Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives
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Exploring Composition Studies: Sites, Issues, Perspectives
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781607326298 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Utah State University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/03/2016 |
| Edition description: | 1 |
| Pages: | 300 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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EXPLORING COMPOSITION STUDIES
Sites, Issues, and PerspectivesBy KELLY RITTER PAUL KEI MATSUDA
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2012 University Press of ColoradoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87421-882-4
Chapter One
CREATION MYTHS AND FLASH POINTSUnderstanding Basic Writing through Conflicted Stories
Linda Adler-Kassner and Susanmarie Harrington
By now there is a well-developed literature attesting to the importance of stories—of narrative—for the development of institutional, cultural, and organizational identities. Texts from a diversity of fields, from organizational behavior and management (e.g., Brown et al. 2005) to historiography (Noble) to documentary studies (Coles) to our own field of composition (Rose, Lives on the Boundary; The Mind at Work; Ede, Situating Composition), document the power of stories to shape peoples' understandings. This includes (but is not limited to) understandings of a number of relationships: between people and their articulation of understandings; between different ideas about a common subject; between understandings and larger issues of interest or relevance for the subject(s) under discussion.
As a field, basic writing is in many ways defined by the stories that researchers, teachers, and institutions have told about teachers and the students that populate basic writing classes. These stories are located not only in the anecdotes shared at conferences, on e-mail discussion lists, or in teacher lounges, but also in the scholarship of basic writing itself. Scholarship, as well as public discussions in the news and among policy makers, promotes narratives about students and teachers. Academic studies depend on assumptions about the roles students and teachers play, their motivations, and their backgrounds. To understand the scholarship, we must understand the narratives the scholarship conveys. Student placement, for instance, extends from (and tends to perpetuate) a combination of narratives about what literacies they should have developed before arriving at college and what they will be expected to do upon arrival. The content of basic writing courses tends to reflect stories about what students should know to be ready for "regular" composition classes (just as the content of first-year composition more generally tends to reflect stories about what students should know to succeed in more advanced courses across campus). The relationships between definitions of basic writing and basic writers, institutional contexts, and local systems (such as placement and classes) are themselves situated within broader narratives about the purpose of higher education in American culture.
In some situations and circumstances, these identity-forming narratives are relatively stable. When they are connected to basic writing, however, they are considerably less so. Reviewing the literature in basic writing published in the last thirty years reveals a series of break points in stories that have been told about students, instructors, and the purpose of basic writing classes. At each of these points, there is tension in the scholarship about the narrative of basic writing, and these tensions have considerable consequence for the field's very meaning. Basic writing, however defined and however situated, is always a political act, and the stories that shape it have significant implications for students, the institutions they attend, and the culture(s) in which those students participate and, ideally, make greater contributions to once they graduate.
Here, we focus on two overarching themes in basic writing that reverberate in these break points: political sensitivities and origin myths. Specifically, we examine three moments of tension around stories that are seen as central to basic writing's identity and purpose: the discussion, in the early 1990s, about Mina Shaughnessy's work as a founding figure and icon in basic writing; the debate, from the early 1970s forward, about the purpose of basic writing and the movement toward mainstreaming efforts; and recent revisions to the presumed history and origins of basic writing. Each of these moments of tension addresses the fundamental nature of the field, and thus the study of these moments provides a comprehensive overview of the themes that have driven basic writing forward. For a more exhaustive summary of individual works in the field, we refer readers to Laura Gray-Rosendale's Rethinking Basic Writing; our own Basic Writing as a Political Act; and Kelly Ritter's Before Shaughnessy. We focus here on these break points in order to provide a framework for understanding key moments in the movement of conceptions of students, instructors, and programs that extend from the notion of "basic writer" and "basic writing."
As we look at basic writing through these particular moments in time, we emphasize the ways each break point involves competing frames of the story of basic writing. In each break point, conflict emerged because differing viewpoints constructed alternative narratives about basic writing and basic writers. These passionate narratives, complete with villains and heroes, victims and oppressors, locate basic writing in different settings. They differ in the agency assigned to writers and teachers, and thus describe the problems basic writing addresses. Conflict over these narratives emerged as scholars sought to define basic writing. While it is a running academic joke that faculty conflicts are so impassioned precisely because the stakes are so low, in basic writing scholarship, there is an acute awareness of the high stakes. Basic-writing programs are seen as crucial to the success of the academy's most vulnerable writers, and those vulnerable writers often emerge from underrepresented social groups. For the advocates of mainstreaming basic writing, for the advocates of separate basic-writing and tutoring programs, for the advocates of basic writing via enhanced or innovative curriculum structures, the stakes were seen as very high: the promise of higher education for the nation.
BASIC WRITING'S ORIGIN STORIES
Any creation story addresses questions such as "Who am I? "Who made me?" and "Why am I here?" for the purpose of providing inspiration or guidance in the present. Fractures in the story, then, create problems: the past becomes an unreliable guide for current actions. In the same way, stories about basic writing's purpose and its intended audience (especially in the context of institutional and political turbulence) disrupt the flow of a steady story about progress. If there is dissensus about purpose and audience, how can we see that we have moved from X to Y to accomplish goal Z? Indeed, these break points reflect tensions in basic writing—and tensions in the larger society about the purpose of higher education—regarding the very purpose of basic-writing programs. Those associated with basic writing, often working in marginalized parts of the university, have an enormous investment in creating basic-writing stories that offer them—and us—a role that makes a difference. Precisely because of the personal investment in these stories, disruptions are threats. Basic writing, however practiced and theorized, sees itself as the protector of students who are beginning careers as college writers, seeking to create better personal opportunities. Threats to the basic-writing narrative thus become threats to basic-writing students. At each break point, then, fears for students dominate. Without the safety offered by a coherent and successful story, basic writers' access to instruction is threatened.
Swirling around the political sensitivities work is the sense of origin. Creation myths serve, in part, to empower those who come after, and basic-writing creation myths have served to inspire generations of teachers (often working in poor material conditions). Debates about Mina Shaughnessy's role in basic writing have been fierce. First represented as the brave leader in the establishment of basic writing, Shaughnessy was transformed from a scholar-teacher to an icon. Following that transformation, Shaughnessy-as-icon became the subject of critique in work by Min-Zhan Lu and Jeanne Gunner. These critiques of Shaughnessy have opened up debates on the function and history of the basic-writing movement in America.
Shaughnessy is remembered as the founding editor of Journal of Basic Writing and the CUNY faculty member who led the writing program through CUNY's open admissions experience. Even today, almost fifty years after that movement, she remains the best-known figure in basic writing. Shaughnessy's prowess as a teacher, administrator, and colleague had a powerful influence on the emerging field of basic writing. Her Errors and Expectations (1977) articulated a powerful argument on behalf of CUNY's basic-writing students. Adrienne Rich (then an adjunct faculty member at CUNY) called Errors and Expectations a "moving" book. In her blurb on the back of the book, Rich notes that Shaughnessy's work "reminds us, as we may still need reminding, that student and teacher in a Basic Writing course are not adversaries but natural allies, joined in a common cause against the waste of intelligence."
Shaughnessy's career, cut short by her early death, has come to symbolize basic writing itself. Shaughnessy became a symbol or icon of the passionate teacher working in the trenches. Errors and Expectations was cast as the text that founded the field of basic-writing studies, and by extension Shaughnessy herself came to function as an authorial icon. As Jeanne Gunner explained, the actual Mina Shaughnessy transformed into "Mina Shaughnessy" (the author figure), "someone who is 'not just the author of [her] own works [but someone who has] produced something else: the possibilities and the rules of formation of other texts'" ("Iconic Discourse," 28). Shaughnessy's authorial status has held up over time. Although her popularity in the larger field of composition studies has waned somewhat—of the roughly 380 references to her work in JSTOR since 1960, about 40 percent occurred between 1980 and 1989, and they have markedly fallen off since 2000—Shaughnessy remains a touchstone for basic-writing references. Most issues of JBW still contain several articles citing Shaughnessy. As Jeanne Gunner notes, though, references to Shaughnessy "speak of the field as having been founded, developed, popularized by, or identified with Mina Shaughnessy." Errors and Expectations is typically cited "foundationally, rather than noted for particular conceptual attribution" (29). Shaughnessy's assertions about students and teachers, articulated in a particular moment in CUNY history, have to some extent become a foundational philosophy of the field.
Errors and Expectations, along with other publications by Shaughnessy such as "Diving In," a 1976 article published in CCC and reprinted in Victor Villanueva's Cross-Talk in Comp Theory (both first and second editions, 1997 and 2003 respectively), made several assertions about students in basic-writing classes. As Shaughnessy's work circulated after its publication, these rapidly moved from assertions to assumptions, essential elements of the story of basic writing about students in these classes and the instructors who taught them.
The first of these assumptions was that
basic writers write the way they do, not because they are slow or non-verbal, indifferent to or incapable of academic excellence, but because they are beginners and must, like all beginners, learn by making mistakes. These they make aplenty and for such a variety of reasons that the inexperienced teacher is almost certain to see nothing but a chaos of error when he first encounters their papers. Yet a closer look will reveal very little that is random or "illogical" in what they have written. And the keys to their development as writers often lie hidden in the very features of their writing that English teachers have been trained to brush aside with a marginal code letter or a scribbled injunction to "Proofread!" (Shaughnessy, Errors and Expectations 3)
Errors and Expectations moved from this assumption to take a long, slow look at students' writing, analyzing the domains of error that may confound readers. Shaughnessy offered readers a combination of teaching strategies, attitude adjustments, and commentary on the attitudes that students bring to basic-writing classes that affect their responses to writing instruction. In the process, the book also established advanced additional assumptions that rapidly became part of basic writing's fundamental story: that students entering the academy are coming to a new land with which they are unfamiliar, and that the job of the basic-writing instructor is to diligently help students find their way in this strange new world. Shaughnessy famously characterized basic writing as "very much of a frontier, unmapped, except for a scattering of impressionistic articles and a few blazed trails that individual teachers propose through their texts" (4). Shaughnessy's vision argued for the settlement of this frontier territory by students and teachers who would essentially remake higher education. The closing chapter of Errors and Expectations brought together the two pieces of this story, cautioning readers that writing is always in progress. "Few people, even the most accomplished of writers, would say that they always write as well as they can. Writing is something writers are always learning to do" (276). The book noted that basic-writing students are "a unique group from whom we have already learned much and from whom we can learn much more in the years ahead" (291). Most importantly, Shaughnessy contended that the presence of basic writers calls on higher education to reexamine itself. "Colleges must be prepared to make more than a graceless and begrudging accommodation to [bw students'] unpreparedness, opening their doors with one hand and then leading students into an endless corridor of remedial anterooms with the other" (293).
Working from assumptions about students, Errors and Expectations outlined practices for teachers to follow. Shaughnessy's approach to language was partly social—she conceded that students had to navigate "different pressures and codes" as they navigated through different situations. In the story constructed through her writing, she expressed her belief that the presence of errors in students' written texts propelled misperceptions of those students. Thus, Shaughnessy says in the introduction to Errors and Expectations that she chose to focus on formal elements of writing as a step toward disrupting those larger, socially constructed, misconceptions (6). Her work suggests that while she did not perceive academic language to be superior to other registers, she believed that students needed to participate in the dominant language of the academy if they were to be seen as successful (10, 121). This accounts for the focus of Errors and Expectations—readers who approach the book now may be surprised to find how many chapters are devoted to what might seem like surface features of writing.
Shaughnessy's interest in error and its reception did not overly narrow her focus on language, for she further assumed that that an attention to form should be accompanied by an attention to the emotional and psychological aspects of writing. She acknowledged the potentially enormous psychological leap involved in participating in this language as well, noting that "by the time he reaches college, the BW student both resents and resists his vulnerability as a writer. He is aware that he leaves a trail of errors behind him when he writes. He can usually think of little else while he is writing. But he doesn't know what to do about it" (Errors and Expectations 7). Shaughnessy noted that the BW student may start in a "linguistically barren situation," having been "systematically isolated as a writer both from his own response as a thinker and speaker and from the resources of others" (82). Language and thinking can be separated for Shaughnessy, in a way that would seem problematic for theorists two decades later.
While Errors and Expectations acted as a seminal text for basic-writing instructors, in the mid- to late 1980s teacher-researchers began to question elements of the story reflected in Shaughnessy's assumptions about students and writing and the practices she outlined extending from those assumptions. Min-Zhan Lu, in two separate articles (one in College English, "Conflict and Struggle," and one in the Journal of Basic Writing, "Redefining the Legacy of Mina Shaughnessy") argued that Shaughnessy, self-consciously involved in a struggle to establish basic writing as a legitimate field of inquiry and basic writers as legitimate college students, was naturally drawn to narratives that cast basic writers as students who are ambivalent about college culture. Thus Lu explains Shaughnessy's interest in formal aspects of language could be controlled and managed as part of an assimilationist project that would move basic writers into the academy.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from EXPLORING COMPOSITION STUDIES by KELLY RITTER PAUL KEI MATSUDA Copyright © 2012 by University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Foreword: Defining Composition Studies … Again, and Again Andrea A. Lunsford viii
Introduction: How Did We Get Here? Kelly Ritter Paul Kei Matsuda 1
I The State of the Field(S)
1 Creation Myths and Flash Points: Understanding Basic Writing through Conflicted Stories Linda Adler-Kassner Susanmarie Harrington 13
2 Teaching Composition in the Multilingual World: Second Language Writing in Composition Studies Paul Kei Matsuda 36
3 Remapping Professional Writing: Articulating the State of the Art and Composition Studies Tim Peeples Bill Hart-Davidson 52
4 Writing Center Scholarship: A "Big Cross-Disciplinary Tent" Lauren Fitzgerald 73
5 WAC's Disappearing Act Rita Malenczyk 89
6 Scholarly Positions in Writing Program Administration Jeanne Gunner 105
II Innovations, Advancements, and Methodologies
7 Reimagining the Nature of FYC Trends in Writing-about-Writing Pedagogies Doug Downs Elizabeth Wardle 123
8 Transfer, Portability, Generalization: (How) Does Composition Expertise "Carry"? Christiane Donahue 145
9 Writing Assessment in the Early Twenty-first Century: A Primer Kathleen Blake Yancey 167
10 Studying Literacy in Digital Contexts: Computers and Composition Studies Gail E. Hawisher Cynthia L. Selfe 188
11 "What Goes On Here?": The Uses of Ethnography in Composition Studies Elizabeth Chiseri-Strater 199
12 Archival Research in the Field of Rhetoric and Composition Barbara L'Eplattenier Lisa S. Mastrangelo 211
13 Writing Pedagogy Education: Instructor Development in Composition Studies Heidi Estrem E. Shelley Reid 223
Afterword: Redefining the Ineffable-Or, Creating Scholarly Presence and a Usable Future: An Editor's Perspective Deborah H. Holdstein 241
Works Cited 247
Index 274
About the Authors 277