Postpostmodern Compositionist

This is not a new post. A few months ago I was thinking about switching the blog over to Substack and this is the only piece that I posted there. I  wanted to preserve this post as  I am going to be deleting my Substack account. This post was originally posted on June 22nd, 2026.  *** Why do I call myself a lapsed critical pedagogue? The word lapsed suggests that I once believed and no longer do. This may be somewhat deceptive, as I like to believe that critical pedagogy still informs my teaching philosophy in a meaningful way. It doesn’t have so much to do with my teaching as much as it does with my jaded pessimism towards the current state of critical pedagogy. I want to believe in it, but I can’t, and ultimately I have been conflicted about whether critical pedagogy is dead and if it has actually been dead for a long time. When I say “dead,” this doesn’t necessarily mean that critical pedagogy-informed approaches to teaching aren’t being implemented in American classro...

Okay, so this is the second post where I have reneged on my promise to talk more about Composition & Resistance , however, as one can tell by the title of this post, I have been sidetracked by a more timely event. Expect my musings on Composition & Resistance next time.  My mother's side of the family is from New York, and during my childhood we spent most of our summers in Southold, Long Island. In August of the year 2000, my parents took my sister and I into the city and we went to the observation deck located at the top of the South Tower. I was nine years old and thus my memory of the experience is fleeting, however I distinctly remember two things: 1) I was afraid of how high up we were, and for this reason I avoided standing too close to the windowpanes where you could look out at the rest of Manhattan. 2) I also remember being intrigued that there was a Sbarro pizza restaurant within the observation deck space. The past feels like a dream, and while it is hard for me...

In my last blog post, I mentioned that the next two blog posts would feature articles from  Composition & Resistance . Those posts are definitely still coming, but I had an interesting idea I have been thinking about over the past few months, and this week I couldn't help myself in deciding to move it to the top of the docket. At the end of the day this is my blog, so I change the rules whenever I want, right?  Trust me, I have no illusions. I am aware that my blog doesn't get much traffic, if any at all. However, I did notice that Blogger's country-tracking feature shows visitors from over 18 countries, including Kenya, Turkey, and Vietnam. I am not sure how these people are finding my blog or why they are interested in it (perhaps they are rhetoric & composition scholars?), but I also suspect that they might be bots who are scraping the internet for text they can use to train AI models.  Aside: This is a direct comment for people who might be reading this: If y...

A young person might look at the tumultuous state of the world and wonder, what can I do to improve things? Of the many ways that one might respond to this noble call, such a young person could decide to become a teacher. The position comes with a lot of power, though one might initially question this assertion: Writing instructors are only in charge of 25 students per class. In the grand scheme of the U.S. population, isn't this just a drop in the bucket?  While a teacher's influence is admittedly limited to the students in their classroom,  a lifelong teaching career allows for more influence than one might think. For example, I have been teaching composition since 2021 and have so far had the opportunity to influence hundreds of students. Not only this, but another source of teacherly power comes from the fact that t eachers have much freedom (at least in higher education) in choosing what knowledge they want to impart to students. Considering the power we hold as teachers,...

I am aware of NCTE's decision last month to dissolve 4Cs, and as a scholar just starting their career, this obviously saddens me, as I greatly enjoyed my own experience at the two 4Cs I was able to attend in 2025 (Baltimore) and this year in 2026 (Cleveland). I am also aware that more experienced members of the field are mobilizing to address the situation, and while there is a lot of uncertainty, I feel optimistic that the field will be able to reconfigure itself and make up for what is a large loss to the discipline.  I am a lowly graduate student and try not to involve myself in the greater politics of the field.  I will not posit any grand opinions or make any declarations for what direction the field should take, however, this whole situation has awakened me to a larger question of who we are as a discipline. What is composition? How do we quantify it? What should come to mind when one thinks about composition studies? Perhaps everyone might agree that composition means d...

I have had quite the peripatetic summer, and I am finally back in Davis and ready to return to this blog. I feel guilty for not posting as regularly as I should, but now I'm back and have quite the lineup for features going forward. See the picture below for some books I picked up at the library, which I will be writing about over the next few weeks: Books.  a. Whatever (1994)   by Michel Houellebecq: There is more to life than rhetoric and composition. There is more to life than the PhD. For this upcoming school year, my goal is to do more reading that is not related to my academic work. My inclusion of this book in this list reflects this effort. The book so far is a pretty short and light read, but articulates a rather bleak worldview, in the sense that the protagonist doesn't really care about anything. This is my first time reading Houellebecq, and I think this is a regular theme in his works, or the phenomenon of how people in late-stage capitalist societies confront a l...

This piece is a developed version of ideas I forwarded in previous blog posts about composition's ethic of service and its new iteration with the emergence of AI . Enjoy!  *** In their contribution to the edited collection Bad Ideas about AI and Writing , Xiao Tan and Paul K. Matsuda (2026) deconstruct a widespread assumption among writing instructors that student usage of AI writing technologies detracts from or erases student voices. Tan and Matsuda argue that instructor expectations surrounding voice do not consider student intention, as students may deliberately use the Standard Academic English (SAE) dialect characteristic of AI writing technologies to satisfy perceived academic genre conventions. The authors also contend that while concerns about voice often center around “cases where the student mindlessly substitutes their writing with machine generated texts,” this focus causes instructors to overlook or dismiss appropriate ways that student writers might collaborate...