College Composition & Communication - Volume 57, Issue 1, 2005

New-media writing exerts pressure in ways that writing instruction typically has not. In this article, we map the infrastructural dynamics that support—or disrupt—newmedia writing instruction, drawing from a multimedia writing course taught at our institution. An infrastructural framework provides a robust tool for writing teachers to navigate and negotiate the institutional complexities that shape new-media writing and offers composers a path through which to navigate the systems within and across which they work. Further, an infrastructural framework focused on the when of newmedia composing creates space for reflection and change within institutional structures and networks.

This essay attempts to demonstrate how transgender theories can inspire pedagogical methods that complement feminist compositionist pedagogical approaches to understanding the narration of gender as a social construct. By examining sample student writing generated by a prompt inspired by transgender theories, the author’s analysis suggests how trans theories might usefully expand and extend—for both instructors and students—our analysis of the stories we tell personally, socially, and politically about gender. Ultimately, the author argues that trans theories and pedagogical activities built on them can enhance our understanding of gender performance by prompting us to consider gender as a material and embodied reality.

The implications of the Students’ Right to Their Own Language resolution on classroom teaching and practices point to a continual need to reevaluate how communicative actions—linguistic diversities—of students are central aspects of the work within composition courses. This article revisits the historical significance and pedagogical value of the resolution in its critique of student-teacher exchanges, in its advancement of strategies that invite language variations into composition courses, and in its proposal to support the expressive rights of students.

Some scholarship suggests that critical pedagogy should be abandoned for more pragmatic goals. While the democratic and political sensibilities of critical pedagogy require more from the instructor, classrooms that on the surface do not appear to work in teaching students should not be seen as signs that the pedagogy is not worth the extra effort. The classroom experience recounted in this piece suggests that blundered implementation can function as an opportunity to advance knowledge and to understand the ongoing project of critical pedagogy, strengthening it even as we realize that critical pedagogy cannot look and feel like status quo teaching and still enact progressive goals.