Writing in the Now: Cultural Consciousness and Critical Pedagogy in the Information Age of Composition

In the efforts to connect student writing with student living, cultural studies composition pedagogy integrates students’ writing instruction with cultural analysis. This type of instruction is concerned with both individual and social processes of student writing through an intersection between composition and cultural studies, as well as a reconsideration of rhetoric. With modern considerations such as terrorism, greater multiculturalism, digital media, and consumerism, it is even more necessary that composition programs foster critical and reflective cultural and individual awareness, helping students to become more informed, empowered, and democratically-inclined citizens. A focus on social epistemic rhetoric can provide a methodology through which the cultural studies composition classroom can acknowledge and integrate new, and arguably untraditional, understandings of rhetoric.