Patricia H. Perry

Abstract for "Beyond Naming Writing: Freirian Conscientization in the College Composition Classroom"

Many teachers who practice critical pedagogy in the writing classroom admit that by the time they get through some productive, unveiling of targeted issues of oppression or power relations, little time is left for targeting writing or that students don't in the course of a semester translate their newly forming knowledge of the issue into successful writing. Given this result, it is easy to dismiss the critical pedagogical approach in the writing classroom as an ineffective one, and it is, if it doesn't take students beyond naming writing as a reality. As a result of how most students have been conditioned by current-traditional approaches to teaching writing, by the time they reach a first-year composition classroom, the reality to be unveiled is writing.

Critical pedagogy can better serve students of writing when its method for unveiling oppressive realities is applied to the reality of writing. The method, the Freirian process of conscientization, which is explained in this paper, can be used to take students from naive consciousness to critical consciousness of writing and to allow the writing classroom to accomplish the goal of knowledge-making about writing -- thereby providing the knowledge to break the oppressive hold that the inability to write well, to know the nature of writing and what it means to write, has on students and writing teachers alike. The metaphor for the movement from semi-intransitive consciousness to conscientization, in the act of knowing, is a spiral, a series of contiguous cyclical movements which require the catalyst of authentic dialogue. Moving students up the spiral with writing as the cognizable object should be the focus of a critical pedagogical approach to teaching writing; if not, then it fails to unveil the most oppressive reality of the writing classroom.

Summary

Moving students beyond naming to a critical consciousness of writing using the Freirian process of conscientization allows the critical pedagogical approach to better serve the composition classroom.