Diana George

Cultural Studies in composition levels the playing field between perceived high (literary) and low (mass/popular cultural & media studies) textual models in the composition classroom. It attempts to bridge the gap between intellectual propositionizing and practical, work applications of intellectual projects among academic disciplines. Evidence of these aims can be found in the democritization of composition studies for problems learners including cognitively deficient, poverty-stricken or code-restricted learners, the restoration of rhetoric to the center of composition curriculum in order to produce better writer-interpreter citizens workers and critics, and the engagement of cultural studies and postmodernism in the classroom (80-81).

In practice, cultural studies topics focus subject matter close to student experiences and engage in dynamic readings of a variety of texts. The readily-available materials of the cultural studies composition classroom can funtion as a bridge from self-expression to the experience of culture at large by engaging in the making and analysis of myriad texts.

John Trimbur, pensively

The risks of cultural studies are over democritization of textual material in a low-risk environment leading to an “uncritical populist” audience and the subsumption of student experience by way of the teacher-as-textual-guide through the complicated terrains of mass media culture. A third risk of the cultural studies composition classroom is the priveleging of content over creation. Additionally, the cultural studies model can lead to teachers foisting leftist ideology onto students. Finally, cultural studies has shown divides between process model teachers who develop a community of writers versus teachers who use the cultural studies model to create a contact zone in which cultures meet and clash.

The cultural studies approach to the writing classroom will endure because it presents a kind of mother theory that can incorporate other pedagogical practices into its own practice, including: “encoding/decoding studies, ideological critiques, microehtnographies, literacy narratives, networked classrooms, contact zone pedagogy [...] feminism, race and ethnic studies and queer theory” (86). Students can also be engaged as cultural consumers and producers by employing assignments that engage them to produce texts for the world at large as well as the academy.