Is this what we _want_ as the norm in composition classrooms?

Power relations in society and culture are inescapable.  Critical pedagogy is the analysis  and deconstruction of how power works within the classroom, specifically the composition classroom for my purposes.   Over the past two years of my dissertation studies, I have grabbed onto the tension I had felt in the composition classroom concerning academic language. Critical pedagogy allows me to grapple with what can only be termed as  “institutional racism/ classism” inherent in the gatekeeper policies of the composition classroom and the insistence on adhering to academic language as the only acceptable mode of communication in the academic world.  George defines critical pedagogy within A Guide to Composition Pedagogies as “Engaging students in analysis of the unequal power relations that produced and are produced by cultural practices and institutions (including schools), and they hope to enable students to challenge this inequality” (77).  Pulling from critical theorists like Giroux, Schor, and Bizzell, George discusses the need for more democratic education in the composition classroom. This is done through an examination of power relations. Race, gender, social class, language proficiencies: all are rife with power implications.  

When applying critical pedagogy to Heidi Estrem’s discussion of threshold concepts in Naming What We Know in her discussions of “Disciplinary and Professional Identities are constructed through Writing”, I cannot help but be frustrated in the lack of imagination or critical acknowledgment when it comes to discussions on identity in classrooms through disciplinary composition.  What Estrem seems to point out, without seeing herself falling into this quicksand of identity, is that her discussion of students’ assimilation, for lack of a better word, into the academic community by creating and accepting a new identity forced upon them by disciplinary composition lacks representation of the critical discussions surrounding this very threshold; the very foundational knowledge that critical pedagogues challenge, she reifies without representing the on-going critical discussion in opposition to it.  She states,” for many students in college in countering disciplinary writing for the first time, discipline-specific writing threatens their sense of self because these ways of thinking of writing are so distinct from other more familiar reading and writing practices, such as those valued at home or in other communities in which the students are members”,  and she continues to state “ the process of learning to manage these tensions contributes to the formation of new identities, for as people progressed through their major disciplines, writing increasingly complex text in the process they are also writing themselves into the disciplines” (56).   Finalizing her summary of the threshold concept, she reiterates “ approaching disciplinary writing as an act of identity and affiliation illuminates how writing in new contacts is not only about learning abstracts conventions but also about learning how to be within a group with social conventions, norms, and expectations” (56).   

I understand that the purpose of Naming What We Know compiled by Adler Kastner and Wardle is in an attempt to state the common knowledge of the composition teacher and classroom. I also understand that part of that common knowledge is this assimilation with and into academic language. A complete lack of including the criticism of this imposed identity formation is what I contend with. There is, and will continue to be, by post-structuralist, performativity, post-colonial, feminist, queer, and gender studies theorists, a questioning of this heteronormative white male language in Academia and the insistence of the assimilation into it in the same breathe demonizing other language variations.

I agree that at this point, students must have access and knowledge of academic language in order to be successful within the academic world.

I take exception to the missing acknowledgment of the ongoing criticism of this “threshold” as this is not the way that academia has to be.