Teaching Writing as Social Justice

Abstract

If you’re like me, you never imagined that teaching International Relations undergraduates would mean teaching writing. Teaching college writing was meant for the English department, right? But if you’re also like me, you received too-many-to-count unreadable undergraduate papers and had to figure out how to grade them and what to do with them. You vacillated from despair to rage to resentment and maybe even decided to take out the writing assignment the next time. I’ve been there, and this chapter chronicles my story of transformation from my early teaching years of resentment and despair over the state of undergraduate writing at a large, public institution to reframing my approach to undergraduate writing as a critical element of my pedagogy. It shares my experiences of embracing teaching writing as one of our most important deliverable skills to students of all backgrounds and as a critical tool toward social justice.