This article revisits the scholarship on emotion in composition studies and extends this work through a consideration of emotion in community-based writing courses. With examples from student reflection essays from one such course, Writing With the Community, I explore emotion as a generative aspect of the students’ semester writing projects for community organizations. In particular, I examine students’ emotional responses to their community work, which include empathy, shame, anger, and unease, as I argue that students’ emotions were an effective means of attaining their writing goals and a necessary component of their desire for social action and justice. I also offer three concepts from education theorists—emotional scaffolding, encouraging students to inhabit an ambiguous self, and emotion as a mode of critical inquiry—which I develop as strategies for achieving common goals in community-based writing courses.

Educational theorists emphasize the importance of creating a classroom environment that encourages positive or productive student resistance to dominant social discourse. This article revisits work in critical pedagogy, feminism, and composition by focusing on the challenges of teaching a first-year writing course on the theme of masculinity. The gender imbalance of this class, with a majority of male students, combined with the course theme, contributed to an environment that raised unanticipated questions, which prompted the reconsideration of the intersections of critical, feminist, and composition pedagogies. In this class, the dynamics worked against a process of critical inquiry and reflection and instead often reified dominant view-points and social positions, specifically with respect to gender. This article concludes with evidence of how practices in composition studies, especially student-instructor conferences, helped to redirect some of the reactive resistance encountered in the classroom.