Graduate Courses in Basic Writing: A Review

 

            Graduate study in basic writing theory and practice appears to be on the rise. A quick search on Google coupled with Karen Uehling’s 2004 survey[1] show us that universities across the country now offer courses exclusively devoted to the subject, including the University of Southern Mississippi (“Studies in Basic Writing”), San Francisco State University (“Seminar in Basic/Developmental Writing”), Montclair State University in New Jersey (“Teaching Writing and the Basic Writer”), and The Ohio State University (“Teaching Remedial College Composition”).[2] In some programs, coursework like this mandatory. At the Brooklyn Campus of Long Island University, for instance, “Literacy and Basic Writing” is a required course for those choosing a concentration in the Teaching of Writing; at the University of Minnesota, those seeking a certificate in Postsecondary Developmental Education must take “Writing and the College Student: Theory and Practice”

            However, the purpose of the current essay is not to survey the existence of these courses, nor to explore the reasons for the obvious and growing interest in our field, but rather to describe what students in these courses are asked to do and why.  The materials reviewed here were collected via responses to a query on CBW-L in March, 2006. Actually, the decision to request these materials was prompted by an exciting discussion at the Basic Writing SIG at 4Cs last March (2006) regarding graduate study in the field—a conversation that continued online as Lynn Troyka and others organized panels on the subject for CCCC 2007. Glenn Blalock (Baylor University) and Rich Haswell (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) invited me to post these syllabi to CompFAQs[3], joining several other interactive resources on basic writing like Lori Rios’s collection of book titles often used to prepare graduate students to teach basic writing, Linda Adler-Kassner’s series of Best Practices in the teaching of basic writing (to which I return in following section), and Karen Uehling’s 2004 compilation of graduate courses devoted to the teaching of basic writing, which she developed via “the response I received to the query on CBW-L posted February 3, 2004, and . . . other information I could find through online searches of catalogs.” Though the number of graduate courses in this subject appear to be increasing, I will focus here on only three representative examples: Linda Adler-Kassner’s “Teaching Basic Writing at the College Level” (Eastern Michigan University), Karen Uehling’s “The Theory and Teaching of Basic Writing” (Boise State University), and my own “Basic Writing Theory and Practice” (Texas A&M-Commerce), especially with respect to technology integration, assignments, and selected texts.  

 

Technology

            Many of these courses integrate technology into the course plans—both as a productive tool students can later use in their own work with basic writers and as a way to disseminate information among a wider audience of basic writing teachers, scholars, and administrators. The most interesting case of the latter is the wiki of “Best Practices” developed by Linda Adler-Kassner’s students at Eastern Michigan State. As Adler-Kassner explains,

                        In winter 2006, we worked to consider connections between these                                                        questions and    practice: what happens when a person is hired to teach                                      something called “basic writing?” What role does it play in the                                                     institution? How is the class/program shaped? And – perhaps most                                                    importantly – what should instructors in ‘basic writing’ classes do in                                         those classes, and why should they do those things?

                           To explore both sets of questions, the class’s premier assignment was to                                             develop wiki pages that would be useful for basic writing instructors.                                          (http://comppile.tamucc.edu/wiki/BasicWriting/BestPractices)

The projects collected at CompFAQs “are the result of that work.” In this, Adler-Kassner’s students developed theoretically-informed responses to questions like “What are the Best Practices for working with reading in the basic writing classroom?” and “What are Best Practices for providing feedback in the basic writing classroom?”  In response to this last question, more focused concerns emerged like,  “How do we address surface conventions in teaching writing so that students do not suffer the negative perceptions created by errors?” and “How can we address the perceptions of surface conventions?” and “How should teachers negotiate the power struggles when giving feedback on student papers?” They even offer a number of posts describing effective classroom practices for technology (inside and outside the classroom), peer review, and working with ESOL students.

            In the collaborative atmosphere that permeates our field, the wiki is a very fitting choice in that it enables writers to revise (add to, edit, and rearrange) current entries and post new ones. It also allows readers beyond Adler-Kassner’s class to join the conversation in rather tangible ways by likewise posting new entries and adding to those already available. A few questions posted are not yet answered, for instance “What the composing processes of basic writers?” and “How can a writing center be integrated into a basic writing program?” For years questions like these have been asked, answered, complicated, and and asked again in our scholarship, our classrooms, our programs, and similar rhetorical spaces throughout the field of basic writing and—like any smart, growing, and reflective community—the answers offered are always already in flux, just as the answers generated by Adler-Kassner’s students are always already in flux. As she explains in her student handout describing this innovative wiki project (see “Inquiry Group Project—CompFAQs Wiki Pages and Presentations”), “Wikis are collaborative—what you start here will be posted on the CompFAQs site, then added on to and developed by others who bring their experience and expertise to the proverbial table.” In her introduction to this valuable resource, Adler-Kassner invites this conversation to live on: “We hope [this resource] provide[s] useful information and [is] a productive foundation upon which to extend the ongoing conversation about basic writing.”

 

Readings

            The readings selected in all three courses situate basic writing by drawing attention to its richly politicized history (Soliday’s The Politics of Remediation, 2002; excerpts from James Traub’s controversial City on a Hill, 1994; Tom Fox’s Defending Access, 1999; Shirley Lauro’s play Open Admissions, 1982[4]), the complexities of curricular and programmatic development (Kutz, Groder, and Zamel’s The Discovery of Competence, 1993; Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts, 1986), the politics of difference (Zhan-Lu and Horner’s Representing the “Other,” 1998; Mutnick’s Writing in an Alien World, 1995), and the way literacy education lives within the lives of basic writers (Sternglass’s Time to Know Them, 1997; Gilyard’s Voices of the Self, 1991; Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, 1989; Villanueva’s Bootstraps, 1993). All three also included much discussion of Mina Shaughnessy and her influence on the field of basic writing. In my own course, we began with Jane Maher’s biography of Mina Shaughnessy’s life (Her Life and Work, 1997), which offers an in-depth portrait of not only Shaughnessy-the-person but also Shaughnessy-the-administrator negotiating the politically-charged atmosphere of Open Admissions at City College. We concerned ourselves with her pedagogy, as well, through a student presentation on her important work Errors and Expectations, a presentation that took on special resonance after spending so much time with Shaughnessy through Maher’s Her Life. Our key concern, however, was the local context in which Shaughnessy and the many devoted teachers in the SEEK Program worked. Thus we followed Maher’s biography with Soliday’s The Politics of Remediation, paying particular attention to the ways in which remedial programs exist to further stratify educational institutions and opportunities. As Soliday likewise writes about her experiences at CUNY, her work seemed especially appropriate following Shaughnessy.[5]    

            The single greatest influence on my curricular choices was probably the fact that I teach this course at a public university in Texas and the majority of students taking Basic Writing Theory and Practice will be teaching basic writers at Texas colleges and universities. The culture of testing is always already a part of any basic writing class in any public college or university in Texas, at least since the TASP law was instituted in 1989. TASP (Texas Academic Skills Program) is, of course, the law that required universities to "remediate" students failing the reading/writing/math sections of TASP. It was repealed in 2003, but the logic that made it so persuasive in the first place remains on most campus. Since many of our students received their K-12 educations in Texas public schools, they are used to this environment that "tests" literacy (etc) in ways that run counter to so much research in our field. I thought that effective teachers and administrators of this population needed to become cognizant of the material and political circumstances limiting and shaping what's necessary and possible within any basic writing program, at least those in which they were likely to teach. I also wanted those who may be less familiar with the politics of testing (and, as Soliday points out, the ongoing "politics of remediation" in response to what she calls the "always-new literacy crisis") to consider the ways in which such experiences might shape a basic writers' attitude toward literacy education in general. I wanted to train advocates for basic writers, as well as teachers and researchers in the field; that's probably why I will include Adler-Kassner and Harrington's slim, powerful Basic Writing as a Political Act (2002) next time around. In the end, however, I wanted them to understand that, as Richard Miller asserts, “constraining conditions are not paralyzing conditions” and, therefore, in order to affect change within this context, “students, teachers, and administrators must develop a sufficiently nuanced understanding of how power is disseminated in bureaucracy” (211, emphasis in original).

            Like Adler-Kassner and Uehling, we also made great use Susan Bernstein’s Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings as an introduction to the broader field of basic writing. Bernstein’s collection is incredibly effective in helping new teacher-scholars reflect on key scholarship and make use of it in their classrooms, programs, and public discourse about basic writers and their needs. Classic articles like Adrian Rich’s “Teaching Language in Open Admissions” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue” to more recent pieces like Jeffrey T. Grabill’s “Technology, Basic Writing, and Change” and Ann E. Green’s “My Uncles Guns” are organized into sections focusing on—among other things--the reading-writing connection, student and teacher perceptions of basic writing, approaches to grammar instruction, and the needs of ESL writers. Each section is preceded by a concise introduction and followed by useful questions prompting relevant classroom activities and something she calls “Thinking about Teaching.” My students found it to be a very useful and accessible resource in helping them better understand and begin to articulate the complexities in identifying the basic writer, determining how basic writers write, and how a basic writing classroom (and program) should function.

            As we well know, “Basic Writing”--the term, the field of study, the profession, the very concept—is fraught with controversy. Tensions are plentiful, including excellence versus access, high school expectations versus those at the college level, “school” literacy versus “home” literacy, and institutional needs versus student needs. I don’t mean to imply that the tensions here are completely binary; they are much more complex than that. Though our readings, discussions, and various writing projects, we explored the theoretical, professional, disciplinary, practical, and ideological issues that make up and arise from these tensions in basic writing.

            The theoretical questions driving our course included identifying the basic writer (Who’s the basic writer? How does a basic writer differ from other writers? Is there any difference? How can we tell? How might this difference be determined? Should we attempt to stratify writers in this way? What’s the function of [and the justification for] identifying this difference? What’s the function of this differentiation in the life of the student writer? When does a basic writer stop being a “basic” writer? What are the effects of being labeled “basic writer”? What standards can we use to effectively determine when a basic writer is no longer “basic”? What causes a writer to become a “basic” writer? Is it the label itself? What are some other possible causes? How can we know this? Should someone marked as a basic writer in one context be considered a basic writer in all writing contexts? In other words, is it possible that “Johnny Can’t Write” for timed essay exams like TASP but writes quite well in other, very different, perhaps even more complicated contexts? What’s the political function of identifying basic writers? the economic function? the institutional function? the pedagogical function? the ideological function? the social function?), determining how basic writers write (What does the work of a basic writer look like? How can we determine that a particular text has been created by a basic writer? What do we mean by “error”? Why is that a difficult question to answer? What is the function of identifying errors in student texts [or, in Shaughnessy’s terms, recognizing “patterns of error”]? What can a basic writing teacher do with this kind of knowledge? Does the writing process of a basic writer differ from that of other writers? If so, in what ways? What accounts for this difference? What’s the political function of identifying characteristics that may differentiate a text written by a basic writer from one produced by a more “successful” writer? the economic function? the pedagogical function? the ideological function? the social function?), and determining how a basic writing classroom should function (What do basic writers need to learn? Why? How should we design the basic writing classroom? Why? How does a basic writing classroom differ from a first-year composition classroom? Is there a difference? Should there be? Why? If so, what accounts for these differences? What do basic writers already know, and what’s the best way to design a basic writing classroom in order to draw from this knowledge-base? What’s the best way for a basic writing teacher to determine the knowledge-base of a basic writing student? What can we do about student resistance? What can we learn from it? What are the benefits of exploring what works [and what doesn’t work] in a basic writing classroom? What are the consequences?). The political questions driving our course, other than those I snuck in above: What’s the history of, justification for, and function of state-mandated, high-stakes testing like the Texas Assessment of Academic Skills (TAAS), the Texas Academic Skills Program (TASP), and the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills (TAKS)? What are some of the political, economic, ideological, and social consequences of high-stakes testing, especially as those consequences define basic writing and basic writers? The practical questions driving the course, other than those embedded in the questions listed above, included: What’s a good way to make group work in a basic writing classroom? What are some good strategies for teaching basic writers to revise more effectively? to read more critically? to participate in class discussion more passionately?

            The major goal of the course was somewhat paradoxical: I hoped that our few weeks together[6] would both complicate and simplify their understanding of the basic writer and basic writing classroom. It seems that this was also a major goal in Adler-Kassner’s and Uehling’s course designs. The assignments and readings Adler-Kassner chose appear to have been designed to answer and further complicate answers to questions like those articulated on her syllabus, questions that may have likewise motivated Uehling’s choices and that certainly motivated my own:

·        Who are students called “basic writers”? . . .

·        What is basic writing? . . .

·        How are basic writers determined? . . .

·        What are classroom strategies used for working with students in basic writing courses? . . .

·        What is the public discourse about basic writing and students in basic writing courses? . . .

·        What can you/we do about basic writing? . . .

Uehling and I choose to root this conversation in open admissions, especially as it manifests itself at CUNY. As Uehling describes it in her 2004 syllabus, “students will study,” among other things, “the history of basic writing and the impact of open admissions policies on the teaching of composition.” To that end, her students began with two key pieces from the Shaughnessy’s years with the SEEK Program at City College (Shaughnessy’s own “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” and Adriane Rich’s powerful illustration of the material constraints of Open Admissions), several artifacts from the early days of our profession (including a two-part interview with Sondra Perl included in the first issues of The Newsletter: Conference on Basic Writing Skills from 1982), and Shirley Lauro’s Open Admissions (1982).

            Uehling’s choice to include Lauro’s short play is particularly savvy as this 30-minute drama reveals the complex and subtle ways institutionalized racism affects even the most well-meaning among us. Professor Alice Miller and Calvin Jefferson are the only characters in this drama that takes place in “a cubicle Speech Office at a city college in New York” (242). Alice is an overworked Professor of Speech Communications who “started out to be a Shakespearean scholar” (242) but finds herself—12 years later—“teaching beginning Speech” to “35 Freshman a class, 20 classes a week” (251). Calvin—an 18-year-old first-year student in Open Admissions Program at the College who is, “at first glance a street person” (242)--catches Alice in her office and demands to know why he got a B on the last project, in fact why he always seems to receive Bs. It’s a scene that, as the stage directions explain, “begins on a very high level of tension and intensity and builds from there. . . . The audience’s experience from the start should be as if they had suddenly tuned in on the critical round of a boxing match” (243). Alice tries to postpone the discussion with Calvin as she is rushing to attend another meeting, but he won’t have it. He’s desperate and he’s frustrated. Instead of helping, Alice spends several minutes talking about his “Speech Syndrome” (245), his “Harlemese. Don’t you remember? I called everyone’s attention to your particular syndrome in class the minute you started talking” (247). Near the end of their “match,” we begin to learn the true source of his frustration, following yet another one of Alice’s attempts to correct him (“’Ask me,’ Calvin” not “Ax” me):

                        CALVIN: “Ax you?” Okay, man. [Turns to ALICE] Miss Shakespeare           `                                   Speech Communications 1! [Crosses US of ALICE.] Know what I’ll “ax”                                            you right here in this room, this day, at this here desk right now? I’ll “ax”                                      you how come I have been in this here college for 3 months on this here                                        Open Admissions and I don’t know nothing more than when I came in                                              here? You know what I mean? (250) . . .

                        . . . You understand what I am Communicatin to you? My high school has                                             tole me I got brains an can make something outta my life if I gits me the                                            chance! And now this here’s supposed to be my chance! High school says                                        you folks gonna bring me up to date on my education and git me even.                                            Only nothing is happening to me in my head except I am getting more and                                  more confused about what I know and what I don’t know! . . . So what I                                              wanna “ax” you is: How come you don’t sit down with me and teach me                                                which way to git my ideas down instead of givin me a “B”? (251)

Not only was she unable (unwilling?) to “teach [him]” how to get his “ideas down,” but the “B” itself appears to be meaningless as an assessment. Calvin asks her, “Well, what’s that “B” standin for? Cause I’ll tell you something you wanna know the truth: I stood up there didn’ hardly know the sense anything I read, couldn’t hardly even read it at all. Only you didn’t even notice. Wasn’t even listenin, sitting there back a the room jiss thumbin through your book” (249). In fact it seems most everyone received a “B,” and Calvin is outraged. “I don’t even turn no outline in? Jiss give me a “B.” [He rises and crosses R of ALICE]. An Lester a “B”! An Sam a “B”! What’s that “B” standin for anyhow? Cause it surely ain’t standing for no piece of work!”  (251).

            Through this heated exchange, we learn the toll these underfunded and highly politicized programs have on the actual people involved. What is happening to Calvin is outrageous, but it’s even bigger than Alice. His disadvantage is built right into the system. The classes are too big, resources are too few, and teachers in the Program are just “hanging on.” “Calvin don’t blame me!” Alice exclaims. “I’m trying! God knows I’m trying! The times are rough for everyone. . . . I haven’t written one word in my field! I haven’t read 5 research books! I’m exhausted . . . and I’m finished! We all have to bend. I’m just hanging on now . . . supporting my little girl . . . earning a living . . . that’s all. . . . I can’t do it, Calvin. And that’s the real truth. I’m one person, in one job. And I can’t. Do you understand? And even if I could, it wouldn’t matter. All that matters is the budget. . . . and the curriculum. . . and the grades. . . and how you look . . . and how you talk!” (251; 253).

            She can’t help him. In the first place, she doesn’t know how. In the second place, the problem is bigger than either one of them, as Adrienne Rich explains in “Teaching Language in Open Admissions.” Rich calls Open Admissions a “naively optimistic experiment in education.”

                        Naively optimistic because I think the white faculty at least, those of us who were                                   most committed to the students, vastly underestimated the psychic depth and                             economic function of racism in the city and the nation, the power of the political                              machinery that could be “permissive” for a handful of years only to retrench,                                   break promises, and betray, pitting black youth against Puerto Rican and Asian,                                poor ethnic students against students of color, in an absurd and tragic competition                                  for resources which should have been open to all. (15)

From what I can discern from Uehling’s syllabus, Calvin and Alice serve as a starting point for the many complicated questions Adler-Kassner and I asked above. How can we best help Calvin? How can we best help Alice to help Calvin? What went wrong? How might Alice have handled this better? What training and support did she need to be able to handle this better? What did she need to know about Calvin in order to help him? What assumptions led to their problematic exchange? What material, political, ideological, and cultural conditions limited and shaped their interactions (both in that office and in the classroom)? I had never ready this play—now almost 25 years old--before running across the title in Uehling’s syllabus. I will certainly be using it next time I teach this class as it puts a face on complexities of “remedial” instruction in ways little else can.

            Another piece that personalizes the basic writer’s dilemma in powerful ways is Ann E. Green’s short story “My Uncle’s Guns” (also included in Bernstein’s collection). Much like Lauro’s play, Barbara Mellix’s “From Outside, In,” and Gloria Anzaldua’s “How to Tame a Wild Tongue,” Green’s creative piece forces readers to confront the impossibility of separating language from identity—something Alice attempted to do in pushing Calvin to rid himself of “that Street Speech” (252). Unlike Mellix and Anzaldua who illustrate these complexities via personal literacy narratives (or “autoethnography”), however, Green offers a first-person narrative from the perspective of a working-class student attempting to develop an essay for a first-year composition class. Interspersed among a safe and largely commonplace essay quite often associated with first-year composition are digressions into the real, complex, and fascinating lifewords and thoughts of the writer (metacognitive moments), things the writer decides not to include because she believes the events and choices that make up her life beyond school are not welcome in the academy—certainly not in this particular classroom where she feels certain she’ll be judged as a redneck if she shares them.

            Until we read that piece, at least one student (“Paula”) had quite a bit of trouble with the notion of student responsibility. In fact, the second week of class she came in and hardly had her books on the table before she began asking me, “At what point does it become the student’s responsibility to step up to the plate? I keep reading and digging for someone to get to this. Did I miss something? Everything is society’s fault or the school’s fault or the teacher’s fault! What about the student?” A few of the others already there as we waited for class to formally begin stepped in to answer her query with more questions: “What about the institution’s responsibility?” “What about the teacher’s responsibility?” But I think the question of student responsibility took on new meaning for her—for all of us—when we started discussing “My Uncle’s Guns.” One member of the class (“Charlene”) told us she could really relate. Guns have always been a part of her life. Many times she’s ridden in that truck with the gun in the glove box that the narrator in Green’s story talks about. She knows that world of guns and hunting well, and she understands—instinctively—the difficulties the narrator experienced in telling her personal stories in a college context. When she moved from Texas to start high school in Indiana, she—like the narrator--knew she would have to keep that part of herself out of the schools. As she explained, “They already thought I was a hick, anyway. Why give them anything else to go with?” Later, when she was training to become a teacher, her advisor humiliated her when she used “fixin’” one day in class. He made it seem that her entire career would be over before it began if she didn’t immediately purge that word from her vocabulary. She went on to teach at-risk middle school students in California and later Texas, but she never forgot what her teacher said and she struggled to keep her “hick past” out of every classroom she entered.

            I asked her, “As a young student, how did you determine that gun culture was considered ‘hick’ and unwelcome in the classroom, and how did you determine which aspects of your private life would be considered ‘hick’?” She told me she “just knew.” She heard her classmates speak in class and she drew from that. She listened to all her teachers. She, too, “saw how [her teachers] looked at” all things not urban, not “sophisticated.” I asked everyone, “In ‘My Uncle’s Guns,” what could the teacher have done to help that student find comfort in bringing what she found relevant and most personal into her classroom and this particular project?” They responded by returning to Adriane Rich’s argument as Rich asked that same question more than thirty years before. How do we create trust? Of course we pointed to the way her teacher “looked at” her students and why the teacher might be looking at these students as though “teaching us . . . won’t help us.” Charlene and a couple other students in the class said they know that look. Charlene said that she has always played the game (keeping her “hick past” out of the classroom) so that no one would ever look at her that way again.

            Green’s short story and the discussion it generated made it possible for Paula to begin to understand responsibility as quite a bit more complicated than she originally thought. I no longer had to work against the fiction of autonomy (as I had been)—at least not any abstract. We got there through much more accessible, relevant means. I believe that is exactly what Lauro’s play can do for us, as well.

 

 

 

Assignments

            As we’ve already discussed, the “premier” assignment in Adler-Kassner’s class was a wiki project in which students were required to generate and post a series of Best Practices in Basic Writing. In order to ensure these projects were as deeply informed as possible by basic writing scholarship and teaching experiences that were carefully consumed, digested, and reflected upon, her students were required to complete weekly “Reflect-Projects.” “Generally,” she explains, “for these responses, you’ll reflect on issues from the week’s readings and  think (or project) about how they affect your thinking about basic writing or work with students-called-basic writers (in about 2-4 pages).”

            They post these “RPs” to an online forum before class and then response to one another “in the Forum space” (something she calls “RP Responses”). As Adler-Kassner explains, “Responding serves two purposes: it allows all of us to think together (which is cool and fun) and it helps to perpetuate our dialogue outside of our once-weekly class meetings (which is important!).” In addition to the many ways in which these RPs and the RP Responses likely prepare students to generate and make productive use of the Best Practices in Basic Writing (both in their own classrooms and in the CompFAQs wiki discussed earlier), these assignments led to a culminating activity (“Final RP”) in which students were required to “formulate a statement of your philosophy regarding BW, reflect on the theoretical foundation for that philosophy, and apply it to your thinking about teaching BW.”

            In our course at A&M-Commerce, we also used cyberspace to extend conversations beyond the walls and time constraints of the classroom and to encourage students to reflect, reflect, and reflect some more on their own experiences with basic writers, with public perceptions of basic writing, and with the course readings and classroom discussions. I’m afraid that my attempt to avoid the rather clunky platform our campus used at the time led to an overly complex system for online discussion, however, and I look forward to making use of Adler-Kassner’s much more graceful system of RPs, RP Responses, and FPs—especially now that we are using eCollege rather than the much less user-friendly program to which my university subscribed in 2004, the year I taught the course I am describing here.

            Like many folks, I often employ weekly “Response Papers” or “Position Papers” in my graduate courses as a low-risk way to work both with and against the readings they encounter. In this course, however, we tried something a little different with the same goal, however: “Discussion Leader (DL) Activities” and “Participation in the Online Discussion” generated by the DL, together making up 40% of their final course grade. The DL Activities included both an online component (a post that would serve as a discussion starter in response to the readings for the following class) and a face-to-face component (a one-page handout that synthesizes the key issues the DL sees “emerging from the online discussion and add[s] to it by pushing past and against it and asking us to do the same.” Like Adler-Kassner’s RP assignments, the DL activities did not require writers to develop solid arguments. In the handout describing this project for students[7], I offered the following advice:

                        You don’t need to solve anything for us at this point. The debate will rage on, and                      we will probably need much more information before we can offer any firm                               solutions (solutions that will be disrupted again as the conversation continues and                                  further complications emerge). Instead, push these ideas to the breaking point.                               Develop new ways of   looking at these key issues. Encourage and engage in that                           rigorous give-and-take of ideas and arguments that make graduate school and                           academic discourse in   general so very powerful for us.

Participation in the online discussion is pretty self-explanatory. This activity simply required students to get and keep involved in the conversations started by the DLs.

            Because we only had five weeks together, I was required to limit our reading list to a mere handful of texts. I did not want their introduction to the field to be limited to our required readings, however. Thus, like many graduate courses, our class was required to generate a Book Review “on an approved, book-length study of BW.” Our list included Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts, Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations, Deborah Mutnick’s Writing in an Alien World, Ann DiPardo’s A Kind of Passport, Laura Gray-Rosendale’s Rethinking Basic Writing, Bruce Horner and Min-Zhan Lu’s Representing the “Other,” and Marilyn Sternglass’s Time to Know Them. In addition to these written reports, I asked for them to “develop a handout, make enough copies of it for the class, and present your review for us in a way that allows us to productively engage with it.” These reports offered much fodder for reflection and further discussion of our required readings and the questions that drove the class. The final project required them to develop and sustain a scholarly argument relevant to the field of basic writing.

            The other two courses reviewed here, however, assigned culminating activities more deliberately designed to develop teacher-scholars and, therefore, bridge that theory-practice gap so much a part of education in the real world. Karen Uehling, for example, asks her students to create both a “Research Essay” (typical scholarly, graduate student faire) and a “related curriculum ‘paper” (of equal weight) that is, in Uehling’s words, “the practical spin‑off from your research essay.” As I’ve already pointed out, Adler-Kassner’s assignments required students to synthesize the theoretical and the practical in developing Best Practices in Basic Writing for CompFAQs, as well as the Final RPs in which they were to articulate their own theoretically-informed philosophies regarding basic writing and the teaching of basic writing. I chose to conclude our semester together with the requisite conference paper in which students offered a sustained, theoretically-informed argument relevant to our field. Next time, I will take a page from Uehling’s and Adler-Kassner’s course plans  and instead ask students to develop projects that attempt to bridge that theory-practice dichotomy in more deliberate and practical ways. Most of the syllabi I reviewed prepare students to become theoretically-informed practitioners and practically-informed theorists. In the end, then, I suspect that is what basic writing teachers and administrators must be: both theoretically-informed practitioners and practically-informed theorists.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Susanmarie Harrington.  Basic Writing as a Political Act: Public Conversations about Writing and Literacy. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 2002

Bartholomae, David and Anthony Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts, Counterfacts: Theory and Method for a Reading and Writing Course. Portsmouth, NJ: Boynton/Cook, 1986.

DiPardo, Anne. A Kind of Passport: A Basic Writing Adjunct Program and the Challenge of Student Diversity. NCTE, 1993.

Fox, Tom. Defending Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999.

Gilyard’s Voices of the Self: A Study of Language Competence. Wayne State UP, 1991.

Grabill, Jeffrey T. “Technology, Basic Writing, and Change.” Journal of Basic Writing. 15.1 (1996). Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Second Edition. Susan Naomi Bernstein, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2004. 275-287.

Gray-Rosendale, Laura. Rethinking Basic Writing: Exploring Identity, Politics, and Community in Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1999.

Green, Ann E. “My Uncle’s Guns.” Writing on the Edge. 9.1 (Fall/Winter 1997/98). Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Second Edition. Susan Naomi Bernstein, ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s P, 2004. 50-59. 

Horner, Bruce and Min-Zhan Lu. Representing the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Basic Writing. NCTE, 1998.

Kutz, Eleanor, Suzy Q. Groder, and Vivian Zamel. The Discovery of Competence: Teaching and Learning with Diverse Student Writers. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1993.

Lauro, Shirley. Open Admissions. in Political Stages: An Anthology of American Plays. NY: Applause Theatre and Cinema Books, 2002. 239-254.

Maher, Jane. Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work. NCTE, 1997.

Mellix, Barbara. The Georgia Review. 1987. Working With Ideas. Donna Dunbar-Odom. Houghton-Mifflin, 2001. 266-273.

Miller, Richard E. As If Learning Mattered: Reforming Higher Education. Cornell UP, 1998.

Mutnick, Deborah. Writing in an Alien World: Basic Writing and the Struggle for Equality in Higher Education. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1995.

Rich, Adrienne. “Teaching Language in Open Admissions.” Harvard English Studies. 4 (1973). Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Second Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 14-28.

Rose, Mike. Lives on the Boundary: A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educationally Underprepared. NY: Penguin Books, 1989.

Shaughnessy, Mina P. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. NY: Oxford UP, 1977.

Soliday, Mary. The Politics of Remediation: Institutional and Student Needs in Higher Education. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002.

Sternglass, Marilyn S. Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level. Mahwah, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997. 

Traub, James. City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College. Perseus Books, 1995.

Villanueva, Victor. Bootstraps: From an American Academic of Color. NCTE, 1993.

 

 

 


[1] The context and findings of Uehling’s survey will be discussed later in the essay.

[2] A forthcoming essay in the 25th anniversary volume of the Journal of Basic Writing promises to offer a much more detailed portrait of graduate programs and courses in basic writing than will be offered here (Barbara Gleason, Fall 2006, 25.2).

[3] CompFAQs is a subset of CompPile (a searchable database of scholarship in composition studies), both of which were developed and are maintained by Blalock and Haswell.

[4] Before reviewing Karen Uehling’s syllabus, I had never heard of this play, which I will discuss in much greater detail below as it offers an powerful illustration of the complex ways in which Open Admissions was implemented.  

[5] In that Sternglass’s Time to Know Them offers an in-depth portrait of the students and their experiences at City College, I should have included that among our required readings. I will next time.

[6] The course described here was during a summer term and thus only five weeks long.

[7] All handouts discussed are available at CompFAQs and at http://faculty.tamuc.edu/scarter/archive/E776.htm (which includes only those handouts associated with my course).