Belief in the students’ capacity to learn also assumes, with early composition activist teachers Marie Ponsot and Rosemary Deen (1982) and Paulo Freire (1991), that students enter the classroom already writers of literature, already writers (and readers) endowed with agency and authority. As a result, activist pedagogy is transformative rather than additive. As students and teachers learn to examine problems or situations more critically and explicitly through language, not only does their repertoire of writing skills or tools expand, but also their responses or behaviors change, indicating that internal changes or transformations have also occurred. The concept of personal transformation leads to the final premise of activist pedagogy, that teaching and learning are inherently public and thus political, not private, acts. Even though teaching may occur in large lecture halls (not likely for composition classes) or via the internet (much more likely) where student-to-student and student-to-teacher interactions are most tightly circumscribed, students and teachers nonetheless do interact in ways that create meaning socially and that reverberate beyond the initial acts of communication. In other words, activist pedagogy embraces a political agenda, which in the United States might be expressed as a citizenry more fully engaged in the democratic process and perhaps able to share more fully in the economic or material rewards believed available to those workers who can articulate their ideas and critiques more effectively (Berlin, 1990). Therefore, activist pedagogy aims to effect both idealist and materialist ends; activist pedagogy is supposed to do something for students and teachers, to make life better (eventually) for everyone.