Updated July 2022 (always under construction)

I’m glad you are reading this. Your being here means that I’m teaching another composition class and that I’ll get to work with you on learning how to make use of a college education and to make and take meanings in our world. Love this work.

College composition courses are my favorite courses to teach. I’ve been working in higher education for a long time, and I keep coming back to college composition–sometimes called First-Year Composition (FYC)–because it gets directly to what I see as the work of a college education: becoming better at making meanings with and for other folks. When I started teaching college composition decades ago, I made a distinction between college composition and advanced composition, on the one hand, and basic writing, on the other. Working with writers with diverse identities and experiences led me–a straight, white guy–to decompose and recompose my view of what it means to learn to compose in college. That process is still going on. Now, I use the same Pressbook for every composition course that I teach. College composition now names for me an opportunity for some group of people to practice using and producing some kinds of texts critically and reflectively. The kinds of texts vary a lot between courses. The way in feels pretty similar. My students and I form up a network of writers who use texts–make sense of texts and produce texts–in order to work on some shared problem. We practice collaboratively taking and making meanings with and for others.

Why do I design this kind of education? I’ll offer you three reasons:

1. (de)Composition courses create an opportunity for college students to take up and practice with tools they need to survive and thrive in college and, I hope, beyond in a diverse democracy. I like seeing students become successful.
2. (de)Composition courses create an opportunity for college students to reflect on the knowledge and skills in communication that they bring to college and to decide how and whether to adapt their knowledge and skills in a new and, to be honest, pretty weird environment that has a long history of exclusionary practices. I like seeing students become confident and critical and improve my teaching, their own education, and American higher education.
3. (de)Composition courses create an opportunity for students and teachers to explore together some relevant problem and try to write up some solutions. I like being part of education that leads to relevant outcomes and a more sustainable world.

This sort of education is critical and reflective activity. We will engage in what Raymond Williams (a now dead British writer whom I like) called the “mutual determination of values and meanings.”  We will not all value and mean the same thing; we will not produce meanings that we all own equally; we will not all be interested in the same things. We will, again using Williams’s words, share a commitment to “the keeping of the channels and institutions of communication clear, so that all may contribute, and be helped to contribute.” Students learn college composition by engaging in a “free, contributive and common process of participation” through which they decide how to participate in ways that contribute and help others to contribute.

The murder of George Floyd at the end of May, 2020, clarified for me the importance of this sort of education in the U.S. I realized that the mutual determination of values and meanings in the U.S has to be an antiracist process and that promotes antiracist thinking and action. As a teacher, I have always understood that composing is not colorblind. People make meanings from were we are and have been. That means that composing, for me and my students, is raced. While I have long asked my students to recognize this, something changed for me in 2020. As I listened and learned in the weeks following the public murder of George Floyd, I came to see and feel that just recognizing race is not enough for me or for a college education in the U.S. As I read the work of LaShyra Nolan, Ibram X. Kendi,  and many others, I came to call out the ways in which college composition must be antiracist work if it is to be of much real value for us now and here. I can see no way for American college students to develop the literacies they need to thrive in a diverse democracy without engaging in antiracist work. Keeping the channels and institutions of communication clear requires my students and me to listen for and learn from voices that have been excluded, to recognize the structures that exclude those voices, and to build communities and texts that value and include those voices. To put a fine point on it, for this course to have real value for us, all of us must listen to and learn from black voices, recognize the structures that devalue and exclude black voices, and to value and include black voices in our classroom interactions and in the texts we produce. Black voices matter. For me and many others, this work will include continuing to rethink assumptions and change our practices as we learn from those who our communities have historically ignored.

So how do we do this kind of education?

This kind of (de)Composition course works as we all get interested in learning some new tools, drawing critically and reflectively on our own knowledge and skill, engaging a common problem together, and making meanings together.  Of course, there are lots of other details. I still ask students to complete assignments, one or more for nearly every class session. I try to design those assignments so that you will have lots of different ways to engage them, lots of ways to respond. I don’t always succeed. Assignments, it turns out, are assignments.

Even though I’ve tried to slow the course down a bit, it still seems to move quickly. There is a logic that maybe helps us all manage the pace. The first assignments will ask you to make decisions about how to be in the course and to submit some writing you have already completed. The next assignments will guide you through the course syllabus and a course overview and start practicing close reading. Together, these assignments that give you and me a sense for where you are as a composer and give us a chance as a class to decide how to tackle our shared problem. After that we are off to the races, reading about, framing, and working on a shared problem. The units and weekly assignments guide our explorations.

I really am glad you are in this course. Really. You bring knowledge and skill that the rest of us need. You have a lot to contribute to our work on a shared problem. Settle in and start engaging the assignments–I’ll do the same.

Do the work completely, you complete the course successfully. That’s our mantra.