Class Work: Site of Egalitarian Activism or Site of Embourgeoisement?

Abstract

s the college composition classroom a site where professors offer not just a set of skills to be mastered but also "a form of cultural citizenship and politics," which aims to reconstruct "democratic public life" so that "subordinate groups [...] have the opportunity to govern and shape history rather than be consigned to its margins"? (Giroux 367, 368, 367; see also Freire, Berlin, Bizzell, Shor). For most of us, the answer to this question is obvious. Of course the college composition classroom is a site for such activism: our pedagogy should be counterhegemonic, the literacy our students achieve should be critical, and all of us should seek positive change in our communities, indeed in the world. To be sure, some problems are "now commonly recognized" in putting such Freirean theory into practice among undergraduates in the United States, as Richard Miller points out (11); it is difficult, for instance, for some of us to agree that "basic writers are very much like Freire's peasants" (Bizzell 133, see also Hardin 103). But neither the problems nor the recognition of them has unsettled the power of critical literacy in the composition classroom. Today, compositionists "focus [.. .] almost exclusively on ideological matters," as "writing proficiency has dropped from view as a key purpose" (Durst 5; MacDonald 117). Undoubtedly, saysJeff Smith, the various strands of critical literacy are now the "Standard Model" of pedagogy (307), aimed at all students, whether or not they are prepared to engage it. In the past fifteen years, voices have protested the institutionalization of this "Standard Model"-I have cited several in the preceding paragraph-and they have done so principally, and in my view correctly, by inveighing against the bad faith of the middle-class professoriate while, at the same time, pointing out how deeply critical