Writing as an Act of Power: Basic Writing Pedagogy as Social Practice (Composition, Literacy, Rhetoric).

This dissertation is a critical inquiry into the ideological assumptions that inform familiar practices in basic writing pedagogy. Starting with the recent fascination among composition teachers with Thomas Kuhn's theory of paradigms, the first chapter describes the positivist dichotomy between writers and the world and how it restricts process-centered theory and product-oriented theory alike. The rest of the dissertation examines the limits imposed on the definitions of writing as both process and product, and offers an alternative, critical pedagogy based on Paulo Freire's dialogical principles and complemented by Michel Foucault's social analysis of discourse. Chapters Two and Three examine the product and process theories as representative textbooks apply them to basic writers. The product-oriented presentation of writing as a vocational survival skill encourages inexperienced writers to draw authority from personal experience, only to submit to readers' impartial, institutional authority. Process theory presents writing as a tool for personal and intellectual enhancement; yet it, too, ultimately advises student-writers to subordinate their creativity to formal requirements in order to ensure audience underst and ing. Because both theories locate the writer's authority in a subjective realm and the reader's authority in the "real" world of discursive regulations, both tacitly deflect students working to achieve social authority into sacrificing it. Chapter Four presents Paulo Freire's pedagogy as a foundation for an alternative to the product and process theories. The interplay between discourse, consciousness, and reality at the heart of Freire's pedagogy is essential, but his abstract description does not account for U.S. social conditions and their effect on language practices. Ira Shor's adaptation for U.S. college students does explain social influences on student and teacher consciousness and classroom practices. But to underst and how discourse operates in social relations, the chapter explains Michel Foucault's detailed outline of the social and institutional regulations which govern and are governed by discourse in Western culture.PhDLanguage artsUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/159871/1/8412075.pd