Thus, first, I introduce women at the Center for Nonviolence and the challenges they faced in pursuing literacy. Furthermore, I discuss the lines of inquiry pursued in my attempts to understand the nature of these challenges for them, other battered women, and the many students with whom I have worked as a consultant in the writing center and have taught as a first year college composition instructor at IPFW. My rhetorical goal here is to illustrate the complex effects of domestic abuse on literacy learning as a way to help compositionists better see the effects of multiple forms of trauma that traditional-age students, not only returning adults, bring with them to the college classroom.

I then introduce the theory of enactionism, an extension of the psycholinguistic theory of connectionism, through which I can explain memory phenomena associated with survivors of domestic abuse not accounted for under other theories of the mind. Afterward, I argue that compositionists can better understand the effects of domestic abuse on literacy learning by characterizing domestic abuse as traumatic and understand the most complex effects of domestic abuse as posttraumatic stress disorder. My rhetorical goal here is to demonstrate that the social constructivist theories often espoused by activist teachers of composition cannot explain sufficiently the struggles of students with histories of trauma nor yield adequate teaching practices with them because social constructivism does not account for the neuropsychological effects of trauma on literacy learning. Consequently, I argue that activist compositionists should expand their theoretical grounding beyond the scholarship of our own discipline. Activist composition teachers following in Freire’s model should incorporate into our pedagogy the empirically and quantitatively supported research into biological mechanisms of learning, especially those suggested by correlations between trauma and memory formation and retrieval—in order to facilitate the learning of all our students.