An instructor teaching a summer semester of freshman composition collected data for a descriptive study from five students in the class. Of the five students, one was Caucasian, and the other four were Hispanic; all had children. A central value of the study was its potential for demonstrating the benefits of teaching composition through…

Strange as it may seem, the classroom is not, by and large, accepted within the composition discipline as a scene for genuine knowledge-making and theory-building. Teachers should go back to the "concrete materials" from which knowledge and theory are made. An example of what can be learned in the classroom comes from an effort to…