Abstracts, JBW 24.2 Fall 2005

Present-Process: The Composition of Change

Jessica Yood

Because the writing-process movement has been deemed our field’s founding “paradigm”—at least since Hairston’s 1982 essay declared it so—“process” has remained stuck in the philosophical and historical assumptions of a “paradigm.” The paradigm theory, has, from its first associations with composition, offered a view of change wholly unsuited to work in writing. Today, as we face monumental changes in public higher education, thinking in paradigms is even more useless, if not paralyzing. This essay traces the history of the lin between process theory and paradigms, argues why the pairing of process to paradigms sold process short, and, finally, resurrects the term “process” as a term that helps characterize innovative approaches to disciplinary and writing program change. By drawing on theories of “process” from a range of fields and by connecting these theories to a case study of one new WAC/BW program, I offer “present-process” as a productive, workable perspective for our field.

It’s Not Remedial: Re-envisioning Pre-First-Year College Writing

Heidi Huse, Jenna Wright, Anna Clark, and Tim Hacker

Responding to mandates from the Tennessee Higher Education Commission to eliminate “remedial” or “developmental” courses from state-funded, four-year institutions, the University of Tennessee at Martin (UTM) Department of English developed a college-level pre-first-year writing program for entering students identified as underprepared for college-level writing expectations. In this article, we describe the design and implementation of our new two-course program of college-level writing courses for underprepared students and reflect on the program’s status after one year. We offer a general context for UTM’s developmental courses into which we place our specific courses as they began and later evolved into our current English 100 and 110 program. Our goals in writing this article are to help other institutions with limited resources that face situations similar to those we’ve encountered over the past few years—institutions that, like UTM, have difficult decisions to make while still seeking to enhance all their students’ academic success.

Uses of Background Experience in a Preparatory Reading and Writing Class:

An Analysis of Native and Non-native Speakers of English

Diana Becket

The goal of the study reported in this article is to analyze ways students in the first course of a three-quarter college preparatory sequence in reading and writing write about their experiences in their essays. The student participants were three native speakers of English and three native speakers of Punjabi, who had lived and studied in the United States for between three and five years at the time of the study. In order to assess how these students’ writing related to the context of the class and the students’ backgrounds, both faculty and students were interviewed. The students were asked about their reactions to their placement, their pre-college educational experiences, and their perceptions of the preparatory class. The reading and writing sections are taught separately and in sequence. The instructors share equal responsibility for assessing the students, so both instructors were asked to evaluate the students’ achievement in relation to their expectations for the course. Analysis indicates that, for the students in this study, both native and non-native speakers of English are trying to find ways to make the transition from high school to college. However, in order to succeed, each of these students needs individual orientation to the demands of the preparatory class. Some students need more help with development of ideas whereas others need more help with editing for correctness.

Represent, Representin’, Representation: The Efficacy of Hybrid Texts in the Writing Classroom

Donald McCrary

The article explores the use of hybrid linguistic texts in the writing classroom, both as articles of study and possible models of composition. Standard English linguistic supremacy prevents many students from using their full range of linguistic knowledge. The inclusion of hybrid texts in the writing classroom might help students, in particular working class and non-white students, to establish a linguistic and cultural connection between the beliefs and practices of the academy and those of their home communities. In addition to analyzing hybrid discourse from a popular urban magazine, a newspaper article, a scholarly article, and literary non-fiction, the article analyzes several student responses to hybrid literacy narratives and several student literacy autobiographies that use hybrid discourse. The article argues that students’ reading and writing of hybrid texts might increase their awareness of language and eradicate the negative consequences of standard English supremacy.

Servant Class: Basic Writers and Service Learning

Don J. Kraemer

This article examines some of the tensions and contradictions between the process-oriented, learning-centered pedagogy commonly associated with basic writing and the product-based, performance-centered moment mandated by writing-for-the-community varieties of service learning. Because end-of-term “writing-for” projects cannot provide students with nearly as much opportunity to reflect on their practice and also to work through the narcissistic moment that academic discourse typically demands, it is suggested that students in basic writing classes would be better served by additional work in academic discourse rather than by being made servants by writing-for-the-community service-learning projects. Writing-for projects remove the students from the problems they would solve, whereas continued work in academic discourse encourages students to see themselves in the problems, the image of otherness helping them reflect on the new problems their solutions create.