In attempts to find appropriate and authentic materials for students who are developing their academic writing skills, instructors often turn to works written by professional academics. However, genres such as published research articles and textbooks in specific disciplines may not be the most suitable models for what first year composition…

Public rhetoric pedagogy can benefit from an ecological perspective that sees change as advocated not through a single document but through multiple mundane and monumental texts. This article summarizes various approaches to rhetorical ecology, offers an ecological read of the Montgomery bus boycotts, and concludes with pedagogical insights on a…

Numerous critics have repeatedly called for the use of curricular materials drawn from the learner's everyday world, and for many of today's students, one valuable source is the lyrics of contemporary rap music. In first-year writing courses at Michigan State University, the words to one rap song, "You Must Learn" by the group Boogie…

Suggests that incorporating popular culture into freshman composition classes can help students understand and engage in course content and can increase interest and motivation. Discusses the idea of discourse communities, or spaces in which meaning is negotiated. Reviews strategies for making students aware of different discourse communities when…

The city is described as a place where strangers meet, and that is also what happens in the public space of the composition classroom. If students share anything, it is an awareness of the need to negotiate the institutional demands of the freshman writing class and an invitation to enter the public forum where the issues can be divisive,…

Assigned to teach a freshman composition course with a history and reading co-requisite, a New York college instructor developed a course in which students would begin to see history--through their reading, writing, and thinking--as a series of events intricately connected with their own lives and ways of looking at the world, rather than…