The Composition Commons delivers a timely take on invigorating higher education, illustrating how college composition courses can be dynamic sites for producing a democratic, just, and generally educated public.

Jessica Yood traces the century-long origins of a writing-centered idea of the American university and tracks the resurgence of this idea today. Drawing on archival and classroom evidence from public colleges and universities and written in a lively autoethnographic voice, Yood names “genres of the commons”: intimate, informal writing activities that create peer-to-peer knowledge networks. She shows how these unique genres create collectivity—an academic commons—and calls on scholars to invest in composition as a course cultivating reflective, emergent, shared knowledge. Yood departs from movements that divest from the first-year composition classroom and details how an increasingly diverse student population composes complex, evolving cultural literacies that forge social bonds and forward innovation and intellectual and civic engagement.

The Composition Commons reclaims the commons as critical idea and writing classroom activities as essential practices for remaking higher education in the United States.
 

A collection of essays and stories written in Spanish by students for students.

Contar Historias: Escritura creativa en el aula es una colección de ensayos e historias de no ficción escritas por estudiantes de grado y pregrado que tomaron cursos y/o asistieron a talleres de escritura impartidos el Departamento de Español y Portugués en la Universidad de Texas en Austin. El libro es una muestra del trabajo creativo de estudiantes que hablan español en casa pero que nunca escribieron un texto creativo en esta lengua; estudiantes para quienes el español es su segunda, tercera e incluso cuarta lengua, y estudiantes para quienes es su lengua materna. La diversidad de voces y la amplia raigambre cultural, lingüística y geográfica de la que emergen se juntan en este volumen que refleja la multiplicidad de maneras en que el español apela a las nuevas generaciones de estudiantes, no solo en UT sino en todo el país.

Contar historias: Escritura creativa en el aula (Telling Stories: Creative Writing in the Classroom) is a remarkable collection of topical essays and poignant stories written by undergraduate and graduate students who took courses and/or writing workshops offered by the Spanish Creative Writing Initiative in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin. The book showcases an abundance of amazingly creative work and includes heritage speakers who have never before written a creative work in Spanish; students for whom Spanish is a second, third, and even fourth language; and native speakers. The diversity of voices from an array of cultural, linguistic, and geographical backgrounds collected in this volume reflects the multiplicity of ways in which Spanish appeals to students, not just at UT, but everywhere.

The stories include—but are not limited to—intimate tales of attending college; personal testimonials on the effects of climate change, experiences navigating the US health system, and accounts of many beautiful memories from childhood. They reveal the moving and diverse ways of communicating in Spanish and are themselves potent arguments for the importance of using creativity, working collaboratively, and telling stories in the classroom.