Abstract This article suggests pedagogical practices to help first-generation students gain effective problem-solving strategies for the future transfer of writing knowledge and skills. The retention of first-generation students depends on developing four positive dispositions for learning: success attribution, self-efficacy, expectancy value, and self-regulation. Meaningful writing assignments with a connection to students’ cultural experiences are an essential foundation for improving transfer. Specific reflective activities are detailed for analyzing emotional reactions to writing experiences, evaluating procedural writing strategies, and solving current and future writing-related problems. A reflective problem-solving pedagogy promotes deep learning by emphasizing students’ agency in responding to writing difficulties and their resourcefulness in creating successful solutions.

The bias against personal experience manifests in writing courses as privileging the citation of scholars, fearing emotional writing, and equating argumentation with democratic ideals. To value the lives and knowledges of marginalized students, the curricular goals, assignments, and activities for writing courses needs to be reconsidered. Culturally sustaining pedagogy explores, extends, and examines the experiences of students. Meaningful, experience-based, narrative writing assignments are suggested: memoir essays, ethnographic research reports, and multigenre interview projects. Analysis activities challenge students to examine a chosen experience through several scholarly lenses. By adding complex analysis to their writing, students gain a challenging new experience that considers past, present, and future influences upon their identity formation. Experience-based writing assignments make room for home language through dialogue and informal genres that include intentional code meshing and translingualing. This inclusion prompts questions about academic language conflicts and opens discussion about how language represents identity, negotiates hierarchies, and permits agency.

Color highlighting is used to connect revision mini-lessons to teacher comments that are easy for students to identify and quicker for teachers to generate electronically.

The author reports on and analyzes the inclusion of parody in her sequence of assignments for a graduate composition theory seminar. She contends that having students write parodies of particular theorists and theoretical camps enables them to gain critical leverage that they might not otherwise obtain on a field (in this case, composition studies).

Research Article| January 01 2006 Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities Nancy Mack Nancy Mack Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Pedagogy (2006) 6 (1): 53–78. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Nancy Mack; Ethical Representation of Working-Class Lives: Multiple Genres, Voices, and Identities. Pedagogy 1 January 2006; 6 (1): 53–78. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-6-1-53 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsPedagogy Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © 2006 Duke University Press2006 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.