Encouraging a civic literacy: A pedagogy of self-reflection, agency, and action

TL;DRAbstract

Students enter college composition courses with preconceived ideas about literacy. Literacy myths restrict the ways that students engage in writing activities and limit their development and perceptions of themselves as writers. To overcome these barriers, writers should become active participants in the construction of their literacy development. A composition pedagogy should encourage writers to redefine their literacy as continuously changing and as a fluid concept—a literacy of possibilities. Composition researchers and pedagogues should find ways to re-conceptualize literacy as fluid changing from context to context—or, as Deborah Brandt (1998) suggests, literacy in flux. Jay Robinson (1998) calls for a pedagogy that encourages civic literacy among students: developing agency, engaging in conversations, and drawing on Freire's “praxis,” taking actions that produce change based on critical self-reflection. This study contends that a pedagogy of civic literacy encourages writers to

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