About

Linda Adler-Kassner is a professor in the Writing Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara, within the Department of Education. Her specialization includes public policy and writing, English Language Arts instruction, writing program administration, writing and language pedagogy, composition pedagogies, and qualitative research methodologies. Her work also encompasses literacy in historical and sociocultural contexts, histories of literacy, and communication and composition theory. She is engaged in research and teaching that explore the intersections of literacy, language, and pedagogy, contributing to the understanding and development of effective writing instruction and policy.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Sociology
• Social Science
• Medical education
• Data science
• Mathematical economics
• Social psychology
• Mathematics education
• Medicine
• Virology
• Pedagogy
• Epistemology
• Philosophy
• Mathematics

Selected publications

• Service-Learning at a Glance

  Reflections A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric · 2025-08-20

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Editors’ Note: This article originally appeared in COLLEGE CYBERBRIEF, an electronic newsletter sent to members of the Colelge Section of TEACH2000. Reprinted with permission of the National Council of Teachers of English. The list of electronic resources appeared in Adler-Kassner’s CyberBrief; we’ve updated the list a bit and added some print materials.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The WPA as Activist: Systematic Strategies for Framing, Action, and Representation

  2024-09-10 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  WPAs are often forced to make choices among an array of not particularly appealing options. Ann Feldman describes one such dilemma in the writing program she directs: Facing pressure to enact cuts that would, in part, preserve the 2–2 load taught by faculty (including Feldman), Feldman had to decide what case to pitch. Bigger classes? Large lectures with recitations? Cutting the second-semester research writing course? Ultimately, the program chose to “lower the ACT score that would allow more students to waive . . . the first required course. This could reduce the number of students taking first-year writing courses,” which meant that the English Department (and the program) could cut the number of writing sections offered, thus reducing costs (Feldman 2008, 88–89). Feldman's vignette illustrates the complicated choices facing WPAs. It raises questions with short-and long-term implications that are doubtless familiar: Who takes writing classes? What is the purpose of those classes in the university? Who teaches those classes and what is their status? The list goes on.

  PublisherDOI

• Introduction to This Volume

  2023-06-26 · 1 citations

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The past five years have seen a microrevolution in college-level Composition through service-learning. Like many young academic movements, service-learning has been considerably preoccupied with logistical and administrative issues. Both faculty and students widely attest to the increased motivation produced by the alliance of Composition with service-learning. Service-learning helps to bridge such divisions by bringing people together with positive common causes and collective tasks that foster communication and social bonds. The most immediate effect of service-learning is to rearticulate the college or university as part of rather than opposed to the local community. The combination of service-learning and Composition, both in practice and in theory, has helped to raise questions about each, as well as about larger disciplinary, institutional, and social issues. Rhetoric offers a great deal to theorizing service-learning and Composition, or the theory/practice connection more generally, because it has always viewed communication as a kind of technology, a form of action aimed at producing effects.

  PublisherDOI

• Transfer and Educational Reform in the Twenty-First Century

  2023-06-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  To talk about transfer of students learning across contexts from high school to college or from college to work, for instance is to participate in a discussion about the purpose of school that has ranged for the past 150 years. Perhaps for this reason, it also is a feature of prominent educational reform efforts like the Common Core Standards, the subject of this analysis. These can include rhetorically-based concepts and 'asking students to engage in activities that foster the development of metacognitive awareness, including asking good questions about writing situations and developing heuristics for analyzing unfamiliar writing situations'. This is the fundamental argument associated with college and career readiness, a frame that has become so dominant in discussions of the purpose of education that to question it is anathema. Yet, the research on transfer indicates that it is the ability to analyze the specific expectations among different contexts for practice, whether academic disciplines or workplaces, that contributes to writers success.

  PublisherDOI

• Writing the Community

  2023-06-26

  book
  PublisherDOI

• Sense of Place and Belonging: Lessons from the Pandemic

  Teaching & Learning Inquiry The ISSOTL Journal · 2022 · 4 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Pedagogy
  • Sociology

  This study investigates how students experienced a sense of place and a sense of belonging in both in-person and virtual learning environments by analyzing student interview data. As educators and university students grapple with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we consider how students experience the presence and absence of sense of place and belonging, and how this could inform faculty and staff practices. We conclude by offering recommendations for university educators, with a particular focus on the benefits of building communities of practice.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Writing Expertise: A Research-based Approach to Writing and Learning across the Disciplines

  2022 · 8 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Computer Science
  • Mathematics education

  Why This Book?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Guiding Students Towards Disciplinary Knowledge With Structured Peer Review Assignments

  Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice · 2021-06-14 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Effective assignments facilitate the connections between course content and disciplinary conventions. We argue that implementation of structured writing and peer review activities can facilitate the connection making process for the students. This paper provides evidence of the positive impact structured writing and peer review activities have on student performance in an Advanced Research Methods Course in Psychology. Results suggest that student participation in structured writing and peer review activities result in higher final paper scores. Further work is needed to explore the mechanism by which structured peer review assignments foster student success in a course and disciplinary community.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rethinking Epistemologically Inclusive Teaching

  Utah State University Press eBooks · 2020-02-03

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Here we outline four critiques, concerns

  PublisherDOI

• Recognizing the Limits of Threshold Concept Theory

  Utah State University Press eBooks · 2020 · 3 citations

  • Computer Science
  • Epistemology
  • Mathematical economics

  Here we outline four critiques, concerns

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Elizabeth Wardle

  10 shared

• Heidi Estrem

  7 shared

• Susanmarie Harrington

  5 shared

• Ann Watters

  4 shared

• Robert Crooks

  4 shared

• Margarita Safronova

  University of California, Santa Barbara

  2 shared

• John Majewski

  2 shared

• Peggy O’Neill

  Loyola University Maryland

  2 shared