Expanding students’ conceptions of writing: The inclusion of social-justice-themed texts into writing courses

Amid a growing need for critically informed and socially active publics, higher education institutions strive to illustrate the value of their curricula for their students and their communities. Critical pedagogy theorists like Paulo Freire and Henry A. Giroux argue that students should be taught to use their course materials to critically engage with others in discussions about inequalities in their communities and to imagine ways of addressing those inequalities. Writing scholars such as Alexis McGee have highlighted the potential of using social justice themes to teach writing concepts in ways that help students connect what they are learning in their courses to the world around them. Here, I analyse data from a study of four college-level writing instructors who used critical pedagogy to guide their incorporation of a social-justice-themed text into their first-year composition courses. The instructors used the text to illustrate the importance of the concept of voice to students’ conceptions about the power of writing. My findings show how the inclusion of such social-justice-themed texts can help students in a diverse range of courses to critically reflect upon the larger relevance of what they learn and to apply that new knowledge to issues impacting their communities.