Date Published: 2026
Course Context
The Social Justice as Rhetorical Practice (WRA 441) course is an upper-division elective offering from a Midwest Research 1 university. Emphasizing rhetorical analysis of public and professional writing, the course is open to graduate and undergraduate students in a 15-week semester, face-to-face format.
Reflection
This was the first time I taught this course with a diverse student population from various disciplines and at different levels of matriculation. The rhetoric of prison writing produced from multiple positions framed the course; however, prison writing as such addresses and advances social justice principles. Through our rhetorical analyses students discovered tropes of prison writing, such as testimonial realism and spiritual or transformative journeys. Students also reflected on academic discourses of the humanities’ and social sciences’ key moves such as reflexivity, ethical awareness, and dialogic orientation. The in-class writings offer students rhetorical experiments using course readings so they can work hands-on with constructing different effects on the way toward making social justice inflected appeals and arguments. I use a Grading Contract as a way to highlight how social justice can/ought to be advanced in a learning environment. Yet, the contract is also limited as a neo-liberal as a political-economic construct. I learned it is challenging to have students focus on rhetoric while bracketing vehemence over the injustices of social systems particularly the criminal legal system, which is precisely one of the course’s key goals: to understand the animating grounds for rhetorical constructions which are always already socio-political acts. In our discussions it became clear we needed to address early on how rights-, interest-, and needs-based discourses also framed rhetorical choices. In the future, I would flip this course on its head so that students chose their individual entry points into prison writing’s relationship to social justice and then, following their leads and interests, assist them with advancing their rhetorical analyses of texts related to U.S. mass incarceration.
