I have adopted the phrase "school-to-work" to signal an increased pressure to make writing programs vocationally responsible.  And, while I do not think that vocational responsibility is in itself a burden and that vocational irresponsibility is to be heralded, I do worry that the push to make writing programs vocationally responsible often seems to come at the expense of making them critically irresponsible.

Today, I feel pressure from two sides.  I find myself wading in the stream of an older current which views writing as composition and composition as a service English departments offer the rest of the university in the form of skills training masquerading as general education.  I am pressured to understand writing as neither an art nor a science but as a mundane habit.  The intersection of computing and writing introduces a new current which increasingly exerts pressure on writing curricula; this current views writing as a form of generalized skills training which focuses on learning software for documentation and presentation -- this is what is often meant by computer literacy.  

Teaching responsibly means resisting these trends in curriculum design and infusing our courses with a critical pedagogy.