The Role of Reading in the Composition Classroom.

Abstract

As a teacher, I have always found selection of texts peculiarly painful. To choose include in a literature or composition course is inevitably make decisions about exclude, and exclusion is nearly always painful. As a writing program administrator, I came dread those hordes of publishers' reps hawking their wares, and even more so, that moment when, after careful deliberation, we presented our instructors (most of them graduate students) with lists of approved texts for various courses. Quite simply, text selection defines us: defines courses we teach, our goals and ambitions, our theories and pedagogies. Questions about read in composition courses have shaped them selves into a fierce ideological debate, fueled not only by local tensions between those who teach literature and those who teach composition, but also by broader concerns about constitutes literacy and about nature and function of higher education. We need, as Jane Peterson has argued in College English, reframe this debate: to focus on instead of genres and contextualize our conversations about Freshman (314). Much of discussion about in writing courses has proceeded from an unintentionally narrow or even impoverished sense of involves. Moreover, commentators have frequently asked wrong starting questions. What if instead of asking, what should we read in composition classes? we asked why do we read in composition classes? By focusing more carefully on happens when students read, we can make more astute choices about both course design and text selection. In supervising novice teachers (specifically, graduate student instructors), I came recognize how differently each teacher sees Iser and others call the act of reading and its connection anyone who teaches composition knows as the writing process. The students in my weekly teaching practicum were once complaining, as they often do, about anthology of non-fiction essays selected by our departmental textbook committee. As I recall, reader in question was an innocuous, inoffensive collection of expository essays, exactly text that a committee of teachers with strong individual viewpoints might select in compromise. The graduate students, all second quarter teaching assistants responsible for their own sections of English 1 (a freshman-level expository writing course), bemoaned both paucity of

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