Kellie Sharp-Hoskins and Kerry Banazek

Introduction

Write just the opening paragraph for a major essay you’ve been assigned. Play it as safe as you can. Follow ALL the rules you know: what are introductions supposed to include? What are they supposed to do? Use “proper” or “academic” grammar. Include a topic sentence for the paper as a whole and a transition that suggests what would come in the next paragraph, if you were writing it now. Put that aside. Now: Write three different versions of opening paragraphs to an essay on the same topic. Take a different “risk” in each one. Make them as different from one another as you can. Show off your wildness. Know you don’t have to keep anything from these iterations —you will need to reflect on how they might impact audiences, and you might then choose to use one of them or some sentences from each.

We begin this essay by sharing a prompt we have shared with others before—a relatively common assignment that asks students to rely on prior experience with essays and their introductions as well as conceptual relationships to genre. Part of what we like about this prompt is that it is purpose-driven, but it doesn’t require students to decide to take a risk or embrace consequences of that decision. Rather, it invites an understanding of risk as something productive of textual differences. It might even help students, in the words of Robin E. Jensen, “consider how risks emerge through discourse and are therefore discursive,” and work toward a rhetorical perspective on risk that emphasizes how risk “comes into being (i.e., is constituted) at the moments of communication” (86).

However, as folks who have alternated administering the University Writing Program at our regional, land-grant and Hispanic-Serving institution, we are also invested in understanding how assignments individuals believe in “fail” to function in expected ways when they become anchors for program-level curricula. As is true many places, the range of instructors who teach general education writing at our university includes first-time teachers and teachers with over 25 years of experience; domestic and international teachers; teachers with a variety of linguistic and cultural literacies; teachers with a range of embodiments, access needs, and privileges. When we share things like the above prompt with this group, we do so expecting instructors may use it to fill 50-minutes with in-class writing, not adapting much; they may keep its vibe but rewrite it in their own voices; they may or may not tie it back to other work or the “major” assignment they are using it in relation to; they may even scoff and replace it with something entirely different.

In short, building curricular infrastructure to support diverse teachers is always a kind of risk, one that feels high stakes because there are humans with lives and feelings involved, but also one that often “pays off” when it does in refractive, complex ways that—even when palpable—can’t be tracked through linear cause and effect. Grappling with and grounding “pay off” is simultaneously more difficult and more important given the shifting geopolitical contexts of our pedagogies, which put additional and highly variegated pressure on curricula and instruction. In the text that follows, we acknowledge this by turning, in particular, to scholarship inspired by systems-level thought, which, we propose, links risk and failure to their conditions of possibility and emergent effects without oversimplifying their relationships to one another.

In undertaking this project, we are partly responding to shared felt resistances—which emerged before we knew one another—to “common” stories in composition studies driven by quick, abundant uptake of Jack Halberstam’s 2011 Queer Art of Failure and Allison Carr’s 2013 Composition Forum article ”In Support of Failure.” In part, then, the article at hand is an attempt to excavate motivations for our embodied resistances so we can work with them in productive ways. In what follows, we center the field’s imagination of risk as it rhetorically emerges from pedagogical vernaculars, which, we argue, individualize and flatten the variegated textures of risk precisely by attaching it to academic and rhetorical failures—also imagined as individual and personal. Contra scholarship on risk that invokes its relational and systemic valences, the commonplaces that emerge from vernaculars still frequently ignore how risk and failure are distributed in unequal ways, how they attach to some bodies differently than others and, consequently, provide unequal access to the rhetorical resources that allow individuals and communities to imagine futures. Broadly, this argument resonates with Carr’s own 2024 retrospective critique of “failure pedagogies” in their circulation; in Following Failure, she articulates explicitly the many ways how, “as a pedagogical platform, failure is not neutrally positioned, nor equitably accessible for all” and accounts, “What I did not understand [in 2013], but which I cannot unsee now, is how much that [original] argument presumes and promotes a neoliberal worldview that for all of its subversive artifice simply reinscribes preexisting channels for privilege and exclusion/oppression.”

To advance our more particular argument that WPAs (and others involved in teacher training) bear particular burdens to build infrastructures that help instructors actively avoid such reinscriptions, we first address how teaching vernaculars can correlate “risk” and “failure” while also individualizing both—assuming exposure to either is something that happens to or is elected by individual people. We then briefly review rhetorical scholarship on risk, arguing that articulations which emerge through systemic problems can disrupt teaching vernaculars well precisely because their relationship to individualization differs: whereas individuals do participate in risk and experience failure, systems dispose and predispose them differently to both. Following, we offer a heuristic set of questions dedicated to the goal of disrupting the ease that often accompanies equations of risk (and risk assessment), judgements of failure or success, and choices made in particular moments, by particular individuals. Our heuristic is organized through conceptual pairings we often hear instructors, in particular, repeat—“Risk and Spontaneity,” “Risk and Experimentation,” and “Risk and Reward.” Questioning vernacular couplings, we argue, facilitates rhetorical excavation of unstated assumptions about whose risks pay off—and when, where, and why. In order to concretize this work for others, we conclude each heuristic section by proposing both a small assignment and a topic or exercise that might effectively anchor a related professional development event for instructors.

Pedagogical Vernacular: Risk and/as Failure in the Writing Class

Working to conceptualize, mitigate, or redistribute the many risks (including failure) that face teachers and students in writing classrooms, scholars in writing studies call attention to relations among teachers (and students) and risk. Teachers and students take risks, accept risks, encourage risks, minimize risks, reject risks and so forth. While crucial to foregrounding student and teacher agency, however, this framing inadvertently individualizes risk and attendant failures. Moreover, while theories of risk and failure remain largely bilateral in the field of composition (see Commer et al.), we argue that the composition’s pedagogical vernaculars are saturated with their co-implication. Risk, in the writing class, tends to be articulated enthymematically as a risk of rhetorical or academic failure. Consequently, framings that inadvertently individualize risk simultaneously individualize failure. A student who takes a stylistic risk, for example, risks failing an assignment. A teacher who encourages risk-taking may fail to recognize how this impacts even students who seem to thrive as writers following related prompts.

At the same time that composition scholarship seeks to complicate options for risk-taking, [1] then, vernaculars that surround risk still attach it to individuals—who take, accept, or encourage risks. In the last few years, for example, compositionists have suggested, “The arbitrary grading scale positions students to learn strategically and to minimize risk-taking” (Bowers & Smith Daniel 373); defined “intellectual risk-taking as a rhetorical form of self-deliberation” (Teagarden, Mando, and Commers 56, emphasis added); prompted teachers to ask, “What risks do you ask students to take in your class? What kinds of risks do you take in your class?” (Pantelides, Grayson, & Stone 448); and invited “students to accept the invitation to risk failure” (Bartkevicius 117). While we see much value in these individual projects, taken together they evidence commonplaces whose terms remain most meaningful when engaged not as such but rather in situated, complex ways.

Moreover, a vernacular premised on individual risk belies our experience listening to instructors, whose talk about pedagogical choices and consequences often reveals a textural quality to risk that does not align neatly with risks we (as in, the authors of this chapter) might feel in a classroom. Bringing in contract grading or digital assignments then responding to student frustrations, for example, does not feel particularly risky to us. A “failed” assignment or assessment experiment doesn’t feel like it will expose us to censure based on student reactions, neither does it make us feel we are “failing” our students. Of course, such risks sit differently for different bodies, revealing patterns of risk and failure that accrue for folks based not only on individual predilection or calculus but on layered social and cultural values and norms. And while we believe in the veracity and materiality of feelings, feeling isn’t the only difference. Contract grading may feel risky to a new graduate assistant because they don’t have experience with its principles or confidence in their deployment, but experimenting in ways students question can also impact teaching evaluations that the job market still asks to verify. Employing digital tools that frustrate students may feel risky to a multilingual teacher (even with significant digital literacies) because their students’ expectations interface with interpretations of the instructor’s embodiment and language use. The affects and effects of risk are not only experienced differently based on how folks are embodied in proximity to norms (i.e. race, gender, ability, sexuality, nationality) but on how their personalities and behaviors are interpreted in the local and institutional cultures in which they are teaching. Such intersections reveal how an individual account of risk and failure is insufficient to understand its patterns of accrual for certain types of bodies. Confidence or charm or introversion, and how they interact with embodiment, for example, may support, impede, or complicate a teacher’s ability to “take” risks, their feeling of what counts as a risk, or how they “get away” with seemingly risky acts. By flattening attendant matters down to choice, our vernacular offers a sense of agency (which we value), but it cannot account well for complex, textured effects of “failed” choices on varied bodies, lives, and imaginations. Miscalculations, misequivalencies, and misattributions abound.

Moreover, when we invoke pedagogical vernaculars, we are not thinking only or even first about the vernaculars of trained compositionists; indeed, we argue, especially in the context of program building, attunement to vernaculars must be informed by languages that come with graduate students in creative writing, literature, and cultural studies—as well as languages that seep in via larger cultural narratives (e.g. economic metaphors). Vernacular, in composition, can be a term of disruption (e.g. the “vernacular insurrections” Carmen Kynard traces through exploration of Black Freedom Movements and their transformation of literacies and how we imagine them) or a term that aims to otherwise upend or democratize linguistic hierarchies. Yet vernacular expressions that function as pedagogical commonplaces—packaged assumptions that go without proof while setting terms of engagement—are not inherently disruptive, generative, or tilted toward justice (see Ono & Sloop); we argue that vernaculars of pedagogical risk are particularly burdened and, through their ties to neoliberal economic assumptions (enumerated more below), often conservative rather than liberatory. We also suggest these vernaculars are not escapable and thus deserve sustained attention from writing students and instructors—with support from reflexive WPAs (even if we’d prefer sidestepping related discourses altogether).

Re-Imagining Relationships: A Heuristic for Disrupting Vernaculars of Risk

In the remainder of this article, we focus on questions designed to help both instructors and administrators participate in decoupling risk from some commonplace terms whose influence it struggles to escape. That is, we suggest ways to disrupt the assumption that particular terms are—or ought to be—positively correlated with risk in ways that mitigate the impact of academic and rhetorical failures. Importantly, the terms (and the attendant conceptualizations they rely on) we seek to decouple from risk and failure are those that we overhear—and sometimes find ourselves using—in the daily work of teaching writing and administering a writing program. These are not pairings explicitly theorized in the field but those that have found purchase in hallway chat and student conferences, teacher and learning centers, and annual performance review narratives. Some of what we reference corresponds to knowledge our field has referred to as “lore” or “teacher talk,” but we favor the term vernacular as a way to emphasize how the couplings addressed below necessarily emerge through comingling of established compositionists with new teachers, teachers situated in other disciplines (especially creative writing), mediated public narratives and everyday conversations that seemingly have nothing to do with writing or the teaching of writing.

In framing movement through three types of decoupling exercises as a heuristic, we invoke a long tradition where “heuristic reasoning” is “not regarded as final and strict but as provisional and plausible only” (Lauer 1970, 396), Inspired, in part, by Nicolai Bodemer and Wolfgang Gaissmaier’s models of risk perception that include an “affect heuristic” and “availability heuristic,” our heuristic questions work to contextualize risk’s variegated effects. We hope this leads teachers and writing program administrators to ask not only, What risks do you ask students to take in your program’s classes? And: What kinds of risks do you ask instructors to take in your program? But more centrally: How are risks—in their plurality, complexity, multiplicity, and materiality—explicitly understood by both students and instructors?

First Step: Decoupling Risk and Spontaneity (Attending Processes and Temporalities)

While we don’t often hear teachers explicitly talk about “risk and spontaneity,” this coupling is the title we give to vernacular framings of risk where it is bound in time or to particular time-bound choices, which we do hear reflected by teachers frequently in phrases like “the student took a risk” and in invocations of slippery terms like inspiration or flow. Postulating “risk taking” as the volitional act of a student or teacher, pedagogical vernaculars can unintentionally isolate risk in time—the spontaneous choice of an agent who decides in one moment that they will (or can, or should) take a risk. While this may feel spontaneous—the product of a decision, opportunity, moment, or assignment—spontaneity is not a random but rather an emergent property that marks relationships between expectations and divergence. Marked moments of failure, similarly, always stand in for a history replete with conditions and implications of failure. We propose that decoupling risk from spontaneity is particularly important for curriculum building, administration, and teacher training because folks tasked with such work are anticipating and narrating risk and failure at some remove from places it creates effects.

Below we first offer a list of heuristic questions that guide us through this decoupling before modeling how they might be used to frame administrative and pedagogical relations to risk and failure.

Heuristic Questions to Decouple Risk from Spontaneity

• At what moments and under what conditions does the option of “taking a risk” emerge for teachers and students?
• What must occur before students can identify something as a desirable risk in a writing class?
• How do practices students identify as risky align with teacher articulations of risk, and how do (mis)alignments in risk assessment shape possibilities for student writers?
• How does an invitation to specific risk-taking build on other opportunities within a semester or college career?
• How might seemingly small risks feel outsized given their relation to student embodiments and experiences?
• How do instructors’ embodiments inflect not only their discourses around risk and their ability to model “risky” writing but also student reception of their assignments and invitations?

Articulated as a list, these questions can appear overwhelming, but they remain, we submit, vital when risk is valued or vaunted programmatically; we also submit that foregrounding such explorations has practical potential to change the shape of later labor (e.g. at moments when student complaints emerge). In arguing that working well with risk, failure, and their complexities makes it crucial to investigate such temporalities, we invoke Matthew Houdek and Kendall R. Phillips’ “temporal rhetorics,” defined as “ritualistic and repetitious discourses, practices, and performances that produce and sustain how a given [collection of] people views themselves as existing within time” (371). Such repetitious discourses, we further emphasize, contribute to tolerance for variance and discomfort, as well as willingness to meet surprising texts or tasks with openness or curiosity. All these factors drive identification of texts and tasks as risky (or not) and shape reactions to such identifications.

As a group, the above questions encourage suspicion of compositional cultures where vernaculars position risk as a singular noun, as if it exists at particular moments in concrete terms. We acknowledge the appeal of such vernaculars can be practical (actionable): Risk understood thus can be correlated with specific experiments or rewards. But a sense of time where risk is taken (or not) at a particular moment belies (1) ongoing and asymmetric exposure to risk—its politics of precarity, and (2) its impact on experiences of time, which speeds up or slows down in the face of threats to autonomy or other harms. While a teacher may experience “risky” genre-bending student writing in the moment of grading (assessing it purposeful or unsuccessful), the student labored across time. Conversely, a teacher may attribute decisions and labor to a student whose account sounds serendipitous (the story of a happy accident) or whose real “risk” was in submitting a piece of writing they cannot tell a reflective story about (a piece of AI writing, a copy of a dormmate’s assignment, or an essay that so fully follows usage rules a student has given up all sense of authorship). In any case, a grade fixed in time does little to account for how that grade might travel with a student, how it might encourage—or discourage—a teacher from assigning similar projects, and so forth.

While risk can potentially be engineered to seem spontaneous or fleeting in one classroom, it cannot be disarticulated from the longstanding or contextual issues of precarity that circumscribe it. Acknowledging different timescales of risk and failure for students and teachers evokes what risk scholar Catherine Mei Ling Wong terms the “incompatible temporal logics of the actors” (111). In a pedagogical system this contextualizes differences, for example, between the hard-won, risk-forward teaching philosophy of an experienced instructor and a first-year writing student’s experience being praised for conventional essay structures throughout high school or with a student’s feeling of fit on campus (how often they see faces or voices or languages like theirs amongst their peers or reflected in the faculty), their immigration status, their economic, food, and housing security, and so forth (see, for example, Calafell). As discussed above, this doesn’t suggest pedagogical risk easily or neatly correlates with embodiment, positionality, or style. Rather, it invites us to pay attention to iterations of risk—the repetitions and accruals that allow it to emerge over time with different, and differential, effects.

Here, we also observe the temporality of risk can sometimes feel extra inaccessible to new instructors. Without multiple experiences to contextualize effects choices have on a particular group of students, new instructors are understandably prone to causal imaginings: the risk of collaborative or multimodal assignments is either worth it or not, successful or a failure.

Especially when coupled with the language of promised rewards or purposeful experimentation (discussed more below), it can be difficult for new teachers, but really all teachers, to unpack how risk’s valences extend beyond moments, assignments, or semesters. Of course, temporality’s interplay with experience (invoked above through references to performance and repertoire) is messy, too—new instructors are sometimes more willing to take pedagogical risks than experienced instructors, perhaps more comfortable with “experimental” media forms that have emerged as integral to their daily lives, less inhibited by expectations, and so forth. Indeed, risks to teachers and students can never be fully accounted for in time because they unfold across time and, again, in relation to shifting contexts.

While these examples direct attention to messy relationships between risk and time for individual teachers (and their students), when collated they allow us to see some potential consequences for programmatic-level encouragement to take, accept, and articulate specific risks. When an administrator, for example, uncritically espouses risk as a pedagogical good, they may inadvertently corroborate a version of risk that stays with an assignment or semester, neglecting both its emergence and capacity to follow folks around. Heuristic questions like those shared above, then, may help administrators and teachers resist the compelling narrative that risk is individual or temporary and, in so doing, begin to undermine its pathologies.

Professional Development for Instructors: One hour workshop that invites instructors to collaboratively map the timescales of student risk and/or failure; ask small groups to identify a “low stakes” writing risk or failure (that might show up in their class) and creatively imagine its histories and futures. Begin with a little thought experiment situated in your institutional context as a model (ideally drawing on ideas from disciplines instructors come from that extend beyond composition).

Assignment for Students: Develop (either in advance or with students after a conversation about risk in writing): a single 5-minute free write that asks students to do a specific “risky” writerly thing. Follow up by asking students to get in groups and discuss their experiences writing: how did taking this risk feel? Deploy the same exercise in-class every three weeks. As time goes on, encourage students to track whether or not their feelings change over time; what influences changes? How do the whims of any given day interact with changes that might be related to practice or experience working through iteration?

Second Step: Decoupling Risk and Experimentation (Attending Forms of Risk Taking)

While the first step encourages engagement with timescales of risk and failure that exceed intentions and moments, this step focuses attention on how sentences, paragraphs, essays, and projects evolve in socio-technical ways. We draw evidence of this vernacular in the frequency with which we hear teachers correlate risk with style or form as in “I’m trying to get students to experiment a little more” or “they’re playing it safe,” or even, “I can’t get students to move away from standard topics.” Consequently, we tend two related commonplaces—the first, assumed correlation between writerly risk taking and experimental formal choices; the second, assumed correlation between conceptions of risky writing and “difficult,” “sensitive,” or “non-academic” content. Attending forms and formal aspects of risk taking is critical both because this may be the first thing instructors think of when invoking the idea of risk in the classroom, and because it highlights how linguistic structures, social and cultural norms, and power structures inflect one another. We suggest form and content must both be evaluated when assessing the “risks” a writer and piece of writing take because we understand the two as inevitably interanimating; moreover, risk, as discussed above, cannot be reduced to mere cause-and-effect isolated from broader conditions of possibility. To understand risks a writer or piece of writing seems to take, then, is to understand how—and for whom—risk emerges as such.

Heuristic Questions to Decouple Risk from Experimentation

• Just because something looks or feels risky to me, does that mean the writer was knowingly or voluntarily taking a risk? What might not be available to us about the pre-history of “risky” texts and assignments—and how might that inform classroom relationships to the idea of risk taking?
• When and for whom is taking a “boring” or conventional route a risk of its own?
• Who might experience linguistic conventions as a threat and stylistically “risky” writing as a safe place? Where and Why?
• How can seemingly “risky” forms that might appeal strongly to students with diverse lived experiences be introduced in structured ways that make adoption feel doable in context rather than merely risky?
• In cases where connections between risk, precarity, and experimental forms are present, how do they operate? What norms, cultural patterns, and lived realities do they engage? How does this prescribe possibility and for whom?

Pedagogical vernacular that emerges from the coupling of risk and experimentation often take the form of surprise and praise for (unexpected but) recognizably “successful” style choices made by students—a teacher remarking on “authenticity” of a student’s voice or their “audacity” in sharing a difficult experience, for example. This is reminiscent of Jacqueline Jones Royster’s recounting of a presentation where she “rendered th[e] voices” of characters in a scene that “required cultural understanding,” and was met with what she refers to as a “well-intentioned response” to her “authenticity”: “I’ve never heard you talk like that, you know, so relaxed. I mean, you’re usually great, but this was really great! You weren’t so formal. You didn’t have to speak in an appropriated academic language. You sounded ‘natural.’ It was nice to hear you be yourself” (36–37).

This “well-intentioned” response reduced Royster’s linguistic repertoire to polarities of authenticity, based on assumptions about her embodiments. Royster wasn’t here taking a risk so much as writing rhetorically, and yet it was interpreted as a risk worth taking by the audience member. And whereas Royster unapologetically “claim[s] all [her] voices as [her] own very much authentic voices, even when it’s difficult for others to imagine a person like [her] having the capacity to do that” (37), this experience bespeaks the variety of ways risks attach to style depending on whose bodies and literacies are involved.

Indeed, “authentic” relationships to communities rarely represented in the academy often indicate the only expertise established professionals are willing to cede to minoritized bodies—regardless of what varied, legitimate, and much needed expertises constitute a writer’s wider repertoires. Bodies that through their presence disrupt white, heteronormative, and/or ableist norms of knowledge production and insist on belonging in unreproachable (conventionally styled) terms are not, as it were, taking less risks than those who share “authentic” selves, they are simply taking different ones.

Using the heuristic questions proposed above to attend seriously to sentence level choices and effects ought to introduce an avalanche of questions related to White Language Supremacy, among other historically situated linguistic violences that populate student and instructor lives. While important at the level of instruction, this is all the more critical for administrators narrating program values and commitments during orientation, in professional development spaces, or through other resources. One way to begin opening this topic as it pertains to pedagogical experience and assignment design (while following up on above questions of motivation and reward) is to foreground April Baker-Bell’s insistence educators must not only acknowledge that “traditional approaches to language education do not account for the emotional harm or consequences these approaches have on Black students’ sense of self and identity” but imagine and implement alternative models (8). Developing such models demands accounting for ways even “successful” risk taking by Black student writers—that is rewarded with supportive feedback, high marks, and genuine sharing of positive affects—unfolds in relation to larger frames that are emotionally and academically fraught. For those whose available languages flout expectations, bringing one’s own language and linguistic expertise into the classroom is not only a present-tense risk because it might not be received with care, recognition, or respect—it is also a risk in more temporally complex ways, considering how having one’s language received with care is historically asymmetrical.

It bears note that in the field of composition, a critical mass of programs and instructors are committed to the idea that it is worth giving students wide stylistic or genre latitude and inviting them to bring home or community literacies and personal investments into their writing. It can seem either like we are all taking risks together—as a field, pushing back on institutional norms and received knowledge about the utility value of formal Englishes—or that there is no longer any true risk in asking students to write with varied Englishes or about personal topics. But such interpretations miss the complex, contextual nature of risk and its uneven effect on producing harm or resulting in failure.

Students from backgrounds historically underrepresented in higher education sometimes rightly feel culturally salient content doesn’t “belong” to institutions or white instructors, which leaves them in a bind when “invited” to share but not formally invited to protect their privacy or given leeway to choose less personal, more conventionally academic approaches. Having one’s language and stories received with genuine care when that is not how they have been received in other classrooms can inspire feelings of anger, sadness, or resentment. Working at a reflective, metacognitive level that keeps the violent realities of normative, ablest educational institutions in the forefront of one’s mind takes its own toll. In short, a risk that “pays off” by helping a student produce meaningful (to themselves, instructors, or wider audiences) writing might have emotional costs instructors are not privy to. As we suggest attending to related facts in teacher training and pedagogical experience design, this need not mean we can—or should aim to—avoid the circulation of affects and cultural feelings, but rather that we need to be willing to sit with the messy uncertainty exposed here.

Insofar as messiness and uncertainty are unavoidable features of teaching and learning writ large, teachers and administrators may find themselves reluctant to take seriously the additional work of contextualizing risk. If we are going to fail to mitigate risk anyway, what’s the point of attending to it so closely? But this question, again, defers and obscures differential effects of risk and failure. Our proposal, then, is not to refuse risk (impossible) but to try to surface its systemic features in order to engage its effects more responsibly.

Thus far in this section, our examples of “deviant” or “risky” style choices seem to suggest stylistic risk emerges in our context only through vernaculars, personal stories, and informal (as opposed to academic) language structures, which, of course, is not true. Indeed, for some writers, readers, and instructors, literary modes and genre-blending moves are more readily accessible as “risky” style choices. We suggest these, too, are implicated in the question (from above): Who might experience linguistic conventions as a threat and stylistically “risky” writing as a safe place? There is a long tradition of calling out wild poetic or conceptual projects for their “lack” of meaning and labelling this kind of writing a “luxury” only the most materially privileged writers can afford—”a game for insiders with no connection to popular values” (Davis). Impenetrable walls of text (streams of consciousness), the wide-open pages of minimalist poets, automatically or procedurally generated texts, and found (stolen, remixed, repurposed) texts all fall subject to such critiques. Yet, there is an equally long tradition that exposes how writers may “risk” using these same “difficult,” “experimental,” and “impersonal” forms out of lived commitments—driven by felt need to invent new ways of being and belonging through languaging (for example, queer and Black poetics driven by linguistic materialities or sonic play, which resonate in excess of both norms and normative ways of meaning making). In short, experimenting with language can be a way of taking up space or insisting on the radical political potential of play and delight—when experienced by bodies facing prejudices, power imbalances, and material or existential threats.

Calling attention to traditions of experimental poetry could seem to be reinscribing relationships between risk and experiment rather than disrupting them, but we hope working through this heuristic’s questions will instead encourage attention to how experimental writing is plural; its particular forms all have their own rules, canons, and cultural relations. This stands contra the surface assumption all “weird” texts are equally predicated on risk—in the same way the above discussion aimed to disrupt the possibility of assuming all informal, community driven, or conversational languages assume risk in similar or inherent ways.

One goal of decoupling key terms, for us, is to allow conceptual space for some relations to reemerge in more specific, multiple ways. Disrupting standard forms of language can disrupt the logic of standards. But not all impenetrable texts are radical, and not all writers of nonsense believe it to be political. Accordingly, we ask those who use radical texts as classroom models to recognize that students who come with primarily normative experiences of embodiment, social identity, and literacy might find it, paradoxically, easier to mimic the languages of radical queer, disabled, and/or racialized writers for whom style’s risk is always also substance; a risk can appear to work (and impact readers, including teachers) without being grounded or ethical.

Professional Development for Instructors: Create a resource packet or slide deck on epistemic violence and citation politics (see, for example, Dotson; Itchuaqiyaq & Frith), attuning instructors to the variety of ways superficial engagement with difference can reinscribe normative expectations of style and genre, including by marking voice in terms of authenticity. Ask each instructor to reflect: what’s a topic they are intellectually very prepared to discuss but which does not belong to them; a topic on which they ought to cede the floor to someone else? What’s a voice or expertise that “belongs to them” but not their students? How do they decide whether or not to share that voice with others? Does this feel like a “real choice” or something values, exterior pressures, or other factors compel them into making at particular moments?

Assignment for Students: As an explicitly ungraded, in-class activity, ask students to brainstorm a variety of “voices” they bring to writing and then attempt to write a sentence each using those distinct voices (about a topic on which they have a lot to say). Ask students to annotate sentences with a note on their effects: how does each “voice” shape what feels possible with the topic? How do they think each would be received by particular audiences and why? Which voices feel invited to comment on the topic? Which seem out of bounds? Then disrupt “authenticity” through a discussion that disrupts some assumptions about voice. You might choose to break down ways writing studies and literature use “voice” as a metaphor, paying special attention to voice as something that can also be understood materially through biology, gender, sensation, technology, or environmental effects.

Third Step: Decoupling Risk and Reward (Attending Motivations for Risk Taking)

Readers of this article have almost certainly heard the phrase, “high risk, high-reward,” given its favor by venture capitalists and foundational scientists alike. While risk isn’t precisely the same kind of term in the world of writing that it is in the worlds of financial investment or neuroscience, premises buried in this phrase also enjoy wide acceptance among writers and educators, as evidenced by exclamations of a writing or teaching risk “paying off.” We understand failure as an always-implied third term in this relationship: the possibility that haunts reward is failure; in order to qualify as a risk, a choice or action must portend the possibility of individual loss/failure/punishment or gain/success/praise. The ease with which reward maps risk, we contend, can be attributed, in part, to simple narrative value. Deeply imbricated in capitalist and market-based premises and reasoning, the story that we took a risk and it “paid off” is deeply satisfying insofar as it aligns with larger cultural narratives. Decoupling risk from reward, we suggest, begins to wrestle risk from these premises, offering us new ways to assess its effects on writing and the teaching of writing.

Heuristic Questions to Decouple Risk from Reward

• Who is most comfortable taking not just risks but “big” risks in a school setting?
• Given the opportunity to take a big risk as a writer, who might prefer a “boring” or conventional alternative [2]—even if traditional grade-related barriers have been mitigated? And why might that be so?
• When and for whom is taking a “boring” or conventional route a risk of its own? For whom does reward take particularly unconventional shapes, which might have little or nothing to do with the assignments and guidance an instructor offers?

In our vernacular adage, high-risk might suggest either a highly unpredictable outcome or a particularly high likelihood of failure. The concept “high-reward” holds value in part because it is elusive—rewards are not for everyone. We argue this is precisely why disrupting risk-reward logic matters for writing teachers and administrators; the supposition of scarcity impacts most “those who are [already] disproportionately affected by failing networks of social and economic support” (Teston 478). It is, for example, widely understood that first-generation and non-traditional students are disproportionately impacted by the threat laced into negotiating unpredictable outcomes (Mullen). Less widely discussed are cultural frames and legacies that make risk feel worth it for some while only indicating danger, harm, or possibility of failure for others.

Experiences of writing or teaching risks not paying off are uncommon in published accounts of teaching and writing; indeed, even publications explicitly focused on (teaching or writing) failures “pay off” when the accounting for such finds an audience in the field or offers scholars new insights or perspectives. But a risk/reward coupling imported from beyond the context of writing overwrites preexisting and ongoing risks—precarities—that unevenly circumscribe acute (teaching/writing) risks and actions. When we ask, “who is most comfortable taking not just risks but ‘big’ risks in a school setting?,” the answer varies. Sometimes, it is those who have the least at stake: those for whom privileges mitigate the costs of a failed experiment (or bad grade); those carrying the least pressure from outside forces to “succeed” in a conventional way; those who are uninvested in traditional success primarily because they don’t believe they can attain it; those who have the luxury of carrying inside themselves an expansive archive of sample texts where risks paid off for other writers. You might see yourself in this list—either because you’ve always been a relatively privileged, “good,” or voracious student of reading and writing or because you’re a non-traditional student that never felt seen or safe in schools. In either case, risk may not feel particularly risky: a bad grade either has no consequences or the consequences are too predictable to feel noteworthy.

By asking who is most comfortable rather than who is most likely to receive high marks when “risk taking” is encouraged or evaluated, we do not mean to suggest comfort is ideal (or, conversely, to be avoided) but rather that it is cultural information filtered through embodied reactions to particular ways of talking about writing. And that this question can be a good starting point for imagining how perceived risks attend to student and instructor embodiment in differential ways, especially as we consider how intersectional identities, unpredictable reactions, and community-level factors cannot be separated from individual relationships to risk.

We find this especially important when we consider the field’s uptake of assessment practices that foreground labor—ostensibly removing traditional grade-related barriers from student’s tolerance for risk. Persuaded by their promise, we must nonetheless remind ourselves no single instructor in a single classroom can fully or even frequently remove cultural pressures associated with literacy instruction in our country (an ongoing conversation in the field, e.g. Fernandes, Brier, and McIntyre). Adopting contract grading, for example, shifts emphasis from normative literacies to labor, which students can ostensibly choose to perform (or not). Failure here sticks to a “willingness” to work. But this may undermine the chances for success of a nontraditional student who has significant outside responsibilities (work, childcare, etc.) and thus little time but who has worked hard to develop normative literacies for their writing classes. Situated research that complicates use of contract grading and ungrading speaks back to the complexities of risk that interface with student bodies, lives, and literacies, which, we argue, ought to be extrapolated to broader discussion of how we imagine and discuss risk and failure with teachers and their students. Moving away from individual models of risk and failure facilitates this discussion, shifting attention away from teacher and student choices to their conditions of possibility.

Following the work of Carrie L. Hall, we observe that students who find themselves particularly subject to the wide variety of “boredoms” schooling asks us to navigate or who find themselves encountering literacy tasks while “under duress” bring different (and varied) relationships to attention and thus engagement with them (56). Work on the strengths and assets of neurodivergent students and instructors also points strongly in this direction (see, for example, Yergeau). To be open to a risk without regard for reward—whether driven by disposition, the pleasure of process, iconoclasm, or a nervous system that thrives under uncertainty rather than being threatened by it—is not uncommon, even as the commonplace that opens this section argues for attention to a risk’s ends rather than its means and affects.

Professional Development for Instructors: With the explicit goal of making consequences of pedagogical risks more visible, in an orientation space (like new GA orientation or a pre-semester workshop), invite teachers to imagine: 1) Something we are asking them to do that feels like a risk; 2) Something they’d love to do in the classroom someday, but that feels too risky to put into action right now; 3) How they will react when a student interaction reveals that something they took for granted as straightforward, easy, even boring was, in fact, part of a “risky” relation. Informed by their responses, share information, given the structure and hierarchy of your institution and geopolitical location, about when and how the Writing Program (or administrative home of instructors) can and will support teachers who “take” risks with pedagogy and when issues exceed its authority.

Assignment for Students: In the early drafting process for a major assignment, ask students to write a “boring” paragraph for an upcoming project. Use class time to discuss what makes writing boring (to the students) and when or whether they can use such knowledge to their advantage. Later, ask students to return to a more developed draft with an eye to the boredoms: where does “boring” text serve them because it does not feel risky? How might that coupling of boredom and lack of risk go awry?

Conclusion

We conclude by emphasizing the fact that structure and guidance can shift—sometimes, to some extent, in some contexts—both who is comfortable “taking” risks and who is positioned to recover from, respond to, or learn from failure. We further suggest reflexive questioning of our discourses surrounding risk is most impactful when coupled with clearly presented opportunities to “begin” and “begin again.” Whereas questions proposed in this article invite teachers and administrators to observe patterns and identify correlations among students and writing, we can also encourage creation of opportunities for students to participate in iterative writing practices that reveal the different textures for interfacing risks associated with their writing practices —without, of course, requiring that they disclose particular or biographical relationships to specific risks. Here, we build on the premise: While risk like “choice can be empowering, it can also be unnerving if students have no idea of professor expectations, where to begin, or what to do if they are disoriented” (Hall 63). We believe learning requires openness to change and thus at least occasional discomfort, but we maintain there is little or no evidence that experiences “being unnerved” by structural ambiguities or unclear expectations belong in a writing pedagogy that is kind, caring, and equitable. That, indeed, it is possible to scaffold what is commonly called “risky” in ways that sponsor contextual awareness and feelings of security, even as students test new-to-them literacies, styles, arguments, and relations between text and body.

We end here with the note that, of course, there are many additional commonplaces and vernacular couplings worth disrupting. A more comprehensive heuristic might address the vernacular coupling that links collaboration and risk, given ways co-authorship (whether coauthors are human or nonhuman) requires writers to “risk” giving up some portion of agency. In terms of extending the work under our existing headings, we can imagine future work on style or experimentation grappling with the question: How can instructors that do not come to our classrooms fluent in experimental, conceptual, queer, or crip art forms still help students access their possibilities? And we can imagine future work on systemic temporalities exploring: When and how do time (and other) pressures show up for students in the semester or year—how do pressures from outside the classroom (financial deadlines, difficult exams in other general education classes, climate-inflected allergy seasons, etc.) become apparent in student writing, and what (varying, perhaps risky) forms does this take? We also imagine studying couplings that center failure (e.g. failure and quitting) more explicitly would, through co-implication, elucidate risk in moving and productive ways. Of course, the overarching question here—how to design experiences for instructors and students alike that use the couplings above to complicate rather than slide back into commonplaces—is nearly impossible to answer, which is its own invitation to iteration. We look forward to seeing how others bring their situated, embodied relationships to vernacular commonplaces related to risk into the conversation.

Notes

[1] Teagarden, Commer, Cooke, and Mando, for example, explore the concept of “intellectual risk” through its “various definitions and its possible place in writing classrooms by first charting the presence and use of intellectual risk-taking in higher education discourse and research in composition studies” (117).

[2] Building on Hall’s work, we understand “the boredoms” as a suite of related affects related to attention and inattention, which, while typically vilified in school settings, are best understood not as markers of deficit but rather as “change signals” and opportunities to discover how student strengths, wants, and affects show up in literacy education.