The role of the reader in how the meaning of a text is formed has been a nearly obsessive concern of recent critical thought. While theories of reader-response or deconstruction may seem to have had little effect on the practice of teaching literature, they do hold much in common with the way many teachers try to teach writing. The works of Roland…

Argues that educators need to acknowledge how the material interests of part-time and adjunct teachers, graduate assistants, tenure-stream faculty, and administrators can come into conflict in composition in order to negotiate fairly among them. Discusses how the culture of academic professionalism militates against such a consciousness, and…

The teachers are urged by Beech and Thelin to help students expose ideology in their texts and the texts of others. The idea of teaching critical practice is highlighted by Harris who thinks that one can learn to expose ideology by reading cultural texts closely and critically.

Intellectuals lament the disappearance of community, a nostalgia for the small town that has supposedly given way to the anonymous crowds of the city. Likewise, scholars have talked about "discourse communities" in romantic terms, referring to a place where all share the same values. However, a more urban view of social life, in which…

This series of roundtable papers explores the attempt of writing instructors to empower students by teaching them both to write within the discourse of the academic community and to write critically against it, resisting its accepted forms of thought and discourse. (CJS)

The cognitivist view of composition suggests that if students are supplied with a set of writing strategies, they will learn to think in more complex and powerful ways, observing their own ideas and writing from another person's viewpoint. On the other hand, some social critics argue that composition teachers need to help their students enter into…