ABSTRACT
What does it mean to talk about literacy in the title and content of a course for beginning college writers? Is an emphasis on academic literacy compatible with a belief in multicultural literacy? And how does such a course incorporate an established, although still not universally practiced, pedagogy of process and collaboration? These questions recur throughout this volume and are asked and answered in different ways by various writers. In this chapter, I raise these questions by explaining how certain basic principles of literacy learning and teaching inform the first-year composition course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. How well these principles have been implemented and how valid they prove to be in the context of students’ and teachers’ work and lives remain open questions, explored collaboratively through the kind of classroom-based research and theoretical inquiry represented in this book.
