Two Feet In | Writing and the Institution

The Parable of the Mote and Beam, Domenico Fetti, ~1619, (c) Metropolitan Museum of Art Sinned Against and Sinning I feel that somewhere, sometime, we've all sinned. We've all sinned in criticizing, mocking, deriding students' work. It's a mote-beam, problem, really, as we forget where we come from, where our writing was when we were first year students. Many of us in the teaching professions also come from different economic and literacy backgrounds that can't compare to those of our students today. This is certainly true for many students who attend community colleges such as mine, many coming from lower SES environments, struggling schools, homes with few literacy experiences other than those of mass media and family lore. I don't devalue these last two discourse environments, but too seldom are these discourses are undervalued in the first year course, many instructors adamant that the course is designed to inculcate those middle class values (Bloom) o...

Yesterday eight students participated in a video chat via Google Hangouts with Dr. Andrew Joseph Pagoda on the subject of racialization, white privilege, and some other similar topics. I had arranged with Pagoda weeks ago not only to open the conversation about these topics with my students, but also to test the technology available on our campus. Pagoda had sent some documents that the students were asked to read before to give students some experience in the topics to be more comfortably engaged. Some observations: 1. My college feels that students should not be engaged in these long distance video conferences. With a student population near 20,000 students, we are not prepared to have these conference where students actually engage with another voice. The potential for unidirectional video is easy -- nearly any room could show a talking head using the banking model of education throwing words at a class. But what has appeared more difficult is to arrange an actual conference whe...

Referencing the Egyptian Revolution, by artist Graphic Resistance, 2011 <http://graphic-resistance.deviantart.com/> Plenty of research has been published on resistance of/by students within the classroom, especially within the writing classroom. A brief, incomplete, bibliography: Carter, Christopher. Rhetoric and resistance in the corporate academy. Hampton Pr, 2008.  Corkery, Caleb. "Rhetoric of Race: Critical Pedagogy without Resistance." Teaching English in the Two-Year College 36.3 (2009): 244-256.  Flowerdew, John. "13 Critical discourse analysis and strategies of resistance." Advances in discourse studies (2008): 195.  Gorzelsky, Gwen. "Working boundaries: From student resistance to student agency." College Composition and Communication (2009): 64-84.  Palmerino, Gregory. "Opinion: Teaching Bartleby to Write--Passive Resistance and Technology's Place in the Composition Classroom." College English 73.3 (2011): 283-302...