College Composition & Communication - Volume 51, Issue 4, 2000

A case study of the evaluation of a three-year pilot project in mainstreaming basic writers at City College of New York suggests that the social and political contexts of a project need to be taken into account in the earliest stages of evaluation. This project’s complex evaluation report was virtually ignored by college administrators.

When a composition teacher incorporated community-based writing assignments into her course, she found that the curriculum did not support students’ transitions to nonacademic settings. Her success in transforming the curriculum suggests that the writing classroom can function not only as a site for “general writing skills in-struction” but also for analysis of rhetorical variation.

We offer institutional critique as an activist methodology for changing institutions. Since institutions are rhetorical entities, rhetoric can be deployed to change them. In its effort to counter oppressive institutional structures, the field of rhetoric and com-position has focused its attention chiefly on the composition classroom, on the de-partment of English, and on disciplinary forms of critique. Our focus shifts the scene of action and argument to professional writing and to public discourse, using spatial methods adapted from postmodern geography and critical theory.