New Worlds of Errors and Expectations: Basic Writers and Digital Assumptions

Recent theory and scholarship in literacy and basic writing have greatly expanded our professional understanding of how arenas for the teaching of reading and writing are constituted.As we recognize reading and writing as social and political activities, we perceive our classroom roles as collaborative and transactional: in teaching, we are affected, and directed, by our students-their interests and competencies-as much as we affect them as learners.It is no longer possible to teach by way of presuming a linear trajectory for learning; that is, to subscribe to what Brian Street calls the "autonomous model of literacy." 1 Students bring their social worlds, engaged ideologically, to the classroom.We do the same, ostensibly representing the university, a bastion of ideological limits as both our students and colleagues regard it. 2But it is not that students represent many worlds, their teachers just one.The Spring 2009 issue of JBW makes clear that the cross-cultural nature of both students' and teachers' experiences, in and outside of the classroom, offers teachers the perspective by which to invite an ever greater range of students' extracurricular interests, practices, and beliefs into the classroom-with the goal of strengthening students' capacity for social critique.Another result also obtains: students come to realize that their social, extracurricular worlds are sometimes also ours, and that we as their teachers can be partners with them in exploring these same worlds we share.It is this very sensitive understanding of the range of experience encompassing students' so-called "private lives," and thus their ways of being in the classroom, that inspires Donald McCrary to argue for religion as a relatively untapped framework by which to help students examine their process of identity-formation and coming to know society.In our lead article, "Not Losing My Religion: Using The Color Purple to Promote Critical Thinking in the Writing Classroom," McCrary helps us to see students beyond gender, race, and class distinctions, as he recognizes their great efforts to determine their own futures.Religion, he asserts, is part of this endeavor, indeed the push "that allows some students to get out of bed in the morning, encouraging and supporting them to struggle through another day."Noting that religion is generally seen and discounted by the academy as a tool for reinforcing limits, McCrary explores the 1