College Composition & Communication - Volume 55, Issue 1, 2003

The following article focuses on Latino students’ difficulties with higher education because of dual constructions of identity from and toward the Anglo mainstream. First, the article addresses Other perception: the potential problems Latino students (Mexican Americans) encounter in higher education based on how others perceive their individual and group identity. Second, it addresses self-perception: the contradictory expectations that Mexican Americans have of the mainstream in higher education. The discussion of these issues is presented in a letter format that primarily speaks to audiences outside the mainstream.

Intercultural rhetoric, like the project of empowerment, is the site of competing agendas for not only how to talk across difference but to what end. The practice of community- based intercultural inquiry proposed here goes beyond a willingness to embrace conflicting voices to an active search for the silent resources of situated knowledge in an effort to build a collaboratively transformed understanding.

Drawing upon their longitudinal study of four undergraduate writers and focusing on the progress of one of them, the authors question assumptions that confuse skills assessment with the measurement of academic and personal development. They argue for a broader view of writing development and a teaching approach that fosters it.

In this article the author explores the educational process in which college sophomores enrolled in a reading and writing course are engaged. She defines this education as translation: a process of preservation, re-vision, and re-rendering of both texts and selves, prompted by particular course assignments, readings, and forums for interaction.

Rhetoric and Composition As Intellectual Work, edited by Gary A. Olson, reviewed by Joseph Harris; The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education, by Mary Soliday, reviewed by Bruce Horner; The Testing Trap, by George Hillocks, Jr., reviewed by Joan A. Mullin; An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa, by Philippe-Joseph Salazar, reviewed by John Trimbur; Writing and Revising the Disciplines, by Jonathan Monroe, reviewed by Carl G. Herndl.

In today’s classroom and larger cultural climate, overtly politicized “critical” composition pedagogies may only exacerbate student resistance to issues and identities of difference, especially if the teacher is marked or read as different her/himself. I therefore suggest that the marginalized teacher-subject look to contemporary theoretical notions of the “radical resignification” of power as well as to the neglected rhetorical concept of mêtis, or “cunning,” to engage difference more efficaciously, if more sneakily. Specifically, I argue that one possible praxis for better negotiating student resistance is the performance of the very neutrality that students expect of teachers.