Notes from the Writing Instruction Underground

This kind of control, this kind of juice among America’s purveyors of middle-class virtue suggests to me that as writing teachers we cannot allow whiteness and middle-classness to go unchecked in the classroom. If we abandon the critical perspective here because we see the values of one group as superior to others,’ as the principle aim of composition pedagogy, then we really aren’t preparing students to become—as many of my fair-skinned colleagues like to say—citizens, active participants in the shaping of our democracy.