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, unsettling, and even painful. The range of possible approaches to composition is quite large: (1) cognitivist, emphasizing goal-oriented process and student-centered pedagogic devices; (2) expressivist, with its ideologic critique of dominant culture and de-authorizing of the teacher in favor of the student; (3) social constructivist, claiming apolitical, communal discourse communities and collaborative learning methods; and (4) radical, insisting on liberation and relying on dialogic interaction. In the classroom, the teacher needs first to establish the normal discourse as the central text and then use intentional abnormal discourse to arouse wonder and skepticism. By modeling abnormal discourse, teachers entice students not so much to follow as to experiment, and by listening, students refuse to preserve the power and the authority of the podium. (Contains 15 references.) (CR)