I am pleased to open issue 7.1 of Prompt with the news that we have selected new editors for the journal: Rick Fisher, Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Wyoming, and Kelly Kinney, Associate Professor of English at the University of Wyoming. Our journal approaches college teaching as scholarly work that aims to support student learning, and Kelly and Rick both have deep backgrounds in the scholarship and practice of college writing. The next issue of the journal, 7.2, will be the final issue edited by me in collaboration with Managing Editor Holly Ryan. Holly and I have structured the editorial transition in a way that we hope will allow the incoming editors to benefit from our experiences in building and editing the journal while also encouraging them to consider new ideas and approaches that will keep the journal vital and engaging to our readership. I am looking forward to continued conversations during this transition and seeing how the journal grows under their leadership.
I would also like to welcome Christopher Basgier, Director of University Writing at Auburn University, to our Editorial Board.
I am excited to share with you four essays and writing assignments that all seem to be influenced, in various ways, by key conversations driving academe in recent years, including those about the pandemic, the persistence of structural racism and oppression, and climate change. In putting the issue together, I found myself thinking about how I have been editing this journal long enough to start to see the way that history shapes and changes college teaching. As the worlds inside and beyond the university have changed in the last few years, so too has the work educators have done with students. I hope the existence of Prompt as a forum for sharing current work on teaching writing helps both our authors and readers think critically about the ways our world is changing us, and our students, as well as the changes we want to make.
In “Field Guide to Lost Futures: A Collaborative Engagement with the Anthropocene,” Danielle Taschereau Mamers offers an assignment driven by creativity and collaboration for taking on a painful topic during a difficult time. Students in this cultural studies course jointly authored an online field guide to elements of the world we are losing or expect to lose during the Anthropocene. The idea of a field guide assignment could be imported into many courses, and the field guide produced by Taschereau Mamers’s students is available online.
What if the Burkean Parlor were extremely online? In “Using GIFs to Position Students as Scholars,” Jamie Henthorn offers an assignment that asks students to use GIFs as a way of entering into critical dialogue with a text. This inventive assignment makes interacting with scholarly writing more interesting and engaging for student writers and helps students build confidence in their ability to respond to difficult scholarly texts.
Samuel Dunn and Sherri Craig will help contribute to discussions of social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion within the field of technical and professional communication with the assignment they share in “Social Equity and Intercultural Communication in the Workplace: A Case-Based Technical and Professional Communication Assignment.” They adopt a case study pedagogy to get their students thinking and writing about challenging workplace communication problems related to identity and culture.
Jackie Hoermann-Elliott and Margaret V. Williams, two self-described “journalists turned faculty,” help their students gain the confidence and skills to break into freelance writing in “Scaffolding toward Self-Efficacy: Preparing Underrepresented Writers to Pitch as Freelance Authors.” The assignment offers students models and guidance toward a form of writing, the pitch, that is often composed and shared privately and thus would be difficult for writers without existing connections in the journalism industry to learn about and compose.