In “Revenge of the Poet-Critic,” Charles Bernstein writes that “artists and intellectuals have a commitment to try to make their work […] not in the watered down forms that only capitulate to the mediocracy, but in forms that challenge, confront, exhilarate, provoke, disturb, question, flail, and even fail.”

I ask my first year composition students to think about this quote every semester—it stresses the fact that, in order to compose in meaningful ways, we must take risks, surprise ourselves, and experiment.

The writers and makers in my class recognize that composition can be a collaborative, pleasurable, and challenging process of meaning-making in a variety of forms. We subvert the notion of composition as the production of hermetically sealed essays by designing projects that reach multiple audiences via the use of media including film, voice recordings, websites, blogs, and digital portfolios.  I encourage my students to critically connect their lived experiences to larger social and cultural narratives through research and storytelling, to recognize and articulate the relationships between the personal and the political, and to critique institutionalized oppression, including linguistic chauvinism.  Having taught at some of the most diverse institutions in New York City, I’ve been lucky enough to facilitate classrooms where students with incredibly different histories, cultures, and experiences can grapple with meaningful questions about composition, identity, and politics of language and embodiment.

Some practical ways in which our investment in collaborative reading/composing manifests itself are: student-led writing workshops; student-generated assessment rubrics; a focus on respecting, critiquing, and working in diverse modes and media (e.g. memoir, qualitative research, documentary, manifesto, spoken word poetry, visual and multi-modal text, fiction, letter, essay, etc.); student-generated, multi-modal research project topics based on interests/passions and developed in collaboration with me and their peers; a digital portfolio system in which students take control of their work and make critical choices about revision, audience, and design. 

My own research has often interrogated outmoded notions of what constitutes "academic writing."  The writers in my courses have consistently impressed me with the ways they critically approach issues about which they are passionate through the their thoughtful use of forms such as PSAs, spoken word poetry, blogs, and surveys (among other genres), and continue to keep me thinking about the implications of their work in a broader context.

I’m excited to see shifts in the academy as more scholars, programs, and institutions embrace the value of interdisciplinarity. I believe first year composition courses are powerful sites for students and faculty alike to expand what writing/composing means in the 21st century.  I enjoy engaging new technologies and emerging genres with the writers in my courses; I want them to be nimble, flexible thinkers who feel confident writing/composing across a variety of rhetorical situations both inside and outside of the classroom.