Cultural Studies in the Writing Classroom

Within composition studies, a pedagogical theory which has taken hold comes out of cultural studies. This perspective influenced by Marxism, Freire and other theorists concerned with critiquing capitalist culture and freeing people from their social conditions, influences composition classrooms in various ways.

First of all, cultural studies theory challenges teachers to set up composition classrooms to be sites of critique of the dominant culture rather than just reproducing that culture. This involves a paradigm shift because in the past colleges have been preparing students to function within the larger culture, especially in terms of getting jobs. However, there is precedence within college curriculum's to better the student and the culture-cultural studies just goes farther in its transformative goals.

Because of the goal to transform the dominant culture, cultural studies within the composition studies resists the idea that the first year writing class should simply be a service to the rest of the University community. The writing classroom isn't there to just teach a set of skills, but, as Patricia Harkin argues, it should promote an inquiry into cultural values and postmodern ideas.

The composition classroom isn't insular even if its primary focus isn't service to the rest of the academic community. In fact, this inquiry promoted by cultural studies may help students develop a critical awareness and writing technique that is essential in all discourse.

When developing cultural studies pedagogy in the composition classroom, instructors need concrete information on how to promote critical awareness. One theorist, Alan France, attempts to connect the liberatory and political impulses of cultural studies to the day-to-day realities of teaching writing by presenting pragmatic strategies for teaching students to write critically about culture.

For example, France suggests using examples in the media to look at multiple and contradictory messages designed to promote certain capitalist values. With this tool, teachers can help students develop awareness of their own ideological subjectivities. In order to do this, students must be alerted to the historical and political dimensions of language and knowledge production.

France argues that students must learn to see how they are situated and identified by language. In Left Margins, France writes that teachers, "need to set up classrooms where students talk about their responses to popular texts as mixed rather than simple," where "they can write of the pleasures as well as the problems they find in popular texts."

To be effective, cultural studies must understand how resistance is generated by these teaching practices and how this opposition can be useful in framing cultural contradictions.