Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching - Paperback

by Holly Hassel (Author), Cassandra Phillips (Author)

An expansive look at the discipline of writing studies, with a focus on serving and supporting first-year writing students and instructors at open access institutions.

There is a huge gap between perceptions of the field of writing studies and the material realities of those who teach in it. Materiality and Writing Studies: Aligning Labor, Scholarship, and Teaching argues for the centering of the field's research and service on first-year writing, particularly the "new majority" of college students (who are more diverse than ever before) and those who teach them.

The book features the voices of first-year writing instructors at a two-year, open-access, multi-campus institution whose students are consistently underrepresented in discussions of the discipline. Drawing from a study of 78 two-year college student writers and an analysis of nearly two decades of issues of the major journals in the field of writing studies, Holly Hassel and Cassandra Phillips sketch out a reimagined vision for writing studies that roots the scholarship, research, and service in the discipline squarely within the changing material realities of contemporary college writing instruction.

About the CCCC Studies in Writing & Rhetoric (SWR) Series

In this series, the methods of studies vary from the critical to historical to linguistic to ethnographic, and their authors draw on work in various fields that inform composition--including rhetoric, communication, education, discourse analysis, psychology, cultural studies, and literature. Their focuses are similarly diverse--ranging from individual writers and teachers, to classrooms and communities and curricula, to analyses of the social, political, and material contexts of writing and its teaching.

Author Biography

Holly Hassel is a professor of English at North Dakota State University. For sixteen years, she was a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County, a two-year college campus in Wausau. She earned her PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2002, has served as editor of the journal Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and is serving as chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication in 2022.

Cassandra Phillips is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee at Waukesha, where she has taught for over twenty years. She also serves as the first-year writing and developmental English coordinator for the College of General Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.