AbstractThis article describes an antiracist first-year writing curriculum, formulated in the wake of Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. Classroom participants examined the racialized and class-based nature of “Standard English,” then each student informed their instructor of how they wished to be graded. Student coauthors reflect on their educational experience.

The two primary US political parties are increasingly polarizing along affective dimensions. To increase students’ engagement with controversial texts and conversations, the author theorizes a novel method of critical pedagogy: performed contradictoriness. By emphasizing seemingly contradictory identity markers, the instructor attempts to become opaque, thereby frustrating students’ attempts at interpretation.

Rather than ignoring or criticizing students' vocational concerns, critical pedagogy can work on, in, and through them, thereby gaining persuasive credibility and simultaneously extending Paulo Freire's educational project. Following Freire's command to “rediscover power,” this article employs Michel Foucault's analysis of neoliberal biopolitics to imagine possibilities for both personal and systemic transformation.

Around 1986, inventional researchers began to presuppose an externalist philosophy of mind, thereby ushering in the postprocess era. Ecological composition and posthumanism,now understood as postprocess inventional models, present direct pedagogical applications, allowing different objects (e.g., databases, search engines) to qualify as writing and favoring rhetorical impact over “originality.”