This article details how Bartholomae and Petrosky came to design a course for basic writers. It discusses their approach to the course (one based on close reading and written responses to specific texts), the ways in which such reading strategies are critical for basic writers, and the specific curriculum goals of their basic reading and writing course. This course concentrates on literacy and writing from a social constructionist perspective and seeks to teach academic discourse to basic writers. This article offers a critical synopsis of the book, outlining the methodologies and pedagogical philosophies surrounding Bartholomae and Petrosky's course. This article takes up questions of epistemology in basic writing pedagogy and examines issues of authority as they are presented within basic writers' prose.
Facts, Artifacts, and Counterfacts presents curriculum, theoretical framework, and rationale for teaching "students outside the mainstream—students unprepared for the textual demands of college education" (4). This course disrupts many of the previous constructions of basic writing courses by suggesting that basic writers be challenged intellectually rather than given rote exercises. Drawing from contemporary theory and social constructionist philosophies, the text reveals how teaching thoughtful, critical reading can help basic writers to utilize and comprehend academic discourse. The book includes a brief discussion of the problems basic writers face, pragmatic suggestions about how to teach reading and writing skills to basic writers, the procedures basic writers undertake when completing reading and writing, a case study of one basic writing student, an explanation of the implications of reading and writing assignments, and a discussion of error, editing, and the complexities teachers face while teaching these issues to basic writers.
Cohen begins with an extended metaphor that connects Thomas Pynchon, Voltaire's Candide, and the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. Through the lens of concerns over globalization, Cohen examines the history of writing across the curriculum, its relationship to basic writing, and its possible future path. Cohen then outlines classroom workshop techniques that attend to students' basic skills without neglecting critical thinking or a postmodern perspective. He contends that instructors should not abandon the utopian ideals of WAC simply because they have failed to work perfectly in the past. Taking small steps, such as tinkering with individual classes and then with programmatic issues, he argues, is a path that offers much promise.
Textbooks specifically for developmental writers first appeared in the 1890s, as mainstream composition authors such as A. S. Hill and John Genung responded to growing cultural and institutional concerns about linguistic correctness with basic treatments of college-level writing. By the advent of open-admission policies in the late 1960s, basic writing texts had slowly developed into standardized forms such as the simplified rhetoric, basic handbook, and workbook, still seen in large numbers today. Simplified rhetorics as a whole portray the sentence and paragraph as the primary units of discourse and reduce writing to an algorithmic, rule-governed process. Basic writing handbooks and workbooks offer prescriptive lessons on mechanics and pages of fill-in-the-blank and multiple-choice exercises for which students provide correct answers. By isolating and diagnosing discrete grammatical problems through repetitive drills and simplified rules, these texts ignore most of what compositionists currently know about the phenomenon of writing—that it consists of saying something to someone in context. They also reflect a basic writing community that has not progressed as much as a reading of professional books and journals would indicate.
See: Joseph F. Trimmer, "Basic Skills, Basic Writing, Basic Research" [37].
Delpit uses the process versus skills debate, as well as other examples, to uncover and critique larger societal and educational cultures of power that inform U.S. classrooms. Progressive and liberal educators, Delpit argues, do significant and irreparable damage to black and poor students who are not participants in the culture of power by ignoring or denying that cultures of power exist and, in turn, by not articulating for students the rules of that culture. Delpit, however, does not advocate a simple, unself-reflexive return to direct instruction. She recognizes that students need to use their knowledge and to write for real audiences and purposes at the same time that they are taught and use the conventions and expectations of academic discourse. Delpit's narrative analysis, coupled with the chorus of teachers she quotes, constructs a rich look into the cultural divide that exists in classrooms in which white teachers, even those with the best of intentions, do not recognize themselves as part of the institutional and cultural forces constructed to ensure the continued success of white and middle-class students at the cost of further disenfranchisement of poor students and students of color. The pedagogical divide is articulated nowhere more strongly than in Delpit's contrastive descriptions of democratic and authoritarian classrooms.
This article illustrates the ways that Elsasser worked to implement a student-generated pedagogy in which the women in her writing class at the College of the Bahamas shared responsibility for setting out the terms of the curriculum and course theme. Guided by her reading of Paulo Freire and Lev Vygotsky and her conversations with colleagues in New Mexico, including Kyle Fiore, Elsasser embarked on her teaching with a goal of moving the students from a position of accepting knowledge passively to seeking it out and generating it. The readings and assignments in her course were challenging but rewarding, for the women invested a great deal (and had a great investment) in the subject and the eventual collaborative assignment, an "Open Letter to Bahamian Men." This letter gives the women an opportunity to use writing as a social and political tool in a way no traditional curriculum could have. Fiore and Elsasser illustrate how Freire's pedagogy can work outside Brazilian peasant communities. But more than this, it illustrates the power of trusting students—their capabilities, their interests, their motivations, and their abilities—to rise to the challenges put before them, individually and collectively, when they are given both the responsibility and opportunity to have a voice in the content of their writing courses.
Fleck became frustrated while teaching a course structured around "The Arts of the Contact Zone" by Mary Louise Pratt and an excerpt from Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions. Based on his own explanations, his students were not arriving at understandings of these complicated texts. His solution was to create discussion groups of three to five students because research in the use of small discussion groups claims that students can better modify and clarify ideas through discussions with other students. Fleck reports that students who had never talked ein class participated in the small-group conversations and that students used key-term definitions created by the group while discussing Greenblatt to write more sophisticated essays. Fleck concludes that small-group discussions release students from the anxiety of speaking to the entire class, help students ask questions and clarify their thinking, and encourage students to engage in more sophisticated discussions of complicated texts.
See: Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone" [221].
To motivate learners, Goode asserts, it is necessary to provide a real context for their reading and writing. Goode describes the CONCUR ("CONtextual CURriculum") program at Piedmont Community College in rural North Carolina, whose purpose is to provide developmental English students with a context for reading and writing. The CONCUR program models the workings of a publishing house: students choose what to read and what to write, and the term's writing is collected into a class-designed anthology that is published and shelved in the school library. Simply knowing that their writing will be published spurs the students to attend carefully to their coursework. Students read fifty to seventy-five pages of complete books each week and "reflect, analyze, speculate, [and] evaluate" their reading in a journal shared with the instructor (75). Students also participate in silent reading, book discussions, vocabulary sharing, minilessons on reading strategies, and literature circles.
Grobman attempts to carry into practice Henry Giroux's call for educators to consider carefully "the crisis of youth" and the ways that youth culture is depicted in the media. She therefore takes a cultural studies approach in working with her basic writing students to help them gain the critical and rhetorical skills "to write across and against their socially inscribed identities" (9). Grobman learns about public sites where her students can publish their views, but she has also come to question the implications of Giroux's call, particularly educators' responsibility to provide an ethical discourse in the classroom that might allow students to use their voices to assert their identities and to challenge existing ones. Grobman finds that she and her students got caught up in the contradictions of accepting and rejecting these representations, and she concludes that this ethical discourse is difficult to negotiate in practice. The difficulty she experiences raises some key questions for educators: How does the teacher encourage critique and at the same time not subtly direct students to engage in critique that is ideologically aligned with the instructor's? And at what point does the instructor accept students' views, even though these views support negative representations of young people, particularly representations that involve race?
This revised version of a talk given at the 2001 meeting of the City University of New York Association of Writing Supervisors continues a line of thinking that Harris set forth in A Teaching Subject: Composition since 1966, which offered a critique of the current use of metaphors of community in teaching writing as both utopian and confining. Harris argues that instructors need to avoid the kind of easy reliance on the idea of community that permeates discourse about writing classrooms. Instead, he suggests that instructors adopt alternate ways of imagining writing and teaching as taking place in more open, contested, and heteroglot spaces, proposing three counterconcepts to community: public, material, and circulation.
See: Mark Wiley, "Response to Joseph Harris's 'Beyond Community'" [192].
Harris examines the problems that emerge from the growth, initiation, and conflict metaphors that have become dominant in the field of basic writing. While acknowledging differences in discourse, these metaphors fail to recognize the problems that occur for students. The article discusses Mary Louise Pratt's theory of contact zones and argues how a more expansive view of this theory could be helpful in basic writing. It maintains that if these conflicts are allowed to emerge in a natural way that encourages students to choose their own positions, this atmosphere would be more beneficial because it would be less artificial and would present differences in a more meaningful way.
See: Mary Louise Pratt, "Arts of the Contact Zone" [221].
Lazere asks whether liberatory pedagogy, as it has come to be defined in the United States in generally Freirean terms, serves the needs of students better than a basic skills approach. "Leftists," he writes, "err grievously in rejecting . . . a restored emphasis on basic skills and knowledge which might be a force for liberation—not oppression—if administered with common sense, openness to cultural pluralism, and an application of basics toward critical thinking, particularly about sociopolitical issues" (123). In arguing his case, Lazere undertakes a Marxist critique of both liberal and conservative motives for pedagogical choices. A leftist educator himself, Lazere nonetheless launches a critique of James Sledd, Andrew Sledd, and Richard Ohmann, among others, for their refusal to see beyond their own assumptions about the relative value of various approaches to literacy education.
Maas-Feary explores the difference in students' attitudes toward College English, a developmental writing class, and Freshman English, the writing class required for all students at Finger Lakes Community College. Students in College English do not take pride in their work and believe that the class should be easy to pass and Freshman English students take the class seriously and produce thoughtful work. Maas-Feary believes these attitude differences can be attributed to the stigma assigned to College English at her school. She concludes that the instructor needs to infuse the developmental writing class with an attitude of purpose by assigning college-level work that challenges students' views of themselves as well as the class.
Raymond describes the process that he and colleagues from the speech and anthropology departments on a campus with a substantial population of commuter and working students went through to develop and implement a learning community. Raymond discusses how the instructors gathered support and planned their classes and underwent assessment by the college's assessment expert, students, and faculty. He also discusses the assessment tools he and his colleagues used and includes student writing samples and excerpts from his own assessment journal. Raymond concludes that linked courses can help to demonstrate students' reading, writing, and critical thinking abilities and facilitate student retention.
Starting out refers to those "traditional" college students, eighteen to nineteen, who are entering college for the first time; starting over refers to nontraditional students returning to college to complete studies started years in the past or attending college for the first time in search of a new career. A third target audience for the book is basic writers. The book is designed to break away from a skill-and-drill mode of worksheets and "objective" instruments to help students learn how to write better. Unlike other approaches, which publish complete student essays in tandem with "professional" writers' essays, this text employs student writing of various types, lengths, and quality. Uehling uses these assorted texts to illustrate many of her pedagogical points. For instance, that distinctions between modes of discourse are an artificial way of examining composition since, outside of the artificial world of the classroom, few paragraphs and virtually no compositions are written exclusively in one mode. Uehling provides advice to student writers about developing a positive attitude, accepting suggestions, letting go of the text and allowing others to read it, building writer confidence, and allaying fear. Uehling also spends some time discussing "critique anxiety" and ways to overcome this serious impediment to joining the conversation of the classroom (120–22).
Wiley argues that composition studies, and in particular basic writing, can benefit from the present educational reform movement involving learning communities. Practically speaking, learning communities provide environments of peer collaboration and relationship building and can thus facilitate learning and writing development. Moreover, Wiley counters Joseph Harris's conception of the basic writing classroom as a "city" that privileges conflict over consensus and that positions the student as a developing public intellectual. Learning communities help students acquire the "discourse about being a student" (30) through social networks that do not ignore conflict but instead aid students' negotiation of consensus "at [students'] point[s] of need" (31).
Wiley responds to Joseph Harris's critique of "community" in the fall 2001 issue of the Journal of Basic Writing by emphasizing the materiality of learning communities, the need for both dissent and compromise, and the complementary natures of the concepts of community and public. Wiley rejects the notion that community implies a regressive, naïve, or enclosed space. Rather, he argues that communities, especially learning communities, offer new possibilities for thinking, learning, and writing.
See: Joseph Harris, "Beyond Community: From the Social to the Material" [185].
Wilson explores how a shift to an online course has affected her students' work. Faced with poor student retention and pass rates at her urban commuter college, she undertakes a research project that compares the performances of students in two traditional discussion and workshop classes and two computer-intensive classes that used a prototype version of the Interactive English software program. After tracking her students through subsequent writing courses, Wilson found that the discussion and workshop group had higher drop and fail rates and lower pass rates than the computer-intensive group. She attributes these findings to several aspects of computer-intensive environment: it encouraged more stable attendance; it presented new instructional strategies, including writing workshop days, peer review, and increased individual communication; it offered explicit instruction that allows students to work on their own and at their own pace; and it raised expectations or standards that could be supported and upheld. As more classes have begun to use Interactive English, instructors have started to work together on an English Evaluation team that will compare students' writing performance across institutions.
Winslow and Mische describe a thematic course they have developed for at-risk students. The course is centered "around the idea of the hero as one put into a position of difficulty and who must then decide whether to act to overcome obstacles, to establish a new position for himself in society, and perhaps to renew society in the process" (77). Initially, students examine the archetype of the hero by reading Carol Pearson's The Hero Within: Six Archetypes We Live By and Homer's Odyssey. Classes are organized into seminar, large-group lecture, small-group workshop, and tutorial formats, and students are placed in a combination of these types of classes to work on their writing and their understanding of complex texts.