Freshman English

The Anti-Thesis Thesis; or, Why I Don’t Use the Word “Thesis” [Very Often] in Class

I may well be setting myself up for some charges of “composition” heresy: I try to avoid using the word “thesis” when I’m teaching Freshman English.   Although I’ve practiced this erasure for a while, I recently made a public statement about it at our August Orientation and was interested in reactions from several who heard […]

Son of “Panopticism”

I’ve been using Michel Foucault in first-year writing courses since I began teaching, and I’m not alone. There have been portions of Discipline and Punish in Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading for as long as I can remember. I may be misremembering, but I recall Foucault’s first section, “The Body of the Condemned,” in […]