Much composition pedagogy begins writing instruction within familiar territory. As a result, composition educators often structure curriculum and courses so that students first write in familiar genres, like personal narratives, and examine and critique their own lives, experiences, and even beliefs through those genres before turning to unfamiliar territory. In this essay, the author considers some of the problems students and teachers may encounter when beginning within familiar territory and then provides yet another option for how a composition course might begin writing instruction to foster students' critical consciousness. To do so, she examines how one pedagogical approach, the explicit teaching of genre, incorporates the familiar, mainly through familiar genres, and then she explores the difficulties that students may encounter when beginning within familiar genres. She argues that these difficulties may lie within one's own assumptions about composition pedagogy and critical consciousness as well as the ideological forces of genres and what she is terming as the "genre effect." From this, she expands upon current approaches to the explicit teaching of genre by proposing and exploring a pedagogy that considers the "genre effect" and invites students to begin not with the familiar but with the unfamiliar. (Contains 7 notes.)