Postpostmodern Compositionist

The blog is now ten posts old. Here's hoping for many more posts to come!   Today I thought I would talk a little bit about pedagogy. Like many other writing instructors before me, bell hooks has influenced my approach to teaching and I do consider myself a critical pedagogue. I have read her books  Teaching to Transgress (1994) and Teaching Community (2003), and there are two quotes from these texts that I want to analyze. While these two quotes are scattered across both texts, for me they have always worked together to form a certain theory of free speech that informs my bearing in the classroom. However, after rereading these quotes in preparation for this post, I realize that my original interpretation might not reflect what bell hooks was actually trying to say. I am worried now that I am potentially cherrypicking her ideas to support a preconceived opinion. Let's investigate.  I will provide the two quotes here and offer an analysis:  Quote 1 , from Teachi...

This post is a continuation of my post from last week, which you can find here . I will finish discussing the three influences from my "Theories of Writing & Literacy" seminar in 2021, which led me to becoming the compositionist I am today.  1. The first influence would be the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives, also known as the DALN. You can find the website for the DALN here . When I was first doing research for the course final project, I remember initially being confused about why the DALN existed in the first place. Why would anyone want to collect student literacy narratives? (1)   My brain made the connection soon enough. As an English major I was (and still am) very interested in narratology and folklore studies, and in the same way that folklorists go out and collect folk tales to put into archives for future research, I see now that the DALN serves a similar purpose. Unfortunately, the DALN's search engine isn't great (I don't think they have th...

A LITERACY NARRATIVE ABOUT LITERACY NARRATIVES By Casey Manogue This blog post is the first of a two-post literacy narrative, which details a pivotal moment in my transformative journey from English major to compositionist. During the spring semester of 2021, I was finishing up my M.A. in English at CSULB, where I was specializing in 20th century American literature. It was my last semester before graduation and I was only signed up for two courses, until it came to my attention that I needed to take a third to have enough units to graduate. I was looking forward to a chill semester, so the prospect of taking another class was more than a little annoying. I reluctantly signed up for a course titled "Theories of Writing and Literacy," which worked well with my schedule, however, I was disinterested because I knew this was a rhetoric and composition course and not a literature course. Since I was working as an embedded tutor at a local community college, I figured that the know...