Researching the Minimum Wage: A Moral Economy for the Classroom

Abstract

Writing and research assignments in a composition class may seem politically inert but are not. Even the trivial is ideological. Writing about one's summer vacation, that quintessential cliche of composition instruction, is inherently since it must necessarily elicit sensitive socioeconomic information about the writer, information that can scarcely be considered value-free. Ironically, the numerous assaults on what has recently been termed the neoFascism of the left (Camille Paglia qtd. in Stanfill 24) and illiberal education (D'Souza 51) have inadvertently revealed the severely ideological intent of all pedagogies. This backlash against so-called political correctness has made glaringly explicit the extent to which every cultural practice is a practice. In fact, thanks to current conservative retrenchment, one need not any longer justify the claim that writing is always already a act. Certainly, the writing assignment to be discussed here, an assignment which requires students to research and report on what it would be like to live on minimum wage, is not really any more than a more traditional research assignment on, say critical perspectives on Hamlet or the effects of television on children; it is simply more obvious about its content because it involves an inquiry into economics rather than literature or culture. As this assignment suggests, my approach to teaching composition is openly in that I choose, for pedagogical reasons, to focus writing classes on social issues. I take this socially-oriented approach to the teaching of writing not because I regard writing as form without content but because I find that my students squirm when I deal with rhetorical issues and research techniques in isolation. While I find the detailed analysis of rhetorical structures fascinating, the majority of my students regard this exercise as a form of torture. By contrast, they find discussion of social concerns intellectually engaging and thus, because they are engaged, they perform better rhetorically. Like Toni-Lee Capossela, whose article, Students as Sociolinguists: Getting