Derek Swain

I’m a professor of English Composition at Saddleback College, Mission Viejo and Irvine Valley College. I received my M.A at CSU Chico in the Language & Literacy program in the Graduate School of English. My research interests focus on theories of ludology, student agency, the teaching of writing, and participation. …

For so many Freshmen Composition students, writing is something done in school by addressing a prompt using a prescribed structure based on what they believe the teacher wants. In this paradigm, writing becomes a syllogistic if-then statement: if this is writing, then I don’t like to write OR if this …