Disrupted Routines: A Thoughtful Response to Controlling Student Writing

This article uses a quasi-spiritual lens to examine why some teachers feel compelled to inappropriately control student writing. For almost half a century, professionals in composition studies have engaged in vigorous conversations about the problem of teachers co-opting, correcting, and rewriting (essentially appropriating) student texts as part of their teaching practice. Most agree this prescriptive approach discourages students from owning their texts, while simultaneously short-circuiting the learning process. However, few have asked why the compulsion to control student writing persists for some teachers. Applying ideas from Jerome Miller’s book The Way of Suffering: A Geography of Crisis, this paper offers one possibility: The urge to inappropriately control student texts may come from our unwillingness to suffer. Can we, as teachers, allow our safe routines–our orderly worlds–to be disrupted by imperfect student writing?.