Russell Mayo

Writing center praxis can be enriched by noting the affinities between peer
tutoring and “deschooling,” a concept first articulated by social critic Ivan
Illich in 1970. Ivan Illich’s proposals for alternative educational
arrangements, such as peer matching and skill acquisition, resemble writing
center spaces and the work of peer tutoring. Connecting deschooling with
writing center scholarship, I describe how peer tutoring resonates with
Illich’s vision for what education might look like in a deschooled society:
convivial, user-initiated learning that resists the competitive, commodified logics of traditional schools.

Digital link https://wac.colostate.edu/docs/wln/v48n4/mayo.pdf

This practitioner-focused chapter argues that teaching Shaun Tan's graphic novel The Arrival with ekphrastic poetry offers a valuable arts integration strategy for teaching visual literacy and critical thinking about human migration and human/nonhuman relations. Pairing Tan's book of wordless visual art and ekphrastic poetry can, in the words of literary scholar W.T.J. Mitchell, support an "overcoming of otherness" through composition, literacy, visual arts, social studies, and social and emotional learning.

Building on important scholarship in eco-composition, eco-justice, and sustainability studies, I argue that writers and writing teachers must direct attention to the relationship between writing and place, context, environment. Through writing, we must consider a number of pressing environmental challenges too often overlooked in English classrooms, particularly the growing climate crisis. I close by offering suggestions for writing not just about the environment, but writing in, for, and with our environments.

Damon Gameau's documentary offers an inspiring, optimistic look at how current technologies and community action can be used to combat climate change and make the world a better place for future generations. With its imaginative and informative approach, the film also provides plenty of stimuli for classroom discussion and projects, as LUKE RODESILER and RUSSELL MAYO outline.

While some may equate the daily chaos and disorder of working in a writing center with anarchy, I invoke anarchism as an overlooked theoretical lens with which to view literacy and learning. This essay begins by posing the question, What might tutors, educators, and scholars be missing by not looking at writing centers from an anarchist perspective? Blending writing center lore with ethnographic and theoretical research, I approach anarchism as both a lens and a process for exploring the everyday, informal learning practices of peer tutors at a large university writing center. Overall, I explain how tutoring in this particular informal learning space fosters an autonomous form of “anti-oppressive” educational praxis, prefiguring a normative set of anarchist values including spontaneity, mutuality, and cooperation. In the end, I argue that re-presenting writing centers as affinity spaces of social learning through an anarchist lens offers rich potentials for re-envisioning our work through more radical conceptions of non-hierarchical learning and social relations, while also transforming higher education policies and practices along more ethical and egalitarian lines.

In light of the growing ecological crisis, I problematize the constructivist educational philosophy of John Dewey. Although many view Dewey’s pragmatism as complementary to both social justice education and environmentalism, proponents of eco-justice education such as C. A. Bowers question many of the fundamental assumptions at the heart of Dewey’s theories. I also consider the implications of an eco-justice lens for English teaching and teacher education.

Damon Gameau's documentary offers an inspiring, optimistic look at how current technologies and community action can be used to combat climate change and make the world a better place for future generations. With its imaginative and informative approach, the film also provides plenty of stimuli for classroom discussion and projects, as LUKE RODESILER and RUSSELL MAYO outline.

This dissertation presents a case study exploration of peer tutoring in a university writing center (WC) viewed through the lens of "deschooling," a radical educational theory articulated by social philosopher Ivan Illich. In this manuscript, I explore my personal experiences of schooling in relation to Illich's work and the rhetoric of Illich's deschooling thesis. I also present research findings from the Great Lakes State University Writing Center (GLSU-WC, a pseudonym), a unique literacy learning space where students come together to learn about academic writing through pedagogies and interactions that more closely resemble "deschooling" than traditional classroom relations. My overall argument is that GLSU-WC's pedagogy of reciprocal learning represents an "actually-existing" form of deschooling, albeit one that has developed within and in many ways supported by wider educational structures. That is, I view peer tutoring in the GLSU-WC a...

Catastrophic storms, searing heat waves, crumbling waterfronts, warming oceans, air-fouling forest fires and mass extinction have become facts of life. Under these conditions, it is difficult to imagine that the global industrial civilization will continue in its present form. This requires us to reconsider the subject of ecocomposition from a new perspective: “What does it mean to teach college writing in the face of this sobering reality?” The introduction reviews the history of ecocomposition and reframes it in light of the apocalyptic turn in climate discourse over the last quarter century as well as the role that ecocomposition theory can play in framing these discussions. Teaching Writing in the Age of Catastrophic Climate Change is organized into four sections. The first section considers the environmental narrative from the viewpoint of climate justice, while the second reframes pedagogies of place in light of the climate catastrophe. The third section examines the intersections of writing studies and the natural sciences, while the fourth section entertains the personal and emotional dimensions of teaching ecocomposition within the framework of catastrophic climate change. If we have been successful, these chapters provide a starting place for having sobering discussions in our classrooms, and considering what ecocomposition means in this unsettling age.