MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

First Year Composition (FYC) courses are taught by individuals ranging in experience from first-time graduate assistants to tenured university professors. These classrooms are filled with students from across the world, giving diversity a whole new meaning. Differences in race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and age are some of the varied traits that make up the learning community in post-secondary education. Coming from unique backgrounds, these students develop habits and styles based on previous education learning environments. FYC is often their first exposure to scholarly writing and the academic discourse community. Each student has specific goals and needs for composition and advanced composition courses that will develop during their college journey. These students also have a mixture of challenges that they must face in the classroom that professors must aide in.

In this paper I discuss an evaluation criteria created from analyzing popular professional resources from notable publishers within the college composition industry. The rubric is designed to analyze professional resources from the perspective of a new educator. This paper also details what the field of rhetoric and composition says in regards to students’ rights to their own language based on critiquing these handbooks. Not limited to Second Language Learners, this paper will also look at nontraditional standard English used in the classroom such as African American English. By identifying how industry professionals describe these students and engage with their work we can see the progression of the field and what further steps need to be taken in terms of inclusion in a post-modern world.