Abstracts, JBW 26.2 / fall 2007

The City University of New York and the Shaughnessy Legacy: Today's Scholars Talk Back

Judith Summerfield, Peter Gray, Cheryl C. Smith, Crystal Benedicks, Mark McBeth, Linda Hirsch, Mary Soliday, and Jessica Yood

To commemorate the 30th anniversary of the publication of Mina Shaughnessy’s groundbreaking book, Errors and Expectations, a roundtable discussion was held at the March 2007 Conference on College Composition and Communication in New York City. This article, based on the earlier discussion, examines the question of CUNY’s multiple identities within the legacy of Shaughnessy, who coined the term “basic writing” and founded the Journal of Basic Writing in 1975. Composition theory and practice owe much to Shaughnessy’s work at CUNY’s City College in the 1970s against the backdrop of the University’s experiment with Open Admissions. Although much has changed since then, CUNY is still associated with that rich historical moment, and with the questions Shaughnessy and others at the time confronted. These questions, which grapple with the very nature of literacy and democracy, need to be reframed for our times. Contributors to this article include scholars from a number of CUNY’s 17 undergraduate colleges, each of whom begins with a quotation selected to focus attention on an issue of relevance today.

Stretch at 10: A Progress Report on Arizona State University’s Stretch Program

Gregory R. Glau

Arizona State University’s basic writing Stretch Program has now been in existence for more than ten years. Statistical data for nearly 8,000 Stretch Program students continues to indicate that the program helps a range of at-risk students succeed. This is true, also, for students from under-represented groups, who comprise roughly 40% of Stretch Program students. Stretch has been replicated at other colleges and universities, but as with any basic writing program, there are still problems and political issues that crop up and that must be dealt with.

Re-Modeling Basic Writing

Rachel Rigolino and Penny Freel

In 1996, the State University of New York at New Paltz developed the Supplemental Writing Workshop Program for its basic writing students in response to public pressure to discontinue the offering of so-called remedial writing courses at four-year institutions. Our primary purpose in this article is to describe the design of the SWW Program, which we envision as a Seamless Support model of instruction. In this model, basic writing students receive extra support in the form of integrated writing workshop and tutoring sessions. SWW sections of composition have the same objectives and requirements as non-SWW sections and award the same credit, enabling basic writers to progress towards completion of the Composition I and Composition II sequence in two semesters. Now in its eleventh year, the SWW Program has proven to be successful in terms of the way its students compare with their cohorts in the areas of retention and graduation rates, and overall GPAs. While further research, including more thorough qualitative analysis, needs to be done, it is our hope that the success of this model can be used to inform the ongoing conversations about the future of basic writing in the academy.

Assessing Student Writing: The Self-Revised Essay

Janine Graziano-King

In an effort to assess student writing in a way that reflects current views of writing (i.e., as a social process supported by the interaction of a number of cognitive sub-processes), and yet still seeks to determine what students can do independently, it has become a common practice to include timed essays in student portfolios. However, this practice adds to the already heavy cognitive load, identified by Hamp-Lyons and Condon, that the assessment of portfolios places on readers. Here, I suggest an alternative method of assessment—the self-revised essay. The self-revised essay requires that students, at the beginning of the semester, write an essay in response to a prompt that reflects a theme that runs through course texts and discussions. Then, throughout the semester, students revisit, reflect on, and revise their essays three more times, with all reflections and revisions taking place in class. The result is a multi-drafted essay, written independently, but informed by course texts, class discussions, and instructor and peer feedback on other essays written for the class. As an assessment tool, it offers the best of both worlds—like the portfolio, it reflects current views of writing, and, like the timed essay, it allows readers to have full confidence that students are the sole authors of their work. Further, it does both without placing on readers an overwhelming cognitive load that might compromise the assessment process.

The Economy of Explicit Instruction

Don J. Kraemer

The risk posed by explicit instruction in composition is that the reduction of writing to stock moves and effective devices may diminish the writer’s agency and guarantee reproduction of the teacher’s. The advantage of explicit instruction is power: overt and recursive attention to selected strategies can help students imagine the public agency the instruction itself may temporarily suspend. This study argues that growth in student writing can follow from replacing problem-solving assignments (based on the problem-solving strategies found in Freakonomics) with rhetorical-analysis assignments. In this latter kind of assignment, the four features of explicit instruction that this study found empowering are (1) paying attention to how published writers frame problems; (2) labeling the framing move as a rhetorical design on readers; (3) weighing the effects of such designs on readers; and, in a rhetorical analysis of Freakonomics, (4) rewriting an already-framed problem. Such instruction is necessarily preliminary to, but also part of, reflective inquiry into the ethics of the conventions, practices, and aims of teaching and learning academic writing.