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We Want to Know Who Our Students Are

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Patricia Bizzell
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Extract

Composition studies concentrates on students, not texts. We in this field want to know who our students are. What abilities to use language do they bring to the academy? What new kinds of intellectual work are they able to do? What challenges does academic discourse pose for them? These are research questions we explore with rigor but also compassion and, sometimes, admiration. My favorite origin story claims that this field's modern iteration sprang from reluctance to use first-year writing courses, required at most universities, simply to eject the “boneheads.” Instead, we learned from Mina Shaughnessy and others to regard even the most struggling undergraduate writers as agents, operating among intersecting and competing discourse communities. For us, student writers are not solitary creators, nor are they intertextual blurs.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 129 , Issue 3 , May 2014 , pp. 442 - 447
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2014

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References

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