Writing Students: Composition Testimonials and Representations of Students

Marguerite H. Helmers

Nov. 1994 · State University of New York Press

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This is a book about the usual teacher-student relationship in composition courses. It disrupts and rewrites the commonplace conception of the relationship by revealing the uneven ways in which power is deployed in and around the classroom. And it offers a responsible alternative. The author not only offers teachers a way of learning about power relations at their own specific sites, but also works towards a more equitable redistribution.

Drawing from testimonials about teaching practice published in the journal College Composition and Communication, Helmers explores conventions in this form of writing that portray students in a negative light and show the teacher to be powerfully triumphant in his or her creative pedagogy. Several prevalent modes of representation are discussed in the book, all of which define the students as distinctly different from the teachers, in other words, as an other.

The texture of the work is rich because Helmers takes an enormous amount of post-structuralist theory and recasts it in the sphere of the teacher-student relationship, itself an underexplored realm.

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Marguerite H. Helmers is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh.