Honoring Class: Working-Class Sensitivities in Honors Composition

The issue of social class rarely injects itself into assignments in honors English composition courses. The students take few chances with structure, analysis, voice, or audience invocation. Clearly bright students, they seemed baffled when asked for complication in their thinking or to take a chance with an unconventional structure. It was time for honors students to acknowledge their class identity in order for them to develop the critical insights desired in good writers. The author uses this article to describe an honors curriculum designed for an accelerated summer term. The students in this course read Michael Zweig's (2000) "Working Class Majority," a text that argues that social class can best be understood as a relationship of power and control between capitalists and laborers. They examined case studies that indicate that an honors curriculum that challenges students' worldviews through social class analysis can push honors students toward complex understandings.