writing studies at Salt Lake Community College. Her research has been published in College English, CCC, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, WPA Journal, Pedagogy, Journal of Writing Assessment, and others, in addition to edited collections. She is a co-recipient of the CWPA Outstanding Scholarship Award, TETYC Best Article of the Year Award, CCCC Writing Program Certificate of Excellence, and the Two-Year College English Association Diana Hacker Outstanding Programs in English Award.

Holly Hassel is professor of composition at Michigan Technological University. She has served as program chair and chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication as well as editor of the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College. Her research focuses on college students’ transition to postsecondary academic literacies and has appeared in coauthored or edited scholarly books, as well as peer-reviewed journals. She has received national awards for service and research.

Jennifer Heinert is professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She has served as department chair, faculty development coordinator, and assessment coordinator and provided leadership to both institutional and program curriculum design initiatives. Her research focuses on the teaching of writing at access institutions, and her work has appeared in Pedagogy, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, WPA Journal, and Peitho, as well as in edited collections.

Cassandra Phillips is professor of English and the First-Year Writing and Developmental English coordinator at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research focuses on literacy development, reading and writing pedagogy, and writing program coordination. Her work has appeared in edited collections, Pedagogy, Teaching English in the Two-Year College, WPA Journal, Assessment in Writing, and Peitho, and she recently coauthored a book on writing program administration.