This dissertation identifies and interrogates dominant attitudes and assumptions that inform our practices and shape our narratives in composition, attitudes that we must continually reshape as we expand our understandings of language as material social practice. By exploring particular tales of confrontation and struggle that took place in academe during the politically tumultuous times of the late 1960s and early 1970s, this project demonstrates how language attitudes can function to reflect dominant myths and biases about identity. Many of composition's best attempts at theorizing difference and designing pedagogical practices based on those theories have served---often against our intentions and desires---to (dis)accommodate those students we label "nontraditional."; This study also challenges the privileging of traditional epistemologies and rhetorical styles in composition studies, particularly as those ways of knowing and communicating have shaped institutional practices that limit practitioners' abilities to connect with each another, and the field's capacity to connect with and make significant contributions to the public at large.; Chapter one traces the growing awareness of the (tacit) authority institutional structures have had to shape academic and wider cultural life. Chapter two looks at how linguistic, discursive, and rhetorical differences surface and play out in journals launched as the professional organization of composition began structuring the field during the late 1960s and early 1970s, journals like College English and College Composition and Communication. Chapter three explores long-held assumptions about language and identity that must change when educators are committed to accounting for the emotive, the intuitive, and the spiritual in any learning process. Chapter four argues that neither students nor teachers learn very well without an emotional connection, an affective dimension, to their learning process and makes explicit claims for the value of using affective texts to train composition teachers and to teach writing. Finally, chapter five explores the ways marginalized people have internalized society's disdain for nonstandard languages and suggests some ways for throwing off these negative internalizations and carving out new intellectual and discursive spaces. The chapter contends that teachers must challenge themselves to go beyond inherited standards to construct new intellectual paradigms that acknowledge multiple forms of knowing and expertise.
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