Classrooms, Pedagogies, and the Rhetoric of Equality

Whether society still finds itself in the sort of peril that Weaver postulated over forty years ago is not a question I wish to debate in this essay; my purpose is, instead, to take a closer look at the word equality as it is used in current scholarship in composition studies. Not only is equality a term that occurs frequently, particularly in reference to the new collaborative classroom, but, far from standing alone, it is often accompanied by a host of related termsequity, egalitarian, peer, and even democracy-that depend on it in part for definition and that are often used interchangeably with it. In The Idea of Community in the Study of Writing, Joseph Harris examines the uses and abuses of that ubiquitous term, community, concluding that while it packs a powerful rhetorical punch, its practical application is so vague as to be ultimately meaningless. Do equality and its satellites fall into the same category? I will argue here that indeed they do.