College English - Volume 77, Issue 5, 2015

As the people most directly harmed by standardized education, students must lead both local and national fights for progressive, alternative pedagogies. This article exhorts writing teachers to help cultivate youth agency by establishing a Rhetoric Project in concordance with the Algebra Project, which employs mathematics literacy and community organizing as tools for promoting quality education. Specific Rhetoric Project efforts can include building cultures of rhetorical literacy and updating traditional organizing methods for twenty-first-century contexts. The Rhetoric Project is framed as an initial step toward a potential interdisciplinary alliance of writing and mathematics teachers and students.

This essay argues that calls to end, move beyond, or expand composition participate in a discourse of need that accepts and reinforces the legitimacy of dominant, and

This review takes on the assumption that readers of College English believe in democratic practice and the possibility that education can play a role in supporting and cultivating those practices. The books reviewed here are a good reminder that education does not have to be focused on competition and achievement, about defining intelligence through academic aptitude, a reminder well served as the Common Core and its impending assessment shape the nature of public education and its goals.