Abstracts, JBW 25.2 / fall 2006

Back to the Future: Contextuality and the Construction of the Basic Writer’s Identity in JBW 1999-2005

Laura Gray-Rosendale

Gray-Rosendale continues a project begun with “Investigating Our Discursive History: JBW and the Construction of the ‘Basic Writer’s’ Identity” (JBW 1999) in which she employed a Foucauldian archaeological perspective to trace the dominance of as well as the disruptions within the three major metaphoric allegiances of basic writing studies: developmental, academic discourse, and conflict. In this piece, Gray-Rosendale argues that three new constructions of basic writing student identity that have gained prominence in the journal from 1999-2005: the basic writer’s identity constructed as in situ; the basic writer’s identity constructed as a theory, academic discourse, and/or history reformer; and the basic writer’s identity constructed as a set of practices in action. All are part of what she terms a “contextual” model. Identifying both beneficial and detrimental aspects of this contextual model, she calls upon basic writing teachers and scholars to work to combat some of the problematic elements within this latest metaphoric allegiance.

In the Here and Now: Public Policy and Basic Writing

Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington

Recent public policy discussions and documents reflect frames that will have profound effects on questions central to teachers of and students in basic writing courses. We argue that if basic writing instructors/administrators want to have a voice in these discussions, we must develop strategies and gather data to support our positions; we then propose some potential strategies and possible questions for research.

Reasoning the Need: Graduate Education and Basic Writing

Barbara Gleason

While college composition theory/pedagogy courses are standard offerings in composition and rhetoric graduate programs, specialized basic writing graduate courses lag behind. At the same time, there is a pressing need for highly qualified teachers of nontraditional adult students, especially in community college and adult literacy education programs. This need has recently been articulated in two official statements from the Two-Year College Association of NCTE. It is also being realized by the efforts of individual professors who have collectively offered at least nineteen such courses in recent years. A second argument for offering more BW graduate courses is the extensive BW scholarship revealed by such publications as The Bedford Guide for Teachers of Basic Writing, 2nd ed. (Adler-Kassner and Glau) and Teaching Developmental Writing: Background Readings, 3rd ed. (Bernstein). This essay argues that graduate programs should augment current commitments to preparing graduate students to teach, research, and administer programs for nontraditional adult students by regularly offering courses on basic writing theory, research, and pedagogy.

Arrested Development: Revising Remediation at John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Mark McBeth

Basic writing has played a large role in the history and institutional identity of the City University of New York (CUNY). From the Open Admissions era of Mina Shaughnessy to the present day, “remedial courses” at CUNY have been revised in response to different colleges’ missions, curricular initiatives, university policies, and public opinion. Briefly reviewing a short history of remediation at CUNY and the university policies which affected it, this article then describes an intensive developmental writing course newly implemented at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. It explains the course’s strategies, rationalizes its approach, and examines its successes as well as its continuing challenges. Theoretically approaching the basic writing course from the combined perspectives of Mary Louise Pratt and Lev Vygotsky (“the contact zone of proximal development”), this newly revised course takes seriously what Mike Rose says when he suggests “that a remedial writing curriculum must fit into the overall context of a university education.” In a pedagogical situation where a gatekeeping exam (over)determines students’ educational progress, this course goes beyond skills and drills or test-taking preparation to challenge students’ critical thinking and develop their college-level writing abilities. It gives students and instructors a curriculum that does not teach to the test but, instead, with it.

Redefining Literacy as a Social Practice

Shannon Carter

Despite multiple and persuasive arguments against the validity of doing so, many basic writers continue to be identified by what Brian V. Street calls the “autonomous model of literacy,” a model that research tells us is as artificial and inappropriate as it is ubiquitous. This article describes a curricular response to the political, material, and ideological constraints placed on basic writing via this autonomous model and instead treats literacy as a social practice. After a brief description of the local conditions from which our program emerged, I articulate what I call a “pedagogy of rhetorical dexterity,” the new model upon which our curriculum is based. Informed by both the New Literacy Studies and activity theory, rhetorical dexterity teaches writers to effectively read, understand, manipulate, and negotiate the cultural and linguistic codes of a new community of practice based on a relatively accurate assessment of another, more familiar one. The final sections of the article describe the assignments included in a recent version of our curriculum, as well as selected student responses to these assignments and readings. Accepting that a curricular solution to the institutionalized oppression implicit in much literacy learning is necessarily partial and temporary, I argue that fostering students’ awareness of the ways in which an autonomous model deconstructs itself when applied to real-life literacy contexts empowers them to work against this system.

Teaching Multilingual Learners: Beyond the ESOL Classroom and Back Again

Vivian Zamel and Ruth Spack

Language and literacy are situated in specific classroom contexts and are acquired as students engage with the subject matter and tasks of these courses. Therefore, all faculty—not just those who teach courses devoted to teaching English to speakers of other languages (ESOL)—are responsible for contributing to multilingual students’ acquisition of language and literacy. Drawing on qualitative research studies, including first-hand accounts of students and faculty who discuss their expectations and experiences in undergraduate courses across the curriculum, this article explores how faculty can facilitate the learning of multilingual students. Analyzing a variety of pedagogical strategies that faculty across disciplines have enacted in their own teaching, we find confirmation for our theory that when writing is assigned for the purpose of fostering learning, and when instructors provide supportive feedback in response to what students have written, writing can serve as a powerful means for promoting language acquisition. Significantly, this across-the-curriculum research indicates that when faculty transform their pedagogy to meet the needs of ESOL students, all students benefit. This research also has critical implications for the philosophical and pedagogical perspectives that bear on ESOL teaching.