Abstract

Offering an emancipatory response to the widening fissure between day-to-day experience and institutional conventionality, [Kurt] Spellmeyer [in Common Ground: Dialogue, Understanding, and the Teaching of Composition] concludes with ideal of classroom practice that maintains a balance of communicative that silences no one, teachers or students (22-23). If freshman paper, for instance, were seen as threshold between two distinct contexts of social life and meaning, teachers could stop serving as initiatory gate-keep[ers], barring the way to pollution by the 'nonacademic.' (Bloom 846) Spellmeyer's reported view, seemingly endorsed by reviewer Lynn Z. Bloom, is that to eschew gatekeeping-at least in first-year college writing courses-is utopian aim, but in the good sense: the shimmering ideal at the horizon of current practice, the thing to keep moving toward. Gatekeeping is all caught up in power imbalances, silencings, the imposition of one value system (the academic) on another and presumably more natural one-an imposition seen as part of misguided and perhaps even fetishistic concern for purity (and consequent anxiety over pollution). Compared to such practice, any ideal is better, even one that's bit pie-inthe-sky. Views like these are such commonplaces that they are rarely defended in detail, or even fully articulated. Bits of explication, however, lie here and there in any