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This article examines two course redesigns undertaken to improve student support, learning, and retention in the basic writing program at Oakland University, a doctoral research university in southeast Michigan, where support for developmental writers has fluctuated dramatically between nurture and neglect over the past fifty years. However, current conditions--including the creation of a new department of writing and rhetoric and a university-wide commitment to student support and retention--have set the stage for dramatic revisions to the way our basic writing and supervised study courses are administered. Over the last five years, the writing and rhetoric department at Oakland has revised both of these courses to better align them with our first-year writing program's focus on rhetoric, research, revision, and reflection. These changes have formed the groundwork for a new curricular model that we believe will provide multiple layers of faculty and peer support for our most vulnerable students.

This program profile demonstrates how the first-year writing program at Oakland University has engaged contingent faculty in research, assessment, and program development over the years, employing evidence-based practices to improve individual classroom instruction and to redesign the entire first-year curriculum. The authors describe their efforts to develop an inclusive model for research and professional development, a model that seeks to empower the faculty to join disciplinary conversations about the teaching of writing. Overall, the profile contributes to existing scholarship on large college writing programs by illustrating how faculty may collaborate to develop and assess curricula, to conduct and publish research, and to build a program that shifts the conversation from what individual instructors may believe about writing instruction ("I think") to what the department may collaboratively know about best practices ("we know").

In this critical program profile, the authors provide an analysis of the historical, political, theoretical, and practical circumstances that influenced the development of Oakland University's undergraduate major in writing and rhetoric. Through an analysis of the developmental process and the major itself, this article explores many separate, yet interconnected issues. These include the development and naming of a department of writing and rhetoric, the impact the major has had on the first-year writing program, the theoretical and practical structure of the three-track major, as well as the institutional impact the program has had.

This essay explores some of the challenges for the discipline of rhetoric and composition implied by the growth in undergraduate writing majors. Through six narratives from junior faculty at five different institutions, this work explores the ways in which these new faculty were, or were not, prepared for the challenges of developing and implementing new writing majors. Finally, the authors discuss ways in which those who are currently working in undergraduate degree programs can help to provide the intellectual and scholarly materials necessary for graduate programs to more thoroughly and specifically prepare future faculty for their work on undergraduate majors.

WRT 329: Introduction to Writing Studies is a course in Oakland University's (OU) Writing and Rhetoric major program that provides students with a survey of composition studies as an academic discipline. It includes an examination of the history, theories, research, curricula, and pedagogies associated with composition studies in the university. Herein the author describes her first attempt to teach this course in winter 2012 and her subsequent revision for the winter 2013 semester. This course design article includes course description and context, description of the institutional context, theoretical rationale, and critical reflection. The article also provides the course's catalog description and extended description, course objectives, list of required texts, list of assignments, and course schedule.