This article was published in Literacy in Composition Studies. Click on the image to read the article or see the abstract below.

Abstract

In this article, I focus on an everyday writer, my mother, engaging in self-sponsored writing to learn (WTL) activities across her lifespan. Focusing specifically on her personal journals and her accounts of her longitudinal WTL trajectory, I trace the learning pathways she took to develop her identity as a mother across her life. Writing was a benefit to her everyday life given, as she puts it, there is no set “instruction manual” for how to parent. Additionally, I trace the “multidirectional” nature of her literacy by investigating how literacy learning circulates given Jane’s intent to pass her WTL journals down to her children as a text to learn from when they become parents (Lee). In making my argument, I extend conversations happening in our field about writing and learning as a lifewide activity. I emphasize the importance writing has on identity development and learning across one’s life and, as such, this article helps literacy studies, lifespan development of writing studies, and motherhood rhetorical studies gauge the vast ways writers write to learn outside of formal schooling.  

The following is the MLA citation:

 D'Orazio, Anna. "'Kids Don’t Come with Instruction Manuals': A Mother Writing to Learn Across Her Lifespan." Literacy in Composition Studies, vol. 12, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1–23. https://doi.org/10.21623/1.12.1.2

This co-written article was a part of Xchanges' Graduate Symposium installment. Click on the image to read the article or see the abstract below.

Abstract

In our TPC classrooms, we often teach students who have extensive experience writing for “real world” contexts through their co-ops or internships. In that vein, students often have institutional writing experience that we, as their instructors, are unfamiliar with. As graduate instructors, much of our teacher training is focused on FYC alone, and alongside assumptions that our experience teaching FYC transfers easily into teaching TPC, we are often caught in what Mary Louise Pratt (1991) identifies as a "contact zone,” a space where differing expectations for writing between instructors, students, and administration “meet, grapple and crash with each other” (34). In our experience of the TPC contact zone, graduate instructors of English are expected to teach TPC genres using their existing knowledge of composition, genre, and rhetoric, despite the fact that such instructors often have little to no context for the various professional writing contexts our students write for and the genres they write within. Following Jamey Gallagher and Kris Messer (2022), this article questions how we teach reading and writing instruction to students “who are already in the real damn world” in our TPC classrooms (147). Specifically, we consider how graduate student instructors can be supported in developing a pedagogy that is not driven by “what we think is expected of people in the work world” (147), but rather, is built around the contextualized rhetorical skills that students’ current and future careers ask of them. To address this question, we place our experiences as graduate students teaching TPC into conversation with existing TPC and FYC pedagogies, ultimately identifying the challenges we have faced as having structural solutions that will help new instructors bridge the gap between the rhetorical contexts of these two subfields.

The following is the MLA citation:

D'Orazio, Anna, Katie Monthie, Brooke Boling, and Alex Evans. "The TPC Contact Zone: Preparing Graduate Student Instructors for Students’ Writing Realities.” Xchanges, vol. 19, no. 1, 2025, pp. 1-11. https://xchanges.org/tpc-contact-zone-19-1   

This co-written article is for the 2026 special issue of Writing and Pedagogy, edited by Ryan Dippre and Talinn Phillips. The article is titled "The Tattooed Body: A Tableau for Lifespan Writing." The abstract is below. The article is expected to come out by the end of 2026.

Abstract

At the intersection of bodies, writing, and identity, this case study defines tattooing by what it does in everyday literate lives: compose who we are, could be, and could have been. More than visual design, tattooing operates as an everyday bodily writing strategy, a long-term embodied multimodal composing project that performs, orients, and rewrites an identity across a life. Building on lifespan and embodied multimodal research, we term these strategies "embodied writing moves" to examine how our case study participant, Sydney,  uses tattoos to construct complex possibilities for selfhood over time. We take up the concept of “moves” to see the tattooed body as a tableau of evolving action and intent for lifespan writing and research, tracking how individuals make visible the lifelong identity projects they are continually working on or thinking through. Concluding with implications for lifespan research and the teaching of writing, we highlight the need for mapping moves that more aptly account for the connection between writing and the body.