martial arts for adult learners

The instructional effectiveness of kinesthetic and body-centric teaching methods on basic writers as culled from martial arts
Introduction
The amount of adult learners in colleges has grown rapidly in the last three years, due in large part to the economic downturn following the mortgage scandals and stock crashes of 2008, and the large amount of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans returning to the United States . This increase in adult learners is causing teachers to change their teaching styles, because adult learners bring unique skills to the classroom and unique problems as well. Martial arts, a term defined here as “systems of ancient combat and conflict management and of behaviors beneficial to these activities”, can be used in a classroom setting to create lessons and activities that promote the desired academic behaviors and character traits for successful academic performance in composition. This paper will examine how martial arts can be used in the composition classroom and will also examine the author’s personal journey through martial arts. It is the hope of the author that these personal stories will enlighten the reader as to how martial arts work and their effectiveness as character building activities.
The author will examine three martial arts, Karate, Capoeira, and Tai Chi, and show how they can be used in the classroom to teach basic literacy skills, to teach how to use those skills in a critical and social conscious way, and to teach how to interact with others and with the environment respectively. For the purposes of the readability, the author will use the pronoun “I” for all personal stories, of which there will be several.
I walk into a small classroom, and ten faces stare at me expectantly. They assume, given my dress (a button-down shirt and khakis) that I am there to teach them. I say “Hello” and get a mumbled “Mornin’” back from the eight students who are awake. As I write on the board “Composition”, a student lifts his head from the table, a small dribble of saliva adds itself to the growing pool on the student’s books.
“Hey you teaching this class, man?” he asks in that loud tone of the newly woken. His hoodie disguises his face.
“Yeah, I am teaching this class. Please don’t call me, man, call me Mr. W,” I say.
“Sorry, Mr. W.” he gets the hint. I continue writing the schedule on the board.
Composition
Instructor: Mr. Withstandley
Welcome!
Plan for Today:
1. Introduce ourselves
2. What is writing?

I am about to write a very sloppy 3 on the board when he asks it. The question. The one question I always get when I teach writing classes.
“Why do we need to take this class, anyways?”
I sigh. The urge to tell them “You need to learn it because I said so!” is strong, and I almost give into the temptation. They are required to take this course, after all. While it is a non-answer, it is a satisfying one, but the “I said so!” sticks in my mouth, makes it feel rancid. I did not like it when my parents brandished that phrase, like a talisman against any argument; why would these students feel any differently? Why would I bring out this same talisman on such an important question as “why should I spend weeks and thousands of dollars learning this skill?” This question deserves a real answer.
The answer is that my students need this skill. Their writing skills are sorely lacking, with many unable to create coherent sentences, let alone paragraphs and papers. They need to express themselves in cogent sentences and well crafted emails, for they will be judged in their professional lives, either partially or wholly, on their writing skills. What is it about writing that makes students yearn for any other type of learning? Is it the ephemeral nature of writing, the fact that is does not separate into tidy “right” and “wrong”? Is it because I teach at a technical school, teaching students that want tangible skills, not this “wishy-washy” skill of writing? Students do not see a concrete “this is how you write” standard with so many varying mediums of writing in use today: blogs, tweeting, emails, texts, etc. Writing exists in life, which is not easily compartmentalized and standardized.
My students, and indeed most adult education students, act in English classes like that have been abused by the composition curriculum. What happened to them to make them this way? We can imagine many scenarios through which students were turned off of writing. Let us look at several.
When students begin learning writing, in elementary school, they are eager to share their stories with the teacher and with their fellow classmates. We can imagine, in an Elementary classroom, that students have a journal writing class every day in the afternoon. As the students sit down to write, almost all are eager, pouring their lives through pencils. There is one, however, who does not share this zest for writing. Let’s call him Steve. Steve is extremely smart, and loves reading. He also loves talking, specifically about science, math, and his favorite topic of all: the books he is reading.
When Steve is asked to write, however, the well of spoken words dries up. His inability to form his words on paper creates frustration for him, but he does not stop trying. With the teacher’s encouragement, he continues writing until he gets the handle of it. Once his words start flowing well, he enjoys the activity and soon becomes as voluble on the page as he is when speaking. We can imagine Steve loving writing as he goes through Elementary school and maybe even some of Middle school. When writing moves past the free form journaling and story writing in Elementary school, however, he is faced with grammar, rules, and structure to pen his free writing into the box of Standard English. Sentence grammar was mentioned in his other classes, but the teachers never enforced the grammar much. As the teachers began requiring proper sentence structure and introduce proper paragraph structure to students (all the better to make their writing academic in nature), Steve’s interest in writing begins to fade.
Finally, Steve is asked to write his first paper; the topic is the T-Rex, and why it is the most fearsome monster. While Steve is engaged by his topic, he really just wants to write a fantasy story about how his Dad comes home one day with a big T-Rex and gives it to him as a pet. Steve would ride around on the T-Rex and have adventures, probably in space. What Steve is being told to write, however, is a one page typed research paper on the T-Rex, with at least one quotation used and cited correctly. The information needs to be true, not made up from his head. When he asks why he can’t write what he wants, he is told that this is the lesson for the day, and that academic writing is important for later schooling.
The grade he receives on this paper is a C, which is the first C he has ever received. His teacher writes on his paper that he used too many fantasy elements in the paper (Steve was determined to have a dinosaur pet in his story), and that he did not cite his source correctly. His paper is also bleeding intermittently from the small red marks; commas, colons, capitalization added and removed, and comments such as “Please see me after class” and “this needs to be a research paper, this is not a fantasy story!”
When Steve gets to High School, things are not much better. He is asked to write more academic papers and the creative pieces he so loves are nowhere to be seen. He does not understand the need for the academic essay, and the best reason the teachers could give was that it would be useful in more schooling? When he asked if it would be useful outside of school, he got a withering stare and was told to get back to work.
The grammar work was confusing to him. It was all taught to him using workbooks and worksheets and lecture. His teacher told him to fix the errors in the sentences, but it never translated to his essay writing, which was always replete with misspellings, overuse of commas, and sentence fragments.
There were other students who loved the academic work, loved the thesis statements. Steve could not imagine why, but he watched in wonder as they worked, trying to imagine what they saw in this subject. What was it about research that they enjoyed so thoroughly? These were the same students that loved the grammar exercises introduced in Elementary school, and the rules for academic writing seemed to Steve to be similar to those grammar rules-thin rules that were easy to misstep. We can imagine what happens next, that Steve, frustrated and disillusioned with school, gives up on English altogether. While his schooling started with writing that was more free-form, he was eventually taught the rules of writing, but taught them in a punitive fashion. The corrective nature of grammar linked, in his mind, the idea of grammar and punishment. Added to this connection is the academic writing style, which was never introduced to Steve in a way that would display utility. The creative writing that he loved when he was little, the writing activity that engaged him fully, was replaced by academic writing, a writing for which he felt no affinity.
I teach many students like Steve, students that have been let down by the educational system. These students started loving school, and they were good in the classroom. Something happened that made them like school less and less, typically poor explanations of the use of different writing styles or grammar instruction through the use of worksheets and isolated exercises that disconnected the grammar from the writing world that those grammar rules were supposed to support. They come into my classroom angry at the educational system and with poor technical writing skills dues to this animosity.
When my students ask me why they have to learn to write "my way", I show them that there is a “standard” method for writing; the “academic style”, replete with its seemingly constricting conventions and commas and semicolons placed just-so, like the garnish in a 5 star restaurant dish. This standard method, while it can be perfected and expanded upon to create the true academic style, still has, as its basic form, all of the basic communications tools and conventions that writers use every day, whether they write tweets, emails, or journal entries.
While I can be as flippant as I want to be with students, I always stop myself, remembering when I was in their situation. When I began teaching, I often tried to think about how I interacted with and perceived school, to empathize with my students, but I realized that, as a teacher, I could not empathize with them on school reactions because of a lesson I was taught by one of my former bosses.
We were in his office during my second term working at the school. We had been talking, animatedly, about how to motivate students through engaging lessons. I was feeling disheartened by my inability to keep the students engaged. Many were perpetually late to my classes, and even when they did show up, they were inattentive.
"I mean, I know not everybody thinks the comma is an awesome punctuation mark, or that the semicolon is the secret weapon for impressing bosses, but I have to be able to translate at least some of my enthusiasm to my students. I mean, how else do you explain how I got so excited over language?"
"Oliver, you and I...we 're freaks," He took a sip of coffee as he said it, enjoying the confusion that played on my face.
"Freaks?" I was confused
"Yup, we are totally odd. It is not normal to like grammar like you do, or for me to enjoy philosophy the way I do, but there you have it. We can 't expect our students to love our subject like we do; we just need to teach them to love it a bit more than they do right now. We need to trick them or convince them to do more work in our class than they were intending, to make them learn despite themselves." He leans back in his chair as I think on this.
“But how the hell do we convince them to be engaged in something the fundamentally don’t want to do? They didn’t come to school to learn English, they came to learn Photoshop, or AutoCad, or Soldering. How do you think we should engage them?” I ask, my brain still trying to wrap around the idea of being a freak.
“I think” he started slowly, leaning forward “that you need to use their interests against them. Show them how they need to learn English in order to get that job in Soldering or in Architecture,” he said.
I thanked him and left. I had a lot to think about.
There has been a surge of adult learners into the college classroom, many coming back to school after as long as a 20 year educational hiatus. Their academic muscles have atrophied in this time, and their enjoyment of the written word runs the gamut from determined all the way to a specific animosity towards anything not directly related to their core subjects, and who can blame them? They are returning to school, and it is taking all their energy to just come back into school and take on the new and complex world of post high school academia. For them to come to school, they must willingly give up thousands of dollars in tuition per class, and hours a week for the class time, plus hours extra to do the homework required for the class. Adult learners, unlike the traditional 18-22 yr old college students, do not have the luxury of having school as their profession. Adult Learners must focus on school at the same time that they focus on their work and, in many cases, their home lives, including children and grandparents. (Kenner and Weinerman) To add on the burdens, both economically and emotionally, of education are a draining and daunting prospect.
Being able to empathize with students is important, and double so for adult learners, because “Adult learners who are successful in their home community have likely patterned their behavior on successful members of their peer group.” (Kenner and Weinerman) Adult learners, to succeed in their previous environments, have gravitated towards and emulated successful people from that environment. When these students begin in the classroom, they are thrust into an unfamiliar environment. To find success here, they must either become autonomous, or find another role model and emulate again. With careful use of empathy, compassion, and a heavy use of modeling proper behavior, the teacher can become that role model for students. The empathizing process starts with feeling their frustration, and knowing what it was like to be frustrated by a learning experience.
The time when I felt their level of frustration with a new learning experience was when I started learning Martial arts, and I always think back on it when I want to remind myself of how students must feel in my class. The frustration that they feel when they try to grasp the concept of proper grammar, or the possible use of the academic essay are paralleled by my frustration with learning how to punch, stand, and breathe correctly; these were all things that people should not need to relearn. My students think they know how to communicate, because of their ability to communicate in their home environment, and are equally frustrated when I tell them they need to learn a fundamentally new way of communication. I thought I knew how to stand and breathe, but the context of the activity changes the nature of the activity in such a way that previous knowledge may not be immediately useful. Before learning how useful martial arts is as a concept in the basic writing classroom, a brief look into my personal history with it will hopefully be illuminating.

Why I began training in martial arts: My personal story
I remember always wanting to be involved in martial arts. I grew up watching Jackie Chan movies with my Dad. We always watched them when my Mom was out at a Lawyer conference, either the Bar Examiner’s conference, or something involving one of the many jobs she held when I was little. My Mom hated pure action movies, loudly voicing her displeasure. “Where’s the plot? What’s the point?” She would yell, throw up her hands in disgust and walk out. She loved movies that were based in reality, and she saw the martial arts movies as fantastical as the books with wizards and knights that I read at night in my room.
We would watch the movies with some take-out Chinese food in front of us, in what my Dad would call “Father-son bonding time”. He always emphasized that we could “belch and fart the whole night” like I needed any extra incentive to hang out with my Dad. We did belch and fart a lot, but I blame the Chinese food. Thank goodness those movies had subtitles. Our laughter at the bodily emissions masked most of the spoken dialogue.
I remember being enthralled by movies like The legend of the Drunken Master where Jackie Chan plays a young Wong Fei Hung, a historical martial arts master, who disobeyed his father often, but then was trained by on old man in the ways of Drunken Kung Fu, an odd martial arts that takes on the affectations of a drunkard in its movements and strikes in order to confuse the opponent. I knew none of that at the time I watched it, but I did know that the swaying and falling made for a heck of an interesting movie. I wanted to be able to move and strike like that, to use my strength for good, to protect people like in the movie. I felt like this when I watched super hero movies as well, but the martial arts movies held a special place in my heart, because it seemed like a regular guy could get that strong; their strength did not come from radioactive spiders or yellow suns. These late night movies inspired me to learn martial arts later in my life, and to finally bring elements of it into my teaching, the better to service my Composition students.
My journey to learning martial arts started at a train station. Four years ago, while waiting for my train into the city, I was reading on education and literacy, preparing for my class at the University of Pennsylvania. My brain was crammed with pedagogical minutia from Piaget to Gardner to Ericson. While I tried in vain to see how all the theory linked with pragmatism, how stages of development in theory, in towers of Ivory, linked with children, living in buildings of stone, I hold my head, wearing myself out. I stopped reading, and just sat, squirming to find a comfortable position on the cold, ridged metal bench.
A man walked up, in long black trench coat, buttoned to his chin, brown hair blowing in the wind. We looked at each other. A moment of confusion followed by recognition and smiles, and we shook hands. Gabe and I went to middle school together, and had not seen each other in a decade. In middle school, I never really interacted with him much. We hung with our own small crowds, nerd ships passing in the night, I suppose. He was a small, lanky kid in Middle School, with goofy glasses and shoulder length hair. Now his hair was shorter, he had traded his glasses for contacts, and he had filled out to a normal, fit adult size. He sat down next to me, and we began chatting, bridging a ten year gap. “How have you been, Oliver? He asked. It was a habit of his to always use people’s names when talking to them. So I told him of my college time studying English and Education, and of my Graduate school time studying Elementary Education.
“How have you been?” I ask. He told me of his time at Temple University; he was due to graduate soon with a Bachelor’s degree in Asian Studies with a minor in Religion. He was focusing on Eastern Medicine, mainly Acupuncture. Being the product of Western Medicine my whole life, I was interested and skeptical. He took my hands in his and looked at my fingernails.
Upon examining the different lengths between the nails of each hand, he declared that I had strong lungs, because fingernails grow during sleep, and their growth is very oxygen dependent, and that my left lung was stronger than my right, because those fingernails were longer. I still find myself staring at my nails, trying to figure out if what he said was right. I never found any good evidence on the correlation between fingernail length and lung strength. The conversation flowed naturally from the Eastern view of nail growth to martial arts, his real specialty. Apparently, he had been training since he was five years old, and at his most intense training, when we were together in Middle School, he was training seven days a week, five hours a day, plus three hours a day at home in solitary practice. To say he was obsessed was to say that cats might like sunbeams. He invited me to train with him at the Dojo, or training place, in his home, to have a free lesson whenever I had a free afternoon. I eventually found that free afternoon, and many more free afternoons and days after that.
In the five years I have been teaching, teaching people from the age of 6 all the way up to the age of 60 in various environments: in the Philadelphia public schools, in a school in Malvern, in a private school in Philadelphia, adolescents on a track, and a for-profit technical college, I have been able to condense all the most important lessons I learned about teaching, leading, and learning into a single sentence. So here it is.
A sentence and a punch are, fundamentally, the same thing.
No, I am not claiming that writing is, by definition, a violent act or that UFC champion Anderson Silva is akin to Shakespeare. What I am claiming is that the ability to communicate with the body, either through the movements of dance, or through the movements of a punch or kick from Karate, or a slow sweeping movement from Tai Chi, allows us to inform and instruct the more “mainstream” communicative method of writing and speaking.
This might seem odd to people who assume that martial arts are just a system of violence, of producing force to maim or even kill opponents. “What on Earth does that have to do with writing?” a teacher might rightfully ask. I have been practicing martial arts for the past 4 years, and martial arts are much more complex and nuanced. This popular interpretation of them is born out of movies like The Matrix, Enter the Dragon and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and while these movies do much to entertain their audiences, and they do raise the public’s awareness of these beautiful activities, they do so at a cost; they pervert the true meaning of the Martial arts as a whole and present the combative aspect of them as the entirety of their existence.
While those movies show martial arts as a tool of destruction, used by evil to dominate a small island and traffic drugs (Enter the Dragon), or to battle a whole nation (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon), or to conquer the whole world (The Matrix). These same tools are used by the protagonists of the movies to fight the evil, but they fight the evil by destroying it, so they also use the tool of martial arts as one of destruction. Viewing Martial arts as one of destruction is an incomplete view; Martial arts do destroy, but they also create; they create purpose, character, morals, and kindness. Sadly, the view of martial arts as violence is compounded in the only other view the general public gets of Martial arts: combat sports.
In combat sports, like Mixed Martial arts (MMA) cage fighting or boxing, you see two men duke it out for a set amount of rounds until one emerges victorious by knocking the other person unconscious or winning by time out in boxing, or KO, TKO, or submission in MMA (choking the opponent or holding his arm in such a way that the pain causes him to admit defeat). These sports are very brutal, but like the Gladiator games of Rome, the public cannot look away, so they grow in popularity. I am not here to argue against these sports, as I think they are fine entertainment, if you like that sort of thing, and that people should be able to pursue their sport. That said, their activities do warp the public perception of martial arts as purely violent. They do contain a wide array of skills that have their basis in combat and war, but can, with modifications, be used in school lessons.
An Introduction to Martial Arts as Conflict Management
What is a martial art? When I watched those Kung Fu movies, my answer was “That cool stuff that lets you jump on trees!” or “It lets you hit the bad guys, win, and be a hero!” When I began training, my answer changed to “The stuff I am learning so I can do all the cool stuff I saw in those movies! I mean, they are all true, right?!” Now, when I train, it is just to better myself, but that sounds wussy, so I haven’t told my consciousness that yet. If it knew, it surely would stop and drag me to the gym to bench-press heavy things of various sizes. I took a cruise around the internet, looking for definitions of martial arts. There were some styles touted for their health benefits, like Tai Chi. On the other end of the spectrum, there was an ads for “Fear no man! Discover what martial arts masters and the Army don’t (sic) want you to know!” One art makes you into a healthy, peaceful person in the park, and the other makes you into, apparently, a walking AK-47. What other activity has this breadth of expectations linked to it? There are no tennis ads that promise to show you how to launch tennis balls into orbit, or Basketball ads that claim to show you how to dunk from the other basket. How do we find out the truth to martial arts? What is it actually used for?
I think we can find the meaning of martial arts if we look at the intersection between the claims that the advertisements make. From the 1970’s ads that claimed “I can paralyze a 200lbs attacker with just one finger!” to the Tai Chi ads that claim rejuvenating health benefits, to Karate ads that claim to increase a participant’s self confidence, there is a clear topic emerging at the intersection- conflict management. Conflicts are caused by incorrect communication between people, a person and her environment, or between a person and her own body. If that communication is correct and accurate, fights will not occur, people will interact very easily with their environment, and healthiness will increase, because people will communicate well with their bodies. The first claim, the ability to defeat a large attacker with one finger, is resolving a conflict among an assailant. While it seems that she is resolving the conflict with aggression, especially given the other wording in the ad “I’ve made rough characters cry out for help themselves ….(sic) and I’ve left muggers suffering in pain on the ground,” she is still resolving the conflict, and managing the amount of damage and danger she incurs due to the confrontation. It can be presumed that without this special training, she would not be able to overcome an attacker or, at the very least, would have to use all her fingers.
The health benefit claims that Tai Chi ads make, and the confidence building claims that the Karate ads make, are still conflict management. Managing and promoting health and wellness is resolving conflict, in that it manages the damage and danger that is incurred through illness and injury. Tai Chi is efficient in reducing stress in its participants and effective in managing pain and injury.
It is important to think of martial arts as studies in conflict management, both in conflict outside of ourselves and conflict within, because it is this perspective on martial arts that makes them useful in the classroom. As previously stated, conflict is caused by inappropriate communication, and conflict management is a study in communication. Of course, studies in proper communication fit in extremely well with composition studies, because writing is another form of communication. Martial arts are as varied as they are numerous, and to deal with all of them in the scope of an English class is asking to be overwhelmed. I will simply focus on three: Karate, Capoeira, and Tai Chi. Here is a brief look at their history and a comprehensive look at how they can be used in teaching composition.

Karate and Basic Writing pedagogy
History
Karate became popular in the West in the 70’s and 80’s; due to movies with high flying kicks and cool fight scenes. Bruce Lee’s movie Enter the Dragon included a lot of Karate, and his movie Return of the Dragon introduced Chuck Norris, an accomplished practitioner of Karate, to the movie world. The West’s infatuation with Karate continued through the 80’s with the Karate Kid movies, which took the typical sports movie motif (a young, plucky kid starts a sport and eventually plays in the championship game and wins) was combined with Karate. Because of the movies, Karate is one of the most well known martial arts in the West. For this reason, it is very useful in the classroom as possible content for the course. As the sport of MMA has risen in popularity, it is quite possible that many students would be interested in discussing martial arts, and if the teacher can funnel that enthusiasm for discussion into the pen and onto the page, so much the better. If teachers wish to use Karate as a subject in their Composition classes, here is a brief introduction to the martial art.
Karate is a martial art that was born on Okinawa, which is a set of islands that sits between Japan and China. Karate was a self defense art born out of an older system of pugilism called Te, which means “hand” in Japanese (it is pronounced “Tea” in Okinawan, and is written as “Ti”). This older system was influenced by the other Martial arts of China and Japan by the traders that came to Okinawa. Eventually, due to more significant influences of the art from Chinese traders, the style’s name was changed to Karate, which means “Chinese Hand”. The style began as a system of self defense, for civilians to defend themselves and their families against aggressors. The crucible of self defense influenced everything about the martial art, from the movements used to the philosophy of when and where to use those movements when interacting with an opponent.
While Karate started as a self defense system, it was transformed into a system for sport and for self improvement by its modern masters. Gichin Funakoshi, often thought of as the father of modern Karate, learned Karate in Okinawa in the beginning of the 20th century. He studied under two famous Karate masters named Yasutsune Azato and Yasutsune Itosu. Funakoshi took what he had learned from these two men, and brought it to the school systems of Japan. In 1921, Funakoshi was asked to display some Karate techniques and Kata (prearranged solo forms) for the Ministry of Education in Tokyo. He so impressed those at the demonstration that Karate began to be introduced into the school system, in the same way that we have gym class in the United States. The movements of Karate, used for self defense and violence in their inception, were softened for the school system, and the aim of Karate was changed to include self improvement and a strengthening of character. (Funakoshi)

Principles and Concepts as they relate to basic Writing
To explain the principles of Karate, here is the story of how I learned my first Kata (Form) in Karate.
Early in my training, my Sensei taught me the first kata of Karate, called Heian Ichi. I remember it was late Fall, and the crisp wind was cutting through my thin uniform, making me shiver. I was the only one there that day, which was odd for a Saturday. I was glad to have no one around to see my uncoordinated movements as I tried to learn a whole new set of techniques. Before he taught me the form, he demonstrated it for me. As he started, with a stiff bow, his eyes looking at the ground, his demeanor changed. The kind eyed teacher who started the bow was replaced with a steely eyed and focused fighter as he rose to stand up tall. He stepped and blocked low, and as he punched straight ahead of him, an opponent of ideas and cloud was knocked away. I saw the strength in each punch, but I saw the grace in the punches as well, as they flew out from his hip like daggers.
The movements, simple blocks that swept across the body and down, so that the forearm was held low, next to the inside of the thigh, or punches that started at the hip, shot forward, and twisted at the end, to finish straight ahead, were much easier to see and understand than the confusing motions of other martial arts that he had shown me. While other styles would hook their legs under the opponent’s knee, pull him down and perform strikes to the throat, left ear, right ear, and then an elbow to the nose; Karate would deal with the same opponent by blocking once and then striking decisively, usually to the throat or the center of the chest. The result of subduing an assailant and defending oneself effectively was the same, but the movements were much simpler. All that Karate consists of are simple movements that have been refined to mirror sheen, in their refinement, the movements speak volumes.
My Sensei finished with a second bow, and as the steely look left his eyes, he motioned for me to try the kata. As I started, I was corrected immediately. “No, move your leg out more, you will be stable that way!” My punch was no better “No, turn the punch more; you want the top knuckles to be completely parallel to the ground at the end of the punch!” I quickly found that the simplicity of the motions belied the complexity within. I remember getting very frustrated that I could not even get these simple movements. When he saw this frustration, he stopped me, grabbed my hand, and guided it along the correct arc to end up in the block, and then pulled my arm from my hip, turning it at the end so that it finished in a perfect punch. What he was doing was what good teachers do for their students, he was modeling the correct behavior, greatly increasing the chances of success in future attempts. After I stumbled through my first attempt at the form, he nudged my arms and legs into the correct positions, teaching them where they needed to be.
The difference between a correct technique and an unpolished one was made even more apparent when my Sensei asked me to show a technique from the form I had just learned. He threw a punch at me, and I blocked it with the movement from the kata. “That was good. Throw a punch at me.” I did so, and he did what looked like the same block. As his forearm struck against mine, my arm felt tingly and I had the intense desire to not use that arm to do anything for a few minutes. While it did not look damaged, it felt like there would be a large bruise on it very soon. Our two blocks looked the same, but the slight changes in angle, rotation, and speed made all the difference.
“Why do you think Karate strikes so few times, as opposed to other styles? Doesn’t it seem less effective?” Sensei asked me. I looked at him, confused. It did seem less effective. If you were successful with all of the movements it worked beautifully, but if you missed with any, an attack would get through to hit you. I shuddered at the thought.
“Karate strikes are merciful strikes. A Karate practitioner strikes only as many times as necessary to accomplish his goal, and no more. His hope is to convey his will without striking at all,” My Sensei said. This idea of Karate as mercy is echoed by Masayuki Hisakata, a master of Karate whose words were gathered and translated in Jesse Enkamp’s The Karate Code. Masayuki said “Katsu jin ken [life-giving-fist…] best expresses the significance of Karate,” . Karate allows one to “cultivate one’s mind, practice self-defense skills and build a strong, healthy body,” . In other words, Karate builds upon the basics of all martial arts, and refines them relentlessly. It is its focus on the basics that makes it such a good choice for our study of the intersection between martial arts and literacy.
As it is with Karate, so it is with writing. There are times when we need to get our point across quickly and efficiently, where we need to be direct, lest our errant words, like strikes, cause unintended harm and distress. While there are styles of writing that value verbose and aesthetically pleasing language, for many writing, especially the beginning writing form of the five paragraph essay; simple, straightforward language is called for. I propose here that Karate’s focus on structure and form, of repetition to learn skills that are necessary for higher level martial technique, are useful in teaching the basic writer. The concepts of Karate-simplicity, directness, efficient- are also the concepts composition instructors wish to instill in basic writers.
The very term “basic writer” needs to be defined before we see what it is that this student needs. The “basic” writer at a Community College is very different from the “basic” writer at Harvard, a fact that was seen even in 1994. The “basic” writers at my school have problems that run the gamut from basic sentence structure all the way to developing coherent and original ideas.
Patricia Bizzell defines “Basic Writers” as those who are “least well prepared for college.” (Bizzell) This statement is quite broad, and places on the mantle of writing the superlative of “Most important subject in College”. It does not hold true all the time, however. For students in standard four-year colleges, their knowledge of academic writing conventions could limit their ability to form deep critical thoughts, as Bizzell claims. If we take that as a proven statement, we then must consider students who are enrolled in two year technical colleges. These students do not require, in their job, the deep analytical and critical thinking skills that Bizzell says are lacking in “basic” writers. These students may have internal motivations to learn the skills necessary for their job, and nothing more .
Students are the least well prepared when they are lacking in writing skills is because writing skills are communicating skills, and skills in communication and writing corellate positively with job performance. . When asked what skills are important for school, the “3 R’s”: “Reading, wRiting and ‘Rithmatic” are mentioned as a kneejerk reaction. Never mind the misspellings required to make the mnemonic effective, the fact remains that, were schools only focused on three areas for learning deeply, writing would be among them. In this age of Vlogs, T.V., Youtube, and diminished readership on all “conventional” (read: books and literature) levels, why is writing important? If less people are reading, writing is doing less work, isn’t it? The answer here, of course, is no, but the answer is not as simple as all that, unfortunately. Our writing has changed audience and focus, but has retained importance in a world that has increasing reliance on videos and images. Text messaging has risen in recent years and has developed its own syntax. Emails and text messages have supplanted oral phone conversations due to their efficiency and the “paper” trail that paperless communication creates. The internet has limited face-to-face communication among people and, bereft of the human element, a person’s worth is measured by his/her writing capacity. Writing has opened up, moving from the medium through which lawyers and philosophers discussed ideas to the medium by which everyone’s ideas are deconstructed and critiqued. In short, if a student cannot write effectively, she will be severely handicapped both societally and economically. The process by which writing is taught largely relies on the type of writing being taught. When trying to teach students how to write an academic essay, focus should be on conventions of writing, rhetorical strategy, and a structure that, while it may become less rigid over time, begins very rigidly defined. When teaching academic writing, this very rigid format for paragraph development has been effective in teaching basic writers.
A paragraph is 5-7 sentences long
1st sentence: Topic sentence that summarizes the paragraph
2nd sentence: Evidence( usually a quotation from a reputable source) that proves the topic sentence
3rd Sentence: A sentence that, in the author’s own words, explains the quotation.
4th sentence: Explain how proving the topic sentence helps prove the overall thesis of the paper
5th sentence: Concluding/transition sentence This rigid structure is useful for students who are not comfortable with writing, because it gives them something to rely on during a writing process that they perceive as confusing. The structure demystifies the academic paragraph writing process, a process that is confusing for adult learners. The academic paragraph is a tool of Standard English. Basic Writers are still coming to grips with the conventions of Standard English, even when they enter college. This method for teaching students, giving them concrete activities to “hang their hat on”, was taken from the basics of martial arts. I was a complete beginner in martial arts, only bringing into the lessons the “skills” I had picked up from movies and the general body awareness that comes from daily living. In this way, I was much like my composition students. They bring with them strong internal motivations, but the experience they bring with him is non-academic, and needs to be bridged to fit in with the academic world.
“Make a fist,” My Sensei, or teacher, asks of me on my first day of training with him. I bend the four fingers of my left hand down, first at the base knuckle and at the second knuckle, keeping my fingers straights otherwise, and then I placed my thumb across the index and pinky fingers. I look up hopefully, did I get it right?
“No, remember to bend all your knuckles keeping your fingers tight against your palms so that when they strike” and here he hit his right palm hard with his left fist “your fingers remain safe”. I do this, and then hit my palm a couple times. Whack! Whack! My hand feels pretty solid in there. He moves on to teach me about the wrist, and how it needs to be straight as I hit, or it will buckle and get injured as I hit harder materials. When he turns my wrist down too far, so that the knuckles of the index and middle fingers don’t fall on a straight line with the forearm, he hits my knuckles lightly, as I would have during a punch. My wrist rattles a bit in pain, and I learn quite quickly to keep my wrist in the proper structure. He had me punch a bag filled with sand that was hung on the wall, and I was thankful for the lesson before on structure; had I not had it, my hand would have been very sore indeed by the end of the day, and I am not sure how eager I would have been to continue learning martial arts.
The formal rigid paragraph given to the students in the beginning of composition courses requires them to use their non-academic skills in an academic setting. It takes their abilities to follow directions and applies that skill to learning the rudiments of an unfamiliar skill, much like the composite student in Kenner and Weinerman’s essay comes into school well versed in following directions.
Many of the students are frustrated by academic paragraphs, and do not see them as needing to be fundamentally different from paragraphs in journals or paragraphs written in emails. At my school, there is a course for starting students that focuses on study skills and teaches how to use technology tools (Microsoft Office products). My redesigned final project for the class is to create a presentation on what services or products those students would add to the school to make it better. This course is taken before any composition courses, so these students have not been instructed in proper paragraph structure. Their main idea for the school was to create a better stocked school store, with a donut kiosk in the school store. In the following example, the name of the school has been changed to “the school”.
We will improve classroom materials by providing some new projectors for the classrooms. Many of the school’s projectors are old or unable to work properly. An improper projector can be very disruptive to a class. Another way to improve classroom materials is to make lab top computers available to the students. The school’s labs can become rather congested so the lab tops could be an alternative way to get work done.
Our plan to improve Course materials is to have new or updated books. Keeping books updated with the proper information is important to a student’s education. Also another way to improve course materials is to have new or updated magazines. Students don’t want to read old or worn magazines. They’ll just end up sitting on the shelves collecting dust. This is why our store will provide new books and magazines for the students to enjoy.
These students argue passionately for their ideas, but many of the sentences do not follow the preceding sentence logically. “Keeping books updated …” is followed by “Also another way to improve …updated magazines”. While both books and magazines are written, and they have a tenuous link with the word “improvement”, one is a course material and one is not. These students do not have any evidence presented that the books are out of date. This could have been solved by quoting the cover of one of the magazines on display, as most are from 2008. This would have bolstered their case.
Compare this writing to a final paper written for a course on rhetoric and debate that my school offers. The student who wrote the piece was one of the students in the group who wrote the piece previously examined. I have italicized the student’s thesis statement, which is placed as the last sentence in her first paragraph.
Face book! Youtube! Tweeter! Oh my! Has our young generation been taken over by the internet and other aspects of technology? They are constantly consumed by electronics, gadgets and the internet. While our soon to be future leaders and parents of the world are glued to computer screens, I can’t help to ask the question, when do they have time to be kids? While technology can be useful in many ways, it is affecting our youth. Technology is making kids dependent, obese, unintelligent and socially awkward. (Emphasis mine)
Technology makes our youth dependent because they constantly rely on it throughout the day. They use it for entertainment, school, work and leisure purposes. According to an article in The New York times, “the average kid ages 8-18 spends 7 ½ hours a day using technology gadgets equaling 2 ½ hours of music, almost 5 hours of TV and movies, 3 hours of internet and video games, and just 38 minutes of old fashioned reading.”(New York Times 2010) This leaves very little time to get outdoors and enjoy social or physical activities. This is why many children are becoming overweight or obese.
In these paragraphs, the writer has not only stated a coherent thesis, but the structure of the paragraph after the introduction is structured in a way that provides evidence for the claims, and links those claims to the main conceit of the paper, that technology is bad for children. The author shows mastery of the rigid academic paragraph structure by adhering to it faithfully throughout the paper. The author even displays hints of an emerging post basic skill set, most notably the ability to integrate quotations into sentence, rather than quarantine them in their own sentence pens.
All Karate techniques, even advanced techniques, can be found in the basic techniques of the style. The simple movements learning in the Kata (form) I was taught by my Sensei (teacher) are the same movements that are used in advanced Karate techniques. The way a technique in Karate goes from simple to complex is the precision and power of the movement, the timing of the movement, and the context in which the movement is used. Advanced Karate techniques also use the basic movements as a starting point, and build on them to create move complex movements. By linking the advanced techniques to the basic techniques in this way, Karate is much like writing.
Writing is often taught by starting with simple sentences and moving to complex sentences, as if “equating complexity of structure with complexity of thought and vice versa,” . The idea behind “Generative Rhetoric” a term which Christensen coined, is that the type of writing that we enjoy reading, the writing in bestselling novels and in magazine articles, is not the type of writing that we promote at schools. He looked at sentences for complex ideas, rather than complex structure, and found that often the sentences with the simple ideas had complex grammatical structure, but that sentences that contained simple grammatical structure often contained complex ideas.
Christensen explains his theory by looking at famous quotations from world class authors, and finds that their phrases are often complex, but they are complex because the simple idea is a platform on which the ensuing dependant, independent, and prepositional clauses are placed. All of the clauses added to the sentence add feeling or generate a new set of ideas. Many of the ideas generated b these extra clauses in the sentence are not directly linked to the main idea, and are in fact abstractions from the regular idea, not concrete descriptors. This use of abstraction, metaphorical writing, is what separates a living sentence from a dead one.
Christensen breaks living sentences down to 4 main ideas: addition, direction of modification/direction of movement, levels of abstraction, and texture. The idea of addition, taking simplicity and adding to it to create complexity, that simplicity is contained within complexity, was shown above. The second principle, of directions of movement, involves the placement of modifiers in a sentence to create connections between words that force the reader to move backwards through the sentence and consider again the beginning of the sentence, the movements, when the sentence closes. Christensen says this of his second principle.
“The main clause, which may or may not have a sentence modifier before it, advances the discussion; but the additions move back- ward, as in this clause, to modify the statement of the main clause or more often to explicate or exemplify it, so that the sentence has a flowing and ebbing movement, advancing to a new position and then pausing to consolidate it, leaping and lingering as the popular ballad does.
His sentence moves back and forth on itself, ideas eating themselves to generate new ideas from the digestion, like the Ouroboros, the snake that devours its tail. It is interesting to look at this sample sentence from Christensen in terms of martial arts. He names this skill a “direction of movement” within the sentence. This implies that great sentences are alive and move. They do not just convey one idea, and they do not stand still delivering that idea to the audience. Sentences that are alive move and deliver several ideas, changing pacing and complexity to most appropriately convey their various messages.
Martial arts work in a similar way to Christensen’s dynamic sentences. When a punch is thrown, it includes a single idea, and seems much like the static sentences that Christensen so decries. The dynamic movements of Karate are seen in its techniques. Karate techniques, which are all generated by taking the basic movement and adding to it until a technique is created, have several goals, and use variable pacing to accomplish them. Here is an example. A simple Karate response to a right straight punch is to quickly block the punch by pushing on the outside of the punch using the left hand or left forearm while stepping to the left to get around the puncher. The response ends with a counter punch to the side of the head. This movement can happen very quickly, each movement at the same fast pace, or the counter punch can be changed to a chop or some other movement. Changing the counter punch will necessitate a change in pacing to either add power or emphasis.
The third component of Christensen’s generative pedagogy, levels of abstraction, relates to using metaphorical language in sentences to enhance meaning. This use of language, using the word “cow” for example, to mean the animal, or a pejorative term for someone who is stupid, or to mean money, as cattle can be equated with worth and value. Language that just stays as straight descriptions does not engage the audience as much as language and sentences that change to different levels of abstractions. Perhaps “He walks down an old road” but if we add “He walks down an old road, withered trees like old men, groaning out painful memories; his old bones sympathize,” we move from a description to a more complete description of the setting and a character . This additional information uses the first component-addition, and the use of the phrase “withered trees like old men, groaning out painful memories” is using an abstraction to add to the meaning.
This level of abstraction is very hard for basic writers to learn. When they write, they use absolutes and pure description to get their point across. Speaking in analogies, comparing to items that don’t seem to link together logically is difficult for them. Many of these abstractions involve retreading the same material with different levels of abstraction to explain points more fully. Many basic writers have trouble explaining the points using abstraction; like parrots, they repeat previous points with a most small changes in their wording. The retreading to them seems boring and pointless, as if they were physically retreading the same trail, digging in a deeper and deeper groove into the dirt. In reality, they are retreading parallel paths, crossing and re-crossing their point, highlighting it with their steps.
It is the fourth concept, texture, which makes this retreading stay interesting. The idea here is that writing needs to change in speed, intensity, and feeling in order to stay interesting. This change in texture, in feeling, keeps the writing interesting, even when it traverses similar points. Sentences start simply. They grow to involve clauses with abstractions, creating patchworks of new fabric with comfortable, familiar T-shirts.
The idea of retreading familiar ground, but with differing levels of abstraction and texture is very applicable and similar to Karate. In Karate, students typically begin by training single forms or Kata. In traditional training, students train the same Kata over and over again until their teacher deems it to be correct. Gichin Funakoshi said it best when he explained “I would practice a kata (“formal exercise”) time and again week after week, sometimes month after month, until I had mastered it to my teacher’s satisfaction. This constant repetition of a single kata was grueling [and] often exasperating.” . All martial arts involve repetitions of movements, but Karate focuses on this repetition of movements almost obsessively. As explained before, all of the advanced movements of Karate come from the basic movements and structures. Because of this, Karate practitioners must practice the same movements again and again to perfect the timing, angle, speed, and power of the specific movements and strikes. With each repetition of the movement, they are practicing a level of abstraction with the movement until it becomes ingrained, and then moving to another level of abstraction, another focus with the movement or form, until finally all levels of abstraction are mastered. Sometimes a punch is used like a punch, but other times, it is not the outward movement of the punch that is the focus of the technique, but rather the motion pulling the punch back that is the focus, or the punch is focusing the strike on different knuckles than the traditional middle and index finger knuckles. These small changes turn what could be a boring exercise into one that is almost infinitely interesting.
This constant repetition can be seen in writing as well, in the grammar exercises. Teachers often begin classes with grammar drills and sentence work where students are tasked with circling the verbs and underlining the subjects in the sentences. Many students can do this once or twice without complaints, but some teachers ask them to repeat the process several times in a row, under the impression that the repetition will fix the ideas and rule in students’ brains. The students at my school do not care for grammar exercises, seeing them as useless, except as soporifics. If we teachers use repetition because it worked for us when we wished to learn literacy and grammar, and did not diminish our love of the subject, we must remember that we are all freaks of the classroom, aberrations with a love of writing and literacy that cannot be diminished even with repetitious grammar exercises.
Students in English classes resist the grammar work, but students in Karate classes do not likewise resist the similar repetitious drilling of basic techniques like punching, blocking, stances, and kicks. A student ends up executing, on average, 100 punches a training session. Both of these drills ostensibly teach the same things: the structure of communication inherent in the art. Why do students in Karate focus on throwing punches over and over again until they reach some imagined acceptable level? Many do this because they see the direct connection between practicing a punch until it is correct, and increased combat ability. Why is it that people who study English and Composition abhor grammatical drills, even if they know that the knowledge of grammar would prove invaluable to their writing? Perhaps the same sense of purpose, the connection between the practice of an action and the performance where a form of that action is needed is not seen so readily. To fix this, students need to practice grammar in the way that Karate practitioners practice punches, with purpose and an end goal in mind. Learning the rules for the sake of learning them is like learning how to punch and kick simply for the aesthetic value. When grammar, is taught isolated from the living sentence it is supposed to take part in, it creates an artificiality that discourages students from exploring and creating, and limits grammar to a set of rules, rather than a way to convey correct information. In martial arts terms, correct grammar is the correct structure for different strikes that enables them to deliver force correctly, and efficiently to the opponent. In other words, correct structure allows the martial artist to convey the correct meaning or feeling to the opponent through the use of differing strikes.
Teaching the basic academic conventions to all students, regardless of their intentions to travel farther into academia, gives students a vehicle of speech conventions that are recognized inside and outside the academic environment as having value and containing valuable speech, because good, clear, academic writing is the same as good, clear writing. Students can then use these conventions to share thoughts and ideas with professionals in their field and in others. They gain the ability to use their creative thoughts about the world and share them in a format that is easily digestible. It is a starting point for students. The academic conventions shown in “basic writing” courses provide basic writing skills in short order. This level of writing is one that we should not settle for, however. We should work to ensure that, when students are done with the basic writing course, they are not “basic writers” anymore . We have changed the definition of basic writing to show students and the world at large that “basic writing” is not so basic.
Basic Writers should not be seen as lesser writers. Writing with clear, plain language creates an ease of conversation that is rarely seen in academic writing. Basic writing, like the basic techniques in Karate, are practiced over and over again until they shine, and are used in the exactly correct location at the exactly correct time, using the exactly correct amount of force. This skill is one honed from hours and hours of work, and should not be seen as basic.
The important distinction here is that many basic writers are “adult beginners”. They cannot be treated and taught the same as our other large group of basic writers, elementary school children. They must be taught the complex skill of writing in a way that recognizes their flaws, celebrates their effort and attempted complexity of sentence that they try to wield, and honors them as a life peer or elder. We need to create a process of socialization that is fundamentally geared towards adults. We must look at their unconventional sentences—“After attending (school), I received my Associate Degree in Drafting and have accrued extensive training in many different programs that will laminate (sic) into a focused, well rounded and driven perspective required to achieve well over what the position requires,”—and see them as an attempt to make sense of the writing system, and not as “non-writing, as meaningless or imperfect writing”. In this sentence, the student, P, is trying to make sense of the conventions of cover letters, but is incorrectly linking quantity of words with their quality and clarity.
Compounding this issue with basic writers is that they are often instructed by teachers who, understandably, love complex sentences and enjoy flowery and voluminous speech. The disparity between what the teacher sees as good and clear writing, and what the student actually needs in order to be a clear communicator, often create confusion in the student. When I asked P what he meant when he said “…in Cad and have accrued extensive training in many different programs that will laminate (sic) into a focused, well rounded and driven perspective required to achieve well over what the position requires” he told me that he just want to say that I have learned a lot in my programs and that I am willing to go above and beyond job duties. When I asked why he did not just write down what he told me, he said that another teacher told him to write that sentence and use bigger words in his writing.
The idea that the more complex the writing, the more correct and appropriate it is, is an idea that plagues the Basic Writer. Mina Shaughnessy understands this need, and wishes to train teachers to instruct Basic Writers in the most effective way for them, which may be radically different from the way that most other college students are taught. Her strategy to slowly socialize teachers in the ways of Basic Writing instruction, weaning them gently from the role of tough taskmaster who instructs writers in the finer points of compositional construction, and accepts nothing less than the highest level of essay, a standard often met and even exceeded by many college writers; to “teach unflinchingly in the same way as before, as if any pedagogical adjustment to the needs of students were a kind of cheating,” is a very concrete goal. To the teachers with aspirations to teach Basic Writing as a Standard English class, perhaps just with shorter assignments, Shaughnessy answers with a loud and consistent wakeup call. Some students just need more help.
The basic writers in my school, as it may be in other schools, gravitate towards the concrete, the physical, the tangible, and avoid the ephemeral, the seemingly purely mental, and the overly conceptual. They see writing as skewing more conceptual than practical and physical and they eschew it. They look for what is immediately useful, because they have extremely busy lives. Common sense tells us that we learn best what we enjoy, and the more difficultly grasped the subject matter, the more essential an ingredient enthusiasm and desire is in the learning soup. Here is one of my favorite examples.
One day, when collecting papers from my Composition class, I was looking excitedly at the growing pile of papers on my desk. Wow, more students than normal are handing in their papers” I thought to myself. My sense of satisfaction as a teacher soared. I looked through my pile of papers to see if Gerald had handed in a paper. That would just make my day. Gerald was an artist through and through, when I looked at him, I got that artist vibe and could see him talking with his friends excitedly about which Photoshop brush stroke to use to create an intended meaning or feeling. He wore his artistry on his sleeve…and his calves….and a small bit on his shoulder; he had many tattoos, all of which he designed and then gave to a tattoo artist, saying “Recreate this, but do it sub-dermally on my left arm. Oh, and don’t skimp on the detail.”
His enthusiasm for art and visual expression did not transfer to written expression. His negative reaction to writing was such that he blatantly refused to participate in writing. I eventually got him to write, but only by letting him write on PowerPoint slides, all accompanied with pictures that he designed, with animations that made his words pop and sizzle. By the end of the course, his writing, while on a “non-standard” platform, had emotion and force. He was only able to generate that writing by making a compromise with writing. He agreed to meet writing halfway and, in the process, created something new, fresh, and personal.
Here you can see that students clearly respond well to assignments and projects that relate to their area of interest, and seem to have immediate use for them. For Gerald, it was only when I allowed him to express himself with a medium he loved that he could utilize the writing skills I had taught him. This is much like how my Sensei starts every martial arts class.
When we walked into the Dojo, which was just his house, the routine was always the same. First, we had to avoid the random detritus that seemed to grow in my Sensei’s house like a multi-material fungus. Shirts and socks cavorted on the floor, playing games with spilled cereal as cats ran underfoot. After that navigation was complete, we went to the kitchen to drink tea. As we drank, trying to find a bit of peace and order amongst the clutter, which followed us into the kitchen-dishes piled high in the sink were encrusted with oddly colored foodstuffs, we found calm in a question he always asked. “What do you want to learn today?” he would ask. This is very strange for any teacher to ask, to cede control of the direction of the class completely to the students’ whims.
That day, before I could think of a response, a student replied “I want to learn some Drunken Kung Fu.” Our Sensei nodded and taught us what is, apparently, the first thing you learn in the style; he taught us how to fall. For the uninitiated, let me explain. We had to fall into a plank position, which is a push up position resting on the forearms. We did this from standing, and as we fell, even though we were falling on mats, we knew it was going to hurt. I thought the first fall was the worst, until I did the second, and found that first fall had just softened up my forearms for more pain. Was this experience fun? No, not really, but not all learning is immediately fun. It was an exercise that I would have stopped doing had my training partner, the one who had suggested the activity, not been continuing. He was buoyed by his suggestion, no doubt. This exercise was practical, though, as it got us over our fear of falling. Without that fear, we found that we were better at keeping ourselves safe during our training. If we slipped and fell, we didn’t tense up, we just went with the flow. When that undesirable situation of falling came up in a real context, we knew what we had to do, and we acted appropriately.
In the same vein, when my students complain about the analytical essay work that we do in the class, calling it useless or impractical knowledge, I know that when they are faced with an analytical essay in the future, either in future classes, or as part of a project for work, they will know what to do, and will be able to act appropriately. When I have asked students what they wanted to work on, some have said that they want to know how to write a proper analytical essay. Whether this is because the subject was required by the curriculum or because of the student’s actual interest, the fact remains that the very act of choosing the subject for the day sustained their interest.
As for martial arts, it was these questions that not only kept me coming back, despite the messy conditions of the Dojo, but also allowed me to try styles, movements, and activities that I would never have tried otherwise; I would have been too nervous to try new things if my Sensei controlled the curriculum completely. Perhaps it is the prospect of choice in my lessons that keep students showing up, when no one is forcing them to come, and some travel as much as three hours to get to school every day.
I have shown here how we can use individual moments to create engagement and interest, but how do we do this course wide? Can we just string together engaging moments to create an engaging course, like links in a chain? No, the analogy for engagement at a course wide level is the chain mail. This piece of armor, while made of individual rings of metal, must be constructed with the piece in mind, as the placement of each piece within the whole can either fit harmoniously and lay flat, or can bunch up in odd places, poke and prod. Mina Shaughnessy, one of the most outspoken advocates for the Basic Writer, compared writing to learning piano or sports in “Some Needed Research on Writing”.
"Among most of the arts and skills people attempt to acquire in this society, the sequences and goals of instruction are far more stable and specific than they seem to be for writing. Most students of piano, wherever they study, make their way through similar types of scales and exercises … For such skills, teachers need not invent whole pedagogies as they go, nor return with debilitating regularity to fundamental questions about their purposes and procedures. They continue a vital tradition of instruction in which their roles are of unquestioned importance. It is assumed that to learn to play the piano or to dance or to play football, a person must generally become someone 's student. And that someone, a teacher, understands what comes after what and what constitutes an acceptable level of performance at each step along the way". Thus begins her argument that we need to treat writing like coaches treat skills like piano and football; writing is a skill that, for some, must be learned wholly in the classroom. We cannot assume that our students will learn writing outside of the classroom. When our students depart our carefully constructed learning environments, they travel into and through a world of distractions. Every friend that they pass, who waves at them to hang, every building they enter, every action they decide upon introduces more distractions from the difficult task of learning that the teacher has presented. Mrs. Shaughnessy’s instinct is correct here, that writing needs to be taught as a self contained skill like piano; the student is introduced to the basics of the subject and as mastery is achieved in the basics, is slowly introduced to greater complexity and nuance. Mistakes are expected and encouraged; mistakes indicate risk and growth. This growth in complexity that grows along with the student’s abilities also builds interest, because it becomes an exercise between the student and the skill itself, between the student and the piano, or the student and the punch; the teacher ceases to matter. With the de-emphasis of the teacher, the student’s intrinsic motivation comes out, and true learning can commence. In this article, Mrs. Shaugnessy even explicitly states that we should take lessons from the way hobbies and physical activities are taught, and apply them to writing. Whereas teachers must either reinvent whole pedagogies for writing, or contort their teaching to fit the pedagogy du jour of their school, coaches and teachers of extracurricular activities are outside of the curriculum, and can fashion lessons in a way that they know will function and promote learning. I feel we should not only take the context of these physical activities to inform literacy teaching, but also their content. Like my former student Gerald, who only wrote when literacy was married with his main interest, we, as teachers, should encourage the inclusion of the activities and skills learned in the hobbies that so habitually distract our students from writing. To include other activities in our writing class may seem to dilute the literacy experience previously offered, much like throwing too many juices into a drink, ruining the flavor thereby. It can seem scary to bring other topics in. While there are many reasons for this trepidation, it all really boils down to control. Teachers have control over their classrooms, and enjoy having that control, whether or not they will consciously admit to it. Good teachers all effectuate some system of control in their classrooms, which allows them to teach effectively, inviting some risk-taking by students; however, teachers need to trust in their ability to engender trust among their students in order to link their students’ lives to the study of English. It is through this link that students are engaged in the subject, and can connect the ephemeral to the physical. Experienced teachers know this; they know to balance their control with student freedom, to allow the student to explore and create in a safe environment that introduces composition variables (E.G. grammar rules, syntax, vocabulary etc.) at appropriate times for maximum knowledge assimilation and comprehension. New subjects that are tangentially related to the “standard” English curriculum should not be shunned, but welcomed by teachers as alternative avenues for engagement and intrinsic love for the subject of writing. To give you an example from my own teaching, I just recently restructured my composition classes. The way the introductory composition course was structured before, the curriculum was frontloaded with the mechanics of proper essay writing. These mechanics, while clearly important, were presented in a way that did not link them to the student’s previous knowledge. The curriculum jumped from sentence structure to thesis statements, and then jumped to discussions of essay construction. The ordering of items was haphazard and confusing for students. When I began teaching this curriculum, I found it to be boredom inducing for the students. It was all of the frontloading of writing instruction that bored the students. They wanted to get to the task of writing. Many of my students do not care about writing classes, but they are internally motivated and goal oriented. These students are making the best of an undesirable situation by learning how to write even if they disagree with the utility of the material. Many wanted to write, but had to wait and slog through theory and 5 paragraph essay construction guidelines to get there. When they finally got to writing, what they found was an unappealing 4 page essay on a subject chosen from a list of safe topics. Three students were writing about the death penalty, two people were writing about their feelings on abortion, and most of the rest of the students were writing on their feelings towards marijuana. While the students had chosen their topics for their final papers, and the topics most certainly dealt with difficult topics, they did not inspire the students. The choice was a false one, a sanitized choice, and it lead to apathy amongst students that might otherwise have been interested in writing.
As I looked at my tired introductory composition students that term, I was not surprised to find them disengaged from their papers. Some were talking with friends while sipping oversized energy drinks, desperate to stay awake, others were sleeping on the tables. I realized I needed to take action. I needed to complete a Herculean labor; I needed to wake them up.
I looked around the room for something to help. The white walls would be no help, nor would the commercialized pretty painting of a boat sailing happy waters hanging in the back of the room, dead center on the wall. Desperate for a tactic to get them awake and excited, I tried flicking the lights, to shake the boredom from the students, searching for the fruit of knowledge in their boughs.
The epileptic light show that ensued made the room into a rave; a rave where people wanted to sleep and chat. Some of the students were paying attention to me the whole time, their frustration at their fellow students as understandable as it was obvious and acute. It made me happy to think that some students were excited to be there. These must be the students who like reading and writing and liked their paper topics, I thought to myself. Every class had at least one.
The other students, the disrupters, were there because they had to be. The school requires everyone to take my course, whether they like it or not, and they often take out their frustration at forced education on me and on my subject, as if I am the sole cause of all of their woes. These students needed some reason to be engaged in my class. They had to be there anyway, so they might as well enjoy it and learn something from the experience, lest they just learn bitter hatred for school in general and writing in particular. The rewrite of this course, to organize the material based on structure, basics, and immediate functionality and usability of the written word, was based on my experiences with how my Sensei structured our training.
When a student begins training at the Dojo, they are brought through the basic movements of martial arts. While there are lots of different styles, with many of the movements being incompatible with others, there is a basic set that ensures a strong body as a foundation for learning more complicated techniques and movements. The beginning sets of movements, the basics, are designed to keep the student safe as she learns new material.
When we begin in training, we are taught how to punch. This helps keep our hand and wrist safe should we hit anything during exercises, or when we make the decision to punch during sparring (a practice wherein two people practice fight, using techniques they have learned in order to block strikes and deliver strikes). Here are some of our basics. I will also compare these basics to compositions and writing. My Sensei often said to us “Sparring is a conversation”. What he meant by this was that the strikes and blocks that occur during sparring be thought of as arguments and statements that each side makes to further their point. The points they are making during sparring vary depending on the people sparring and the various other factors that likewise modify the meaning of vocal arguments. Here are the basics of martial arts and their corresponding communicative properties.

The basics of martial arts:
Punches: As I have shown how punches work, I will just explain here that punching is much like a sentence, in that the structure of the punch must be correct for the type of punch being used in order for it to be effective. Many punches look unsupported and unstructured by people unfamiliar with that specific way of punching. In the same way, many students, unfamiliar with the structure of writing and sentence styles, look at some sentences and see them as ineffective when they are in fact effective sentences. The punch is the standard way that most martial artists deliver their meaning during a sparring match. Thinking of a punch as a sentence has several implications for the Composition classroom. A sentence needs to have structure , and needs a subject and verb in order to be complete. While other parts can be added, these two things are the required grammatical pieces. Like the sentence, the punch only requires a proper hitting surface, and an arm movement to project force. As it is with sentences, so too can you add different parts to punches to change them, add force or just add flourishes to make them more aesthetically pleasing.
Stances: These are ways of standing that make the practitioner more stable and give him/her the ability to resist force coming from specific directions for specific stances. We go over how to stand in stances, the uses of various stances, and how to switch between stances. Stances are a way to resist the opponent, to stand firm in an argument. This idea is so firmly linked with persuasion and communication that all persuasive papers have stances to which the writer adheres and defends. Stances allow the practitioner to utilize other parts of the body to strengthen punches, and other movements. Likewise, in an essay, a solid stance allows for the use of many different writing techniques. . A good stance also allows the use of all kicking techniques, as stability will be less of an issue.
Kicks: these teach how to keep the practitioner’s legs and feet safe during kicks and how to deliver force using legs. In the beginning, students are taught the basics of where and when to use certain kicks. Kicks are, like punches, ways to deliver meaning, and their structure, while it does not have as many divergences as does punching, nevertheless can seem unorthodox to the uninitiated martial artist. The only difference between punching and kicking in the meaning making level is that when a kick is performed, meaning is made at the sacrifice of balance and stability. We teach our beginners to not kick higher than the waist for this very reason.
Blocks: This basic blocking set is taught that covers the standard ways of protecting the upper body from strikes coming from various angles. These techniques keep the practitioner much safer while practicing. We go over how to use blocks to perform a variety of functions. The first, of course, is to keep the practitioner safe. Once this is mastered at a basic level, we show how the blocker can use his block to advance his position relative to the opponent. We also show how the blocker can use her block to avoid further confrontation, if that is the goal. Blocks are the ways to defend against punches and kicks, to resist the opponent’s arguments and create a position where a response argument can be made.
After we have taught the basics, the students are ready to learn techniques from a variety of styles. After students know how to deliver and protect themselves from various simple arguments, to use our metaphor of sparring as communication, students are taught techniques, which are combinations of the basic punches, kicks, and blocks that were taught before. As my Sensei did with the “Drunken Boxing” segment earlier, he always gives the students a choice as to what techniques to learn. Students pick a style that they wish to learn a technique from, and then they pick an attack to defend against. This questioning introduces the student to a new style, a new way of communicating with the body, and it gives the student the proper context in which to use this new communication tool.
The restructuring of this composition course started with structure. It started with a question. “What did I think was important in Composition?” With that question firmly in mind, here is a lesson plan it constructed.
Writing is not just academic, and for most adult learners, treating it as such is tantamount to ruining writing for them. The original Composition curriculum had very little in the way of non-academic writing, almost devoid of journal writing, rants, love poems, and letters to a boss- all very valuable forms of writing that do not follow the academic rule set. I begin every class with a writing prompt for the students. Common ones I use are these: describe your favorite meal in as much detail as possible, write about why you are here in school, and write about your favorite hobby. These topics are purposely vague, to get the students writing without fear of their inner editor. I left them write for ten minutes without stopping before I solicit the students to share. This gives the students a chance to try out different literary muscles, and to try to tie together all they have learned about the basics of composition, and the sharing allows the student to show their writing to a larger audience for critique. One student, in responding to the “write about your favorite meal” prompt, wrote such a riveting and compelling description of spaghetti with meatballs that the class’ collective mouth was watering.
To give another example, during the winter, when students had to slog through poorly plowed streets and narrowly avoid accidents to get to school, I took that frustration and had them write a rant about snow. After explaining that a rant was an argument piece, a writing piece that just took raw emotion and put it on the page, I had students write for ten minutes and then share. The exercise had even the staunchest opponents of writing taking pen to paper to share their emotions on the “crap that falls from the sky” as one student called it. I introduce these genres using readings that the students can respond to, provides them with a base for expression, and allows for a shared , and a shared experience for discussion. I will often bring in articles from Philadelphia Magazine or The New Yorker, lead a discussion with those articles, and invite the students to respond to the articles in a page of writing. I find that one page of writing is a good length, because it is not that scary to students, but still gives me a long enough piece of theirs with which to see their ideas develop. I allow the students to respond in whatever way they deem fit: poems, short stories, rants, or lists, for example. This freedom allows students a chance to develop their voice, showing them that writing comes in a variety of flavors.
Capoeira and Critical Pedagogy
History
Karate is an art focused on effectiveness over aesthetics. Its movements may not look very pretty to an observer, but they are effective, and beautiful in their efficiency. Capoeira, an African-Brazilian dance martial art, is anything but unconcerned with aesthetics. In Capoeira, if you kick a guy in the head, it needs to look stylized, like a dance. The art has many upside down movements and spinning movements, movements that are not seen in other martial arts. While it is less well known than Karate, it has still made its way into the popular culture, thanks to the video game Tekken 3 (in which one of the fighters, Eddie Gordo, uses Capoeira as his fighting style, the movie Ocean’s Twelve (in which a master thief, François Toulour, uses Capoeira to evade a laser security system) and the 1993 movie Only The Strong (a movie focused entirely on the art of Capoeira and how it is used to stop a drug lord and bring trouble kids around). The art itself was not very popular, and was virtually unknown outside of Brazil until the 1960’s; it is now gaining some notoriety in the United States. Much of the soul of Capoeira is alive in Break Dancing, an acrobatic dance form that came into being in the 1980’s in New York. While the link between Capoeira and Break Dancing is a contentious one, it is this author’s belief that there must be a connection there, because the movements are too similar.
Capoeira is an art that is not only useful for students due to the aesthetic beauty and the tenuous link to break dancing, an activity that many students would know, but is also interesting to students because of its connection with Critical Pedagogy. Many of the students I have taught were deeply interested in political and societal issues, and all in economic issues, because of their relationship with work, which is one of equating hours and money, closely watching both to make sure the one gives enough time, and the other covers their monthly costs discussing these economic issues necessitates discussing politics and social justice issues. Before we get into the topic of social justice, we will look at the history of Capoeira, and how its history affects the theory and movements of the art.
Capoeira is a martial art born out of slavery and bondage. According to Nestor Capoeira, in his book The Little Capoeira Book, which is the definitive guide for Capoeira, the art was started in the 1500’s, when slaves were being brought from Africa to Brazil to provide the manpower for the sugar-cane fields. The Portuguese tried to subjugate the indigenous population, but found that the indigenous people died or escaped before producing labor significant enough to offset the effort of capturing and restraining them. When the Portuguese captured Africans and brought them in large slave ships, the Africans brought with them their religion and musical instruments. In the United States, which still had slavery at the time, slaves were not allowed to fight, but they were also not allowed to dance. Slaves in Brazil were likewise not allowed to learn to fight, but they were allowed to learn how to dance, because dancing and music are an integral part of Brazilian culture . This relative “freedom” allowed the African Brazilian slaves to combine together the various cultures and fighting arts from all over Africa, and take that resulting mix and combining it with Brazilian music and dance to create the dance fighting system of Capoeira.
The art, being created by slaves, was born out of oppression and rebellion, and these two ideas have influenced all its parts. Many slaves would play instruments, like the drums, the tambourine, and hand clapping and singing. The instrument players and singers encircled two combatants, who danced and fought to the music. As Nestor Capoeira places it
“Starting around 1814, Capoeira and other forms of African cultural expression suffered repression and were prohibited in some places by the slave masters and overseers. Up until that date, forms of African cultural expression were permitted and sometimes even encouraged, not only as a safety gauge against the internal pressures created by slavery but also to bring out the differences between various African groups, in a spirit of "divide and conquer." But with the arrival in Brazil in 1808 of the Portuguese king Dom Joao VI and his court, who were fleeing Napoleon Bonaparte 's invasion of Portugal, things changed: The newcomers understood the necessity of destroying a people 's culture in order to dominate them,” . As we can see, Capoeira was originally born out of a culture of oppression, but a culture that allowed dancing, which would make disguising the fighting aspects of the art in the cloak of dancing into an effective subterfuge. These small fights may have looked to the slave-owners and the general populace like the ”Capoeirista” (the Capoeira player/practitioner) was just “letting off steam”, he/she was, in fact, training in all of the things that makes a good fighter: timing, strength, flexibility, and adaptability. When Capoeira was repressed in or around 1814, Capoeira was still practiced, but it was forced to go underground. It was around this time that, to avoid being linked with Capoeira, many Capoeiristas would take on nicknames.
In 1888, when the Golden Law was passed in Brazil, Slaves were finally free. As in America after Slavery, the newly freed slaves did not find acceptance right away. Angered by the inequalities, and with nowhere else to go to make money, many Capoeiristas, the majority from Rio de Janeiro, joined gangs and used their skills to terrorize the populace and make money. This constant fighting led to Capoeira being outlawed in 1892. Capoeira may have been outlawed, and its practitioners punished, but the violent fighting of Rio De Jeneiro was not the only form of Capoeira. In the city of Bahia, people were practicing Capoeira and linking it closely with ritual, religion, and music. It is this version of Capoeira that has become the Capoeira that people know today. It can be argued that it survived to become the second most popular sport in Brazil next to soccer because it hid its inherent radical and subversive nature. The legacy of criticism and subversion is still there, in the system, inherent to it even, but it has been hidden so that it may continue. Capoeira has many lessons to teach the basic writer, but first we should look at what Capoeira is and how it is performed.
Principles and Concepts as they relate to Critical Pedagogy In Karate, everything started with the stances and the punch. It was from the stances that you got the powerful punching ability. In Capoeira, all of the techniques and abilities of the style start from a dance like swinging motion appropriately called “Ginga” which means swing in Portuguese. It is from this movement that all of the strikes, most of which are kicks, originate. The ginga is quite simple, and starts with the legs shoulder width apart and parallel to each other. This position is called parallello. When I teach this movement to students, I tell them to imagine that they are standing on two points of an equilateral triangle, and that the top point of the triangle is behind them. As they step back with their right foot, they raise their right arm up to block their face. They drop the arm as the right foot comes back to parallello, and they repeat the same motion, but with the left foot going back and the left arm coming up to block the face. If this movement is repeated quickly, it looks like a dance, and is very disorienting for an opponent. Because the weight keeps switching from one foot to the next, strikes can come from either leg. The art itself is a combination of techniques and movements, and an intimate knowledge of the music involved in the art; this contrasts it with Karate, which is very focused on forms and basic movements.
Capoeira has many basic movements, like the pushing front kick called bencao “blessing” or the crescent kick called meia lua de frente “half moon in the front”, but half or more of the movements are defined as Floreio of “flowery”. These movements seem to sacrifice usability for aesthetics, and are often variations of the basic techniques that either involves extra spins, prolonged inverted movements, flips, or shows of strength. When comparing these showy movements to the simple but effective movements of Karate, one must wonder what their use is, besides looking really cool. While these movements do look cool, they also serve the purpose of lulling the opponent into a false sense of security. When the opponent looks at those movements, and sees that they do not look especially martial, his defenses may drop, opening him up for a strike. Most would know to block a strike coming towards them from the front, or would be more cautious around someone who is clearly ready to fight, in a Karate or boxing stance. By contrast, if someone is dancing around, that person seems less hostile, and thus will be harder to block. This desire for the attacks and movements in Capoeira to hide their malicious intent carries its way into all the parts of the art. To show this, let me offer a description of the Jogo (the “game” of Capoeira, which is what they call sparring). Imagine being in a city, and you see a group of people gathered together in a circle on the sidewalk of a less used street, and even spilling into the street. All of them are wearing tight white pants, and hanging from the pants are corded ropes of various colors, green, blue, yellow. All of the people are clapping, except for those with instruments in their hands. There are familiar large drums, tambourines, and cow bells, but , in the middle of the instruments, there are three people holding and playing very odd looking things. They look like bows, with the arc pointed towards their bodies, and a bowl on the bottom, which is resting on the musicians’ stomachs. They hit the metal string of the bow with a small stick, and it makes a twanging sound that changes in tone as the musician hits different parts of the string. As we get closer, we hear singing:

All of the people are singing, doing a call-and-response with the musicians. As we get very close, a person from the circle looks at us, smiles, and lets us into the circle. As we look, we see that two people inside the circle are waiting near the instruments. The man and woman are crouched low, tensed springs. As the music intensifies, they begin a slow movement, rotating their bodies first away from each other, and then in slow, controlled cartwheels, always looking into the other’s eyes. As the man lands, he kicks out with his right foot, trying to catch the woman who has yet to finish her cartwheel. She sees it, and closes her legs to block, then spins and lands in a sprawl with a leg swinging quickly towards the man’s face.
The movements continue and flow, first one attacking and the other defending, and then the tables are turned. The man kicks hard at the woman, and she dodges, but slips slightly. She sprawls, and it looks like she has hit her arm hard on the ground. As the man reaches to check on her, she comes alive again, kicking at him with a sweeping leg that starts low and rises to try and catch him on his chin. As the man turns to dodges the sweeping kick, the woman surprises him by landing her leg quickly and rushing in with a head butt to the man’s chest. She stops an inch before making contact, and the man stands up. They both hug and leave the circle. As they leave the center of the circle, to become singers, we leave them, hearing their singing as we walk down the street. In Capoeira, the players are given the chance to be agents in the game, and they flow from players in the center of the roda (pronounced “Hoda”, literally “circle”, referring to the circle of people), to being part of the circle singing and clapping, to being one of the musicians playing various instruments, from the drums, the tambourines, the cowbells, to the odd bow-like instrument at the heart of the art, the berimbau. It is this seamless shifting of positions of varying power and importance within the roda that Capoeira exhibits many of the ideals of Critical Pedagogy, and how it can be used in the classroom to engage students in social justice work, and in the arduous task of critical thinking.
Critical Pedagogy is often thought of as the pedagogy of Social Justice. To take Ann George’s fantastic definition, which she paraphrased from Peter McLaren, Critical Pedagogy “engages students in analyses of the unequal power relations that produce and are produced by cultural practices and institutions (including schools), and it aims to help students develop the tools that will enable them to challenge this inequality”. Critical Pedagogy is a method of teaching others that the inequalities inherent in writing and in various institutions exist, and what they can do about these inequalities, because it is impossible to enact change unless the change that needs to happen is identified and the steps needed are mapped out and organized. Critical Pedagogy, then, is concerned primarily with critical thinking. Because critical pedagogies are in the intellectual camp of the deconstructionists in their desire to break down existing systems and look at, as closely as possible, objective inequality, they must resist using the traditional educational methods; these methods would not successfully transmit ideas that would be antithetical to the educational method’s survival.
Paulo Friere, one of the most important names in Critical pedagogy, calls this oppressive form of education “Banking” education where he states that the school environment is fundamentally narrative and that “This relationship involves a narrating Subject (the teacher) and patient listening object (the students)” . Friere’s complaint here is that traditional education does not create thinking beings equipped with the faculties of deductive reasoning necessary to understand the world in its intricacies, but instead creates mindless workers that know how to receive information and use it, but do not know how to gain that information themselves. In short, Friere says the traditional education system creates students that are dependant in the system of teachers and educators for learning. Real, teaching, Friere argues, should involve “problem posing”, where students are asked to solve problems and think for themselves . This problem posing works to remove the teacher from the place of knowledge holder, and it is central to Capoeira.
A typical Capoeira practice starts much like most other physical activities-with a warm-up. It is, of course, important to stay limber during strenuous physical exercises, so stretching and warming the muscles prepares them for extreme movement in the form of Capoeira practice and lessens the chances of straining or pulling, serious injuries that can cause a lot of pain and take a long time to heal. After the stretching, which is taught in a “banking” model fashion, because stretching in an improper way causes harm; the class is run through the lesson of the day, often including several kicks and several dodges. While this is initially explained in the “banking” model shown before, with someone at the front of the class displaying the kick and everyone else emulating it, when the kicks and dodges learned are brought together, that learning changes to a “problem posing” method. Students may have understood the kick or dodge in isolation, in an ideal environment where no one was there to receive the kick and there was no kick to dodge, but when they are paired together, the problem is posed: can you dodge this kick? It is here that students see, with immediate results, what they can and cannot do with their newly learned information and skills. They also see the immediate use of these skills. Many of the students will sneak in a different type of kick to see if it can be dodged (they hopefully tell their partner about this before they perform the kick!). It is through this experimentation that students move from passive “receptacles” as Friere called them, and become what I will call here an “agent learner”.
Agent learners have Agency, or the idea that their actions can effect change in the world. Unlike the students raised on the “banking” model, who are implicitly told that they know nothing, and that they must sit there and gain the illusion of action by watching the teacher and acting vicariously through her . This Agency is increased when, at the end of practice, all the practitioners participate in a roda. It is here that they can experiment with their full range of techniques, seeing what fits in which situation, and what movements leave them open. They can also experiment when singing and clapping as well, trying out new instruments, keeping time, and, when they become experienced enough to play the berimbau and change the pace of the music, thereby changing the pace of the game in the roda.
This feeling of Agency not only increases their self confidence, it also makes them more resilient when things go wrong, as they realize that they can change their actions to overcome an unfavorable situation. This is especially needed with adult learners because of the difficulty they have in the academic setting. It has been shown that adult learners have a high attrition rate . Any martial art can increase levels of self confidence and thus increase Agency; much of the gains in Agency occur from sparring practice, where martial arts practitioners can experiment with actions and see the results, try something new, and triumph. Capoeira is arguably more efficient than other martial arts in developing Agency because the two Capoeiristas (Capoeira practitioners) avoid hitting each other when in the roda, they just show that they could hit. The reasons for this are simple; Capoeira is so focused on the music and the rhythm and aesthetics of fighting that actually hitting an opponent would interrupt the flow of the game. Capoeira creates a safe place for practitioners to gain Agency; the fear of injury is diminished tremendously, and the level of experimentation exhibited by new students in the roda is arguably greater than in a student’s first sparring match in Karate; the fear of physical injury hampers creativity.
Using Capoeira in a literacy classroom does more than instill students with Agency, however; it shows them how to subvert unjust authorities. During the beginning of the Open Admissions process, when the Basic Writer became a focus of professors for the first time, these new students faced prejudice from frustrated teachers. According to Min-zhan Lu, in his essay on the use of conflict and struggle in basic writing pedagogy, Goeffrey Wagner was “one of the most vehement gatekeepers” of the basic writing. His descriptors for the basic writing students-“dunces”, “misfits”, “hostile mental children” and “the most sluggish of animals” debased those students, placed them below other students, other human beings. This dehumanizing rhetoric was designed to keep these students out of University, for Wagner clearly believed that the University gate was one that needed keeping. This argument clearly separates people into two camps: the academic and professional people, and the non-academic laborers. This dehumanizing creates an inequality that must be combated by students and other professors.
The professors must give the students a chance to show how deserving they are of the education, but if the teacher fails to do this, the students must subvert the authority of the teacher and learn more than the teacher is willing to teach.
A simple way of subverting authority is removing it from the classroom. Accomplishable in the extreme sense by physically removing the authority, it is also accomplishable, and more desirable, to remove the authority by changing the role of the teacher from static to dynamic. The static teacher role is much like Friere’s “banking” model, treating the student as an Object and a receptacle to be filled. The teacher is always the teacher, always the one who has the knowledge. This static authority will be oppressive at some point during its tenure. The only way to avoid all authority is to make the teaching dynamic; if the teacher becomes the student at times, or abdicates her power to spread it among the students, more equitable learning occurs. This is accomplishable during discussion based classes, where the teacher poses a question and facilitates the students as they prod and analyze the question from various angles. In this model, the teacher is still controlling the classroom, but has just ceded some of his power and authority to the classroom for the period of time of the discussion.
To remove the inequality from the classroom, the teacher must become the student at times, posing problems in which the teacher also participates in solving, but participates in a way that does not turn the teacher into a foci of discussion and leading. It is here, in this model of education, one in which teachers do not exist, that Capoeira is at its most helpful. In the roda, the student will enter with the miestre (literally “master”, the Capoeira equivalent of “sensei”) . Inside the circle, the teacher will pose problems in the form of kick and trips, and the student will propose answers, all contextualized by the nuances of the question movement. For one kick, the response may be to dodge back and attempt to circle the opponent, but for another kick, if the teacher has stretched his position, the student’s response may well be to move into attack, to unbalance, to topple.
When the teacher becomes dynamic in her role, and allows the student to instruct and lead, she is engendering critical thinking skills. This set of skills that is contained within Critical Thinking: discovering a problem that must be solved, conceptualizing a possible solution, gathering information from various areas, evaluating whether that information is both relevant and accurate, enacting the solution, evaluating the result of the solution, and modifying the solution to make it more viable by synthesizing it with new information, is important for everyone to learn irrespective of Socioeconomic status (SES), race, gender, or any other external factor. To gain and maintain the option of social and economic mobility, these skills must be learned and then mastered. When the teacher is removed from the equation, and can no longer be relied upon to provide answers, the onus of critical thinking is placed on the shoulders of the students.
Why should we bother teaching students in accordance with the ideals of critical pedagogy if most of the adult learners are just there to get skills closely related to their career of choice? Does the talk of inequality, social justice, human rights, and other typical social justice themes diminish the job that the composition instructor should be engaged with, teaching students how to write? Jeff Smith, in his 1997 article about gate keeping in the composition classroom claims that writing instruction must be untangled from the mess of conflicting critical pedagogy definitions. He claims that there are gates being kept, and to claim anything besides this is to avoid the issue and discount reality. His evidence for this is that students self select to go to University, thus keeping a gate themselves. The students who go to University go for a specific reason, and that reason is almost never to learn how to fight the unfair societal machine . Because the teachers do not ask the students what they wish to learn, they can keep claiming that what they really want to learn is how to be culturally aware, and how to fight against oppression, when really perhaps they just want to learn how to write effectively and eloquently so that they can garner better employment.
Smith’s assertion that composition instructors must teach their subject well so that the student is well prepared for their chosen career fieldis a worthy point, and one to consider as we see how to teach in a critical manner the daunting subject of social justice. Can there be a social justice curriculum that attains its lofty goals of subverting authority, creating equality, and constructing free thinkers?
Discussing teachers whose power must be usurped, or an evil that causes inequality that must be stopped is, of course, taking the Friesian argument to its extreme. In our modern world, there are few ultimate evils or objectively wrong actions; most of the people in the world and the actions that they take are subjective in their effects. Some may find their actions abhorrent, but there are others who find their actions just and worthy of defense. Evil and good actions exist on a spectrum that is not easily examined. Equality and Inequality are hard to see on a global level, where one man’s inequality is not another man’s, but these concepts come to life when students are faced with inequality in their own lives. How should a student deal with the institutional racism they are faced with every day? By focusing on the everyday problems of students, the writing curriculum is made more engaging, and the ideas of social justice come alive. Most adult learners in college level writing courses have other obligations in their lives besides essay writing and article reading. These students are motivated to learn the subject that they believe will advance their career, but they are inclined to be disengaged with learning that does not obviously advance their careers. When the idea of social justice is made more personal, more authentic, it becomes a real and attainable skill. It is unfair to ask adult learners, already burdened with complex family lives and financial situations to hold them accountable for the answers or even expect answers to the issues of women’s suffrage, sexual harassment, or institutionalized racism. What can they do personally to reduce the inequality surrounding women, from unequal pay to sexual harassment? If we cannot teach them how to combat these inequalities in their current position as grocer (a position that many of my students share), then do we give up teaching social justice?
No, we still need to teach social justice, even if it seems unusable by many students, just like teachers of Capoeira should teach that art even though they know that almost all of their students will not use the skill in their daily lives, nor will they make Capoeira their life and go on to open up their own schools. Like Composition, when students learn Capoeira, even though they have chosen to go into that class, they are not entering into it thinking that they will become great Capoeira Meistres. Most enter into it to get some exercise, or learn more control over their bodies, or just to have fun.
Similarly, the students that are in basic writing courses, especially those courses that cater to adult learners, are not in the course to become professional writers; they are in the class to have their “ticket punched” as it were. These students want a passing grade from the class, so that they can pursue their career goals. To ensure that they gain the skills necessary to tackle their career goals, we need to teach them critical thinking skills. As Smith states, one of the only things we, as English teachers, can be “justified in imposing on students is our judgment of means” . The means that we can pass judgment on and provide instruction in is critical thinking. For our students, this is the means to their end, whatever that end may be.
How do we, as teachers, equip students with the skills necessary to deal with their personal problems of inequality and social justice? Here is an example from my teaching.
In addition to the introductory composition class that I restructured, I also restructured the persuasive composition class. Before, the class presented the main components of critical thinking and analyzing arguments to students through lecture; class readings; and short, sporadic discussions. The discussions created by this type of teaching, while sometimes fruitful, never created the lasting level of critical thinking that should occur. The readings and the discussion were both contained in the classroom, and unfortunately created a discussion in which the students repeated the main ideas of the article, but that discouraged students from doing the hard work of actually thinking about the article. This problem was acerbated by the textbook, which seemed to encourage shallow analysis of the articles.
Many of my students are those for whom English is not their first language (ESL). This limitation affects their ability to read an article and comprehend it fully, let alone think about it critically. In my first term teaching at that school, when the fear of failure prevented me from changing the curriculum overmuch, I stuck doggedly to the assigned articles. While many readers could understand the articles, much of the class time was used getting all the students to a place where they understood the article’s meaning. Once comprehension was reached, we barely had time for analytical inquiry. To place all students on a level playing field in terms of comprehension, I introduced video documentaries to the class in lieu of many of the articles.
This change of medium drastically increased student participation and comprehension, and increased the students’ attendance rates, as well. We spent several days watching some documentaries and discussing them, stopping the video whenever questions arose. The ESL students were able to listen to the documentaries and, along with the pictures and music as contextual clues absent from a written article, they could piece together the meaning of the documentary enough to comment on it and to think about it beyond its superficial meaning.
One of the ESL students, who had not spoken for the majority of the course up to this point, said of the documentary Inside Job, that those bankers make too much money, and that the amount of money one of them made in a year could have rebuilt his entire town and fed them all for several months. Once he understood the complex arguments of the financial crash, he could utilize his critical thinking faculties to analyze the information.

Tai Chi and Ecocomposition
History
While Karate is focused on efficiency and effectiveness of movement, and Capoeira is more focused on the aesthetics and the ability of movements to distract and fool opponents, T’ai Chi is focused on health, wellness, and finding harmony between the Tai Chi practitioner and the natural world. I have left this section for last, because this martial art, much like the compositional pedagogy that I connect it to, requires the knowledge of the other arts and compositional pedagogues to fully understand it.
The history of the art is uncertain because of its age, but here are some basic facts. T’ai Chi, which is translated as “Grand Ultimate”, is a martial art developed in China at least 800 years ago. The art has “been practiced in China for centuries as a form of art, religious ritual, relaxation technique, exercise, and self defense by young and old alike” . The art consists of a pattern of movements practiced very slowly, and at a uniform speed. The thought is that these slow motions are meditative, show the practitioner exactly where improvement needs to be made, and can be sped up and performed effortlessly when needed in a self defense situation.
T’ai Chi is a complex art, in that it has many schools and branches, some of which barely resemble each other. The two most popular branches of T’ai Chi are the Yang and Chen family styles. Chen Tai Chi is said to be older, and looks much more martial, with some very slow movements, followed by explosive displays of power. Yang Tai Chi, by contrast, uses a consistently slow pace, and is practiced around the world primarily for health benefits and meditation rather than for fighting prowess or strength. The slow movements in T’ai Chi are easily contrasted with the forceful movements in Karate and the acrobatic artistic movements in Capoeira. Imagine being at a park in China at 5AM. When we look around, amongst the trees, in a clearing, we see a group of ten people performing a strange set of slow, graceful movements. The people shift their weight to their left feet, rotate their right foot, and shift towards the right, stretching their right arm out, palm up, and resting their left hand, palm down, on their hip. All the movements seem to happen at once, and the movement, although slow, seems constant. The people seem to be floating on the ground, and their arms swim through the air. There is no talking, only movement-soft, flowing movement-and a sense of calm that permeates the area.
If the art were just a combat system, it would not be nearly so complex, and its use in Composition classes would be limited. T’ai chi, however, is a Taoist art, and its links in Taoism affects all parts of it. Taoism, a religion or a philosophy of life depending on sources, is replete with contradictions and odd statements. Taoism focuses on the personal in connection with the universe. To get practitioners to connect with the universe, Taoism believes that the self needs to dissolve . Getting rid of the self is a tall order, and the method that Taoism adopts is the middle path. As is said in a prominent Taoist text called the Chuang Tzu, “The small man sacrifices himself in the pursuit of gain, the superior man devotes his whole existence to the struggle for fame. Their reasons for relinquishing the normal feelings of men and warping their natures are quite different, but in that they abandon the proper human course and give over their whole lives to a strange and unnatural endeavor, they are exactly the same. Therefore it is said, ' Do not be a small man, thus to destroy the very essence of your being. And do not try to be a superior man, either. Follow the natural course” .
This idea that we should eschew fame and monetary gain to focus on a natural course would seem antithetical to much of human nature. Not only is this text compelling readers to avoid too much ambition or money, but it is also linking the small man who focuses on personal wealth, and the superior man who focuses on fame, and decrying both, stating instead that all men should desire and strive for a natural state, which requires no desire or striving to achieve. The term that is used for this natural state is “Wu wei”, which the Chuang Tzu translates as "Do nothing, and everything will be done". It is this type of contradictory statement that starts to break down people’s selves, and connect them more fully with the environment and the universe.
This desiring for a natural state is why T’ai Chi focuses so much on meditation, so much so as to make all of its movements meditative, even if they also contain a martial aspect. T’ai Chi wishes to bring Man and the Universe together by always observing the natural world and reflecting the natural rhythms in T’ai Chi practice. In this reflecting, and this constant awareness of and sensitivity toward the environment, T’ai Chi share much in common with Ecocomposition, and can be used successfully as a vehicle in the Composition classroom to teach students Ecocompositional principles.

T’ai Chi concepts and principles and their relation to Ecocomposition
Ecocomposition, a term coined by Sidney I, Dobrin, is, to use his definition
“The study of the relationships between environments (and by that we mean natural, constructed, and even imagined places) and discourse (speaking, writing, and thinking). . Ecocomposition draws from disciplines that study discourse (primarily composition, but also including literary studies, communication, cultural studies, linguistics, and philosophy) and merges their perspectives with work in disciplines that examine environment (these include ecology, environmental studies, sociobiology, and other "hard" sciences). As a result, ecocomposition attempts to provide a holistic, encompassing framework for studies of the relationship between discourse and environment“.
Ecocomposition, like T’ai Chi, is a combination of many different disciplines that comes together to make a comprehensive whole. T’ai Chi is focused on the human and her relationship with the environment, fully aware that people must recognize, adapt, and interact with their environment. Taoists believe that the universe has all the answers, and that for humans to find peace, they must act by the natural laws. “Heaven operates like the bending of a bow-the high it pulls down the low it brings up. It takes from that which has too much and gives to that which has too little. The way of man is otherwise-he takes from that which is depleted and gives to that which has too much,” says a famous verse from the Tao te Ching, the second important Taoist text . We act in contradiction to the Universe/Heaven/Nature’s laws, for Taoism these are all interchangeable. If we, as humans, acted in harmony with nature, our lives would be improved tremendously.
This connection between what a student is writing and the place in which he writes is particularly important for writers, as well. It is this connection that focuses Ecocomposition. Dobrin is looking at “discourse, place, and environment through theoretical examinations and pedagogical approaches” in terms of writing. For Dobrin, a student writing an essay will write a different essay in the classroom then he will writing in a park, or outside, or even in his house. The change in environment necessitates a change in writing content. Supporting this idea for Dobrin is the concept of reality as “discursively constructed” .
This idea, borrowing heavily from Derrida’s work, states that the way we view reality, how reality seems to us, is filtered through our language, implying that a more robust, complex language would allow access to a more refined view of reality. Thankfully, Dobrin does not see this reality shaping as a one-way street; the Environment is where we get all of our words, so it is the true arbiter of language. The relationship between language and the Environment is “reciprocal and dialogic”, where protecting the fullness of the Environment also protects the fullness of our language, which grows out of that self same space .
The Adult learner, assuming he is a Basic Writer as well, is a student who is still trying to come to grips with the written word, and to find the joy in it that we as teachers seem to naturally possess. The Basic writer, when looked at through the lens of Ecocomposition, can experience the world in a certain sense, and that experience is shaped by the language skills he possesses. To broaden his view of the world, and to increase his connection to the world, it is necessary to instruct him in different language styles. If we want our students to have a broad view of the world and an appreciation for differing cultures and viewpoints, we may find it necessary to create, in their minds, a mental place for the idea of formal language to grow, and to place that formal language in a usable context, which gives their home language a valid and necessary use, as well.
This struggle with the written word is sure to create stress, and this is another place where T’ai Chi shines, stress management. The slow movements of this art have been shown to reduce mental and emotional stress . I have also used T’ai Chi breathing principles in my classroom when teaching stress reduction techniques for taking tests. Tests, which are often a major stressor on any student’s life, can be harrowing. To combat this stress, I teach my students a breathing technique learned from T’ai Chi. The name of the breathing technique even teaches how to perform it-4,7,8 breathing. The idea here is that you breathe in for four seconds, hold your breath for 7 seconds, and slowly let your breath out for 8 seconds. This type of slow, controlled breathing creates an immediate change in my students’ stress levels, making them calmer and more ready to combat the rigors of academia.
A hallmark of T’ai Chi is its constant movement. It never stays stable, but is stable all the same in its movement. It finds stability in movement, even if the movement is internal and invisible to the naked eye. This movement is an argument from T’ai Chi that a practitioner should always be changing to match the environment, and that a different environment requires a change in practice, a different step, a change in weight, or a longer stretching arm. To conclude this section, let me show an exercise I use, bringing the natural world into the classroom to aid in a description exercise in Composition.
One of the ways of writing that I focus on in my class is description, how to create details that pop and sing and transport the reader. To illustrate this, I have my students describe an orange in the greatest detail they can. They write for about ten minutes on this, and I have students share what they wrote. Many of the descriptions received on this have been good, but they always leave something out. Perhaps one description focuses on how the orange feels, but does not focus on how it tastes as much, or one that focuses on the look of the orange, allowing the reader to picture it perfectly, describing the small bumps on the skin, even, but does not go through the intricate process of peeling that perfectly described skin to get to the juicy fruit inside.
I then repeat the exercise, but with one small but significant change; I give each student a Clementine (for ease of peeling versus an orange, and ease of eating) to aid in their description. For the next ten minutes, as they write, the faint sound of peeling is heard, along with the sweet sometimes cloying smell of the fruit as it is opened and eaten. The food brightens the students’ faces in the morning, a time when many have not had anything to eat, and the physical fruit gives the students a more stable and concrete link between their language and the Environment that the language defines. This exercises does not force them to write anything better, and it is not a power struggle; it simply introduces the concept, provides some fruit, and allows the students to write a description while eating, using the student’s natural desire for delicious food to fuel writing. This use of an opponent’s strength against him is a quintessential T’ai Chi concept.

Moralistic Education
Let me end this essay by discussing the use of martial arts in the composition classroom as they relate to moral education. When I asked my students what the point of education was, I received answers that ranged from "We need to learn information so we can do jobs better" to "Some classes are useless, and some stuff just doesn 't need to be learned." The last comment involved a look that included my class in the list of useless classes. While my students, understandably, coached schooling in the fabric of utilitarianism, in terms of what one can do with the information, the economic value of the knowledge, the "meaning" of education is seen in the educational literature as more idealistic for the love of learning irrespective of content knowledge. While my students wish to know how Photoshop works so that they can bring this skill to the workplace, Educational theorists like Theodore and Nancy Sizer say that "Raising up decent and principled children has been the desire of humankind for millennia" . The Sizers also argue that “High Schools have long held three core tasks: to prepare young people for the world of work: to prepare them to use their minds well, to think deeply and in an informed way; and to prepare them to be thoughtful citizens and decent human beings,”
It is their point about creating “decent human beings” that intrigues me. Moral development is a major theme running through much of Compositional Pedagogy, which is seen by just reading through the names of the pedagogical camps: Collaborative, Cultural Studies, Critical, Feminist, Community-Service, and Basic Writing. . Why is this field so full of moral choices and moral education? Shouldn’t we have some form of Compositional Pedagogy that is just focused on essay writing, or genre studies instead of avoiding the content altogether and discussing the context in which the content of writing is used? Composition instruction and literacy study afford students a chance to study morality and other cultures that is unique in the standard disciplines of college. In English courses, students are forced to read stories from different time periods and cultures, to discuss these cultures and the ramifications that the culture has on the plot, and to enter into a character or multiple characters’ lives. Stories teach us how to act, how to behave. They indoctrinate us in a culture different from our own in specifics, but similar in generalities.
The theorists view education not only in a more theoretical, but also in a broader, view. They see education as a place where not only concrete content is learned, but also amorphous concepts about the world. "Most people are mirrors, reflecting the moods and emotions of the times; few are windows, bringing light to bear on the dark corners where troubles fester. The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows." Sydney J. Harris, journalist and author (1917-1986.) Education, to many Compositional theorists, is not just a place for fact gathering, it is also a place for students to learn how to use those gathered facts in a constructive way.
Most educational theorists would agree that content in important. To argue otherwise is to claim that information has no power anymore. These theorists do not mention the acquisition of information, but this should not be taken as an indictment of knowledge gathering. What the above mentioned theorists are suggesting is that it is through reading, discussing, and analyzing stories that we understand what it means to be human. The Scarlet Letter teaches us how to deal with systemic prejudice, and how to rise above it should we find ourselves its unwitting victim; and Huckleberry Finn teaches us how to break from society to further social justice, but stay connected to society to enact further social change. When we read these classic texts, we see how we should act. Like Greek Myths, our modern stories teach us correct action.
As far as Compositional studies is concerned, especially those that skew more pedagogical rather than theoretical, there is little focus and attention given to kinesthetic learners, and the uses and benefits of implementing more, for lack of a better term, body-centric teaching mechanics and pedagogies to aid in compositional and literary fluency. Meaning through Motion; Kinesthetic English was published in 1995, and gives examples of movement based activities to do with middle school children to connect them with the strange, almost alien, lives of the children in Lord of the Flies. Bruce Pirie asks the students to choose a character and create a movement for them. This allows the students an opportunity that a simple writing exercise or even discussion does not; a chance to inhabit the skin of the literature and its characters, to feel what they felt. Of the students, Pirie says " As they move around the classroom, some may choose to curl up in frightened fetal balls, some may nervously try to make silent friends with their fellows, and others may assume a jaunty bravado" .
The students in his class are experiencing the text of Lord of the Flies in a way that "conventional" courses have trouble allowing; they are experiencing the text with empathy. This way of seeing the text allows the student to more fully learn from a text, and to see the message the text presents. There is a reason that we, as teachers, have students read texts that introduce them to different lifestyles and subjects that differ from the student 's lives. We want students to expand their worldview, to experience the world from various perspectives and see from another point of view.
To inform my newly moralistic version of Compositional studies, I looked to the books of Martial arts, to see if the morals inherent in them could inform my classroom as much as their motions and physical content had.
Moral education is found in all stories of Karate and indeed in all Japanese arts. Many Japanese arts end with the suffix “Do”, like Karate-Do (The Way of the Empty Fist), Judo (The Gentle Way [This art focuses on throwing a person in many ways all with minimal effort]), Kendo (The Way of the Sword), and Aikido (The Way of Harmony)”. “Do” means “way” and it expands the focus of martial arts from simply chronicling “Jutsu” (techniques) for fighting and war. Whereas a “Jutsu” art focuses solely on the movements and mechanics of that art, like “Jujutsu” which focuses on throwing an opponent and grappling him much like in Judo, but Judo goes farther and uses the art to teach students self confidence, conflict avoidance, and correct action.
Karate-do acts in a similar way. While it teaches how to strike and seize, skills that would not seem, at a cursory glance, to inspire moral behavior, but the words of the masters in the art speak differently. As previously stated, Masayuki Hisakata said that the “life giving fist” was what defined Karate best; that “Okinawan Karate is practiced as a martial art that defeats and suppresses internal and external enemies” . Another Karate master, Masahiro Nakamoto, claims that the heart of Karate is reflection, and that a true practitioner of Karate will “listen with an open mind and rectify distortions and prejudices in the mind” . These words are echoed by Teruyuki Okazaki, who says that Karate is focused on “stopping the fight” and “If we go throughout our lives with the intention of stopping the fight or conflict, we are contributing to bring peace to the world. That is our goal” . Martial arts teach morals as part and parcel of their lessons on pugilism. To quote Vegetius, “Si vis pacem, para bellum” or “If you wish for peace, prepare for war”. If this is treated as an abstraction rather than a literal text, it means that we should prepare for conflict and frustration, both from others and from ourselves if we ever want inner and outer peace. Martial arts can be used in the classroom to teach, at least in a small part, the morality of a correct way of living.

Final Thoughts Writing is a complex activity, even for those students lucky enough to be acculturate to it through their home lives. For those students in my classes, this acculturation was generally not present. For these students, writing is confusing, frustrating, and inconsistent. These students need a concrete way into writing, a connection from the art of writing to a concrete skill that they can see and hold and grasp. Martial arts, as an outwardly physical skill, give them this grasp, this handhold on which they can start climbing the mountain of literacy. The concrete skills of punching linked with proper sentence construction, of the basic movements of martial arts as linked with communication devices, resisting other arguments, standing strong in the chosen stance of an issue, and responding with a well placed, well timed, and well structured response that explains your point fully are all ideas that have immediate application to the classroom. Martial arts can also be used to teach Social Justice. Adult learners often feel like they have no Agency, no ability to change the course of their lives. This false idea can be combated by showing them that through literacy and writing they can affect change in society, or even just affect the justice of their personal day-to-day interactions. Lastly, martial arts can be used to reduce the stress of students in the classroom, and can be used to honor the students’ home environment in the writing process. Many adult learners come from an environment that radically departs from the environment of the classroom and of the teacher. These students need to feel that their environment and their way of living has value, and honoring their environment by bringing it into writing allows them to feel that their past experience can aid them in their writing, and has valuable skills to help them through the educational process. Lastly, martial arts can bring morality into the classroom, lessons about living and treating others with respect. Students need to see from various perspectives, especially if they are to leave school and enter into a workplace environment that differs dramatically from their home lives. In using concepts from martial arts in the classroom, we can create an environment that is inviting, honors the history of the various students present, and teaches the basic skills of writing along with delivering a context in which those skills may be used, mainly a communicative method to internal and external peace in all relations.

Works Cited
Bartholomae, David. "The Study of Error." College Composition and Communication (1980): 253-269.
Bartholomae, David. "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum." Kay Halasek, Neis P. Highberg. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press, 2001. 171-184.
Bizzell, Patricia. "What Happens When Basic Writers Come To College?" College Composition and Communication October 1986: 294-301.
Capoeira, Nestor. The Little Capoeira Book. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2003.
Christensen, Francis. "A Generative Rhetoric of the Sentence." College Composition and Communication October 1963: 155-161.
Creel, H.G. "What is Taoism?" Journal of the American Oriental Society (1956): 139-152.
Crider, Duane A and William Klinger. ""Stretch your body and your Mind" Tai Chi as an adaptive activity." EDRS (2000): 1-6.
Crystal, David. "2b or Not 2b?" The Guardian 4 July 2008.
Dobrin, Sidney I. and Christian R. Weisser “Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment.” College Composition and Communication 64.5 (2002): 571. "Breaking Ground in Ecocomposition: Exploring Relationships between Discourse and Environment." College Composition and Communication ((2002): 566-589.
Enkamp, Jesse et al. The Karate Code. KaratebyJesse, 2011.
Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2006.
Funakoshi, Gichin. Karate-Do My Way of Life. New York: Kodansha, 1975.
George, Ann. "Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy." Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper and Kurt Schick. A Guide To Compositional Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 92-112.
Johnson, Tara Star, et al. "Learning to Teach the Five Paragraph Theme." Research in the Teaching of English (2003): 136-176.
Kenner, Cari and Jason Weinerman. "Adult Learning Theory: Applications to Nontraditional College Students." Journal of College Reading and Learning (2011): 87-96.
Kuncel, Nathan R., Sarah A. Hezlett and Deniz S. Ones. "Academic Performance, Career Potential, Creativity, and Job Performance: Can One Construct Predict Them All?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2004): 148-161.
Liao, Waysun. T 'ai Chi Classics. Boston: Shambhala, 1990.
Lu, Min-zhan. "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" Highberg, Kay Halasek and Nels P. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press, 2001. 135-157.
Pirie, Brian. "Meaning Through Motion: Kinesthetic English." The English Journal (1995): 46-51.
Putai, Jin. "Efficacy of Tai Chi, brisk walking, meditation, and reading in reducing mental and emotional stress." Journal of Psychosomatic Research (1992): 361-370.
Shaughnessy, Mina. "Diving in: An introduction to Basic Writing." College Composition and Communication (1976): 234-239.
Shaughnessy, Mina. "Some Needed Research on Writing." College Composition and Communication (1977): 317-320.
Sizer, Theodore R. and Nancy Faust Sizer. The Students Are Watching. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
Smith, Jeff. "Students ' Goals, Gatekeeping, and some questions of Ethics." College Englsih (1997): 299-320.
Star, Lao Tzu Translated by Jonathan. Tao Te Ching. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001.
Stygall, Gail. "Resisting Privilege, Basic Writing and Foucault 's Author Function." Colloge Composition and Communication (1994): 320-341.
Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper and Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxfor University Press, 2001.

Cited: Bartholomae, David. "The Study of Error." College Composition and Communication (1980): 253-269. Bartholomae, David. "The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum." Kay Halasek, Neis P. Highberg. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press, 2001. 171-184. Capoeira, Nestor. The Little Capoeira Book. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2003. Creel, H.G. "What is Taoism?" Journal of the American Oriental Society (1956): 139-152. Crider, Duane A and William Klinger. ""Stretch your body and your Mind" Tai Chi as an adaptive activity." EDRS (2000): 1-6. Enkamp, Jesse et al. The Karate Code. KaratebyJesse, 2011. Friere, Paulo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. New York: Continuum, 2006. Funakoshi, Gichin. Karate-Do My Way of Life. New York: Kodansha, 1975. George, Ann. "Critical Pedagogy: Dreaming of Democracy." Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper and Kurt Schick. A Guide To Compositional Pedagogies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 92-112. Johnson, Tara Star, et al. "Learning to Teach the Five Paragraph Theme." Research in the Teaching of English (2003): 136-176. Kenner, Cari and Jason Weinerman. "Adult Learning Theory: Applications to Nontraditional College Students." Journal of College Reading and Learning (2011): 87-96. Kuncel, Nathan R., Sarah A. Hezlett and Deniz S. Ones. "Academic Performance, Career Potential, Creativity, and Job Performance: Can One Construct Predict Them All?" Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2004): 148-161. Liao, Waysun. T 'ai Chi Classics. Boston: Shambhala, 1990. Lu, Min-zhan. "Conflict and Struggle: The Enemies or Preconditions of Basic Writing?" Highberg, Kay Halasek and Nels P. Landmark Essays on Basic Writing. New Jersey: Hermagoras Press, 2001. 135-157. Pirie, Brian. "Meaning Through Motion: Kinesthetic English." The English Journal (1995): 46-51. Putai, Jin. "Efficacy of Tai Chi, brisk walking, meditation, and reading in reducing mental and emotional stress." Journal of Psychosomatic Research (1992): 361-370. Shaughnessy, Mina. "Diving in: An introduction to Basic Writing." College Composition and Communication (1976): 234-239. Shaughnessy, Mina. "Some Needed Research on Writing." College Composition and Communication (1977): 317-320. Sizer, Theodore R. and Nancy Faust Sizer. The Students Are Watching. Boston: Beacon, 1999. Smith, Jeff. "Students ' Goals, Gatekeeping, and some questions of Ethics." College Englsih (1997): 299-320. Star, Lao Tzu Translated by Jonathan. Tao Te Ching. New York: Tarcher/Putnam, 2001. Stygall, Gail. "Resisting Privilege, Basic Writing and Foucault 's Author Function." Colloge Composition and Communication (1994): 320-341. Tate, Gary, Amy Rupiper and Kurt Schick. A Guide to Composition Pedagogies. New York: Oxfor University Press, 2001.