Journal of Basic Writing
Volume 19 Issue 2, Fall 2000
Table of Contents
· Vivian Zamel, “Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn: Promoting Language and Literacy Across the Curriculum “
· Steve Lamos, “Basic Writing, CUNY, and "Mainstreaming": (De)Racialization Reconsidered”
· Mary Kay Crouch and Gerri McNenny, “Looking Back, Looking Forward: California Grapples with "Remediation"”
· Joan L. Piorkowski and Erika Scheurer, “ It's the Way that They Talk to You": Increasing Agency in Basic Writers Through a Social Context of Care”
· Deborah Rossen-Knill and Kim Lynch, “A Method for Describing Basic Writers and Their Writing: Lessons from a Pilot Study”
· Patricia J. McAlexander , “Checking the Grammar Checker: Integrating Grammar Instruction with Writing”
· Judith Mara Kish, “Breaking the Block: Basic Writers in the Electronic Classroom”
·
Journal of Basic Writing
Abstracts, volume 19 Issue 2, Fall 2000
Vivian Zamel
“Engaging Students in Writing-To-Learn: Promoting Language and Literacy
Across the Curriculum”
INTRODUCTION: This is an invited contribution, and we give the
circumstances of the invitation in place of the usual abstract. The last
academic year was the first year of a major writing-across-the-curriculum
initiative for the entire City University of New York. After a first round of
professional development, participants asked for help addressing “language
issues” — issues of student writers who are not native speakers of English
(about half of CUNY’s student population), who are struggling with standard
English usage, and/or who are unfamiliar with the conventions of academic
discourse. Faculty leaders met and agreed that the person who could best help
with such issues was Vivian Zamel. She was invited to give the keynote for a
faculty development event before the beginning of the spring term. The talk she
gave, highly interactive and rich in examples, seemed a great success to all
involved (including, as it happened, the co-editors of JBW). We asked if she
would allow us to publish a version of that talk. We cannot supply, in this
context, the lively interchanges with the audience (especially the “work”
participants were asked to do with student writing and faculty evaluations of
it), but we can offer a particularly cogent and compelling explanation of what
writing-to-learn pedagogy should be and do, compelling most of all for the way
it eschews abstractions and exhortations in favor of the most powerful
arguments and evidence: that supplied by the students themselves.
Steve Lamos
“Basic Writing, CUNY, and “Mainstreaming”: (De)Racialization
Reconsidered”
This essay begins by using the notion of education as “white property” to
explore the racialized discourses surrounding BW students. By analyzing accounts from the early period
of open admissions at CUNY, it shows how students are racialized as
“minorities” despite the significant numbers of whites in the program. It
argues that because open admissions students embody a threat to established
structures of white power and privilege, they are discursively coded as
non-white.
In its next major section, the essay
contends that racialization within contexts like BW needs to be identified and
understood in order to truly dismantle these structures of whiteness. As a
means of proving this, the essay explores two examples of discourse that is
"deracialized" in some way: one pertaining to the end of CUNY open
admissions, and one advocating for mainstreamed BW courses. Both examples
demonstrate that by not directly addressing issues of race, structures of
whiteness are ultimately left intact.
Mary Kay Crouch and Gerri McNenny
“Looking Back, Looking Forward: California Grapples With
‘Remediation’”
This article describes both past and more recent efforts by the California
State University system to come to terms with "remediation" as
defined by various legislative and system wide bodies. It then goes on to
describe recently mandated collaborations between high school language arts
faculty and CSU English faculty to reduce the need for remediation. By
tracing the momentum within the CSU to reduce the number of underprepared
students down to 10% of the entering first-year students by the year 2007, we
show the ways in which the needs of basic writers have been defined and
delineated by political bodies uninformed by recent scholarship in the field of
basic writing. We then describe an ongoing outreach program that attempts
to address the needs of basic writers at the high school level. By
relying on a collaborative needs assessment of high school writers structured
on Freirean principles of codifications of community situations by community
leaders, in this case high school instructors, we document the ways in which
high school professionals and university collaborators can work respectfully together
to support each other in their professional efforts.
Joan L. Piorkowski and Erika Scheurer
“’It’s the way that they talk to you’: Increasing Agency in Basic
Writers Through a Social Context of Care”
As basic writing teachers, our goal is to help students to take on the role of
responsible writers. Part of taking on this role involves students’ using
available resources in ways that enhance their development. This essay
explores a question that troubled us as basic writing teachers: in a program
that is heavily supported, why did relatively few students seek out and use
those resources? Under what circumstances do students seek and not seek
help with their writing? Our research revealed that while various factors
influence students’ decisions to use resources, one factor stands out:
the perception of a context of care in the basic writing classroom.
Students’ perception of a context of care is crucial to their taking on the
role of responsible writer.
Deborah Rossen-Knill and Kim Lynch
“A Method for Describing Basic Writers and Their Writing: Lessons from
a Pilot Study”
We present a holistic method for describing basic writers and their writing to
encourage classroom research at two- and four-year colleges, the most
under-represented sites, and enable comparisons of basic writers across
institutions. Our method grows out of a pilot study of basic writers and
writing at two community and one four-year private college. It makes use
of a survey to understand the basic writers’ backgrounds; “back talk,” through
which students respond to our preliminary interpretations of the survey; and
analysis of student writing for use of some conventional discourse features and
for rate, type and seriousness of error. We offer some preliminary results from
our pilot study to illustrate the type of findings our approach yields and
highlight the importance of such findings to classroom instruction.
Patricia J. McAlexander
“Checking the Grammar Checker: Integrating Grammar Instruction
with Writing”
In his Grammar and the Teaching of Writing, Rei Noguchi recommends integrating
grammar instruction with writing instruction and teaching only the most vital
terms and the most frequently made errors. I found that I could follow
this advice in my academic assistance composition classes by giving a short
course in grammar followed by a grammar checker project. The project provided a
review of the grammar lessons, applied many grammar rules specifically to the
students’ writing, and taught students the effective use of the grammar
checker.
Judith Mara Kish
“Breaking the Block: Basic Writers in the Electronic Classroom”
This essay fuses theories about Basic Writers and writer’s block and addresses,
through the use of hypertext, how computers can help Basic Writers who
experience this writing difficulty. The essay begins with a discussion of
Basic Writers and writer’s block, moves to a discussion of a “Stretch” class
that I taught in the 1997-8 school year at Arizona State University, and then
focuses on problems that the students had in their writing. I discuss the
two main branches of their difficulties—problems with genre and problems with
the linearity of texts—which may be partially alleviated through the
introduction of hypertext theories to the class. Consideration of such
highlights specific problems that basic writers may have and adds a new
perspective to arguments concerning computer aided instruction and its
usefulness in the writing classroom.