"Composition beyond Walls: Arguing for/in Spaces beyond the Writing Classroom " is a panel exploring the transformative potential of de-centering the physical writing environment to foster critical thinking, civic responsibility, and rhetorical agency. The experienced panelists will share research, classroom experience, and practical ideas for implementation, based on place-based pedagogy, community engagement, and digital field research, thus demonstrating how moving beyond four walls transforms writing into a public act. The urgency of this panel is especially important with the rapid development of AI, a technology that has already disrupted our field and to which we must adapt and, hopefully, use (even by not using) for the benefit of our classrooms and our students.

There will be three presentations, as follows:

1. Sharon Mitchler, PhD, Centralia College

“Composition without Walls: Rural Students Writing Community Connections”

The ways students bring their community knowledge and experiences to composition classes creates a prior knowledge lever that helps them to engage across rhetorical contexts. I will share insights on the ways students at a rural community college engage in a three-genre assignment in “Teaching for Transfer,” highlighting their use of multiple languages, genres, and audiences.

I will share first-year data collected from 2017-2025 Composition I courses to explore students’ choices to engage beyond traditional academic forms, building on their interests and community collections with audiences and genres. Student choices reflect their embodied experiences in the local community, lives, and curiosity about the larger world. Patterns and frequency of genres and the audiences students “write” for will be explored, and pedagogical implications for encouraging and welcoming students to write to, and with, their sense of place, knowledge of community, and forms of languages will be discussed.

2. Ninetta Papadomichelaki, JD, LLM, M.Ed. and Lash Keith Vance, PhD, University of California, Riverside

“From Consumers to Citizens: Mapping Communication Ecosystems Outside the Classroom”

Civic engagement remains a primary goal for composition instruction, yet students struggle to participate meaningfully if they cannot evaluate the daily deluge of information they receive or the messages they transmit into the world. This presentation, then, outlines a pedagogy that pushes students out of the traditional academic vacuum and into the complex, real-world communication ecosystems they inhabit daily.

Drawing on the framework of Nicholas Carr’s Superbloom, we ask students to step outside the classroom to critically analyze the "superbloom" of information they consume in their everyday environments, ranging from targeted algorithms on social media platforms to the physical messaging in their communities. Then, focusing outward, we require students to audit their own communication patterns and networks. They evaluate what they transmit to others in spaces beyond the classroom, analyzing everything from curated digital personas to non-verbal choices like attire and public behavior. By moving the locus of composition from academic texts to lived experiences, this approach develops a vital metacognitive awareness. Attendees will learn the theoretical grounding of these assignments and receive practical deployment strategies, thus encouraging students in other classes to transform from passive consumers of classroom knowledge into proactive, reflective citizens equipped to write, argue, and engage meaningfully in spaces beyond institutional walls.

3. Anwita Ghosh, PhD, Georgia Institute of Technology

“From Classroom to City Hall: A Sensory Rhetoric of Civic Engagement”

This presentation presents a place-based model of composition pedagogy that invites students to move beyond the classroom and engage writing as a situated, civic practice. Drawing on my first-year composition course “Becoming ATLiens,” I argue that rhetorical awareness deepens when students are positioned as embodied observers of the environments they inhabit. Framing Atlanta as both a lived space and a contested rhetorical field, the course introduces a sensory approach to city-mapping, where sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch become analytic tools for understanding how public narratives are produced, circulated, and felt. Students engage in multimodal, field-based assignments, including site visits, observational field notes, stakeholder interviews, and collaborative digital mapping projects. These activities are then scaffolded through Georgia Tech’s WOVEN (Written, Oral, Visual, Electronic, and Nonverbal) communication framework, enabling students to translate sensory and spatial observations into public-facing genres, such as op-eds, podcasts, digital exhibits, and policy briefs. This presentation outlines key pedagogical strategies for facilitating this outward turn in composition, including integrating low-stakes reflective writing with fieldwork, designing assignments that foreground audience and circulation, and building iterative feedback loops that connect embodied experience to rhetorical analysis. Ultimately, composition “beyond walls” reorients writing instruction from an academic exercise to a mode of civic participation, enabling students to see themselves as active contributors to the sensory and rhetorical life of the city.