Attending to the Margins: Writing, Researching, and Teaching on the Front Lines

by Michelle Hall Kells, Valerie Balester

Within the next few years, compositionists can expect the pedagogical borders between first-year composition and basic writing to continue to blur as we attend to students currently on the margins of mainstream academia. Our students will be older, poorer, female, minority, and immigrant; and we must be prepared to experiment with pedagogy that will serve them. This important new book was written to assist with that process. Attending to the Margins crosses regional, institutional, gender, rank, and racial lines, providing new insight into how best to teach traditionally excluded students. The essays are grounded in ethnographic, quantitative, case-study, and text-based research that reflects the perspectives of front-line practitioners in the field and their interpretations of methodological diversity in composition studies. Some of the topics covered orality/literacy, bilingualism, bidialectalism, linguistic prejudice and shame, technological literacy, and ethics of disclosure. As one of the few sociolinguistically-informed, research-based anthologies in composition, Attending to the Margins demonstrates the most current applications of method and theory. Graduate-level students, writing instructors, writing program administrators, and writing center directors will all find the book essential reading.

112 pages, Paperback

First published October 12, 1999