Anti-Oppressive Composition Pedagogies

The project of creating an anti-oppressive composition issue began with multi-disciplinary, multi-institutional collaboration between Julia Havard, Erica Cardwell, Anandi Rao, Juliet Kunkle and Rosalind Diaz, who crafted a call for community-building and community-transformation: to build tools, resources, and spaces for transforming our classrooms, specifically our writing classrooms; and to approach the teaching of composition in community, with accountability, and with urgency. This collaboration started as a working group at the University of California Berkeley, Radical Decolonial Queer Pedagogies of Composition, as a number of instructors at multiple levels of the academic heirarchy struggled with the differences between our writing classrooms and our research. Following Condon and Young (2016), Inoe (2015), and Gumbs (2012), our editing team wanted to create a context and process for rich unraveling of un-teaching oppressive systems through composition.

Tracing the Trope of Teaching as Transformation

Transformation, or change on the part of the student, is the intended outcome of all learning situations, but at times this trope is taken too far. By considering how narratives of transformation too often fail to account for agency and complexity in student identity, this chapter answers Boler’s call for interrogations of entrenched belief systems that inform educational practices. Taking American composition pedagogies as its example, the chapter calls attention to the limitations in pedagogies that render students “other” in the teacher’s commitment to social change, proposing that portraying students as incomplete beings in need of transformation could reinforce misguided beliefs that hinder student/teacher interactions. The chapter then closes by encouraging educators to recognize student development as a process, and one that need not lead to beliefs that parallel those of the teacher.

Transformation-Based Database Engineering

This chapter posits a widening gap between workplace writing practices and traditional composition pedagogies. In particular, this chapter suggests that traditional composition pedagogies persist in foregrounding solitary, proprietary authors as model composers, despite the limited applicability of these models. The fields of technical and professional communication, by contrast, have long valued collaboration and modes of authorship that do not always imply the composer’s ownership of a given text. These fields’ biases are reinforced by the advent of digital media, and the Internet in particular. Digital technologies facilitate collaboration and promote a greater range of authorial stances than their print counterparts. The chapter concludes by offering pedagogical approaches directed at promoting composition pedagogies commensurate with the challenges faced by professional and technical writers working in digital composing spaces.

Cut and Paste

This chapter posits a widening gap between workplace writing practices and traditional composition pedagogies. In particular, this chapter suggests that traditional composition pedagogies persist in foregrounding solitary, proprietary authors as model composers, despite the limited applicability of these models. The fields of technical and professional communication, by contrast, have long valued collaboration and modes of authorship that do not always imply the composer’s ownership of a given text. These fields’ biases are reinforced by the advent of digital media, and the Internet in particular. Digital technologies facilitate collaboration and promote a greater range of authorial stances than their print counterparts. The chapter concludes by offering pedagogical approaches directed at promoting composition pedagogies commensurate with the challenges faced by professional and technical writers working in digital composing spaces.