Teaching and Practice: Composing Texts, Composing Lives

Abstract

In this article, Sondra Perl draws on the work of theorists in composition studies, reader response theory, critical pedagogy, and feminist studies to explicate a pedagogy that incorporates her own learning and development with that of her adult students. She emphasizes not only the importance of her students' responding critically to various literary texts, but also the importance of teachers' critically analyzing the texts of their teaching practice. Perl asserts that a classroom of adult learners has the potential to be a supportive milieu in which both students and teachers use writing as a way of brining their own experience to their interpretation of texts. In this way, Perl believes, students and teachers alike author their coming together, and the classroom becomes a site in which they compose not only texts, but also themselves.