Empowerment in Freshman Comp

Session Organizer: Sarah Smith-Robbins
Ball State University
sbrobbins@bsu.edu

“We Thought, Because We Had Power, We Had Wisdom”: Decentralizing the Power in the Freshman Composition Classroom

Since Freire’s idea of the “banking” concept of education was introduced, instructors have made efforts to decentralize the power in the classroom, to prevent the student from feeling “taught at.” But how successful have our efforts actually been? Do the strategies that we use to give the power in the classroom back to our students work? We would say “no.” There is a new need, an emergent catastrophe afoot resulting from instructor’s efforts to quasi-empower students. This half-commitment to empowering students does more harm than good. Our presentation calls for a new commitment to empowering writing students and putting the power of the classroom back in their hands. Presented as a dialogue, this presentation will discuss empowerment in both face-to-face and online classes.

Together, the two presentations will establish the current distribution of power in writing classes and then go on to define the need for new power structures. Finally, we will present strategies and techniques for “destabilizing” the classroom to initiate new motivations for students in writing classes.

Sarah Smith-Robbins
sbrobbins@bsu.edu

Shane Sullivan
sullivan@bsu.edu

Ball State University

Approximating Inside and Outside the Discourse: Roles in the Composition Classroom

Our research examines how integrating role-playing into class lesson plans in the composition classroom works to empower and integrate otherwise marginalized voices, bringing those voices into the contact zone where conflict and struggle exist. Mary Louise Pratt, in “Arts in the Contact Zone,” defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in the context of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (34). Pratt moves away from homogenization in the classroom, choosing instead to confront oppositional discourse, parody, resistance, and critique. To bring a classroom into the contact zone, it seems necessary to open spaces that teaches students “ways to move into and out of rhetoric of authenticity” (40).

We believe it is possible that role-playing is key in helping students access that sometimes painful and hostile space of the contact zone.

Building off of lesson plans and research conducted in our own classrooms, and pedagogy developed by, among others, Min-Zhan Lu, David Bartholomae, and James Paul Gee, our paper explores possible roles that we observe our students trying on in order to mimic the dominant discourse.

Casey Gerhart and Ruth Wollersheim
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee