electures

Hear well-known rhetoricians and award-winning teachers speak on current topics in the discipline and discuss new ideas for the classroom. Learn more

Trends & Teaching

This DVD offers insights from renowned rhetoricians on seven trends in the discipline and practical advice for a range of classroom topics. Learn more

Open Words Journal

Open Words: Access and English Studies is a journal dedicated to publishing articles focusing on political, professional, and pedagogical issues related to teaching composition, reading, ESL, creative writing, and literature to open admissions and non-mainstream student populations. Edited by John Paul Tassoni (Miami University Middletown) and William H. Thelin (University of Akron), Open Words is a refereed journal published twice yearly. Get information on submitting articles.

Spring 2010 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: William H. Thelin, Impediments and Hope
  • Mike Rose, Re-mediating Remediation
  • Joseph Burzynski, Conflating Language and Offense: Composing in an Incarcerated Space
  • Mark Sutton, Messages to and from Third Space: Communication between the Writing Studio and Classroom Teachers
  • Jennifer Beech and Julia Anderson, Teaching the Obama Generation: Helping Composition Students Enter and Remain in the Public Sphere
Fall 2009 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: Editor's Introduction: Untidy Alignments
  • Retention Risks and Realities: One Student’s Story
  • Composition, Deafness, and Access in the Mainstream: Rhetoric and One Student’s Reality
  • Giving a Voice to Nature in the Postmodern Composition Classroom: Or, What Can Ecofeminist Standpoint Theory and Ecocriticism/Ecocomposition Teach At-Risk Students?
  • On the Institutionalization of Basic Writing as Political Economy
Fall 2008 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: Teaching Beginnings for Multicultural Reform
  • Group Work and Autonomy: Empowering the Working-Class Student
  • Bilingual Students in the Composition Classroom: Paving the Way to Biliteracy
  • Writing in Ecological Microcosms: A Pedagogical Field Map for Re-thinking Process
  • What’s Wrong with Larry? Or a Case for Writing Appropriate Comment on Student Writing
Spring 2009 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: The Peculiar Relationship to Reading in College Curriculum
  • The Promise of Eye-Tracking Methodology for Research on Writing and Reading
  • Revaluing Readers and Reading in a College Support Program
  • But I’m Not a Reading Teacher!
  • Cultivating Reading Workshop: New Theory into New Practice
Spring 2007 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: Open Access and the Working Class
  • Bourgeois Realism or Working Class Kitsch?: The Aesthetics of Class in Composition
  • A Dialogue about Rhetoric, Pedagogy, and the Working Class
  • Shaped by Resistance: Work as a Topical Theme for the Composition Classroom
  • The Ineluctable Elitism of Essays and Why They Prevail in First-Year Composition Courses
Spring 2008 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: Access Places
  • How Soon Is Now?: Writing Work, Education, and Fast Capitalism
  • Finding Our Way from Within: Critical Pedagogy in a Prison Writing Class
  • From Other to Another: Regional Campus Freshman English in Transition
  • Queer Disruption in the Rural South: Institutionality and the Viability of Queer Composition
  • Saving the Word or Teaching Writing?: Complicating Binary Critiques of Politicized
Fall 2006 Issue of Open Words
  • Table of Contents
  • Editor's Introduction: Commuting Campuses
  • Brad, Sean, and James: Saying What They Mean in Voices that Sound Like Themselves
  • Amazing Opportunities Await: Liberal Mythologies at a Non-Selective University
  • Academic Legerdemain: When Literacy Standards Become a Sleight of Hand
  • Why Basic Writing Professionals on Regional Campuses Need to Know Their Histories