What I learned at the Center for Nonviolence about the systematic, institutional nature of domestic violence and abuse shaped my critical academic inquiry as a student and feminist, and shapes to this day my teaching philosophy and practices. At the Center for Nonviolence, I had the teaching advantage of knowing that violence and abuse figured prominently in my students’ lives, but now as a first-year composition instructor, I have no such advantage, although my personal tragedies and in those of my adolescent, economically privileged white children have sensitized me to the myriad traumas with which students might enter the classroom.

Having evolved as a consequence of this sensitization, my definition of “activist pedagogy,” as it will be used in this essay, will sound quite familiar to the rhetoricians and compositionist readers of College Composition and Communication (CCC) and College English. With them, I argue that activist pedagogy embraces a few basic premises. For activist teachers, all students, regardless of the extent of prior academic successes, are capable of learning and producing college level writing. Thus, despite terms such as “basic writers” and even the less pejorative “underprepared student,” all students are characterized as having the necessary biological/cognitive capacity to do college level writing, and the role of the activist teacher, therefore, is to create a learning environment in which the necessary academic successes can be achieved. With Judith Newman, who argues about whole language learning, activist pedagogy assumes “error is inherent in the process” (as cited in Berlin, 1990, p. 216)—error is not indicative of student deficiency.