Adler-Kassner argues that some students' issues with the expository essay "extend to a disjuncture between students' own values, reflected in their literacies, and the values and literacy reflected in the shape of the essay itself, as a genre" (86). She traces the history of the form of the expository essay through the work of Progressive Era compositionists like Fred Newton Scott. She notes that while they helped to transform expository writing into an act at least somewhat related to students' experiences, they also insisted that the form (and language) of the essay reflect particular conventions, which themselves reflected particular values of their culture. These conventions and their accompanying values remain intertwined with the expository essay to the current day, but students who do not share these values sometimes have issues with the expository essay for this reason. To make this point, Adler-Kassner examines writing by working-class students and proposes three possible solutions to pedagogical problems arising from this clash between cultures: move toward hybrid texts, design assignments that invite student experience, and allow hybrid language and form into the essay.
Agnew and McLaughlin report on the results of a five-year longitudinal study of sixty-one students originally enrolled in developmental reading and writing classes. The authors followed the academic progress of the students through interviews with the students, interviews with their English instructors, analyses of the students' writing, and analyses of students' academic transcripts. Based on the results of the study, they conclude that the students did not do well overall in college, no matter what their performance was in the developmental English class, but found that African American students did worse than their white counterparts: 57 percent of the white students graduated by the end of the fifth year, but only 22.5 percent of black students graduated within that same time frame. The authors found that students' reading ability was more of a predictive factor than their writing ability in their overall academic success. They also conclude that minority students need more institutional support to be successful at a predominantly white university.
A seven-year longitudinal study that tracked the academic progress of sixty-one basic writers provisionally admitted in 1993 to a rural southeastern regional university found that the basic writing course itself did not negatively affect students' lives as much as the invalid assessment system that framed the program did. Although a poorly designed assessment system is detrimental to any student writer at any level, the results of this study suggest that unreliable and invalid writing assessment may contribute to the widely recognized cycle of academic failure and high attrition rates for black students who, on the basis of one timed, impromptu exit essay, can become trapped in noncredit courses. The subjective nature of creating and scoring single-method holistic essays—an assessment system that lacks conceptual validity and interrater reliability—led to a gate-keeping process that was most damaging to African American basic writers whose home speech is African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Excerpts from students' exit essays and a description of the arbitrariness of one holistic scoring session are included as a possible explanation for why almost twice the percentage of black students (31 percent) as white students (17 percent) did not exit basic writing after four attempts. Four failures to pass the exit essay excluded students from enrolling in any state-supported postsecondary institution for the next three years.
Balester examines the spoken and written discourse of eight Black English Vernacular-speaking African American students at the University of Texas. Although Balester acknowledges a cultural divide between her informants and mainstream academic culture, she does not consider these students disadvantaged or deficient in any way. While she calls on composition teachers to help students learn the conventions of academic discourse, she also calls on academic discourse to change in response to the rhetorically effective practices of students like these because an emphasis on African American rhetoric in the academy "would be an opportunity to expand and enrich our academic discourse that, under a paradigm of white, middle-class, male domination, has traded flexibility for stability and has thus become more rigid than it need be" (159).
The authors work with a variety of populations, including students who speak African American English Vernacular and immigrant and international students, and take "[a shared] interest in helping all [their] students to produce effective and appropriate writing in English for academic contexts and purposes" (26). The authors state that "writers will feel more confident as language-users when their home language is valued and respected" (26). The authors consider the differences between home language and home dialect and suggest how the conditions shift, depending on whether (or to what degree) the home language is considered stigmatized. In addition, the authors point to circumstances when it might be valuable for students to use their home dialects for something not converted into standardized English. They emphasize the significance of inviting students to use their own dialects and the possible consequences of that decision.
Bloom argues that freshman composition addresses a number of the major aspects of social class to get students to write and think as good citizens of the academic community and the workplace. One major reason that freshman composition is the only course required of all students remains its reproduction of middle-class values that are thought to be essential to proper functioning of students in the academy. Bloom likens students in freshman composition to swimmers passing through a chlorine footbath before plunging into the pool. Bloom names self-reliance and responsibility, respectability (middle-class morality), decorum and propriety, moderation and temperance, thrift, efficiency, order, cleanliness, punctuality, delayed gratification, and critical thinking as the hallmarks of middle-class identity. Working-class students are often placed in so-called remedial courses like developmental writing because of an unspoken supposition that they will not be successful in freshman composition classes requiring such virtues. In addition, developmental writing teachers are encouraged to move their students in the direction of these virtues.
This collection of thirty-nine articles provides theory, research, and pedagogy to help language arts teachers use strategies appropriate for black learners at every educational level. An introduction to each of the four sections—"Language," "Reading," "Writing," and "Literature"—gives an overview of the contents within a philosophical and historical context. Each section begins with theory-based articles and concludes with suggested classroom applications. Many of the authors emphasize building on the students' oral language strengths, providing meaningful, sequenced reading and writing assignments relevant to the students' interests, and teaching written standard English during the editing stage of the writing process. Such practices will benefit all students, not just African Americans.
Examining the ways that language affects sex roles, Cochran concentrates on women in English as a second language and basic writing classes. She contends that they are often disadvantaged because they do not possess the language skills that allow them to succeed. In addition, males in these classrooms often make it difficult for women to participate. To facilitate women in ESL and basic writing classrooms, Cochran has four suggestions for teachers: use dramatic scenarios or dialogues, become conscious of the nonverbal communication of the instructor and the student, model the use of nonsexist language, and become familiar with the "literature on the topic of sexism and language" (85).
Coles and Wall discuss a study of students enrolled in a course modeled on the one described in David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky's Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts [177]. Early in the semester, students' responses were typically tied to their understanding of success. They admired those who refused to give up, and they believed education would provide the way to a better life. They treated books as repositories of self-evident facts rather than as arguments constructed by writers to be interpreted by readers. The students "fail[ed] to see . . . how the 'facts' are selected, sorted, and marshaled in the service of particular interests and viewpoints" (302). Later, students were able to identify with the characters' interpretations and explanations of their common experiences and even to move to a recognition of the race, class, gender, and group memberships that might explain the individual's social condition. The students could leave behind a simple identification with the individual and move on to making generalizations across categories. Coles and Wall argue that academic literacy is more than acquiring a set of rhetorical conventions or simply moving from one discourse community to another, and they stress the importance of allowing students to construct their understanding of the texts through their own histories, even if this approach results in conflict.
This study was based on an ethnographic study of three female freshmen who enrolled at City University of New York's Lehman College. Counihan began with high hopes for her subjects, whom she called freshgirls, but she went on to see them fail to pass most of their classes. She wonders why this happened—if the girls failed or if the institution failed them. She centers her study around a description of their classrooms to illuminate the problems facing the freshgirls. Counihan explains the background that produced the freshgirls and the problems that they encountered growing up in one-parent or unsupportive homes. In college, these subjects hoped to find a way into the comforts of the middle class, but none wanted to submit to the workings of their educational institutions to make that happen. Instead, they bucked the system, and their own grades suffered as a result of their nonconformity. The freshgirls did not possess academic literacy, and they resisted their teachers' efforts to educate and engage them. Based on her observations of the freshgirls, Counihan suggests that "we need a serious reassessment of our rigid views of what a college experience 'should' be" (103). She hopes for the adoption of a flexible pedagogy that would hopefully help students like the freshgirls succeed. She concludes her article explaining what has happened to the freshgirls since their semester at Lehman in fall 1995.
Novice writers, particularly those from rural communities attending regional campuses of a state university system, often maintain a separation between "school" knowledge and the knowledge that is valued in their home communities. Asked about their reasons for pursuing higher education, such students frequently speak of the desire for a better-paying job, a better life. Classroom teachers should see their job as expanding that utilitarian agenda, rather than judging it. Engaging novice readers and writers in ethnographic research works against resistance to the learning of the academy by encouraging the students to forge a connection between academic and nonacademic communities. Students speak as authorities about their experiences while they also look at themselves and their communities as subjects for academic research. What students glean from their research can provide them with theories with which to explain and, if they see the need, change the various communities to which they belong.
DiPardo examines the successes and failures of a peer-teaching program at "Dover Park University," a largely white university grappling with issues of racial and cultural equity throughout the campus. She focuses on workshops led by two peer teachers (adjuncts) for students enrolled in a faculty-taught course in basic writing. Through observations, interviews, and teaching logs, DiPardo studies and reports on the dynamics between adjuncts and student writers working together in an intimate workshop setting. The book captures challenges faced by undergraduates who are becoming educators with minimal preparation and pedagogical uncertainty and the development of their teaching self through the day-to-day experiences of working with struggling writers. While she sometimes asserts that both the peer teachers and the university were not curious enough, DiPardo finds that by welcoming equity students and beginning the task of transforming basic writers into mainstream achievers, the students, the teachers, and the institution itself will all be slowly but unquestionably changed.
Dunn presents an overview of current understandings of learning disability theory and a rich discussion about the ways that institutions, writing programs, composition scholars, and faculty privilege certain ways of understanding students' writing problems. Dunn grounds her research in her observations of the extreme difficulty that some students have in learning to use written language proficiently. She notes that composition theory does not fully account for the kinds of errors that some students make, and she suggests that the field has largely ignored neurological causes of writing difficulty and privileged instead research and theory that considers writing difficulty as a primarily socioeconomic challenge. According to Dunn, "[e]ven if only one student— . . . who may have a difference in learning not related to dialect, social class, or educational background—appears in a composition class, the instructor owes it to that student to be informed" (43). The book focuses on perspectives on and controversies about learning disabilities, the ways that composition has understood writing difficulties, multimodal pedagogies for students with learning disabilities, interviews with LD students who describe their frustrations and experiences, and the ways that instructors and administrators can best help LD students demonstrate their intelligence and communicative competence.
Gaskins discusses teaching methods he learned during a week-long training institute at Landmark College, a school for students with learning disabilities. He presents and briefly discusses ten principles that constitute the "Landmark Method" for teaching writing to students with dyslexia, dysgraphia, attention-deficit disorder, and other learning disabilities. Approaches are phrased as imperatives ("exploit the inter-relatedness of reading, writing, speaking, and listening"; "foster metacognition"; "teach to the student's strengths and accommodate learning styles"). Citing the institute's training materials, Gaskins suggests ways that these principles can translate into specific classroom practices.
Gilyard and Richardson survey the core ideas of the 1974 "Students' Right to Their Own Language" (SRTOL) resolution and contend that empirical models of how to implement SRTOL pedagogically are needed. The authors offer a model in the form of a study conducted by Richardson, designed to evaluate the practicality of using SRTOL principles to teach academic writing to African American students who are placed into basic writing. The study asked "to what extent African American speech styles can be instrumental to the development of critical academic writing" (39). Richardson designed and taught a basic writing course focusing on Afrocentric topics and African American rhetoric. Drawing on a modified version of Geneva Smitherman's 1994 typology of black discourse features, the authors perform quantitative and qualitative analyses of forty-seven student essays from this course to conclude that "making the African American rhetorical tradition the centerpiece of attempts to teach academic prose to African American students, especially those characterized as basic writers . . . increase[s] the likelihood that they will develop into careful, competent, critical practitioners of the written word" (50).
Mainstreamed writing courses are especially suitable for returning adults at the City College of New York Center for Worker Education. As is often the case in similar programs, the Center for Worker Education aims to speed up students' academic progress with convenient schedules, life experience credits, and no remedial classes. At the center, all students are placed directly into credit-bearing courses, regardless of their skills or test scores. The curriculum for a first-year writing course is designed for students who have highly diverse competencies. This curriculum features sequenced multitask assignments that offer appropriate challenges for strong students and opportunities to experience success for weaker writers. Students' oral-language fluencies are the foundation for assignments such as interviewing and ethnographic research. Two case studies illustrate the benefits of this curriculum for one weak student and one strong student. Both students wrote ethnographic research reports in the same course, and both experienced growth as writers and success in the classroom.
Gunner and McNenny present their differing views of the 1997 Conference on College Composition and Communication Conference on Basic Writing preconference workshop. Gunner discusses her opinion of how mainstreaming effects educators and students of basic writing. For her, the role of the workshop was to provide "professional synthesis" (4). Mainstreaming basic writers into composition programs motivates writing program administrators to take the students into consideration, lifting the status of basic writing professionally. McNenny focuses on the role of class as a "site of struggle" (7) for regaining "a sense of empowerment" (7). Noting that the existence of class tends to be denied in American culture and that basic writers want to believe the mythology of classless equality, she expresses the need for basic writing teachers to encourage students to scrutinize the class system and its assumptions.
Contemporary theories of writing, such as those of Gloria Anzaluda, Mike Rose, and many others, celebrate the idea that writing takes place at a site of painful yet constructive tension between the academy and the student's original culture. Nevertheless, much basic writing instruction still centers on the relatively isolated mastery of "skills" and discursive conventions, thus failing to acknowledge the inevitable process of ideological repositioning implied in poststructuralist models of language. Lu examines the roots of the basic writing movement that followed the introduction of open admissions at City University of New York to historicize the conceptual role of conflict and struggle in the writings of numerous educators, including Kenneth Bruffee, Thomas Farrell, and Mina Shaughnessy. In the 1970s, the arguments of other thinkers and writers—Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and W. E. B. Dubois—contextualized the emergence of basic writing instruction as a discipline. Only by accepting conflict and struggle as important parts of the scene of composition can basic writing teachers hope to empower their students to make an authentic move toward the rhetorical position that Anzaluda characterizes as the "borderlands."
Adult learners generally have experience, training, and knowledge but may be labeled "basic" if they lack knowledge valued within academia. Furthermore, they frequently have not "named" or "claimed" their own knowledge (4). To bring together her own students' knowledge and academic ways of knowing, Marinara designed a basic writing class that focused on work. Marinara argues that such reflexive curricula can help students to construct "political identities" (14) that "can take action in the world" (14) and that if universities integrate students' own "outside" literacies with academic literacy, what is considered to be academic literacy will change.
McCrary offers a model and a rationale for analyzing womanist sermons in writing classrooms. Womanist theologians construct sermons that reinterpret biblical texts, utilize standard and nonstandard rhetoric, and challenge white male-oriented interpretations. The sermons are examples of intracultural rhetoric that employs traditional African American rhetorical effects to achieve their goals of empowerment among a primarily African American audience. In this sense, they are intended not to cross cultural boundaries but to operate within the African American community, challenging the multiple oppressions that women of color face. Other-literate students (whom McCrary describes as literate in discourses other than standard) especially benefit from the culturally hybrid structures of womanist sermons because they can recognize rhetorical maneuvers that are rooted in nonmainstream cultures. McCrary's analysis of his class's discussions of womanist sermons and of examples of student-generated "secular sermons" shows how using intracultural rhetoric draws on and expands students' abilities to interpret and produce both standard and nonstandard texts.
Deromanticizing the notion of a multicultural classroom as one full of exotic voices, Newton's experiences in a Brooklyn open-enrollment university increased his awareness of the confessional discourse that developmental writers produce. When Newton asked his students to "write about a turning point in their lives" and to include only examples they would be comfortable sharing with him and the rest of the class, they wrote detailed accounts of their families' painful struggles with poverty and disease. He defines developmental students as having histories that have caused them to create academic personas separate from their authentic selves because "The weight of institutional authority had superseded the reservations they had about revealing the intimate details of their lives" (par. 21). Thus, his example serves as a call for teachers to recognize these students' perceptions of the academy and to discover their students' histories so that they do not assume or underestimate the narratives they will produce. Newton also warns against critical pedagogies that ask for such writing because he believes that there is a "very real danger, indeed likelihood of objectifying them, and by doing so dehumanizing the very people we are claiming to serve" (par. 26).
Norment examines whether and how culture-referenced topics effect the writing of eleventh- and twelfth-grade African American students in response to an urban university placement exam. In this study, culture-referenced refers to any topic or prompt that incorporates values, attitudes, and information relevant to African American culture. Further, the topics incorporate a combination of culturally, socially, linguistically, and historically determined aspects of African American culture. The study considers both the overall quality of writing produced by students (for example, its development, content, usage, and mechanics) and the syntactic complexity, organization, and length of resulting essays. Trained raters scored 711 essays holistically, and the essays of 25 students were analyzed using an analytical scale measuring the number of words, sentences, and paragraphs; average words per sentence and paragraph; and number of sentences per paragraph. Norment concludes that culture-referenced topics do, in fact, elicit essays of higher quality and should therefore be considered in the development and implementation of writing pedagogies, curricula, and assessment measures.
This germinal essay introduces the term contact zone, which has seen widespread use and application in postcolonial and cultural studies, among other fields. Pratt defines contact zones as "social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today" (34). Pratt's essay discusses the bilingual literacy and biculturalism of fifteenth-century Incan Guaman Poma, whose twelve-hundred-page letter to the king of Spain chronicles and critiques the Spanish presence in Peru. Pomo's text is an "autoethnographic" text, "a text in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them" (35). These texts often speak from the margins of cultures. Pratt also discusses the ethnographic term transculturation, noting that the term "describe[s] processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture" (36). Many composition theorists have invoked these terms in discussions of disempowered student writers, including basic writing students. Pratt acknowledges that our best opportunities for teaching and learning may take place in the contact zones. The pedagogical arts of the contact zone, based upon cultural mediation, must be developed.
Instead of defining the basic writer, which usually only generalizes or oversimplifies the complex situations of basic writers, we should begin to examine our intentions and methods as teachers of basic writing, especially the work we do with at-risk students, those lower-level basic writers whose reading and writing practices are shaped by social and cultural forces that create problems outside writing. The case study of Javier represents "the multitude of idiosyncratic factors which may influence our students' feelings and behaviors" (101) about reading, writing, and learning. Moreover, the study suggests that "failure" may not be a student's fault at all. Rather, the "problem may lie more significantly on the approach to teaching and the assumptions behind it" (113). This article suggests that the number of at-risk students will continue to grow as America becomes more diversely populated and that our approaches and assumptions must be reflected upon and revised according to the needs of at-risk students like Javier.
Richardson explores what it would mean to center African American rhetorics and discourses in individual writing classrooms and in composition curricula at large. She argues, that African American students are attempting to learn in an educational system that is still dominated by American standardized English and by the cultural hierarchy that it symbolizes and reinforces. Richardson draws on educational research and the rich history of African American rhetorics to explain how students of African American heritage use African American Vernacular English as a "technology" through which to learn and utilize other languages and literacies, including college-level critical literacies. Because African American students are overrepresented in basic writing courses, Richardson argues that teachers of basic writing need to learn and teach the history and linguistic features of AAVE rhetorics and discourses in their writing classrooms. Richardson contends that, "for the most part, America continues to teach us to accept the status of lower achievement for Black students as the norm. Under the present system, we are set in motion to replicate the paradigm and the results" (8).
This essay collection discusses the theory and practice of teaching writing in an environment that embraces multiculturalism and views writing as an artifact of both personal and cultural expression. The conflict and cooperation between academic discourse and multicultural student discourses are explored through essays that address linguistics, literacy studies, and English as a second language students and their teachers. Essays are grouped into four sections: "Linguistic and Cultural Diversity," "The Roles of Teachers and Texts," "ESL Students in Multicultural Classrooms," and "Social and Pedagogical Tensions."
In this collection of twenty-one original essays by working-class academics, the common goal was to uncover unspoken class suppositions and strictures at play in the culture of academe. The authors offer a book that focuses on how social class shapes the ways teachers work in their classrooms, while the individual essays approach this topic from differing theoretical positions, subject positions, and socioeconomic realities. Essays address issues connected with the role of working-class affiliation in academe, the inattention to class in course content, and the ways that composition is seen in some English departments as "second class" or "service."
Soliday describes efforts to help students understand that language can help to shape reality in addition to conveying information about that reality. While working on a pilot project at the City College of New York, where as many as sixteen languages may be spoken within a single classroom, Soliday and partner Barbara Gleason developed the Enrichment Approach to Language and Literacy. Soliday concludes by explaining her goals for first-year writing courses, one of which is for her students to become researchers of their own language. Only by doing so, according to Soliday, will her students develop a fully literate attitude about language and its usage.
Laying the groundwork for a discussion from a Conference on Basic Writing workshop, Tate posits four theses: social class has usually been ignored by compositionists and academics in general; this neglect appears to be ending; this neglect must end if we hope to reach all of our students; and we must address our own class status before we can fully address class with our students. McMillan shares his own class narrative to demonstrate the fluidity and complexity of class and the need for storytelling, for "[t]o unstory class is to cease to talk about class" (19). Woodworth recalls the "teaching" portion of the workshop, including the writing prompt given to participants and the written response of one participant. She then reflects on this response, as well as the responses of others during the ensuing discussion, and concludes by stressing the importance of connecting "class-talk" with teaching as a way to alleviate students' feelings of alienation and as a means to give them a safe place to grow as writers.
Thurston asserts that while the attrition rate is high, "most Navajo dropouts are not academic failures" (264). She identifies five barriers to success that are faced by Navajo college students and offers suggestions to non-Navajo instructors for how to ease those barriers. First, Navajo students often face financial difficulties, so instructors should be sensitive to economic hardships that may not be apparent. Second, Navajo cultural traditions dictate extensive family responsibilities, so instructors should have flexible attendance and due-date policies. Third, Navajo students might be bilingual or speak a nonstandard dialect of American English, so instructors should educate themselves about the Navajo language and understand that learning Standard American English may be a long-term project for these students. Fourth, Navajo value systems and communication styles differ from European Americans', so instructors should educate themselves about Navajo history, culture, traditional practices, and politics, as well as Navajo conversational conventions, rhetorical style, use of silence, noncompetitive approaches to problem solving, and so on. Fifth, ambivalence toward Western-style education may cause students to underperform, so instructors should be sensitive to Navajos' distrust of the dominant culture and its education system.
Troyka argues for support for the challenges that are faced by the nontraditional student in the college writing class. She describes the challenges in terms of positive legacies: students' gregarious and social natures, their comfort with and enthusiasm for oral communication, their holistic thinking patterns, and their ambivalence about learning (particularly that they want to learn but do not know how they feel about the changes that learning will bring to their lives). Troyka reminds readers that these strengths and talents can lead to good self-directed writing. Her strategies and perspectives fit all levels of writing courses; she provides excellent evidence for a constructionist classroom philosophy.
Nontraditional and at-risk students are participating members of our communities, yet because they are also often part of marginalized and oppressed groups, they are not "allowed" the full benefits of literacy. Even with the recent debates surrounding literacy education, these particular students are still being given their identities by teachers and educational institutions. To realize the power of literacy, students should be encouraged to engage in acts of self-determination when reading and writing texts. True literacy comes out of an understanding of the relationship between individual, textual, and cultural selves. This connection is important because literacy is a nationally forged concept and an identity marker of valued citizenship.
In response to the growing diversity in higher education, instructors need to reconceptualize academic discourse and acknowledge multiple types of literacy and approaches to learning. Students' backgrounds and previous knowledge are important resources. In classrooms where students and teachers of various languages and cultures connect, there is the potential for growth and transformation of the academy. Zamel and Spack advocate for an expanded, pluralistic definition of literacy and challenge assumptions regarding academic discourse. They point to the need for "a dynamic process of negotiation, involving both adaptation and resistance" (xii) between teachers and students. The book includes twenty-two previously published readings that address these issues from various fields—such as composition, English as a second language, anthropology, literature, and education—presented in chronological order, beginning with Mina P. Shaughnessy's "Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing" [69] and Mike Rose's "The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University" [29]. The included essays discuss the process of writing and constructing an identity in more than one culture, explore issues of language and power, examine definitions of literacy, critique academic discourse, and challenge exclusionary notions of what academic literacy and discourse are.