PUB TYPE Journal Articles (080) Opinion Papers (120) Reports Descriptive (141)

For one professional teacher of writing, language is one of many locations in which political struggles exist, and the classroom is a site from which he and his students can actively examine culture, developing strategies of language use that can facilitate social change. Critical and feminist pedagogies are two closely related ways of teaching from which socially created power structures can be examined so that society can move towards new ways of thinking and towards a new consciousness. Davis, Resta, Miller, and Fortman (1999) encourage instructors in their informative years of teaching (i.e., beginning teachers) to conduct a type of action research in their own classrooms to discover ways to develop more effective classroom practices. This article is about such research. The article begins with how critical and feminist theories informed the author/educator's teaching of first-year composition at New Mexico State University, a land-grant institution. It then describes the specific classroom strategies that h