Writing Task Environments as Situated Frames for Human Literacy Crafts

Years ago, my experience teaching Comp 101 as an evening course for inmates at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California, opened my eyes to the meaning of situated activity. Inside the classroom deep inside the prison, the cream of the crop of the inmate population sat at desks.

With notebooks and reference materials poised—I provided and collected sharp pencils—they were ready to escape the throb of a cell on a block for a quiet retreat behind green walls into the Disneyland of linguistics. Somehow, they produced typed copies of assigned essays by the due date. Fred must have given them access.

Somehow, I read them. Some, twice or three times. There were never more than ten or twelve essays, I don’t think—nothing like the 30-40 I got from mainstream community colleges courses. I didn’t photocopy any, though I did keep some from the mainstream. I didn’t want to have them in my file cabinet for some psychic reason.

I gave them feedback on their linguistic performances.

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Formal school writing tasks are usually essays in one form or another, at least mildly argumentative, often accompanied by a rubric specifying features of the text per grade category. A thesis statement is a structuring tool that blueprints the argument under construction in the physical space of the text in accordance with the assignment. In the days of stone tablets the space of the text meant more than now.

That is, the thesis statement regulates what can and cannot be said on the stone tablet—it makes promises to the reader and raises expectations. The paragraph delivers subordinate theses or counter-subordinate-theses which fulfill the original promises by offering evidence. Teachers assign essays and assume ethical uses of these familiar tools to write texts that are worth awarding academic capital to high school students.

Situated in a maximum-security psychiatric prison for violent offenders, these tools applied in a loose sense of ‘application,’ but the substance of the inmates’ writings with a few notable examples often lacked any evidence of ethical reasoning or logical analysis of arguments with moral premises embracing any accepted moral framework—virtue ethics, utilitarian calculus, or deontological analysis of musts, mays, and nevers. My frustration with critical thinking as we ordinarily construe it is lack of attention to moral reasoning.

So, we worked on grammatical analysis, how many verbs can dance on the head of an adverb, syntactic variation and combination, a long, popular, and fun unit on punctuation, great times with morphology, and rhetorical schemes and tropes with bling for names—anadiplosis, synecdoche, polysyndeton.

Anything to avoid audience, purpose, and meaning.

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The dominant regulatory framework for writing instruction in situated classrooms across the free U.S., the Common Core State Standards, builds upon the traditional essay from kindergarten through high school.

Kindergartners are expected to give their opinions about stories and books. By third grade, learners are expected to write a paragraph with a topic sentence and three details. There is some waffling about the concluding sentence. By sixth grade, they should be able to write a five-paragraph essay with a thesis.

Since 2012, these standards are applied under the color of law in every state of the Union, with the exception of Alaska and a few other dissenters, some recently as I understand.

By senior year the argumentative essay should be mastered:

“CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.11-12.1.A: This standard requires students to "introduce precise, knowledgeable claim(s), establish the significance of the claim(s), distinguish the claim(s) from alternate or opposing claims, and create an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence."

Those very bright convicted criminals, medicated every evening before supper with psychotropic drugs, huddled together in an academic sanctuary with no windows each Wednesday night of the traditional semester, these flawed human beings didn’t define “knowledgeable” in a manner cognizable in classrooms in either public or private schools. They claimed, “special knowledge” about the criminal justice system’s corruption to support their assertion, they asserted, “I am innocent and should be freed.”

They created an organization that logically sequences claim(s), counterclaims, reasons, and evidence based on morally untenable premises.

How does one grade such essays?

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Here's the deeper irony: The rigid machinery of writing standards masks an allegedly neutral ideology of academic literacy that serves to maintain existing power structures rooted in symbolic violence. Political ideologies become dangerous precisely because they hide themselves in this elite argumentational costume, burrowing within the familiar folds of academic culture and religious tradition, eschewing the scientific and legal tradition, enlisting even thoughtful educators as unwitting accomplices.

In our current era of fractured realities, where facts bend to will and moral reasoning has lost its foundation in formal logic, where scientific knowledge faces unprecedented skepticism, artificial intelligence seems almost a secondary concern.

What our students truly need are democratic spaces where they can engage with writing as a fundamentally human endeavor, one that crosses borders and boundaries, reflects lived experiences, and challenges institutional assumptions about whose knowledge counts and what counts as truth with fresh, youthful eyes.

The lessons from teaching in a prison classroom today reveal not just the limitations of standardized, depersonalized writing instruction, but the urgent need to reimagine how we teach writing in ways that invite diverse epistemologies and empower authentic voices in our fragmented time. We need theoretically grounded, school-university partnership-based, high-quality research on how AI might interface productively with these budding writers.

The U.S. has had enough illogical argumentation clothed in logic devoid of moral anaslysis, whether AI or not. We might think about what hallucinations mean in this episteme. There are other forms of writing craft that have been neglected for too long. It’s time to open the aperture and let the light into the classroom.