Editor's Note

Welcome to Issue 18.1-18.2 of Xchanges—a double-issue featuring some exciting new features!

First up, I do want to position this Editor’s Letter in its specific temporal moment: I am writing this after having returned from the CCCCs conference in Spokane, where I had the pleasure of meeting with many other folks interested in promoting undergraduate-student and graduate-student research and publication. Xchanges has long been lucky to exist alongside other journals that showcase the scholarship (written, multi-modal, and beyond!) of undergraduate and graduate students, in free, open-access formats. I want to take a moment to thank those other journals (TheJump+, Kairos, Young Scholars in Writing, Queen City Writers, and more!) and to celebrate the dedication of the Undergraduate Research Standing Group and the Research Network Forum for showcasing journals like Xchanges that champion the continuing goal of creating and maintaining spaces for emerging scholarly voices in Writing Studies and its subfields.  

Xchanges is now in its 23^rd year and we have an amazing editorial team leading us, including our Co-Managing Editors Beau Pihlaja (Texas Tech), Jenn Burke-Reifman (San Diego State University), and Manny Piña (Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi) and our Technical Editing team, including Eric Mason (Nova Southeastern University), Chanakya Das (Lead Technical Writer, California), and Nicole O’Connell (University of Massachusetts, Amherst). Our review board now boasts over forty faculty members from around the U.S., from a wide variety of institution-types, including liberal arts colleges, state flagship universities, regional campuses, and community colleges. We are so honored to have such a dedicated and committed-to-mentorship review board!

This current issue is a very special one. Not only is it a double issue but it features a few news elements: a graduate-student reflection and a faculty-member “guidance on the publishing process” piece. We are very excited that this issue combines scholarly, research-driven articles from graduate and undergraduate students in Writing Studies fields with pieces that offer our readers insights into elements of student-and-scholar life that are not as frequently discussed as they should be, we feel, in Writing Studies and related programs. We are eager to continue serving, from this issue forward, as a platform for foregrounding such discussions. Similarly, by offering an advice-type piece by a faculty member, we are hoping to normalize certain elements of, and even feelings related to, the scholarly publishing process, a process that for many who are new to publishing and many who are not-so-new, seems opaque and rife with frustrations. In this issue, our featured essay in this realm reveals “tips” that faculty folks have developed over their careers to manage the various stages of the publishing process as its relates to bringing their own articles forward in journal-published form. Our featured graduate-student voice, reflecting on life as an international graduate student teaching assistant, is Nasih Ul Wadud Alam, from North Dakota State University.  His reflection is titled “An International Graduate Teaching Student’s First Year as a First-year Writing Instructor.”  Our featured faculty reflection, on tips related to the revision process, is Xchanges’s own Manny Piña, of Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. He shares insights in his essay “How do I (Really) Revise my Writing?”

Also in this issue are essays by Sophie Boes, an undergraduate scholar from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Rebekah Hayes, a graduate teaching assistant pursuing an M.A. at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. We also feature a co-authored essay by Sarah Pedzinski, a Ph.D. candidate at Indiana University, Bloomington, and Gabrielle Stecher, Ph.D., an Associate Director of Undergraduate Teaching and Lecturer in the Department of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. The essays in this issue range widely in focus, from explorations of the first Superman comic book (Hayes’s “An Everyman Inside of a Superman: A Cluster Analysis of Action Comics #1”), to peer-tutoring practices and impacts (Boes’s “‘Conversation at the Boundaries Between Communities’: An Examination of Tutor and Peer Review Effectiveness Based on Commenting Practices”), to the ways in which Centers for Teaching and Learns (CTLs) powerfully shape the teaching practices of those who avail themselves of their services and programs (Pedzinski and Stecher’s “Centers for Teaching and Learning: Investing in Your Teaching as a Graduate Student”).

As always, we are exceedingly proud of the way in which this issue has come together and the inquiries it brings forward, showcasing the varied conversations that are vitally important in Writing Studies, writ large, today. We look forward to receiving new submissions from prospective authors for our next undergraduate and graduate-student issues in the coming year and we—the entire Xchanges production collaborative—hope our readers enjoy this current issue. If you are an undergraduate or graduate student, we hope you will encourage your fellow undergraduate and graduate-student researchers to submit their work for review. If you are a faculty member, introduce your undergraduate and graduate students to Xchanges as a possible forum in which to potentially publish their own primary-research-driven scholarship (see our Submissions page for more information). We are excited also to showcase additional reflective writing that pertains to processes, challenges, and under-explored themes in Writing Studies, as we have done in this issue, and we are excited to receive submissions in this vein, as well.

Thanks to our readers for 23 years of support!

--Julianne Newmark
Editor-in-Chief
The University of New Mexico