Introduction
As the chapters in this edited collection demonstrate and celebrate, Genevieve Critel’s important work on the rhetoric of participation in writing courses has motivated and inspired a rich body of scholarship, research, and practice. Taking up Genevieve’s call to examine these ubiquitous but understudied practices, contributors have extended and deepened this work with students in face-to-face classes, online/hybrid writing courses, second language-learner contexts, MOOCs, and writing centers.
The fall semester of 2014 would have been Genevieve Critel’s second year as a tenure-track writing studies professor and her first year as the WPA for the first-year writing program at Western Washington University. As the long-serving WPA of this program, I was to be her mentoring partner. Although we did not have the opportunity to build and foster this relationship, Genevieve has partnered with me nonetheless. It is with and because of Genevieve that participatory culture and participation became both the intellectual and pedagogical focus of our first-year writing course that year.
