Composing Anti-Oppressive Communities Using Classroom Agreements

Abstract Upon arrival at college, students often experience difficulty integrating themselves into the new space of a university classroom. They may wonder how their previous skills connect to present use or they may feel linguistic, social, gendered, racial-ethnic, or class-related barriers to inclusion — barriers that are all too frequently invisible to faculty members. Classroom Community Agreements (CCAs) can ameliorate these situations by helping students to express their needs to their classmates and to faculty. CCAs operate on principles of antiauthoritarian teaching embraced by bell hooks; they embody Krista Ratcliffe's “rhetorical listening” and Lisa Blankenship's “rhetorical empathy,” both of which offer strategies for orienting instructors’ and students’ awareness to others’ needs within a classroom environment. This article studies the processes and effects of CCAs in a first-year writing program at a large university. Five faculty members from the Expository Writing Program at New York University narrate their practices of creating CCAs, which they initiated both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These narratives illuminate the ways CCAs build trust, clarify course values and expectations, and enhance experiences of presence and agency. Collectively, our findings demonstrate the potential that CCAs have to foster student belonging and learning in virtual and physical classroom spaces in first-year writing and other disciplines.