Response to “On the Academic Magins: Basic Writing Pedagogy”

America, as the story goes, is the land of opportunity for all peoples, and in today’s high-skilled world, postsecondary education has become the go-to gateway for that truism. Of course, with opportunity comes the potential failure. Survival of the fittest. Not everyone is going to make the basketball team or live off their own business, and the higher we go in education, the more this fact becomes apparent. The real issue comes in when we ask ourselves if this proposition is on even ground for everyone in college. Because though every classmate deals with the same requirements, none of them came from equal financial, cultural, or educational backgrounds, and though ignored by some, I feel this is the issue that basic writing pedagogy takes on. During my relatively limited experience as a tutor and educator, finding a way to “catch up” basic writers have been my most disheartening experiences in the field. They often want to work so hard to be the academic writer, and I don’t know what issues to address first, when to step back from their writing process, and when to cut the strings entirely. Mina Shaughnessy, the god mother of this pedagogy, asks how much society is willing to pay to salvage itself. To this I say we must pay as much as it takes to even the playing field in money, but the real question to me comes when I wonder how far should we as teachers go to achieve this, especially when the difference cultural inflections come into writing.

Despite some cultural issues I had with the essay, I admired what this pedagogy stood for at its core: Treating the outsider as a writer with different experience and experiences, and not as a remedial case. Remedial is a dirty word in this essay, and I can’t blame them for that. The more I learn about these pedagogies, the more my find that writing is a psychological battle as much as anything else. By default, students in a basic writing classroom don’t consider themselves good writers. Rather than grammar drills, though, it’s more important to get them into the rhetorical aspects of writing, especially in filling the deficiencies of analysis and synthesis. They need to feel like they are part of the academic life, and they need to feel like they are an active participant of the Burkean parlor.

I’ve recently begun teaching Image Analysis in Scott Weeden’s W131 class, and I’ve been learning and re-learning the dialectical segment of this pedagogy a good bit. While I encouraged discussion of selected ads (that they got to choose from on my PowerPoint), I would find myself going into a directive-mode of speaking more times than I liked. I learned to back off more in the second class that day, but I still know I could have done more to involve the class in the work. A good example of this was when I told the class what we’d be doing for class the following week. A better way of going about it was to ask them what we’d being doing for Tuesday, and then clear up any holes they have. It mirrors the teacher’s responsibility to understand the writer’s grammar logic, but it’s the same for any part of the class. Get a discussion going, and then ask how it could relate to the assignment. Let the realization come to the students and their writing will come out stronger every time.

This pedagogy also addresses one of my biggest challenges with basic writing students: Revising papers written in the voice of a student’s dialect. During the Indiana Teachers of Writing Conference, I attended the Different Voices in the Writing Classroom workshop. There were some guiding principles for keeping language diversity in the classroom, such as accepting all languages as valuable and meaningful, and inviting students’ home languages into the classroom. In smaller groups we reviewed papers written by such students. The teacher who was working with him in the writing center said she didn’t know what to do with him. He was from Jamaica, but had spent some time in America as child. Unfortunately, he went back home just when he was adjusting to the American public school system, and didn’t come back until he was an adult. His essay, “My First Writing as a Child” was wonderful and tragic. If it was taken line-by-line and put into poetry, it would have worked itself into a rhythmic conversation. But it was an essay, and he was writing how he talked: Flighty yet descriptive, cheery yet unorganized. There were no lead-ins, no topic sentences, bad spelling, bad grammar, and no grounding of the audience. It was beautiful on its own merits, but as an academic essay it was almost beyond repair.

The instance calls back what Mary Epes discovered about basic writers: They are unable to perceive errors on the page. Unfortunately, there were no writing specialists available to help the Jamaican writer find the logic behind his errors, much less spend time understanding the academic format and voicing in papers. There were people in my group that said besides surface cleaning of grammar, the paper was fine, and we had no right to infringe on his manner of speaking. This bothered me greatly, as I saw writing effectively as writing that reached out to many people. This meant writing in the manner most people would understand and respect, which this paper had not reached yet, especially if the audience for this paper was for his professor. I also added in the group to what would occur when he wrote a cover letter or business letter to an employer. It was a discussion that gave me more questions than answers on balancing culture with academia’s expectations, and it didn’t give me much time to write in my notes. However, I did write one line that still sums up my feelings about the experience: Expressing yourself only goes so far.

However, the workshop also showed me that there were ways to involve students’ home lives into their writing while not letting go of assignment requirements. One of Scott Weeden’s students wrote a paper about questioning faith in God in the voice of his grandfather, then in the academic voice, and then an analysis of both. The first part is stream-of-speaking dialogue of the grandfather with punctuation and paragraphing, and I could really tell the writer was trying to channel his grandfather’s Southern mannerisms and sayings. In the analysis he wrote about how he asked his mother for help in describing what kind of person the grandfather was, as well as him realizing how much society judges us on our vocabulary. It strikes a fine compromise of culture/college language, and I’d like to incorporate it into my own classroom one day.

But on this issues of cultural linguistics in writing, I found myself siding with David Bartholomae more than anyone else. That may seem odd, since I mentioned earlier some people ignore political and cultural aspects of student writers and Bartholmae seems to throw in with that lot. But the difference is that Bartholomae and his colleagues isn’t trying to transport students from their cultures’ linguistic rules -- they’re just making them more comfortable as academic writers. I took umbrage with Tom Fox’s view that this was enforcing a neoconservative view of literacy; literacy is a craft as much as an art, and like any craft, one must conform to the rules and skills before they can stand out in their chosen field.

I readily admit I am part of the “dominant culture” of college -- a white, middle-class male, and that gives me privileges in life that I often don’t see. But what would happen if the college had a new dominant culture to it? What kind of curriculum and lessons of rhetoric would change? It’s hard to look into the future, but I would venture to say the core goals of the disciplines would be the same, but the methods may change, just as if another culture took over an automobile plant both in the assembly line and in management. In the end, everyone in the factory is still making cars.

Basic writers, if they come from a minority dialect, will probably have to change the way they write to reach a higher level of discourse. And that’s okay. I often told my tutees and students that there is a writing voice and a talking voice, and the former is often more formal because we’re not always sure who’s going to read it, but also because of the social expectations. I tell them how in my town, people would say “you’uns” (a variation of “ya’ll”), but I wouldn’t put that word in my paper, as it could exclude audiences not from my region. But basic writers can be academic people and still have their culture intact. Scott Weeden’s example essay and the other assignments in the essay show this again and again; our culture is our rhetorical resource and our special angle of vision, but for a cogent university dialogue, we must reach at least a middle ground in everyone’s academic lexicon.

I realize this view may come off as a little hardline, but this essay does make me want to consider the views and experiences of people “outside the margins” more than ever. I’d really like to read some comments from the people on this blog to widen my perspective on this issue of different cultures in basic writing, even if they are just personal stories. No matter what, I think we can all agree that we need to get rid of the stigma of the remedial class in the student’s eyes and turn it into a place of empowerment for everyone in attendance.