Paper # 1 ENGL 810

The discipline of Basic Writing has a few possible dates of emergence. If one refers to it simply as remediation, then it has existed since 1870. Most, however, mark the emergence of the field as a discipline of study to the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In particular, CUNY’s open admissions policy that was enacted in Fall 1970 is credited with shifting the emphasis from remedial education to developmental education; rather than a deficit model, developmental education (of which Basic Writing is a part) focuses on student potential. In the late 1960s-early 1970s, Mina Shaughnessy of City College wrote Errors and Expectations and cofounded several publications, including The Journal of Basic Writing (Soliday 65). Shaughnessy defines the need for “a pedagogy for writing that respects, in its goals and methods, the maturity of the adult, beginning writer and at the same time admits to the need to begin where the beginning is, even if that falls outside the traditional territory of college composition” (9).

Remedial classes existed prior to open admissions. Even Harvard and Yale had classes for students whose college prep schools had not prepared them well enough (Villanueva 98). In America from 1900-1920, colleges began to differentiate student ability level by placing them into tracks. “Institutions use this strategy [differentiation of student ability levels] to resolve a fundamental paradox in American society: how to fulfill students’ aspirations– and demands– for class mobility through postsecondary education without relinquishing the academy’s traditional selective functions” (Soliday 71).

Students march for open admissions, Spring 1968, CCNY

In November 1968, students demanded a change when they overtook City College’s campus and gave the administration a signed petition critiquing the city’s plan to create a system of schools that would further divide students along tracks (Soliday 71). Students pushed for the right to attend the school of their choice. The problem of preparation, or the lack thereof, persisted. Adrienne Rich taught in CCNY’s SEEK program: “Teaching at City I came to know the intellectual poverty and human waste of the public school system through the marks it has left on students– and not on black and Puerto Rican students only, as the advent of Open Admissions was to show” (19).

While the new students lacked certain skills in writing, they had other strengths. Rich defined a quality of Basic Writers that persists today, when she said their best strength was “an impatient cutting through of the phony, a capacity for tenacious struggle with language and syntax and difficult ideas, a growing capacity for political analysis which helped counter the low expectations their teachers had always had of them, and which many had had of themselves” (18).

Shaughnessy was the administrator of a Pre-Baccalaureate program before creating the Basic Writing sequence. In The Politics of Remediation, Mary Soliday explains, “Shaughnessy’s struggle to integrate her program into a traditional liberal arts curriculum challenged the anomalous status of remedial education that has been its lot for a century” (68). The creation of Basic Writing was not only about preparing students for the rigors of college-level work but also about allowing them to join the college in academic work in spite of their current level of preparedness.

In 1993, Bartholomae wrote, “I felt then, as I feel now, that the skills course, the course that postponed ‘real’ reading and writing, was a way of enforcing the very cultural division that stood as the defining markers of the problem education and its teachers, like me, had to address” (Bartholomae 6-7). Basic Writing teachers struggled with what precisely to teach. They debated how much emphasis to place on skill versus allowing the space for students to engage in college-level work on their own terms. This is further complicated when one considers that most teachers of Basic Writing have received little to no formal training in the teaching of Basic Writing.

Too often, Basic Writing scholars reinvent pedagogy rather than refer back to scholarly work already done. In an article about construction of student identity in the Journal of Basic Writing, Laura Gray-Rosendale emphasizes how scholars use the unique situations of their own schools to dictate what should be assumed about student identity. In 1993, Mike Rose pointed out that although there are 40 years of articles in JBW, zero were cited in higher education journals: “Most of us are trained and live our professional lives in disciplinary silos” (29). Most Basic Writing instructors align with some form of Rhet/Comp theory but are often at least one step away from full alignment, contributing to the nature of the disciplinary silo.

Basic Writing programs were tolerated as a necessity. Soliday explains that Basic Writing courses always reflect the current political situation of the larger economy as well as the specific schools or even the departments in which they are housed; the programs have always been used “to boost enrollments while espousing standards; to move students into professional schools without surrendering more credits to an English department; to establish a course of elective literary study while maintaining a compulsory writing program; or to fulfill certain commitments to access for historically underrepresented groups” (62).

Video about the future of Basic Writing, an interview with Rebecca Mlynarcyzk and Ira Shor at CUNY

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. “The Tidy House: Basic Writing in the American Curriculum.” Journal of Basic Writing 12.1 (1993):     4-21. Print

Rich, Adrienne. “Teaching Language in Open Admissions.” Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. 1973. 4th ed. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein. Bedford: Boston, 2013. 12-26. Print.

Shaughnessy, Mina. “Some Needed Research on Writing.” Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings. Dec. 1977. 4th ed. Ed. Susan Naomi Bernstein. Bedford: Boston, 2013. 12-26. Print.

Soliday, Mary. The Politics of Remediation. U of Pittsburgh P: Pittsburgh, 2002. Print.

Villanueva, Victor. “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum.” Journal of Basic Writing 32.1 (2013):97-110. Print.

Photo Credit:
“History of CCNY.” West Harlem. WordPress, 2011. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

Video Credit:

“The Future of Basic Writing: How Can We Grow the Field?” YouTube. YouTube, 30 Aug. 2014. Web. 17 Sept. 2015.

PAB #2

Gray-Rossdale, Linda. “Investigating our Discursive History: JBW and the Construction of the ‘Basic Writer’s’ Identity.”Journal of Basic Writing. 18.2 (1999): 108-135. The WAC Clearinghouse. Colorado State University. Web. 9 Sept. 2015.

Keywords: student identities, Basic Writing students, growth, initiation, conflict

Summary

Laura Gray-Rosendale examines the description of Basic Writers in The Journal of Basic Writing throughout several major movements in the discipline. The first (1975-1976) is with Mina Shaughnessy and the growth model. “Relatively disconnected from the context within which the Basic Writer was actually writing, the Basic Writer’s student identity was inscribed first and foremost by the necessity to become more cognitively advanced and more developmentally mature” (110). Shaughnessy acknowledged that the study of students who were underdeveloped for college was too loose and the emphasis on error would lead to more questions about pedagogy than answers. Uniformity in teaching was neither desired nor possible in this model.

1975-1979 moved away from pedagogical concerns to ideological intention. Louise Yellin’s work is quoted extensively here, the “first piece of meta-theoretical criticism published on Basic Writing scholarship itself” (112). Yellin found the growth model to be premised in hope for growth beyond the students’ current abilities but sadly “in danger of fostering a vocational education, which, often despite its own assertions, reinforced social stratification” (113). Additionally, she cautioned not to romanticize students as a “ ‘culture of the oppressed’ and sought to undermine this” (113).

1979 shifted to an initiation model with metaphors of invention and entrance into a discourse community. Students were no longer deficient and in need of step-by-step instruction by the teacher but rather novices to conventions who needed introduction to the academy. David Bartholomae argued for a more rhetorically-based approach. The 1981 issue focused on revision:“Moving between philosophies of revision, teaching strategies for revision, and students’ own revising techniques, the texts in this issue took revision out of the realm of the fixed and static, seeing it as part of the rhetorical situation which was constantly changing and evolving” (116). The journal then lapsed from 1981-1985.

Under new editor, Lynn Quitman Troyka, the newly retitled Journal of Basic Writing revived with issues no longer focused on one theme or issue. A dialogue opened about the definition of Basic Writers, most notably between Kogen and Hays, Kogen arguing for an initiation model while Hays argued for a developmental model. “The Basic Writer student identity within our scholarship could no longer be seen outside of social and historical forces without raising criticisms about whether its premises rested upon the developmentalist models which reigned previously, or conceptions of student identity which treated the Basic Writer as a ‘child’ who lacked adequate development” (119). The debate was no longer about who the student was but rather how he or she was described.

The conflict metaphor began in 1991. The conflict or contact zone metaphor largely arose out of Mary Louise Pratt’s “Arts of the Contact Zone,” which argues that “classes ought to be places where conflicts between discourses were heightened and examined” (121). The new student identity was “in flux, subject to and a subject of many historical and social forces which, scholars affirmed, had problematically created it” (121). The forces at work for and against students now became the source of student identity. Students were presumed to be on the margins as well as oppressed, but at the same time already aware of their marginality and open to discussing it. Additionally, student identities were no longer viewed as binaries but as plural or multiple: “The Basic Writer’s student identity, though it varied from article to article, was describable as a constellation of societal forces which impacted it and shaped it, as gendered, raced, or classed” (124). An outsider position was presumed; social agency and empowerment became themes for coursework. Gray-Rossdale notes that work during this time is often highly contextualized to “specific situations, specific activities, specific institutions, or specific moments” (126).

Reflection:

Although Gray-Rossdale positions each of these metaphors in a particular timeframe within JBW, all metaphors are currently in play during discussions of Basic Writers on the Council of Basic Writing list-serv and at CBW sessions at CCCCs. The observation that all articles were highly contextualized is interesting to me because I still see that happening during any attempt to create policy statements. Rather than being able to define BW programs or students, there is a reaction to any classification that the definition is not inclusive enough to represent all students. The end result is a non-definition. While all eras agree that students’ writing can improve, the method varies tremendously.

I know this is already much longer than it is supposed to be, but I cannot help adding…The reason I chose Basic Writing for the research topic (apart from the other reason shared in email) even though it will not be my main research focus is that I have no formal study in Basic Writing even though I have been teaching it for 13 years. I know I am not alone in this. Basic Writing is routinely in danger of being cut from university programs (when it has not been cut already). One of my friends is arguing for her program as I write this. Studying BW at the graduate level is a dangerous proposition because it could always disappear. I suspect in many ways, we as a discipline routinely invent our epistemologies as we go, picking up values from this and that along the way because we are teaching on the fly. This is not a systematic way of proceeding, and I fear the over-contextualization of the discipline adds to this because we’re apt to disregard what does not immediately apply to us as of little value or relevance to our specific teaching situation.

PAB #1

Villanueva, Victor. “Subversive Complicity and Basic Writing Across the Curriculum.” Journal of

            Basic Writing 32.1 (2013):97-110. Print.

Villanueva begins with a memory of a meeting with the provost, a meeting where he will have to use rhetoric to lobby for retaining Basic Writing classes and not cutting them from the program as the provost plans. This memory of a day in 1984 is provided without context, but it serves as a great example of one man deploying subversive complicity to save the basic writing program. The office visit serves as a metaphor for how we all encounter situations where we need to know the language to use with those in power positions.

Representation of the office in Villanueva’s anecdote

As Villanueva points out on page 99, “[…] when economic crises loom, the racialized, non-middle-class version of ‘remedial’ writing is immediately slated for removal. And the way to save it is to invoke a rhetoric that cobbles together a multiculturalism or equal opportunity and assimiliation.” While writing teachers teach students to embrace their own voices, they struggle against forces in the university that see their role as enculturation and gate-keeping. Students are expected to write in the voice and standardization of the dominant culture by course’s end.

Villanueva pulls from several disciplines to show how work is being done regarding language use and racism, narrative, and code-meshing. He says that “What we [in English departments] know that they might not is that as language carries meaning, meaning carries cultures and their ideologies, ideologies and their economies” (101). We have much to learn from colleagues across disciplines as they may learn from us about our developmental students. He suggests a dialogue across the disciplines where we pass on what we already know as a discipline about contact zones and critical pedagogies.

The key issue, though, is “how to teach the written rhetoric of power without negating students’ power, the power inherent in their own ways with words” (102). He uses the Puerto Rican concept, jaiberia, a “subversive complicity,” as the answer. Subversive complicity is an intentional mimicry used with full-knowledge to reverse the current hegemonies. This is the sort of language work Villanueva employed in his meeting with the provost. He spoke her language, one of budgets and comparisons to the nearest community colleges; this was not his natural inclination, but he had learned what she wanted and needed to hear.

In Basic Writing, Villanueva teaches students about power and language and the language of power. He shows them how academic articles are structured and the class works together to translate some of the diction of the articles. Students mimic the language, but do so through the lense of an “anti-racist critical pedagogy” (103). There is an act of reciprocity involved. He takes this a step further with the CLASP program at his school (Critical Literacies Achievement and Success Programs). This is an inter-disciplinary program where professors and students learn from one another. It presumes that just as first-generation college students have much to learn about how academia works, the professors have much to learn about their new students. They meet together, get to really know one another on personal levels, and learn deeply from one another. The program intertwines with the Writing Center as well. The tutors are better able to understand the patterns they see in students’ writing. The students are able to learn the discourse of the university.

Reflection

On first glance, this may seem like an odd choice for Basic Writing history. It is not really an overview of the discipline in a traditional sense. Sure, Villanueva refers to the beginnings of BW and gets in the pre-requisite Shaughnessy references. What makes this piece a part of BW history is that it acknowledges the tenuous relationship BW had always had within the power structure of the university.

BW programs are always at risk of being cut, particularly if the economy takes a turn or other disciplines in the university do not see enough evidence of student enculturation. Villanueva calls out the enculturation as racist, and he’s not wrong. The placement tests that funnel students into BW favor the dominant culture, as do the procedures that are often in place for students to promote to FYC. Rather than try to persuade the entire university structure to at long last embrace student voices as those in writing studies have done, Villanueva argues for us to help students recognize the system and learn how to use it to fight the system.

Truthfully, I am still ambivalent about subversive complicity. Certainly, students arrive in our classes thinking that the course will teach them how to use commas properly, etc. They often think that academic writing comes naturally to some students but not to them. It is helpful for them to see that everyone has to learn academic language and how it works. Exposure to it and training in it is what Villanueva recommends, presumably at a pace that is less than that of a FYC course.