#17. Composition Saves the World

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 teachers 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, the pedagogy we decide to implement is key to our influence. Thus follows one of the biggest questions of composition studies: How do we best teach writing to most successfully reach our goals? This question begets another question. What exactly do we mean by goals? I can list a few ideas that immediately come to mind: 

1) Writing instruction should allow students to develop the faculties they need to approach writing situations with confidence. 

2) Writing instruction should foster within students the faculties to become more participatory and civically literate members of society. 

3) Writing instruction should attune students to the material and sociopolitical realities of our society, especially racial and economic inequalities, and thus instill students with a degree of critical consciousness. 

Some might say that writing instruction should accomplish all three. With the influence of Freire on the field in the late 80s / early 90s, most writing studies scholars would probably agree that the "education as activism" model has risen to prominence and has become somewhat normalized within the field. When I say "normalized," I mean that I have had enough exposure to this approach that when I encounter it I generally don't think twice. Not only this, but I will also acknowledge that as a community college instructor, I once adapted such a model for my own courses, though I have abandoned it since, not necessarily because I consider the model less effective, but more because I preferred the 'writing about writing' approach I was encouraged to implement when I started at UC Davis. 

Don't get me wrong, I am very much allured by revolutionary fervor, to the point that I thought about buying a turtleneck sweater to wear in my graduate seminars. I also love old Marx. I am very much spooked by the specter of capitalism, and to evoke the folding of 4Cs, I can also appreciate how all that is solid can melt into air. At the same time, in the spirit of Mark Fisher, I do consider myself a capitalist realist. I have discussed capitalist realism quite a bit on this blog, but to provide a quick reminder, Fisher defines the term as "the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it." I will elaborate later, but to keep it short for now, my feeling is that in a world where there are so many things to be outraged about, I am exhausted to the point that I can't muster outrage for anything at all. 

Book.

How the hell does this relate to composition studies? This leads me to my feature for the next two blog posts, which is the 1991 edited collection Composition & Resistance, edited by C. Mark Hurlbert and Michael Blitz. As I have mentioned about other works on this blog, in 2026, one might have a hard time appreciating that an edited collection like this was probably fairly "radical" for its time, considering that academia is now inundated with scholarly work that assumes this particular ideological bent. I obviously did not have time to read every single article from this collection, but I can tell from the table of contents that the articles deal with a gamut of subversive topics, some of which include critical pedagogy, the treatment of adjuncts, the intersection of composition studies and feminism, and the notion of education as a transformative process. Unfortunately, I am a busy graduate student, so I need to stop writing for now, and for what it's worth, this post serves as an introduction to the collection. For the next two blog posts, I aim to feature two articles that I thought were particularly interesting and demonstrate the range of the collection. Until next time! 

References

(1991). Composition & Resistance. Boynton/Cook Publishers. 

Fisher, M. (2009). Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? Zero Books.