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Social issues in first-year college writing.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

Many educators believe that including social and political issues in first-year college writing is an effective strategy for helping students learn to read, research, and write critically. Others, however, argue that focusing on such controversial topics will distract students from the traditional goals of the course and sway them unwittingly toward the political ideologies of teachers or more articulate members of the class. The challenge, therefore, is to help students use reading and writing to shape their own informed ideologies through thoughtful analyses of multiple perspectives and careful attention to reading and writing processes.

Background

As teachers of college writing, we see many first-year students who are unaware of the complexities of the social and political issues that affect their lives. We know that they know that the issues are "out there"--poverty, racism, homophobia, religious intolerance, sexism, and others--but we can wonder what they have learned about the pervasiveness of these issues, and from what perspectives. If they are aware of the issues at all, that awareness might have come from family conversations, high school experiences, or--currently and often most persuasively for them--from television talk shows. For these reasons, many composition professionals see the first-year composition course as an appropriate site for introducing students to the complexities of the social attitudes and policies that affect those issues. This first college year is a milestone, a turning point, a new page with countless opportunities for reflection, growth, and change. On many college campuses, first-year composition curricula include time devoted to college survival skills--assignments and activities that focus on the behavioral and intellectual growth expected of first-year students. From this perspective, many practitioners argue that reading and writing assignments that dig more deeply into the complex causes and effects of poverty, racism, sexism, and the like provide important pathways to the equally important "survival skills" of critical thinking, scholarly research methods, and informed academic and civil discourse.

Others, however, just as strongly assert that attention to controversial issues steers the curriculum away from its "primary goals" of writing instruction: practicing writing processes, writing effective academic prose, and applying to that prose the standard rules of English usage. In fact, in "Narrating Conflict," Patricia Harkin warns about a prevailing assumption within and beyond the academy that composition courses are "service courses" that should be designed to help students "with skills and drills, to overcome 'faulty' discursive practices" (279). Furthermore, some academics (and many non-academics) believe that the teaching of writing should be a politically neutral process; that to grapple in first-year composition courses with issues such as welfare reform, reproductive rights, racial profiling, or ecological stability is to risk...

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