Journal of Basic Writing
Volume 19 Issue 1, Spring 2000
Table of Contents
· Patricia Bizzell, “Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to Do with “Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourse”
· Terence Collins and Melissa Blum, “Meanness and Failure: Sanctioning Basic Writers”
· Keith Gilyard, “Basic Writing, Cost Effectiveness, and Ideology”
· William DeGenaro and Edward M. White, “Going Around in Circles: Methodological Issues in Basic Writing Research”
· Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner, “Expectations, Interpretations and Contributions of Basic Writing”
· Susan Miller, “A Future for the Vanishing Present: New Work for Basic Writing”
· Deborah Mutnick, “The Strategic Value of Basic Writing: An Analysis of the Current Moment “
· Judith Rodby and Tom Fox, “Basic Work and Material Acts: The Ironies, Discrepancies, and Disjunctures of Basic Writing and Mainstreaming “
· Ira Shor, “Illegal Literacy”
· Lynn Quitman Troyka, “How We Have Failed the Basic Writing Enterprise”
·
News and Announcements
Journal of Basic Writing
Abstracts, volume 19 Issue 1, Spring 2000
Patricia Bizzell
“Basic Writing and the Issue of Correctness, or, What to Do with
“Mixed” Forms of Academic Discourse”
Basic writing instruction has
focused on the problem of how to enable under-prepared college students to
write correct academic discourse. This definition of basic writing work assumes
that there is a single stable entity called “academic discourse.” If this was
ever true, it is no longer. Published scholarship in many fields may now take
the form of discourses in which the traditional academic mixes with
non-academic discourses. These mixed discourses emerge as scholars wish to take
full advantage of all the discursive resources at their disposal, reflecting
the extent to which more and more people are culturally mixed. These discourses
also enable people to do academic work that could be done no other way. These
discourses should not be called “hybrid,” perhaps, because the term is at once
too essentializing and too suggestive of indecedent “parent” strands. But we
should find ways to encourage them in our teaching.
Terence Collins and Melissa Blum
“Meanness and Failure: Sanctioning Basic Writers”
This article considers the systemic attack on economically impoverished
students in higher education. The locus of consideration is a group of
students enrolled in the University of Minnesota General College under a
pilot welfare reform program. Terminated abruptly for political reasons,
the project failed, with impacts on the student-parent participants. The
authors’ face-to-face relationship with the students is the basis for
reflection on the broader issue of access.
Keith Gilyard
“Basic Writing, Cost Effectiveness, and Ideology”
The debate about required composition
courses like Basic Writing, some of which played out in JBW in the 1990s, has taken
on new urgency given recent decisions and inclinations to eliminate such
courses at four-year colleges in CUNY and elsewhere. This essay revisits
that debate, particularly a strand of it that took place in the pages of this
journal, and argues for movement beyond a perceived either/or dilemma.
William DeGenaro and Edward M. White
“Going Around in Circles: Methodological Issues in Basic Writing
Research”
Basic Writing has failed to distinguish itself as a mature field of study since
the researchers in the field do not seem to listen much to each other or to
build on each others’ findings. While those working in developmental
writing demonstrate, for the most part, ideological agreement, we have
significant conflict over what counts as valid evidence by which to build and
advance knowledge. An analysis of methodologies used by those embroiled
in the “mainstreaming debate” illustrates this methodological confusion, which
leads to monologues going around in circles rather than constructive dialectic.
While methodological conformity would be undesirable, researchers ought to
consider the evidence and arguments of those using a variety of approaches to
research.
Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner
“Expectations, Interpretations and Contributions of Basic Writing”
This essay argues that Basic Writing students, teachers, and scholarship are
crucial to enabling colleges and universities to live up to their ideals of
diversity, interdisciplinarity, and student-centered learning. BW
scholars and teachers have developed ways to work with students to better
understand the different perspectives they bring to their writing and learning,
and to use those perspectives to break down barriers between academic and
non-academic worlds and develop “borderland” knowledge and perspectives.
The authors call for more research exploring the potential of basic writing
students to develop such perspectives, and for research exploring the
implications of BW scholarship for assisting in the retention of students and
the revitalization of faculty committed to interdisciplinary learning.
Finally, they call on working with BW students to assist teachers in
researching and developing ways of fighting the material social barriers to the
education of students and teachers.
Susan Miller
“A Future for the Vanishing Present: New Work for Basic Writing”
Current external and internal attacks on Basic Writing are in a metonymic
relation to the entire field of composition studies, and thus bring up a number
of justifiable concerns: original warrants for establishing the field are
losing credibility; its sites are moving physically and being critiqued by its
leaders, who question the motives, theories and the social results of
curricula; its practices have become representations of a “new capitalism” that
improves status and work for only a few, meanwhile inadvertently helping to
disemploy many teachers. New “recognition work” is needed, directed at
acknowledging anxieties about class status among composition professionals,
which are projected onto students and divert the field from commitments to
teach writing and research relations among writers, texts, and instruction.
Developing the capacity to see local communities not as places to which
composition might export its beneficence, but as the places whose interests and
practices it shares, would create a new root metaphor for the field. The
article exemplifies this possibility, describing sites whose origins and
successful practices depend on averting the academic gaze on local constituencies
in favor of taking on cooperative, interdependent projects.
Deborah Mutnick
“The Strategic Value of Basic Writing: An Analysis of the Current
Moment “
Viewed in the context of 1960s mass movements that paved the way for an
expansion of rights to women and minorities in particular, the development of
academic support services like basic writing can be seen as a response to
grassroots political struggles for social and economic justice. Although
such services, along with affirmative action and open admissions policies, have
benefited people of all backgrounds, it has been working-class African
Americans, Latinos, and Native Americans for whom they opened the doors of
higher education. Only if we understand basic writing instruction in this
larger sociohistorical context can we make sense out of the confluence of
conservative and scholarly assaults on it. The author stakes out a
position for the strategic value of basic writing that underscores the need to
defend it—and other hardwon rights to education—while acknowledging the
importance of composition scholars’ concerns about the dangers of tracking,
stereotyping, and misrepresenting basic writers.
Judith Rodby and Tom Fox
“ Basic Work and Material Acts: The Ironies, Discrepancies, and
Disjunctures of Basic Writing and Mainstreaming”
“Basic Work and Material Acts” summarizes what we have learned from
mainstreaming basic writers in first-year composition at California State
University, Chico. We found that “basic writing” as an institutional structure
(defined by the State of California as remedial and granted no baccalaureate
credit) created basic writers. Once basic writers were in the context of
first-year composition, “basic writing” as a concept and as a practice
disappeared. Two related principles about learning to write emerge from
this experience: 1) one learns to do college writing by being in the context of
college writing, not in some other context; and 2) literacy learning does
not come in discrete levels. Drawing upon these insights, we go on to describe
the ways that our program supports writers in first-year composition through
adjunct workshops. The material circumstances of our program support
students’ college writing in ways that lessen the punitive nature of basic writing
and are coherent with recent research in literacy studies.
Ira Shor
“Illegal Literacy”
In this follow-up to previous essays, Shor proposes that BW be mainstreamed
into regular composition, with provisions made for the tutorial needs of
students (following the fine work of Soliday, Gleason, Grego and Thompson). He
argues that a BW empire has been created and driven by bogus testing and by
prejudice. BW, often non-credit but still tuition-bound, is a remedial
“sub-college” depressing the aspirations of working-class and minority students
especially who are stigmatized as cultural deficits. Shor then proposes that
first-year college writing courses should evolve into what he calls Critical
Literacy Across the Community. This program would place writing into real
contexts, connecting literate development to community-based, project-oriented
activities.
Lynn Quitman Troyka
“How We Have Failed the Basic Writing Enterprise”
This “open letter” to the coeditors of JBW and the field of basic writing
generally outlines four ways we have failed the basic writing (BW) enterprise:
1) by giving insufficient attention to public relations; 2) by allowing
ourselves to be co-opted by traditional academic politics; 3) by not unraveling
the confusion of legitimate differences of dialect with “bad grammar”; and 4)
by not taking a more critical and enterprising approach to research. But this
account of failures should not obscure the success of teachers, whose
dedication to and achievements in the BW enterprise have been truly great.