Reviews
Composition faculty may see the women and men in their classrooms as "students" and "writers." Market-minded administrators may call them "clients" and "consumers." In Dangerous Writing, however, Tony Scott points out that a growing majority of our students are workers, logging in twenty or more hours each week at The Gap, Chili's, and UPS. Rather than ignore our students' working lives or assume that a college degree is the ticket out of a low-wage gig, Professor Scott urges us to imagine writing classrooms that foster a "dialectic between the self that works in the service economy and the self that attends the university in search of a secure middle-class life." What is potentially dangerous about such classrooms? When teachers and students together name, examine, and investigate terms of work--including the casualization of labor on which both the GAP and most American universities now depend--together they might also find creative ways to intervene, to rewrite the terms inside as well as outside the academy. Nancy Welch, author of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, While previous scholarship has examined this issue either from outside the discipline, or has focused solely on contingent labor within rhetoric and composition, this book by its wider purview and its knowledge of scholarship in rhetoric and composition, is able to make systemic connections to the discipline and is much stronger for that. It is a courageous book-"dangerous" in that it is a self-critique of the discipline that the author and reader share-and all the more important for that. James Zebroski, author ofThinking through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing, While previous scholarship has examined this issue either from outside the discipline, or has focused solely on contingent labor within rhetoric and composition, this book by its wider purview and its knowledge of scholarship in rhetoric and composition, is able to make systemic connections to the discipline and is much stronger for that. It is a courageous book--"dangerous" in that it is a self-critique of the discipline that the author and reader share--and all the more important for that. James Zebroski, author of Thinking through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing, Composition faculty may see the women and men in their classrooms as "students" and "writers." Market-minded administrators may call them "clients" and "consumers." In Dangerous Writing, however, Tony Scott points out that a growing majority of our students are workers, logging in twenty or more hours each week at The Gap, Chili's, and UPS. Rather than ignore our students' working lives or assume that a college degree is the ticket out of a low-wage gig, Professor Scott urges us to imagine writing classrooms that foster a "dialectic between the self that works in the service economy and the self that attends the university in search of a secure middle-class life." What is potentially dangerous about such classrooms? When teachers and students together name, examine, and investigate terms of work-including the casualization of labor on which both the GAP and most American universities now depend-together they might also find creative ways to intervene, to rewrite the terms inside as well as outside the academy. Nancy Welch, author of Living Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, Composition faculty may see the women and men in their classrooms as "students" and "writers." Market-minded administrators may call them "clients" and "consumers." In Dangerous Writing, however, Tony Scott points out that a growing majority of our students are workers, logging in twenty or more hours each week at The Gap, Chili's, and UPS. Rather than ignore our students' working lives or assume that a college degree is the ticket out of a low-wage gig, Professor Scott urges us to imagine writing classrooms that foster a "dialectic between the self that works in the service economy and the self that attends the university in search of a secure middle-class life." What is potentially dangerous about such classrooms? When teachers and students together name, examine, and investigate terms of work-including the casualization of labor on which both the GAP and most American universities now depend-together they might also find creative ways to intervene, to rewrite the termsinsideas well asoutsidethe academy. Nancy Welch, author ofLiving Room: Teaching Public Writing in a Privatized World, While previous scholarship has examined this issue either from outside the discipline, or has focused solely on contingent labor within rhetoric and composition, this book by its wider purview and its knowledge of scholarship in rhetoric and composition, is able to make systemic connections to the discipline and is much stronger for that. It is a courageous book-"dangerous" in that it is a self-critique of the discipline that the author and reader share-and all the more important for that. James Zebroski, author of Thinking through Theory: Vygotskian Perspectives on the Teaching of Writing
