Dear Colleagues,
College Composition & Communication invites proposals for a 2027 special issue focused on “Writing Pedagogy as Intellectual Fun, Emergence, and Joy.” The full text of the call and information for proposing or contacting us are below.
Best,
Matt & Kara
September 2027 Special Issue Call for Papers
Writing Pedagogy as Intellectual Fun, Emergence, and Joy
Proposals Due: June 5, 2026
In many ways, teaching writing is and has been the heart of our discipline–historically, theoretically, and methodologically. That is not to deny that rhetoric and composition extends well beyond pedagogy nor that writing pedagogy itself has not expanded to include composing in its many forms and contexts. Rather, it is to recognize that writing pedagogy has long functioned as a space of inquiry, curiosity, experimentation, collaboration, and productive engagement within the discipline. What, then, might it mean to more intentionally encourage those habits in the teaching of writing? This special issue takes up the concept of intellectual fun as a starting point for addressing that question. Intellectual fun is not a fixed concept but an orientation toward writing pedagogy that invites joy, delight, and experimentation alongside serious, sustained inquiry. This special issue invites contributors to consider how pedagogy oriented to intellectual fun shapes writing in and outside of classrooms, across disciplines, through various genres and modes, and in specific communities. We are particularly interested in pieces that highlight emerging pedagogies or revisit and reconfigure existing writing pedagogies for the current moment. The core question for this special issue is: What becomes possible when writing pedagogy is approached as a site of intellectual fun–of delight, pleasure, inspiration, or fellow-feeling?
As the February 2025 CCC editorial introduction noted, for us intellectual fun is tied to the gratification of collaboration, reflection, and thinking with others — a disposition toward our work marked by curiosity, care, and attentiveness. Although writing pedagogy may not resolve the larger conditions impacting our institutions and communities, it remains a practice where ideas converge, relationships are cultivated, and new ways of thinking take hold. This special issue builds from that orientation, inviting work that leans into writing pedagogy as generative and enjoyable. We are particularly interested in pieces that highlight emerging pedagogies or revisit and reconfigure existing ones for the current moment, including those linked to the excitement of teaching writing, the solicitude of creating courses students take up with joy, the inspiration that comes from students responding to each other’s drafts, or the motivation students discover within their own learning.
Pedagogy is a notoriously slippery term often meaning classroom practices, philosophies of teaching, or a broad sense of deep education in general, or some combination thereof (Worsham), and we welcome all senses of it here. Here, we sketch here a few commitments entailed in our own sense of the term.
Pedagogy is inquiry. It is a productive and relational site of activity where writing knowledge and practice are re/shaped through instructional methods. Pedagogy links theories of learning, writing, philosophy, and rhetoric to the methods of teaching writing. Writing pedagogy is an ongoing, situated praxis through which writing is questioned, reimagined, and learned.
Pedagogy is an epistemological commitment. It is a stance toward both the “body of knowledge consisting of theories of and research on teaching, learning, literacy, writing, and rhetoric” as well as to “the related [teaching] practices that emerge.” (Tate et al.). This epistemological commitment is multifaceted: theoretical, research-based, rhetorical, personal, and purposeful; it is simultaneously a response to student needs, a heuristic for new ideas, an evaluative check on teaching, a critical self-reflective practice, and a normalizing or resistant social force (Tate et al.). In this sense, pedagogy’s epistemological commitment reflects and enacts Ann Berthoff’s famous “all-at-once-ness” of forming/thinking/writing, and the ways we engage each other in the ongoing processes of meaning-making through symbols.
Pedagogy is also an axiological commitment. “One’s value theory shapes his or her [or their] pedagogy,” wrote Richard Fulkerson. In valuing a certain aspect of the writing situation–the writer, reality, the reader, or the writing itself–pedagogues commit to a certain value system (Fulkerson). Teaching practices are–whether wittingly or unwittingly–in service of certain values. It serves teachers of writing well to know what they value…and why.
Pedagogy is a personal and social commitment. Andrea Lunsford and Lisa Ede’s work on collaborative writing offers one example of how writing pedagogy can constitute a commitment to a version of the self and to social relations — a commitment to a certain understanding of power and one’s place in power structures — reorienting pedagogy towards shared meaning-making and more distributed understandings of authorship, agency, and the work of learning.
Pedagogy is a lived, embodied, and culturally-situated commitment with implications for social justice. Anti-oppressive pedagogies unfold not as technique but as connection–as making room, hearing, trusting, believing, loving (e.g. Friere; hooks). Anti-oppressive writing studies pedagogies build from these ideas: Ira Shor’s adaptation of critical pedagogy; Black feminist teaching methods resisting dominant language norms (e.g. Kynard); honoring how students speak and write within their cultures (e.g. Young); reorienting pedagogy toward survivance (e.g. King, Gubele, and Rain Anderson) and survival (e.g. Patterson). Such efforts feed into wider shifts across the discipline, where scholars like Asao B. Inoue, April Baker-Bell, and Frankie Condon fight racial bias in classroom experiences and investigate writing pedagogy’s connections to power, justice, and equity. Which, of course, returns us to a sense of writing pedagogy as inquiry.
In short, pedagogy is a central commitment of rhetoric and composition. This special issue welcomes various and varied definitions of pedagogy, especially those that connect to interdisciplinarity, joy, and emergence. This special issue is open to many interpretations of its call, including pedagogies focused on specific student populations or contexts (e.g. WAC/WID, second-language writing, technical writing), critical, expressivist, constructionist and constructivist approaches, writing-about-writing and teaching-for-transfer, reading and workshop pedagogy, process and postprocess, and any pedagogies in between and beyond.
Here is a non-exhaustive list of questions and topics to guide invention as you consider intellectually-fun pedagogies.
Possible driving questions include but are not limited to:
- What does it mean to take “intellectual fun” seriously in writing pedagogy?
- How do writing teachers work to inspire or excite students within and against constraints?
- What forms of writing pedagogy emerge when delight, captivation, or experimentation are foregrounded?
- How do writing pedagogies create conditions for fellow-feeling, solicitude, or care?
- How do pedagogical practices shape possibilities for attentiveness, enjoyable inquiry, and intellectual engagement?
Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Writing and writing pedagogy as experimentation or improvisation
- Emergent or adaptive pedagogies
- Joy, pleasure, or affect in writing and writing instruction
- Black joy and other culturally situated forms of meaning-making
- Interdisciplinary writing pedagogies, practices, and tensions
- Specialized pedagogies (WAC/WID, professional, community)
- Graduate-level pedagogies community-building
- The role of constraint in enabling pedagogical creativity
- Relationships between writing, risk, and intellectual exploration
Submission Information
CCC invites proposals for all of its genres for this special issue, and proposal length varies depending on the genre proposed. The proposals for all genres are peer-reviewed, and you can find more information about writing for CCC here.
Article – Proposals for special issue articles should be around 500 words. Finalized articles should be no longer than 7,500 words and should make an original contribution to the discipline.
Research Brief – Proposals for the research brief should be around 250 words. The research brief is a new genre at CCC that aims to synthesize the research on a given topic in 2,500-3,000 words.
Review Essay – Proposals for review essays should list the major works—whether print, digital, or a mix—proposed for review and should be around 250 words. The review essay is a synthetic review of multiple (three to five, usually) major works on a given topic in the discipline and tends to be no more than 3,000 words in length.
Symposium – The special issue welcomes proposals for a guest-edited symposium. Those who propose for a symposium may also submit proposals in other genres.
We welcome proposals from marginalized scholars, international researchers and writers, and scholars from diverse institutional types such as two-year or tribal colleges. We encourage collaboration and coauthorship.
If you’re interested in writing anonymously or under a pseudonym because of the current political climate at your workplace, please email us to discuss this as an option.
Submission Information
No later than June 5, 2026, please submit your proposal via email as a .docx file to ccceditorialteam following the word-count guidelines listed above for the appropriate genre.
Tentative Timeline
- Proposals due: June 5, 2026
- Peer-review feedback to authors: mid-August, 2026
- Full drafts due: early December 2026
- Peer-review decisions and feedback to authors: February 2027
- Final drafts due to editors: mid-March, 2027
- Publication: September 2027
If you have questions about the special issue theme or proposal process, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us at ccceditorialteam.
Best,
Matt & Kara
Works Cited
Berthoff, Ann E. Forming, Thinking, Writing: The Composing Imagination. Boynton/Cook, 1988.
Condon, Frankie, and Vershawn Ashanti Young, editors. Performing Antiracist Pedagogy in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. The WAC Clearinghouse, 2017, https://wacclearinghouse.org/books/atd/antiracist/
Freire, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum, 1970.
Fulkerson, Richard. “Four Philosophies of Composition.” College Composition and Communication, vol. 30, no. 4, 1979, pp. 343–348.
hooks, bell. Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. Routledge, 1994.
Inoue, Asao B. Antiracist Writing Assessment Ecologies: Teaching and Assessing Writing for a Socially Just Future. Parlor Press and The WAC Clearinghouse, 2015.
King, Lisa, Rose Gubele, and Joyce Rain Anderson. Survivance, Sovereignty, and Story Teaching American Indian Rhetorics. Utah State UP, 2015.
Kynard, Carmen. Black Feminist Pedagogies. https://www.blackfeministpedagogies.com/
Lunsford, Andrea A., and Lisa Ede. “Collaborative Authorship and the Teaching of Writing.” The Construction of Authorship: Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature. Edited by Martha Woodmansee and Peter Jaszi. Duke UP, 1994, pp 417-438.
Patterson, GPat. “Loving Students in the Time of Covid: A Dispatch from LGBT Studies.” The Journal of Liberal Arts, Thammasat University, vol. 22, no. 1, 2022: pp 11-16.
Shor, Ira. Critical Teaching and Everyday Life. University of Chicago Press, 1987.
Tate, Gary, et al. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. 2nd ed., Oxford UP, 2014.
Worsham, Lynn. “Going Postal: Pedagogic Violence and the Schooling of Emotion.” The Norton Book of Composition Studies, edited by Susan Miller, W. W. Norton, 2009, pp. 999-1031.
Young, Vershawn Ashanti. “Should Writers Use They Own English?” Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, no. 12, 2010, pp. 110–118.