ABSTRACT
While Marjorie Goodwin's (1990) concept of participatory frameworks leads me to stress the need for a teacher to descriptively evaluate the situation within which a communication act takes place, the idea of a participatory framework also suggests that multiple agents are evaluating a speaker. When a child on the streets of Philadelphia speaks and that speech is inflected for an audience, and opens to invite members of that audience into the debate—to take sides—then, the audience members are always evaluating and creating the meaning of the participatory framework. For the teaching of composition, this multiple interactivity urges moving beyond a student–teacher vision of the composing process and to see the student within a framework of other students, the teacher, and potential audience members outside of school.
