College Writing

College Writing

College writing professors teach writing in a variety of ways around the United States and the world. The reason for this is that some professors are trying to teach their students a different aspect of writing an essay or a paper. Two views on this particular subject that I found interesting were Maxine Hairston’s essay "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" and also Thomas Bray’s newspaper article "Memorial Day and Multiculturalism". These essays are two totally different views on how diversity and multiculturalism is to be applied in America or taught in the college writing classroom.

In personal experience in classes in high school I was not faced with much diversity or multiculturalism. I attended a high school that was predominately white and I associated with mostly white people. I’m not going to say that I never talked to someone of another race or culture but these experiences were somewhat few and far between. Also in my high school it seemed that most of the different races segregated themselves from each other. I do feel that I might have benefited from talking to and interacting with people from different backgrounds than that of my own. But on the other hand to feel comfortable some people might have to be in an area predominately occupied by their race, and for one to comfortably be diverse they first must be comfortable with ones own race and culture.

College professor of writing Maxtine Hairston states "We can create a culturally inclusive curriculum in our writing classes by focusing on the experiences of our students" (Hairston par. 2). This seems to be a class room that would be taught in a way were all people were involved as well as their views and ideas on a certain topic. A class room like this would involve many different types of reading samples from a wide variety of authors ranging from white to black to any race and from either men or women. A lot could be learned in a class like this where people can see how others live their life and how their culture would interact with their own. The main emphasis of this class would most likely be on diversity of everyone in the class. To work on making every student more aware of who is around them and how they could contribute to their own lives. However if someone did not agree with diversifying America and its classrooms then they may not benefit from this way of teaching due to disagreements with his professor or fellow students.