Volume 1 Number 2 Winter 1999 Published November 19, 1999
Co-editors: Linda Adler-Kassner and Gregory R. Glau
Basic Writing e-Journal
Table of contents
BWeBasic Writing e-Journal
William B. Lalicker
A BASIC INTRODUCTION TO BASIC WRITING PROGRAM STRUCTURES:
A BASELINE AND FIVE ALTERNATIVES
Sallyanne Fitzgerald
BASIC WRITING IN ONE CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Peter Goggin: Introduction
Sharon Crowley: Comments
John Ramage: Response
Kohl M. Glau: Questions &
Answers
THE UNIVERSAL REQUIREMENT IN FIRST-YEAR COMPOSITION
Review of Time to
Know Them by Marilyn Sternglass
Reviewed by Patricia
Licklider
Review of Defending
Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education by Tom Fox
Reviewed by Terry Collins
Review of Gypsy
Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
by
Eileen E. Schell
Reviewed by Susan Loudermilk
Review of Representing
the “Other”: Basic Writers and the Teaching of Writing by Bruce Horner
and Min-Zhan Lu
Reviewed by SusanMarie Harrington
Review of Living
Language: Reading, Thinking, and Writing by Alleen Pace Nilsen
Reviewed by Alice L. Trupe
It is with great pleasure
that we present our second issue of BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal,
and we hope you find what follows to be especially interesting and useful.
Anyone who needs to design
or modify a basic writing program will find Bill
Lalicker's survey and advice particularly useful. Lalicker's
ways of categorizing various BW approaches is especially helpful, as he
makes it easy to compare/contrast the different models as well as the strengths
and weaknesses of each.
Sallyanne
Fitzgerald's focus is tighter and equally useful, and we all can learn much
from her college's experiences. It's increasingly obvious that all of
us have to answer more and more to various interested constituencies, including
school administrators, in terms of what our students actually "get" from our
courses, and Chabot's “Throughline” is a useful model. Linking classroom
pedagogy to outcomes such as the ones Sallyanne describes connects nicely to
what others are doing, centered on the Council of Writing Program Administrators
"Outcomes Statement." You can get more information on the WPA
page, and see, for example Arizona State University's model
portfolio assignment.
A regional conference that's
been growing by leaps and bounds is the Western
States Conference, held in alternate years at the University of Utah
and at Arizona State University. In October of 1999, ASU professors
Sharon
Crowley and John Ramage "squared
off" to debate the first-year composition requirement. As Peter
Goggin's introduction explains, there " was no clear `winner' in the
traditional political debate sense and no clear delineation of partisanship,"
and we think you will learn from the discussion.
Our Book Review Section
offers you five reviews of recent and, we think, important texts.
Finally, please respond
to what you read hear, and we'll print your comments and ideas in future
issues of BWe. And as always, thank you for your interest
and support.
Linda Adler-Kassner
Greg Glau
Co-editors, BWe: Basic Writing e-Journal
William B. Lalicker
West Chester University
A BASIC INTRODUCTION TO BASIC WRITING PROGRAM STRUCTURES: A BASELINE AND FIVE ALTERNATIVES
In January 1999, I
conducted a brief survey of writing program administrators to determine
the alternative structures for basic writing programs. My query on
the Writing Program Administrators listserv asked respondents to identify
their basic writing program structures according to five models I’d identified
from a general search of scholarship on the subject. Respondents
not only described their basic writing programs as variants of the five
models; they provided useful insights concerning the advantages and disadvantages
of each model in their specific institutional contexts. (Examples of basic
writing programs herein, when not otherwise cited, are taken from that
listserv survey.) The following is a summary, a kind of primer, about
those models and their features.
Although the appropriateness
of each model relies strongly on a combination of site-specific conditions
such as the institution’s mission, its demographics, and its resources,
no pattern emerged linked to the generic type of college or university
in question. Institutions of every type have developmental writing
programs. One might expect research universities, comprehensive state
universities, liberal arts colleges and community colleges to favor particular
models according to institutional type, but such seemed not to be the case.
Individual institutional needs—and, possibly, the theoretical or epistemological
assumptions driving the writing program--seemed to be a stronger determinant.
Basic writing program
directors, then, should be able to borrow from a range of structural alternatives
in designing the best possible program for their students. The introduction
below will begin by describing a baseline approach—the “prerequisite” model.
(Since critiques of this model, especially of its placement and grading
systems, are prolific in basic writing journals, I will refrain from extensive
analysis and will simply describe this system in order to provide a starting
point for comparing the alternatives.) I will use a parallel descriptive
structure to sketch the key features of alternative approaches.
BASELINE: THE PREREQUISITE MODEL
Works Cited
Adams, Peter Dow. “Basic Writing Reconsidered.” Journal of
Basic Writing 12:1
(Spring 1993):22-36.
Grego, Rhonda, and Nancy Thompson. “Repositioning Remediation: Renegotiating
Composition’s Work in the
Academy.” CCC 47:1 (Feb. 1996):62-84.
Harrington, Susanmarie. “New Visions of Authority in Placement
Test Rating.” WPA:
Writing Program
Administration 22:1/2 (Fall/Winter 1998):53-84.
Haswell, Richard, and Susan Wyche-Smith. “A Two-Tiered Rating
Procedure for
Placement Essays.” Assessment
in Practice: Putting Principles to Work on
College Campuses.
Ed. Trudy Banta. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995. 204-7.
Huot, Brian. “A Survey of College and University Writing Placement
Practices.” WPA:
Writing Program Administration
17:3 (Spring 1994):49-65.
Murphy, Sandra, et al. Report to the CCCC Executive Committee:
Survey of
Postsecondary Writing Assessment
Practices. 1993.
Royer, Daniel J., and Roger Gilles. “Directed Self-Placement:
An Attitude of
Orientation.” CCC
50:1 (Sept. 1998):58-70.
Segall, Mary T. “Embracing a Porcupine: Redesigning a Writing Program.”
Journal
of
Basic Writing 14:2
(Fall 1995):38-47.
Smith, William. “Assessing the Reliability and Adequacy of Using Holistic
Scoring of
Essays as a College Composition
Placement Technique.” Validating Holistic
Scoring for Writing Assessment:
Theoretical and Empirical Foundations. Ed.
Michael M. Williamson and
Brian Huot. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton, 1993. 142-205.
Soliday, Mary, and Barbara Gleason. “From Remediation to Enrichment:
Evaluating a
Mainstreaming Project.”
Journal
of Basic Writing 16:1 (Spring 1997):64-78.
White, Edward M. “An Apologia for the Timed Impromptu Essay.”
CCC
46:1
(Feb.
1995):30-45.
BASIC WRITING IN ONE CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE
Discussions about basic writing sometimes degenerate into whether we should call ourselves “developmental” writing teachers or “remedial” ones. Developmental is supposedly more positive since it connotes moving forward rather than moving backward or correcting past performance. Remedial is also sometimes associated with a medical model of teaching where we perceive the learner as having a deficit or reflecting an unhealthy background in learning. The argument seems to me to miss the point: basic writing is more productively labeled neither remedial nor developmental but instead should be perceived as providing students with the opportunity to acquire the skills that result in successful college writing. However, because basic writers are unique to each context, different sites need to decide what curriculum they will develop to meet the goal of college-level writing. Following this rationale, our community college basic writing program is integrated into the general English curriculum and takes its guidance from the total program philosophy which we have articulated in a document we call the “Throughline.”
Throughline for Chabot College English Subdivision
English courses at all levels will:
1. Integrate reading, writing, critical thinking, speaking, and listening.
2. Address directly students’ reading practices. Reading is absolutely critical to academic success, and we strive to include more reading, in terms of both range and depth, in our program.
3. Approach the teaching of writing by inviting students to write prose pieces of varying length and complexity. Writing is not taught in a progression from the sentence to the paragraph to the essay.
4. Emphasize critical thinking. Critical thinking is the creation of meaning. Critical thinking is not limited to concepts of formal logic but includes grouping items/seeing patterns, drawing inferences, evaluating for purpose, synthesizing and arguing, differentiating fact from opinion, asking questions, evaluating for standards of fairness and accuracy, and making judgments. Critical thinking is broad-based, including sensing, feeling and imagining.
5. Create settings which include speaking, listening and responding and that foster the building of community and forge links to critical reading and writing. Teaching those skills sometimes needs to be explicit and directed. Activities may include student presentations (solo and group/panel); small- and large-group discussions in which students speak to each other and not only to the instructor; student/teacher conferences; interviews in the class or community. We also encourage listening skills that involve note-taking and feedback/response.
6. Include full-length works, defined as any work that sustains themes, including a book of short essays by a single author. We suggest that the work(s) be integrated into the course thematically. On the pre-1A level, we recommend that non-fiction be used; that if fiction or autobiographical works are assigned, they be analyzed for issues and themes connected to other readings in the course rather than for literary aspects; that a combination of book-length works and short essays be used to provide a variety of models; and that students be asked for both personal and analytical responses.
7. Increase students’ familiarity with and knowledge of the academic culture, themselves as learners, and the relationship of the two. Some ideas include: collaborative teaching and learning, using materials reflecting successful college experiences, acknowledging and validating the students’ experiences while introducing them to academic culture and values, modeling academic values, and demystifying the institution.
Applying to all of our courses—basic
writing as well as transfer courses such as freshman composition—this philosophical
statement was developed over a two-year period by the full and part time
faculty. Because we have a coherent philosophy, the basic writing
courses flow smoothly into the other courses and are not separate entities.
The coherence of our curriculum means that neither the argument of remedial
vs developmental nor the current discussion about mainsteaming basic writers
into freshman composition is relevant to our particular community college.
Several incentives led faculty
to create this new approach which has now been in place since fall 1993.
First, in the late 1980’s a number of newly trained faculty were hired
who were familiar with current research in composition, especially reading
and writing theories. Other faculty returned to graduate study at
the same time, gaining new insights. Those trained in earlier theories
decided to retire. And about the same time, a college research project
revealed that the separate reading and writing classes meeting in either
the reading or writing lab were ineffective in terms of student success.
At this point, we received a Title III grant which provided funding for
faculty to begin a Writing and Reading Across the Curriculum Center, replacing
the separate writing and reading labs and classes associated with them
and adding computer instruction to the basic writing classes.
In an effort to decide how
to both create a new center and add computers to classes, the faculty decided
to discuss their philosophy rather than simply add instructional
components. Finally, the college decided to move from quarters
to semesters, so all curriculum had to be revised anyway to make courses
fit the new scheduling pattern. Because courses were revised, the
entire transfer package had to be re-articulated with both the University
of California and the California State University systems. These
two systems required changes in the transfer courses that would make them
more rigorous courses, and faculty believed that the rigor of the courses
for which the students were preparing meant a concomitant rigor needed
to be added to the basic writing courses. In fact, faculty saw the
basic writing classes as being preparatory courses reflecting the transfer
courses. The curriculum was intended to prepare students to be successful
in later courses by offering them opportunities to learn the skills needed
especially analysis and critical thinking. For example, basic writing
classes added full length works of non-fiction, 3 to 6 argumentative
essay assignments with a total of 4000-6000 words, and an emphasis
on analysis and textual references.
So who are the students
for whom we created a curriculum to fit our particular context? Our
community college is a medium sized, California community college located
in the San Francisco Bay area. Like all such institutions, we admit
anyone who is eighteen or older whether or not they have received a high
school diploma or a GED. We enroll about 13,000 students of whom
about 32% are white. The largest groups of students of color are
African American, Asian American, and Hispanic/Latino, but we have immigrants
from most countries in the world. Because our students—about fifty-six
percent are women—come from predominantly blue collar backgrounds, they
must work either full or part time in order to attend college. When
they transfer, it is usually to the local California State University campus,
the University of California campuses of Berkeley, Davis, or Santa Cruz,
or one of the local, private, four-year schools such as Mills College.
Some of them pursue an associate degree or a vocational certificate rather
than transfer to a university. Those students can earn a degree or
a certificate in some programs without taking a transferable English class
or the basic writing sequence since we have a class that is used for the
AA degree and has no required pre-requisite.
Students who enter our college
take a multiple choice placement exam which really evaluates the student’s
ability to understand and respond to passages and to recognize surface
level errors. They do not have to generate any writing of their own
or read extended passages. On the basis of this rough cut, students
can place into freshman composition or the basic writing courses.
They can take the standard two semester sequence or a one-semester, accelerated
basic writing class. If they disagree with their placement, they
can challenge the placement with examples of graded essays or writing for
the workplace. Or they can opt out of the regular program by
taking an Associate degree-applicable, English class: over the fall semesters
from 1995, 96 and 97 only about 130 students chose this course.
Students who identify themselves as ESL learners may enroll in ESL classes
which precede our basic writing courses, or they may attempt the regular
basic writing classes depending on the scores they get on the placement
exam. In other words, we have ESL students in our basic writing sequence—some
of whom have taken the ESL classes and others who have not.
Because anyone can enter
the first basic writing course, the attrition is high. Even so, for
the three fall semesters from 1995 through 1997, between 53 and 60% of
the students in the first class successfully passed the class. During
those same semesters, the pass rate for students in the second basic writing
class ranged from 59 to 67%. Those who took the accelerated class
during the fall of 1997 when it was first offered were even more successful:
71% passed the class. In addition, the research has shown that those who
pass the accelerated class do as well in freshman composition as those
who take two semesters. The success rate for students in freshman
composition who took one of the basic writing classes was almost the same
as that for students who tested into freshman composition, indicating that
our basic writing classes successfully help students develop the skills
they lacked when they entered the basic writing classes. While faculty
are still not particularly satisfied with the number of students who fail
the basic writing sequence or who somehow get into freshman composition
without sufficient skills, for the most part, teachers report that those
who finish freshman composition are well prepared for the final, required
English course.
Our program is our answer
to those who advocate mainstreaming for any program. What we have
created is an approach that fits our context. We want to prepare
our students to transfer to a campus of the University of California or
the California State University, so we want them to be successful in our
transfer English courses which have been accepted by those institutions.
Therefore, we have created basic writing classes to prepare them for those
courses. We want our students to learn to read, write, speak, listen,
and think like mature college students, so we help them gain those skills.
Finally, we believe that our students benefit from writing and reading
challenging arguments, so we ask them to do both. We do all these
things in the supportive environment of a four unit class that meets five
hours a week where the teacher has time to meet with them individually.
Our success in the transfer classes suggests that our approach to basic
writing works well for our students, and the developmental vs remedial
discussion seems superfluous to us as we reflect upon our program.
The Universal Requirement in First-Year Composition
Western
States Conference at Arizona State University
October 1999
Introduction by Peter Goggin
The Western
States Composition Conference 1999:
Debate on the First-year Undergraduate Writing
Requirement
The 3rd annual Western States
Composition Conference, Writing and Politics: Histories, Evolutions, and
Revolutions, was held at Arizona State University, October 21-23, 1999.
As a special conference event, Arizona State University professors of rhetoric,
John
Ramage and Sharon Crowley debated
the politics of the institutional course that for many professionals in
the field of undergraduate writing instruction defines their work, and
field of composition studies itself -- the first-year writing requirement.
The speakers faced each
other on the afternoon of October 21 for two hours. Each speaker had ten
minutes to state his/her position and make opening arguments. Then each
speaker had ten minutes for rebuttal. The remaining time was devoted to
audience participation, discussion, and questions. Mark
Lussier, ASU professor of English, served as moderator.
John Ramage has developed and directed writing centers and directed writing programs at both Montana State University and at Arizona State University. He also served as Executive Director of Arizona State University’s Division of Undergraduate Academic Services. He has published a number of essays in a variety of journals as well as three writing textbooks: Form and Surprise, Writing Arguments, and The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing. He is currently completing a book-length project with the working title Rhetorics of Success in Twentieth Century America. While Dr. Ramage is far from being a proponent of a status quo approach to the politics of the first year writing requirement, he also argues that doing away wholesale with the requirement is neither practical nor necessarily desirable.
Sharon Crowley specializes in the history and theory of rhetoric and the history of composition. She co-directs the PhD in Rhetoric and Linguistics at ASU. Her recent books are Composition in the University (1998),which won MLA's Mina Shaugnessy prize for the year's best book on teaching, and the second edition of Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students (1998), with Debra Hawhee. She also co-edited Rhetorical Bodies (1999), with Jack Selzer. As one of the principle drafters of the Wyoming Resolution, Dr. Crowley’s arguments for the abolition of university sanctioned first-year writing requirements are well established
The following transcript records the debate and discussion that took place. Although the outcome will likely be interpreted in various ways, there was no clear “winner” in the traditional political debate sense and no clear delineation of partisanship. This illustrates, perhaps, the general ambivalence that the field of composition studies has for the universally required first year writing course. While both Ramage and Crowley clearly defined their positions on the politics of the first-year writing requirement, and complex issues, questions and concerns were addressed by the speakers and audience members, it was evident that as a field, composition studies is far from resolving the pedagogical and political conflicts that mark the requirement. What the Ramage/Crowley debate highlights is that the old concerns still exist, and that as a field, we still don’t really know what to do about them. Even if we do, we are far from agreement on how to take action beyond specific invididual institutional bases. However, as the debate itself suggests, such concerns are not just going to go away, and forums such as these are necessary and vital to the field of composition studies in keeping the conversations going.
Comments by Sharon Crowley
Ten years ago I wrote an
essay in which I suggested that universities and colleges stop requiring
their entering students to take an introductory course in composition.
I wrote that essay because I had been participating since 1986 in what
was proving to be a frustratingly unsuccessful professional effort to better
the working conditions of the people who teach the required first-year
course. Tonight as we sit on the doorstep of the year 2000, I find
myself still making an argument that has mostly fallen on barren ground.
In the ten minutes allotted
to me for my opening statement this evening I plan to list my reasons for
suggesting that universities drop the universal requirement in first-year
composition, discuss the advantages that would accrue if the proposal were
adopted, and outline two confusions that appeared regarding the proposal.
Here, then, are the arguments I advance against the universal requirement:
1. The universal
requirement exploits teachers of writing, particularly part-time teachers
and graduate students. Currently, 90% of first-year composition courses
are taught by marginally employed teachers. These teachers are paid
less than other faculty because they are paid by the course—as little as
$1200 per section at some schools. Many have no access to benefits
or job security, have little or no advance warning about what and when
they will teach, and have inadequate offices and little or no access to
phones, copiers, and computers. Equally important, they do not enjoy
academic freedom, which is historically tied to job security. If
you can be fired for saying what you think, you haven’t got academic freedom.
Academic freedom is also denied to teachers of the universally-required
first-year composition course when they are not allowed to design their
own syllabi, write their own assignments, or select their own textbooks.
Because of its carceral
nature, the requirement negatively effects classroom climate. The
required course feels like high school, and so students employ high-school
resistance tactics on its teachers. While their use of this strategy
may not present serious problems to experienced professors, it can be devastating
for inexperienced teachers. The small size and the performance orientation
of the introductory composition course bring teachers and students into
closer contact than is the case in other college courses, and so it is
impossible for teachers to ignore students who act out their resentment
over their temporary incarceration in terms given them by the society in
which they live, particularly if their teachers are women or are marked
by them as members of minority groups.
2.The universal requirement defrauds students. Students invest time, money and energy in the required introductory courses, which often create a good deal of stress for them since the classes are small and are performance-oriented. All students must deal with the requirement in some way, no matter what their major or their career plans: they must either take the course or find some way to escape. Students’ investment in a required course should be backed with some assurance that their efforts are useful or necessary. And yet no evidence exists that the required introductory composition course permanently or consistently improves student writing. Please note that I am not claiming that the required composition course has no effects on students; I am only pointing to a curious silence within our profession about the measurable effects of the universally-required course. Freshman English has no exit exams. It is as though students lack something upon entrance that they need not prove they have acquired upon exit.
3. The requirement has negative curricular effects. I think that the required nature of the introductory course affects the quality of its curriculum. It is difficult to design a course for a large amorphous audience when, moreover, the course fits into no discernible disciplinary or scholarly sequence. In curricular terms, the introductory composition requirement comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. And while it is true that innovative and exciting curricula have been written for the required course, they are difficult to implement and sustain because of the size and impermanence of composition faculties. In large universities, sections of the course are offered nearly around the clock and are scattered across the campus, so that WPAs and/or their staff are hard put to visit sections even once. Part-time teachers hurry from one campus to the next, pick up their mail once a week (if they have a mailbox), and are not invited or are unable to attend curriculum planning sessions. And while graduate students have shown themselves to be capable designers of curricula for the required introductory course, most did not come to graduate school primarily because it offered them a chance to teach the required composition course. And this teaching staff, no matter how capable, is also temporary.
4. The requirement has negative professional and disciplinary effects. Like it or not, university faculty, parents, and taxpayers still assume that the required introductory course teaches grammar, spelling, punctuation, and organization. Because of this they view composition faculty as literacy gatekeepers rather than as intellectuals and teachers. Despite its radical and ground-breaking discoveries about pedagogy, then, composition studies nevertheless remains almost invisible within academic hierarchies because of its association with the traditional required course. Furthermore, the effort required to maintain the required course has kept those of us who profess composition studies from thinking of our discipline in more expansive curricular terms. Without the administrative burden imposed by the requirement, composition specialists could begin to work toward installing writing instruction throughout the curriculum, toward strengthening and expanding writing centers, toward establishing departments of writing in institutions where that is appropriate, and toward offering writing courses outside of the academy where that is appropriate.
Okay. Those are my
arguments against the requirement. Lifting it would alleviate the
negative features of the present situation. Moreover, there is a
distinct advantage to be gained by offering an elective first-year course
in composition; it is control over enrollment and staffing.
As things currently stand, staffing in first-year comp is driven by enrollments.
The uncertainty entailed in tying numbers of sections to enrollments implicates
English departments in low-rent hiring practices, makes us complicit in
the direct assault on tenure that is a feature of the increasing use of
part-time teachers in untenurable budget lines, interferes with quality
training and supervision of teachers, and makes planning for controlled
enrollment growth or shrinkage nearly impossible.
If the introductory first-year
composition course were made elective, enrollments would be controlled
by to the people who support, administer, and teach its sections.
Departments that offer an elective first-year course can limit that offering
to the number of sections that can be responsibly staffed and supported.
And, since such departments will know how many sections of the introductory
course they plan to staff, far in advance of any given semester or quarter,
they can redesign their hiring practices to meet professional standards
as well as the needs of teachers of writing who reside nearby. They
will be able to staff sections of the elective course with trained and
enthusiastic teachers; they can pay teachers in accordance with their
skill and experience; they can hire them well in advance of their
scheduled teaching assignments. I hope it is not utopian to imagine
that in some schools, these practices might lead to others: promoting
teachers of writing based on the work that they do, and offering them security
of employment in accordance with the standards that are used for all faculty
at that institution.
If there is no first-year
requirement, English departments are freer to determine the number of graduate
assistantships they can responsibly award and support. Departments
that need fewer TA's can pay each of them more, if its administrators can
convince their superiors that current levels of TA funding will be more
efficiently deployed in an elective program. Maintenance of a good
writing center, along with a series of good elective writing courses, would
allow graduate students some flexibility in their teaching assignments.
Freed from the enrollment demands placed on them by the required course,
departments that wished to do so could more easily assign graduate assistants
to help faculty in pursuing research projects or in teaching other courses,
within and outside of the department. In addition, graduate assistants
would have more flexibility in planning and scheduling their teaching assignments
from term to term, so they can better balance the demands of graduate study
with their teaching responsibilities, and so that their resumes reflect
a larger variety of teaching experiences.
I mentioned earlier that
my proposal has not met with an enthusiastic reception. I can think
of two reasons why it has failed to gain an audience. The first is
that people often seem to confuse the requirement with the course.
That is, they take it that those of us who want to lift the requirement
are arguing for the abolition of first-year composition. This confusion,
which I assure you is rampant, suggests to me that for many people the
importance of the first-year course lies precisely in the fact of its requirement.
That is to say, the curriculum and goals of the course are sort of beside
the point; rather, the point is to force students to sit through
an introductory requirement. If I am right about this, then the universally
required freshman course is an exercise in power, a demonstration of the
university’s desire and ability to impose its will on the student body.
Now I could put this more tactfully, drawing on the language that is more
often used: the point of the first-year requirement is to introduce
students to the university community, to prepare them for the work that
will follow, and so on. If this is what is wanted, it hardly seems
necessary to conduct this orientation to the university in the context
of a writing course, which everyone agrees is labor-intensive. Indeed,
the proliferation of required freshman seminars in universities across
the country suggests both that this is what is wanted and that such an
orientation can easily be conducted in other intellectual contexts.
The second reason that the
proposal has met with a lukewarm reception is that it does not, on its
face, seem to benefit part-time and other marginally employed teachers
of composition. If we drop the requirement, the prima facie argument
goes, universities and colleges will offer fewer sections of the first-year
course and some teaching positions will disappear. This is true enough.
I ask you to temper this realization with two considerations. Consider
first that students will continue to enroll in a good elective course in
first-year composition. In the few times and spaces where the requirement
has been abandoned, between 65 and 90 per cent of eligible students have
continued to enroll in first-year composition courses. Consider second
that composition programs can afford to lose some positions--I speak of
those very temporary positions that WPAs and department chairs scramble
to fill every fall as an extra 100 or 1000 freshmen show up on the university’s
doorstep, expecting to be accommodated in a section of the universally-required
course. Many of these latecomer freshmen disappear by spring semester,
and so do their teachers’ jobs. As matters now stand, then, those
last-hired first-fired positions offer little in the way of compensation
or status, and nothing at all in the way of benefits. Furthermore,
phasing out the requirement will not happen overnight, given that electivity
will have to be grandmothered into general education programs. Good
planning and ordinary rates of attrition should insure that few teachers
who are on-site will lose their jobs when the course becomes elective.
Response by John Ramage
I -- Abolition Debate
Let me begin by first of
all thanking Sharon for initiating this debate with her thoughtful and
longstanding critique of composition practices. Without contrarities,
Blake reminds us, there can be no progression. Before suggesting why I
think her proposal is misguided, morally obtuse and doomed, I wish to call
attention to the uniqueness of this occasion. Can you imagine another
discipline publicly debating the possibility of un-requiring its most populous
courses? Can you imagine another discipline that has actually examined
and reflected upon its courses and curricula sufficiently to allow such
a debate to be substantive? Can you imagine, for example, the English department
debating the abolition of its Shakespeare requirement? (Don’t worry; we
won’t go there.) Can you imagine another discipline whose members
so broadly share such a sophisticated understanding of, and deep concern
for, the quality of even its lowliest courses.
All of which is an underhanded
way of suggesting that whatever may be wrong with the status quo–which
this afternoon for the first time in twenty-five years I have been entrusted
to defend—there are some things that are very right with it as well.
My first concern with the proposed reform is that it not vitiate our very
real strengths and weaken what, by my standards at least, appear to be
our enormous capacity for good. And what may divide us most decisively
today are the different standards we use to assess ourselves. My own standards
are loosely pragmatic, mostly inexact and decidedly impure. Like most folk
who’ve spent too many years administering programs and making decisions
with the potential to help some and harm others--sometimes distressingly
immediate others--I tend to weigh consequences heavily in distinguishing
good and evil. My criteria for judgment, meanwhile, are derived from the
standards of a given community and try to acknowledge contingent circumstances
within which actions take place. If someone suggests something is
bad or good, thus, I tend to ask, “Relative to what?” and “For whom?”
I am profoundly suspicious of utopias, though I do believe that human agents
have a remarkable capacity to ameliorate the various scrapes that we and
the systems we create, get us into in the first place.
Now, by way of initiating
my argument, I will use a vulgar and self-serving trick. In two stages:
First, a mind experiment: close your eyes and imagine yourself on a packed
airplane. A voice comes on the intercom and announces that the flight
is overbooked. They need people to leave the plane; if enough people
leave will, free lifetime flight vouchers will be given out.. But before
you leap to your feet and head for the exit, there’s one more salient piece
of info: the vouchers go to passengers who stay, not to those who leave.
Starting in first class, one voucher will be given to a remaining passenger
for every one that departs. Imagine the dynamic that would set in
motion? Ok, hold that thought. Stage two. I’d like to see a show
of hands of those among you who are sufficiently appalled by the evils
of the fyc requirement to sacrifice your job in order to see it go.
Before you decide, please remember, Professor Crowley and I are doomed
to finish out our careers in a shamefully low rent discipline unless some
of you step up to the plate. Ok, now with that bit of encouragement, NOW
how many of you would walk away from teaching if it contributed to the
demise of comp conscription? . . . . To those of you who sat on your
hands, Sharon is taking your names and will contact you soon. To those
heroic souls who raised theirs, a tip of the hat. It gives me a sense
of soaring pride to find folks like you in the profession. . . . however
brief your stay may be. Watching you on the eve of your departure, I feel
a bit like Socrates standing before the doors of the Republic, tearfully
bidding adieu to the poets with that wonderfully sonorous phrase.
“Farewell, best loved strangers. . . . Best wishes in the Global Marketplace.”
Unfair? Maybe.
But if I were not tenured and nearing retirement, I would be curious to
hear some ballpark estimate of how many such sacrifices this proposal might
entail. We don’t have to be global and vague about it either; I’d
settle for an estimate based on local conditions right here at ASU, an
institution that both of us and many of you know well. Let’s do it in memory
of all those folk who belatedly discovered, after heeding the call to “reengineer”
their companies--which had nothing to do with people after all, just cumbersome
regulation-that they had been “rightsized” for all the “right reasons,”
right out of a job. So, what is a ballpark guess of ASU’s optimum
size? That is, after all, a fair question to ask of proposal–how might
it affect me? Sharon’s argument is unhelpful on this question. It wobbles
back and forth between reassurances that abolition will little affect program
sizes, and dire warnings that the sheer size of our programs is killing
us (eg she cites the “argument from size” asserting that large programs
are doomed to exploitive funding, and calls it “in this case. . .probably
true”) and with abolition will come the joys of rightsizing.
Having previously thanked
Sharon for inciting this debate, I would like also to thank her for making
me feel so at home in this debate. As I noted earlier, I’m usually on the
other side of these things arguing for changes to the status quo.
And the most daunting aspect of assuming that role, as many of you know,
is the burden of proof that goes with it. Prove that writing centers are
actually efficacious, that WAC programs make a difference. . . then,
maybe, we’ll fund it. Geez, prove to me that Soc 101 is even
marginally useful. But no, that’s not the way things work. I have
to prove (usually with data) that the status quo needs fixing, that the
causes of the problem have been properly identified and that my solution
will cause no more mischief than the status quo it amends, offering reasonable
estimates of both the size and probability of the risks involved. Tedious
business indeed.
Now, what is so refreshing
about the abolitionist argument as it has evolved over the past decade
is its steadfast refusal to assume the servile burden of proof usually
entailed by the petitioner. That’s left to chumps like me. Abolitionists
offer suggestive but hardly definitive evidence for universal problems
of hyperbolic proportions, buttressed by chilling anecdotes and pithy quotes.
And then they demand that the status quo convince them that fyc is effective,
usually according to some vague standard which has never been met, at least
not in any instance they cite. And in order to justify a universal requirement
the status quo is asked to prove some claim on the order of “Every student
needs fyc in order to succeed in the university or in life.” Rarely, at
least since the death of Scholasticism, does one encounter categorical
demands of such daunting rigor.
And as far as establishing
causal links between their lengthy bill of particulars against the status
quo
and their single solution, the abolitionists appear to think, like most
people in the catbird’s seat, that such links are self-evident and
“hardly need saying.” This is just one of many of what might be called
the “mysteries of agency” that flourish in abolitionist arguments.
Though many crimes are committed, few perpetrators are to be found, at
least among the living. It’s always “the requirement” that makes
good people do bad things. And history, apparently, is a nightmare from
which we simply can’t awaken, no matter how hard the abolitionists shake
us. Over and over, as if in a trance, we repeat the sins of Adams Sherman
Hill, and commit acts of current-traditionalism even as we say we are not.
We conduct and publish prodigious amounts of research supporting conclusions
that we turn around and violate daily in the fyc courses we oversee.
Only when the requirement is vanquished, we are told, can we emerge from
this collective trance and be once again fully responsible moral agents.
By way of concluding these
opening remarks, let me state, as succinctly as I can, why I oppose this
proposal. I oppose it because it’s not “modest”; it’s in fact both an “immodest”
one that entails sizable risks, and a “meek” one that can plausibly deliver
only meager gains. It’s an argument that appears to lack the courage
of its convictions. If all the abolitionist assertions are to be
believed, then the course, not the requirement should be abolished. (And
after abolishing the course, those same arguments morally obligate us to
terminate the hapless mopes who created this mess.) It’s a high risk
low gain proposition that can only be successful if accompanied by a significant
increase in resources. And by abolishing the requirement, we give up a
major source of leverage in our struggle to attain more resources. Moreover,
if we rely on some of the abolitionists’ more evocative, scorched earth
arguments to persuade our institutions not to require fyc, our ethos will
be so crippled that we would doubtless see more, not less, resistance to
our pleas for resources. Why, after all, might a Dean or Provost
increase support for a program that has, by its own admission, been complicit
for the past century in offering inefficacious and exploitative courses
for venal reasons?
Abolition is not a solution
in the sense that it remedies problems so much as it “disappears” them.
To what extent do we solve the problems of exploitation by “disappearing”
the exploited? To what extent are we better educating our students by granting
them the freedom to “disappear” from our courses into other courses that,
by any measure one could imagine, are less responsible than our own?
To what extent do we address the problems of difference in our classrooms
by “disappearing” diverse student populations? And to what extent
do we resolve major misunderstandings between ourselves and outsiders
by disappearing into our own disciplinary bunker. We may well emerge from
the aftermath of abolition with cleaner hands and an enhanced image.
We may be free at last to pursue the purer ends of disciplinarity, most
notably the disinterested pursuit of truth unfettered by niggling concerns
about consequences. We may be free at last from intrusions that force
us to engage in public acts of civic discourse of the very sort abolitionists
so heartily wish upon their students We may be free at last from the burdens
of negotiating with each other over the goals and the construction of our
curriculum. But when all is said and done, the price of such purity may
well be the inconsequentiality and solitude of our pursuits.
II -- Rebuttal
By way of rendering my rebuttal
of this proposal as specific as possible, I will offer now an alarmingly
meager “best case scenario” for its adoption right here at ASU. Then, I’ll
unveil my own heretofore tightly guarded and potentially explosive counter-proposal.
Ok, we get the requirement
abolished, incurring minimal damage to our reputation for integrity and
competence in the process. And no opportunist departments negate our sacrifices
by scuttling into the breach and getting one of their courses universally
required. But there’s a little problem with course demand.
Initially it remains brisk. But only, we belatedly discover,
because as soon as we “disappeared” it as a university requirement,
many departments “reappeared” it as a major requirement. Sticky business.
But this being a best case scenario, we’ll say the departments rescind
the requirement after we regale them with a few choice scorched earth arguments
from the abolitionists’ abundant store. Ok, so now enrollments are?.
. . approximately bipkus.
How can students resist
ASU’s exciting new comp course? Because they rarely take any unrequired
lower division courses. Taking courses that don’t “count” delays
graduation. And there’s little margin for error here because ASU
students have precious few–six or seven courses at most--true “electives.”
For all the abolitionists’ singular focus on the horrors of the comp requirement,
it’s important to remember that purely voluntary courses don’t loom large
in most students’ education. [Here I skip a fine grained attempt to relativize
requirements] So how do we get out of this pickle? Let
me borrow a trusted device from my opponent’s impressive store of rhetorical
stratagems–I leave it to our profession’s considerable rhetorical skills
to persuade the university that its obsession with requirements is killing
education. We win. Students have oodles of room in their schedules for
comp.
So course demand is now
“just right.” We are, at last, in charge of our own destiny. Which
immediately raises the question, just who is this “we” (remember
Burke’s injunction always to question the corporate we) that will determine
our newly emancipated program’s fate. Will instructors have voting privilege?
Tas? Fas? Or will we simply “hear” their concerns? And must we seek approval
from the English department or countenance its participation in the
decision-making process? Might the chair veto our best of all possible
proposals? In the interests of expediency, let’s just say that, thanks
again to our considerable rhetorical skills, all these nettlesome questions
are resolved without compromising anyone’s academic freedom and with all
parties to the decision calling it a win/win.
But then, another ugly surprise.
Abolishing the requirement not only dampens demand, it turns out, in the
Provost’s mind anyway, to decouple demand from supply. Funds don’t automatically
accompany enrollments and we must take our place at the end of that long
queue of petitioners begging higher powers for funds in support of non-required
courses. But again, thanks to our considerable rhetorical skills, etc.
Which brings us at last to those questions raised in such vulgar
fashion in the opening remarks. Who goes, who stays and who decides?
We won’t linger on these unpleasantries, for, after all, taking the long
view, everyone will be better off for rightsizing our operation regardless
of who determines what size is “just right” and who is judged unfit for
inclusion. The excluded will surely thank us later.
And now the much anticipated
punch line: the material payoff for our sacrifices. The end of exploitation,
the dawn of the age of better pay, lighter loads, and smaller classes for
all. At least according to the logic of the lifeboat analogy underlying
the abolitionist argument, having fewer aboard should entail larger shares
for the survivors. Alas, not. The powers that be, don’t let us (or anyone
ever, it turns out) keep resources sitting on any unoccupied line, most
especially when the lines are not tenure track lines; they recoup those
resources and reinvest them as they see fit. In this case they move them
to courses now inhabited by our former students. And even in my sunniest
liberal moments, my most Panglossian delirium, I can’t foresee winning
that particular argument no matter what Sharon says.
Ok, so we still exploit
people. But, darn it, not as many. And if other departments
increase their numbers of exploited part-time teachers to handle the influx
of newly liberated comp refugees, we’re still blameless, right? And
surely we have now guaranteed that intrusions on the scale of the UT-Austin
nightmare can’t happen here. Haven’t we? In my view,
abolishing the requirement will at best make such events marginally less
likely. Our ability to resist a determined assault on academic freedom
is affected by many factors, including the size and level of the course
in question, the collective will and shared commitment to the course by
those who offer it, and idiosyncrasies of local politics and power structures.
As we’ve recently seen in the case of a non-required, one-hour ASU course
with three students enrolled, a single determined critic can arouse an
inordinate amount of public ill will toward even the least visible of courses.
I would not, in sum, assume that because a course was not required it was
safe from demagoguery.
Which brings us finally
to students, whose “needs,” we’ve been told, must not be served..
Presumably our all-volunteer enrollees will be happier, less troublesome
and more committed. And maybe they will. But as previously noted,
this freedom of choice is distressingly relative. So too, presumably, will
be their joy. And against the possible benefits enjoyed by a considerably
smaller number of fyc students, one must put in the balance the fate of
those no longer taking our courses. Are they really better off taking a
150-student course taught in large lecture format with machine-graded tests
and sometimes alarming failure rates? The smaller and presumably better
our program gets, the more students we consign to such courses, thereby
exacerbating the already considerable shortcomings characteristic of these
courses.
Having now considered some
major ramifications of the abolitionists’“modest proposal,” it’s time to
take the wraps off my even more modest counterproposal. Call it the “painfully
shy” proposal. With an “exhibitionist option.” This counterproposal
is clearly the product of consequentialist thought, as surely as the abolitionist
proposal is the spawn of a decidedly more deontological or non-consequentialist
turn of mind. (While some might wish to call the latter an “ideological”
turn of mind, I prefer the older, more neutral term from ethics, “deontological,”
thereby avoiding the implication that because something is “ideological”–what
isn’t?–it’s less legitimate than some “non-ideological” argument, which
no one has ever seen at home.) When deontologists bemoan, sometimes
alarmingly, the horrors and the diabolical powers possessed by bad laws
and principles, their very lamentations are an expression of their deep
reverence for norms. Thus, when abolitionists suggest that “the requirement
made us do all manner of awful things,” they also imply that one is powerless
to resist a norm, and that until the norm is disappeared one will never
be free of its irresistible suasive force. Consequentialists, meanwhile,
are generally less reverential toward rules, readily condoning compromises,
exceptions and even violations of any norm which people agree is having
bad consequences. Ironically, thus, it’s precisely the consequentialists’
antinomian bias that makes them more tolerant of requirements.
According to the abolitionists,
it’s not just the requirement per se which is evil--though to be sure their
zeal for individual freedom is perhaps exceeded only by Rose and Milton
Friedman-- it’s all those unspoken entailments and hidden codicils to the
requirement. Thus, if we require the course for everyone in the name
of the entire institution we are inevitably and absolutely bound to create
an incoherent and unimaginably generalized course. And while abolitionists
may loathe the requirement, they can sooner imagine violations of the law
of gravity than breaches of the requirement’s covert entailment.
Which brings me back to
my consequentialist counterproposal. If a given rule has bad consequences,
again relative to the standards of a given community, then abolish, ignore,
subvert or violate it. Take your pick again, according to the relative
consequences of each choice. In this case, the significant risks
and the meager gains promised by abolition do not appear to favor its selection.
I like subversion and violation better. Hence, let the more timorous among
us slyly subvert it by adopting the “painfully shy” proposal.
And let the bold among us violate the damned thing publicly and noisily,
by adopting the “exhibitionist” option. In either case, local decision
would prevail; each program would decide which path to take. If violation
is the choice then practice the politics of “in your face,” flaunt whatever
course you believe in and play up its deviance from the bourgeois,
racist and authoritarian Other who’ve determined our fate for too long.
Get maximum exposure for all your acts of civil disobedience and challenge
the complicit with acts of conscience. As for the subverters among
us, who will I expect be more numerous, quietly get together and
determine what course makes best sense by the best lights of your training
and experience and with no fanfare whatsoever, start offering that course.
If you decide, for example, that Sharon is right and that such a course
would in fact be the introductory course to a new or an imagined writing
major, by all means create and teach that course to everyone.
Now, let me offer my hypothesis
about what might happen were this proposal accepted. I predict that
many programs’ version of a “best possible” course would bear a striking
resemblance to the one they had been offering all along. I base that
claim on the curious belief that many writing programs have in fact been
operating in good faith offering the best writing course they were capable
of imagining without the fact of requirement playing a decisive corrupting
role in the process. Many of these new courses will, predictably, still
horrify Sharon. Some of them will, to be sure, horrify me.
But at last we will be able to identify the sources of our depravity, the
extent to which the requirement made us do things and the extent to which
we were acting in the name of some fallible but hopefully corrigible belief.
Then, having finally put the matter of the requirement behind us, we might
pursue some of the more direct paths to betterment, paths that have already
led many programs to become considerably stronger than they were, if not
as good as they can be. Who knows, we might even decide that the
traditional model of disciplinarity urged upon us by abolitionists is not
in fact the best stay against post-Fordist predations. Once our enchantment
with the requirement issue finally lifts, we might even notice that our
disciplinary bunkers protect ever fewer of us in ever more privileged fashion
even as they preclude collective action on behalf of the growing numbers
of those we exclude.
Question & Answer Session
Transcribed by Kohl M. Glau
A question and answer session followed the statements by Professors Crowley and Ramage, and the section below, I hope, will give you a feel for some of what was asked and answered. While I didn't transcribe the entire session, I wanted to give Bwe's readers a sense of the give-and-take, the tenor of the questioning, and so on, for part of that session.
Transcription is always difficult and any errors are BWe's.
[Question] I would like both John and Sharon to reflect
on some data . . . the folks at the office of evaluation every year
do a survey of all incoming students here at ASU, and a lot of you in this
room are familiar with that. They also survey graduating seniors
here at ASU, and they also survey alumni at ASU. And, among other
things, they ask about some skill sets that ASU students develop here at
ASU.
Question one: What skill
sets do you value most upon graduating from ASU? The three that come
to the top are writing skills, speaking skills, and team building skills.
Then the follow-up question
is, “How well does ASU prepare you in those three categories?”
For the time being, I’ll talk about the skill sets of writing, speaking,
and team building. In the category of writing, about 80 percent say
ASU does a pretty good job in equipping students with the skills they need.
. . .
If you look at speaking,
which is not a required course at ASU, students say about the same thing.
80 percent of them say it’s a very valuable skill, and alumni say the same
thing. “How well did ASU prepare you?” Down around 60 percent,
for the university as a whole, and if you look at departments, its around
30-40 percent, and sometimes 50 percent. If you two would comment
on those for me, I would be grateful.
[Professor Crowley] I think those data are fantastic. That’s great, and I’m glad students are pleased with the experience they get in writing instruction here at ASU. And I’m assuming that your reason for quoting the separate statistic for writing, as opposed to the departmental instruction statistic for writing, is to show that the instruction they are receiving, presumably, in the freshman course, is the one that has the 80 percent [rating].
[Question] I’m not arguing cause and effect.
[Professor Crowley] Okay, but that is the one with the 80 percent satisfaction rate. I find that great. I take the implication of your question to be that if there were not a required course, some of those students at least would miss experience, that they later find, as seniors and graduates, to be useful for them. But, it seems to me that your argument begs the question. If students find writing skills to be so useful, then they know to take courses in it, and they don’t have to be required into it.
[Question] Then why does that not hold for speech as well?
[Professor Crowley] I don’t know.
[Professor Ramage] A couple things. First of
all, I think one of the points of that survey makes, and I think other
data would support, is the unreliability of a writing across the curriculum
program, for instance, to address the problems of writing instruction in
universities. And I say that as a person who has worked with writing
across the curriculum for ten years, and who strongly believes in it, etc,
etc. The problem is that it is very difficult to institutionalize
WAC—it’s outside the departmental structure—and it tends to be tied, with
every place I’m familiar with, to people. And people come and go,
they retire, lose interest, etc., which is why courses that are still in
the books as “writing across the curriculum” haven’t been taught in years.
And that is one of the problems with it, and I think initially, the first
three or four years, you can get a good program, have lots of money, etc.
But, people go away, and others think the university still has this program.
If you don’t root instruction in a department's required course, you can't
rely on it . . .
[The real question is the]
justification of how someone can say which courses “ought” to be required.
I think Sharon and I differ in how we stand as to what I think it takes
to require a course. I don’t think you necessarily prove that in
every case that every student needs [the course] and benefits from that
in order to make the case that you can require it . . .
If people believe that the
course is valuable, [and] again I think what the data shows is that an
overwhelming number of people within and outside the university think that
writing is valuable. Now, as to whether we deliver on our promises
is another issue, but we do believe that it’s [writing] valuable.
And I think if we reverse
it and say, “The course, thought to be the most valuable, is the course
where the student would miss out the most if that student did not take
it.” And we are justified in requiring such a course, and we don’t
have to prove that every student must benefit from every course to justify
the requirement.
So, I guess two things—one,
it doesn’t surprise me that direct instruction in composition [is] vital,
and you can’t rely on the other stuff, for a whole bunch of reasons.
And second, I don’t think we need to prove that every student benefits
from the course . . .
[Question] This question is for Dr. Ramage: how many populations need to become dissatisfied in order to invoke a change in this discipline? I have found both freshman and graduate students (Teaching Assistants) to be both dissatisfied with the requirement. Is the level of the dissatisfaction of these two groups not high enough, or do other groups need to be dissatisfied? If so, how many other populations need to be dissatisfied in order to invoke a change?
[Professor Ramage] “How many populations need
to be dissatisfied?” is one question. Another question, “To what
extent will current populations be more dissatisfied if the proposal is
accepted?”
The second question is a more vital one for me, and I think I can argue,
quite strongly, that students are not going to be happier wherever they
end up in lieu of first year composition. I don’t think the choice
most graduate students face would be either to teach that course and gain
their support or not be there. In fact, Sharon suggested one thing
in passing, the notion that we can take some of our TAs and convert them
into GAs, or move them into teaching other things. Again that assumes
that the budget stays even with enrollment; but that never happens, and
will never happen. The only hard money in the university is on occupied
lines by people who have some form of contractual relationship with the
institution. In every other case, the dollars follow demand.
So, when demand goes away, positions go away. It’s very hard to convert
TAs to GAs, and it’s difficult to move people out of composition to literature
without the money generated by enrollment.
That’s one response, and
the other response is that I have looked at student satisfaction, and while
we certainly don’t place enough resources into composition, and student
satisfaction is extremely high due to the heroic efforts of our graduate
students. I will say, “Yes, it’s true that good teachers get slightly
lower ratings in those courses (first year composition) than those courses
on subjects they specialize in.” However, I don’t think the dissatisfaction
rates for the first year composition courses are as high as you might think.
It’s a tough one to answer,
but it brings us to the real and underlying question: would accepting this
proposal significantly help those populations? And my response: I
don’t really see how it can help those populations deal with that problem,
and I do in fact view them as significant populations.
[Question] Have any of you considered the usefulness of requiring first year composition to student populations with low incomes and had never had the opportunity to get into college? Would the first year requirement help such a population?
[Professor Crowley] We had this argument before; we had
it down in Tucson six years ago, and we had it in the pages of the Journal
of Basic Writing. Part of my answer is I’m very concerned about that
population and I want them to succeed and do well. My reservations
have to do with whether or not they succeed and do well in a universal
requirement. In other words, whether the fact that requiring the
course improves their chances of success, I simply don’t know. Apparently
you have research that shows that if such students meet consecutively,
in small groups, with the same teacher, then they have a better chance
in staying in school. If that is so, then I think that's a great
idea. That’s still not an argument that the setting should be a writing
course. That's still not an argument that it should occur in the
context of a universal requirement.
I agreed in our previous
discussions of this that if some special arrangements need to made for
first generation college students, on a given campus, if people of good
will and concern—like yourself, and this has been your concern all your
life, and I laud you for it—think that special arrangements need to be
made. What bothers me about the special arrangement is that people
who are at risk in staying in college are all together in one place, where
they can be identified by an administration, like that of UCLA, which is
worried about its image of being tainted by teaching remedial courses.
We wouldn’t call these remedial, but UCLA did. I won’t go into the
rest of my arguments, but they are in my first response.
[Professor Ramage] I guess my response would be to
first acknowledge my concern for this population, and I do think they are
served by freshman year composition courses and by the courses associated
with freshman composition. And the data . . . about retention in
the university, would indicate that if we look at a course, in a general
sense, it’s an ideal course from the sense that it is going to improve
student interaction and student retention. We do that better than
anyone else in the university, and we do a superb job.
Another thing. The
possibility of students not taking courses they need: students often choose
not to take the courses they need, due to their anxiety about the subject
or disinterest. And I don’t think it’s at all improbable to say that
someone who is worried about their writing would be less likely to enter
a writing program. As you decouple demand from supply, we can no
longer guarantee our courses, because the administration may no longer
fund courses when the courses become voluntary.
[Question] Could it be possible that we can still keep the first year requirement and give students the option of several types of writing classes? Students could then decide which course would be best for them.
[Professor Crowley] Certainly. Whenever I have
spoken on the issue, I have always assumed that there would not only be
a good elective freshman composition course, but there would also be a
vertical curriculum. Given a local situation, a university and department
should decide how it wants to set up the prerequisite structure . . . I
would like to point out that the universal requirement in freshman English
is now the only universal requirement in many universities. Thirty
years ago, physical education was universally required. Maybe you
don’t know this, but I once sat on a committee at another university that
was interested in abolishing its universal requirement in physical education.
Apparently this was something which came up in the faculty senate every
ten years or so, and the offering of the PE requirement was scandalous.
In other words, kids were going up to the mountains and ski, and they would
receive three hours of credit . . . . It [first year composition]
is the one which has managed to stay alive, in most universities, for all
of its history. Speech and PE requirements have fallen by the
wayside, and math requirements come and go.
I think you’re talking about
a very different beast when you’re talking about a requirement that everyone
has to deal with, than when you’re talking about L1 and L2 courses, which
at least gives students many options for writing courses (Editor's note:
at ASU, L1 and L2 courses are "writing intensive" courses, taught across
campus as part of our Writing Across the Curriculum Program). I don’t
know how many options there are.
[Question] Well, There are many options, but these options are uncontrolled, and that’s the weakness of that argument. At least we have composition people teaching composition classes, whereas an L1 or L2 class, all through the university, may start out with a strong writing base [but] there is no control over what happens in those courses.
[Professor Crowley] Isn’t there a board or committee or something?
[Mark Lussier] What [the questioner] is talking about is the general studies requirements at ASU, and, in fact, we had just gone through a debate as to whether or not we should put the university writing requirement under the general studies requirement; and, in fact, that is not going to occur.
[Question] When the courses start out, yes, they are approved. And there is no monitoring procedure to check on those courses as they go along.
[Professor Crowley] Well, that’s typical of most universities. I've sat on those boards at other institutions, and I know that those committees would like to surveill the teaching and it’s very hard to do.
[Professor Ramage] I would like to respond to the question.
Yes, I think it’s great to give students options and have multiple curriculums
and a writing program. And, as long as you (Sharon) disillusion yourself
about the nature of the “universal requirement,” there is no reason why
we can’t do that. We should all teach the best possible writing course.
To speak again to
[the] point, I sat on the general studies council for four years, and I’m
skeptical about vertical writing programs that are not in control of the
people who are committed to the teaching of writing. [My concern]
has to do with the second largest L1 course on this campus. I also
oversaw the Writing Center at this time, and we had never seen a student
from this course which enrolled 1300 hundred students per year who were
“writing,” during the history of the writing center. So, I asked
to see the syllabus, and, as chair of the committee, I talked with the
teachers of this course. It soon became apparent that no essay, as
we would call it, had ever been written in the course. It is very
difficult to insure; we can apply for it, and say all the right things,
but as soon as you get the status, it’s just another way of controlling
enrolment management. That’s what our general studies curriculum
is all about: enrollment management. Steering students into courses,
controlling demand in particular departments that cannot otherwise get
undergraduate enrollments.
[Question] It has been my experience that graduate students create very innovative and creative methods of teaching first year composition courses, i.e., their pedagogy is very effective. So, is there a way to systemically address graduate students creating pedagogy without abolishing the first year composition requirement?
[Professor Crowley] Yes, I agree with everything you have
said. The question for me is, “If we lost the requirement, would
those of us who are interested in composition lose our interest in pedagogy?”
I think that’s an excellent question, and one I’m happy to see on the table.
I do want to make one other
point, before our time runs out: an issue that really motivates me is the
working conditions of people who are marginally employed. And, we
are not talking about that issue, perhaps because none of us are marginally
employed.
Review
of Time to Know Them
by Marilyn Sternglass
(Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1997)
Reviewed by Patricia
Licklider
Director of Composition, John Jay College--CUNY
When Open Admissions began
at the City University of New York in the early 70s, few, if any, English
instructors knew how to move students with very weak writing skills quickly,
in a semester or two, from orality to literacy to academic literacy. Many
of us were brand new members of the professorate, trained in literary studies,
with only the vaguest notions of how to teach writing, let alone writing
to students who came to be called "basic writers." From our own undergraduate
experiences, we remembered composition courses as product-driven: instructors
would assign a theme a week; these themes would be edited in red and graded,
and thus we would "learn" to write. This method did not work for the new
student writers we met in our classrooms. And so we began to search out
other teaching methods or to invent our own. Some of us, notably Mina Shaughnessy
and Sondra Perl, began to study the composing processes and products of
our students. We were filled with a heady hopefulness, punctuated by bouts
of despair.
This story has been told
already and more fully elsewhere, but I was reminded of those early days
of Open Admissions when I read Marilyn Sternglass's impressive book Time
to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College
Level (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1997). In her six-year
study undertaken when she was teaching at City College, CUNY, Sternglass
followed the college careers of 19 students recruited from her own composition
classes. Starting with 53 volunteer students, down to 19 by the second
year, and finally nine students studied in great depth, she collected all
the writing these students composed for their courses across the curriculum
every semester until they graduated, interviewed the students regularly
about their writing and the ways it related to their learning, and observed
some of their classes. The students who volunteered to participate represented
both a full spectrum of writing skills, from the most "basic" writers to
those placed in regular college composition, and "a wide range of racial,
ethnic, and social backgrounds" (xi). Sternglass shows that if we are willing
to follow students' academic progress beyond their first semesters in college,
we will see them acquiring the critical thinking and writing skills that
seemed out of reach for them as freshmen. She shows that our hopes for
our students in the early 70s were not ill-founded. But we must allow students
the time to develop their skills.
In her book Sternglass examines
the interrelationship and maturation of student writing and learning within
a variety of contexts: in terms of their own complex lives, the writing
instruction they received, the classrooms in which they learned, and the
testing they endured. Her chapters are enlivened with examples of particular
students' writing and interview remarks. Her study, involving six years
of accumulating data and two years of studying and assembling the data,
confronts "the messy, real-world environment in which writing is actually
produced" (11). It affirms several findings about progress in writing and
critical thinking skills from shorter or different kinds of studies. Such
progress does not proceed in a strictly linear fashion but by fits and
starts, depending on many factors, such as the requirements of the discipline
for which the writing was produced and the comments made on it by instructors.
Students who enter college with poor reading and writing skills are often
impeded in their struggle to improve by their life conditions outside of
school, especially by the necessity to work to support themselves and to
pay college costs, but that, given time and support, these students can
develop the competence we should expect in college graduates. Furthermore,
the social histories of students--their ethnicity, their gender and sexual
orientation, their class, their values--all affect their performance of
academic tasks. In fact, she demonstrates more powerfully than in any other
study I have read to date that students from diverse backgrounds, including
basic writers, can contribute valuable insights about the values of the
larger society when in their writing they relate them to the facts of their
own lives. Such insights would be lost if such students were barred from
the academy because of their poor skills, and just as importantly, such
students would be prevented from realizing their full potential. The chapter
on the effects of students' complex social histories on their writing should
be "must" reading for instructors and administrators new to urban colleges
and universities. But it is even more essential reading for trustees, legislators,
and other people outside academia who control the purse-strings and the
admissions policies of academic institutions. "If we deny students the
opportunity to bring their world knowledge and experience to the fields
they are studying, we will be denying not only them but the entire society
the opportunity to change in directions that will benefit all. If, for
example, New York City and other urban areas do not make it possible for
young people to get an education and improve their lives..., who will suffer?
Not just the individuals, but the entire community will as well" (113).
Sternglass's reiteration of this warning echoes as her "cri de coeur" throughout
the book. She has the evidence that underprepared students can succeed
if they have persistence and support. Who will listen?
Reaffirming what researchers
like Haswell have argued and what proponents of writing in the disciplines
have been arguing for years, the students Sternglass studied said that
writing about new ideas in their own words helps them understand and then
to analyze and evaluate them. Contrary to Geisler's claim that writing
does not help students acquire specific facts, the students in Sternglass's
study said that writing WAS useful for that purpose. Even more supportive
of WAC/WID efforts, the students, particularly those starting out with
weak skills, said they preferred essay exams to multiple-choice and other
"objective" exams. They felt that they could better show their instructors
what they had learned in a course when they could write about the material
in their own words.
In her chapter on writing
instruction and its effects on student writing, Sternglass shows that instructors
need to comment on the content of student writing in order to move the
students to deeper analysis, but they should also be candid in pointing
out sentence-level errors and nonstandard word forms. However, instructors
should be able to see improvement in content underneath surface errors
and not equate an inability to control surface features in writing with
stupidity. Sternglass sees freshman composition courses as an essential
first step in helping students understand the goals and uses of writing,
but not enough development in writing ability takes place in one or two
semesters to be measured and considered adequate. Several of the students
in Sternglass's study started out in Basic Writing courses and then proceeded
into "regular" college composition. Because Basic Writing instructors often
concentrate on surface features of student writing and set less demanding
reading and writing tasks, Sternglass prefers mainstreaming students with
weak skills and providing various kinds of extra support for them within
the course by stretching it, for example, from one semester to two or by
providing an extra hour for students who need it.
In examining learning environments
in courses other than composition, Sternglass found that students progressed
well when there was empathy between them and their instructor and when
the instructor encouraged them. With empathy and encouragement, instructors
could make heavier demands, and students could cope with them. This chapter
would be good reading for those interested in promoting writing in the
disciplines.
Considering the students'
experiences with writing tests, Sternglass argues that a single, impromptu,
timed piece of writing is a poor tool for evaluating writing competence,
especially the abilities to revise and to proofread. The holistic scoring
of such tests, particularly CUNY's Writing Assessment Test, with which
she and her students are intimately familiar, concentrates on students'
essays as products. Yet most composition instruction emphasizes writing
as process. Graders of such tests, in their inexperience with ESL students
and basic writers, are also apt to consider the sheer number of individual
errors in an essay rather than the patterns of error. To highlight her
remarks, she cites the example of Ricardo, a student who kept failing the
CUNY test, even though he was doing very good work in other courses. His
impromptu essays contained more surface errors than the papers he wrote
at home, yet both displayed a thoughtfulness about their subjects that
the graders of his exams did not seem to credit. She recommends eliminating
impromptu writing tests for placement purposes, substituting teacher evaluations
after the first few weeks of class or portfolio assessment. Her criticism
is valid, yet given the current climate, especially at CUNY, for "raising
standards" and cutting costs, testing as a means of barring students from
entering college and then from exiting remedial courses is, unfortunately,
here to stay.
Throughout, Sternglass displays
a thorough knowledge of other studies of student writing and often presents
useful reviews of the scholarship for less well-read readers. She also
provides useful advice both for instructors and for researchers interested
in doing their own longitudinal studies. Sternglass throughout the book
uses excerpts from the writing of the students, especially the nine who
kept in touch with her over the six years. But in a late chapter, she pulls
together all the details of four of these histories into four narratives
so as to present a well-rounded picture of each student's intellectual
development. I myself found the verbatim repetition of paragraphs I had
read earlier annoying. Reading these case histories, I was sorry I had
not started with them and then gone on to read about particular aspects
of their writing history in other chapters. This is the only time I have
regretted the "cut-and-paste" feature of computer writing! Occasionally,
I was also put off by the repetition of Sternglass's most fervently held
beliefs about the importance of maintaining both open access to higher
education and financial support for the poorest students. But perhaps because
these are my own most fervent beliefs, they seemed obvious to me. However,
I know that, no matter how totally I and my colleagues agree with Sternglass,
there are many others in much more influential positions in academia who
do not. As I write, CUNY, following the mandate of its Board, is preparing
to eliminate remedial courses in all its four-year colleges and to replace
its Writing Assessment Test, against which Sternglass rails, with yet another
timed, impromptu writing sample for both placement and exit purposes, this
one to be developed by a "nationally recognized" testing company. It is
difficult to be heard over the voices crying for "higher standards" both
in admissions and in matriculation, but if any voices should be heard it
is Sternglass's and her students'. One of them, the young woman Sternglass
calls Joan, the same student who was misrepresented in James Traub's book
on City College (1994) as a "miraculous survivor," wrote that "being at
college is my life. I will not let anyone take it away from me." She survived
financial difficulties, health problems, and a deficient precollege education
to graduate and land a union position at a methadone clinic, earning more
money than anyone else in her family. She succeeded not by a miracle but
by her own hard work, her dedication, and especially her tenaciousness
and a college that allowed her to persevere. Can we afford to lose the
Joans seeking entry to college because they do not yet have the requisite
skills, skills they would surely develop, given the support, the stimulus,
and the time to grow?
Review
of
Defending
Access: A Critique of Standards in Higher Education
by Tom Fox
(Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1999)
Reviewed by Terry Collins
Director of Academic Affairs, General College-University of Minnesota
Reading Tom Fox has always
left me optimistic about the work we do in composition and basic writing.
He helps us see that what we do is genuinely important. And he reminds
us that persistence in working for change on our campuses is worth the
effort when measured by more humane and more effective programs for students
who aren’t always welcome in higher education. Fox’s work points
us toward consideration of questions of access, equity, and authenticity
in the education of all citizens. He defines accessibly the terms
of manufactured exclusion and the regressive practices fostered by them.
Fox’s new book Defending
Access:
A Critique of Standards in Higher Education sits very
comfortably alongside Marilyn Sternglass’s recent award-winning Time
to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College
Level. In both books, the authors confront head-on the right-wing’s
reimposition of arbitrary measures of students’ “preparedness” and their
“success” in rolling back access to higher education. Both books
use student lives and student work, situated in actual programs (for Fox,
Cal State Chico; for Sternglass, CUNY), as the foundation for the argument
in favor of access and against the racist, classist cant of “standards.”
Defending Access is
a smaller book than Time to Know Them, and in some ways is the more
accessible volume. Fox introduces us to five African-American student
writers through whose lives and work we come to understand that “failure”
among students has little to do with preparedness or skills, and has much
to do with the social, economic, and political situations they (and many
access programs) inhabit. He reviews key historical moments in the
evolution of the arbitrary social constructions which pass for “standards”
and explores the ideological arguments which lead to their imposition on
the lives and futures of our students. He does so in a most readable,
cogent way.
Rehearsing a series of political
conflicts over writing instruction at his home institution allows Fox to
critique earlier work in composition (his own included) which suffer from
an underestimation of the hegemonic domination of writing programs, students,
and faculty by institutional authorities. He offers a thoughtful
overview of processes that might serve to dislodge “standards” and the
exclusionary practices they impose on writing programs in their historic
gatekeeper function. Finally, he offers ideas about what a liberatory,
anti-racist curriculum featuring committed, authentic writing
might look like.
Fox’s book is timely, coming
as it does on the heels of Sternglass’s work. Moreover, the larger
critique of “standards” and the rollback of access to higher education
is being enriched from a couple of directions which makes Fox’s work noteworthy.
We might want to consider Fox’s book alongside the work Claude M. Steele
and his colleagues are doing on “stereotype threat” and minority student
underperformance on standardized tests, for instance (see Steele, “Thin
Ice: ‘Stereotype Threat’ and Black College Students,” The Atlantic Monthly,
August 1999, 44-54). Likewise, James Paul Gee’s concept of
“Discourses,” enlarging as it does our understanding of cultural difference
from a rich sociolinguistic perspective, interacts very energetically with
Fox’s new work (Gee was a featured speaker at the 1999 Conference on College
Composition and Communication; his theory of Discourses is most accessibly
available in his Social linguistics and literacies: Ideology in Discourses
[London: Falmer Press, 1996]).
Most importantly, Fox invites
us to dig in for the long haul. He argues convincingly that alternatives
to racist “standards” and the practices they spawn will be countered only
in local situations, through ideologically charged “siege warfare” against
those structures and practices which we might affect in our local sites.
This is a quietly optimistic, important book.
Review
of Gypsy Academics and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and
Writing Instruction
by Eileen E. Schell
(Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1998)
Reviewed by Susan Loudermilk
Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi
Often distressful, sometimes
hopeful, always very informational. After reading Gypsy Academics
and Mother-Teachers: Gender, Contingent Labor, and Writing Instruction
by
Eileen Schell, I had to wonder, "Is slavery alive and well as we round
the corner to the 21st century?" In her book, Schell attempts to
provide "a model of collective feminist transformation" as she examines
the past and current state of affairs for what she terms "contingent faculty,"
specifically part-time and non-tenure track faculty in the English profession.
She focuses on writing instructors, most of whom are women, who are most
often relegated to teach the "dreaded" first year composition courses that
many tenure-track faculty wish to avoid.
Schell traces the history
of how feminine attitudes have affected women in the writing profession.
As writing courses came to be seen as lesser (un)scholarly endeavors, the
courses were left for women to teach, based on sentiments that "women had
'special endowments' that naturally predisposed them to Freshman English"
and an attitude that women "identify with the service ethos," the need
to nurture those under their care. The trend continued well into
the 80's and 90's when the money crises and fear of decreasing enrollments
led college administrators to rely more and more on
contingent faculty to teach courses. Yet even though enrollments
did not decline, and even with the rise of professionalism in the field
of rhetoric/composition, still today many highly qualified women writing
instructors find themselves in part-time or non-tenure track positions,
hoping from year-to-year that they will be able to support themselves until
full-time tenure-track positions open up for them.
I was struck by the parallel
between the conditions Schell describes for these women and my grandmother's
experience as an elementary school teacher. When my grandmother began
teaching in 1926, male teachers were paid more than female teachers, and
female teachers were not considered good long-term prospects because it
was assumed that they would get married and have children. My grandfather
left my grandmother after the birth of their third child, so she was left
to raise the children on her own on a teacher's salary. They had
to move