Introduction: Meeting Students Where They Are

After Tulane University reopened its doors to students and faculty in post-Katrina spring 2006, one of the first things administrators needed to do was reconstruct its freshman writing program. The history of this program has been outlined in an article first published in College English (2009: 29–47), coauthored by Tulane’s director of freshman writing, T. R. Johnson, and two of its first postdoctoral teaching fellows, Joe Letter and Judith Kemerait Livingston. In that article, our colleagues recount how the storm positioned Tulane to focus on the rebuilding of New Orleans, and it details the emergence of the university’s new writing program in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The College English article gives postdoctoral teaching fellows in our program something relatively uncommon among our colleagues at other writing programs across the country: a sense of the circumstances out of which our program was born, the kinds of institutional conversations that influenced its creation, and a vision of how our program participates in the larger mission of the university and its community partners. As postdoctoral teaching fellows, we have a clear sense of where our program has been, but also a more seasoned understanding, several years after the storm, of how the courses we teach at Tulane represent possibilities for all writing classrooms.

In our composition classrooms, instructors create theme-based curricula that emphasize analytical, argumentative, and research-based writing instruction. During Tulane’s first post-Katrina semesters, composition course themes tended to engage directly with rebuilding New Orleans through community awareness—a major initiative at our university. In many respects, our program was founded as a reaction to the need to negotiate and narrate the situation in which the first returning classes of students found themselves—a particularly fraught, but also potentially productive, rhetorical moment. Where better than in the shared experience of the writing course to ask students to practice a rhetoric necessitated by the immediate events that had so recently shaken their own community? However, as Livingston observed so succinctly in her section of the College English article, such ideological expectations were rooted in the earliest aftermath of the storm, and their moment seemed quickly to be lost on subsequent classes of freshmen who “increasingly talked about ‘moving beyond Katrina’ ” (40), a shift in student attitudes that led Livingston to reconsider the appropriateness of such explicitly “engaged citizenship” (42) for thematic course pedagogy:

If we can’t count on the overwhelming kairos of Katrina to trigger sustained reflection on what created that event and to commit students to their immediate surroundings, then we can’t really expect to draw such possibilities from 9/11, from the Iraq war, or even from the prospect of widespread economic collapse.

Looking back, I recognize that I underestimated the pace at which students adapt to a changing present. . . . I also recognize that my course’s theme—the readings and assignments—must adapt just as quickly, semester by semester, in order to meet incoming students “where they currently are” rather than where I would like them to be.

(Johnson et al. 2009: 40)

Livingston’s point about “trigger[ing] sustained reflection” (ibid.) continues to reverberate through our program as we continually think through the practical methodologies that best meet students where they are. As the program’s original focus on Katrina and its immediate effects wanes as a topic for composition, Tulane’s teaching fellows have had to address anew a classic problem of engaging students with relevant content-based instruction in terms of not only intellectual interest and skill sets but also content that can most readily assist in developing those skills. The articles collected in this issue’s FTC section thus address issues relevant for all teachers, not merely for those of us teaching in one particular composition program. My contribution reflects on two different themes Livingston used in the composition classroom and the ways in which implied politics and ideology (or lack thereof) affected the integrity of student writing. Daniel R. Mangiavellano makes a case for using Pride and Prejudice not only to teach skill-based writing but also to help...