[Not] Losing My Religion: Using 'The Color Purple' to Promote Critical Thinking in the Writing Classroom

Kingsborough Community College City University of New York. Available from: Boyd Printing Company, Inc. 49 Sheridan Avenue, Albany, NY 12210. Tel: 800-877-2693; Tel: 518-436-9686; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: http://www.boydprinting.com

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27

Religion; Critical Thinking; Fiction; Books; African Americans; Reader Response; Freshman Composition; Criticism; Gender Bias; Resistance (Psychology); Homosexuality; Racial Bias; Video Games; Liberal Arts; College Students

0147-1635

Private student discourses are often ignored or prohibited in the academy; however, these private discourses are very meaningful, and representative of the ways that students order and speak about the world. Specifically, religion is an extremely significant private student discourse; exploring religious discourse might help students not only to understand the ideological and linguistic formations of discourses, including those that undergird and shape religion, but also to refine their own discourses, written and spoken, inside and outside of school. Using "The Color Purple" by Alice Walker, a text that problematizes religious discourse, Ira Shor's "Critical Teaching and Everyday Life" as a model of illuminating ideological analysis, as well as critical essays about religious discourses, students read, discuss, and write about religion and other private discourses to enhance their writing and critical thinking, and secure a more stable rhetorical position within the academy.

As Provided

34

2009

EJ851080