Abstract

In 1976 Mina Shaughnessy invoked the phrase converting the natives (235) describe an undesirable attitude for a teacher of composition. In her article Diving In: An Introduction Basic Writing, she outlines four stages of development for composition teachers, of which converting the natives is the second. The tendency of teachers at this stage is see themselves as missionaries who initiate the unenlightened into the true path of correct writing. At this stage the teacher's goal is to carry the technology of advanced literacy the inhabitants of an underdeveloped country (235). Joseph Harris also mentions the term conversion in his 1989 critique of the use of discourse communities in the composition classroom (16). We have, Harris suggests, pictured various discourse communities as fundamentally different, in fact, so fundamentally different that we are at a loss explain how students make the break with former communities in order enter new communities. Harris describes the way we have tended think of students