Basic Writing. George Otte
reached a kind of adolescence, BW was rejecting as well as embracing influences. One was computer-assisted instruction (CAI), which had seemed to hold almost utopian promise in its early days: the labor-intensive work of teaching BW students (especially about matters of grammar) seemed susceptible to a benign form of automation. By the end of the decade, however, Stephen Bernhardt and Patricia Wojahn would note in their overview of “Computers and Writing Instruction” that, despite this start in CAI, especially for practice with grammar, “growth in computer use has largely been away from drill and practice toward uses as either heuristic devices or simply tools for writing.” They approvingly cite an earlier overview, Mark S. Tucker’s “Computers in the Schools” (1985), as being acute enough to register “the growing recognition that the machine is most appropriately used as a tool—as a word processor, a graphics process, a spreadsheet, or a database” (165–66).
A much greater disappointment was the growing realization that BW research was having relatively little impact on BW instruction. Nothing crystallized this more devastatingly than Joseph Trimmer’s 1987 JBW article “Basic Skills, Basic Writing, Basic Research.” It addressed the question of why, in spite of the efforts of BW researchers, sentence skills approaches still seemed to have hegemony (at least if one judged by textbooks available at the time). Building on research by Robert Connors (“Basic Writing Textbooks”), Trimmer surveyed 900 colleges and universities and interviewed editors at a score of publishing houses. Though it would be easy to blame the publishers for this sorry state of affairs, Trimmer’s research told a different story, an appalling one of confusion, demoralization, and apathy. Trimmer asked how the surveyed institutions identified basic writers: “The 900 respondents reported 700 different ways to identify such students” (4). His results included the revelation that 70 percent of BW faculty were not professors but graduate students and adjuncts. And he found the editors of the publishing houses no less dismayed than he was by the failure of textbooks to keep pace with research: “These editors know what kind of books they should be selling, but they also know what kind of books sell” (6). Ultimately, Trimmer found BW faculty themselves the real obstacle to effective BW pedagogy, giving him another problem to puzzle through. Why should this be the case? “The simplest answer, of course, is that given the training, the incentives, and political status of these teachers, they see no reason to invest more of themselves than they already have in remedial English” (7).
The implication in Trimmer’s article was that if BW teachers would attend to and act on good basic writing research, then all would be well. But the scholarship itself implied otherwise: BW research seemed not only open to question but also truly questionable, particularly in terms of its accuracy and applicability. Jensen and Troyka had suggested that characterizations of a generic “basic writer” were glib and reductive. This seemed particularly true of the work of the cognitivists: what initially seemed rooted in science ultimately seemed to lead to caricature. An early (and, in retrospect, prophetic) argument along these lines was “Cognition, Convention, and Certainty: What We Need to Know About Writing” by Patricia Bizzell (1982). She argued that Linda Flower and others who used theories of cognitive development radically simplified writers and writing, blurring individual differences and contextual complications for the sake of a clear (and fairly linear) account of the writing process. Bizzell called for balancing such a view with the ineluctable complexities of social interaction. Her own approach was effectively signaled by another article she published that same year: “College Composition: Initiation into the Academic Discourse Community.”
Arguments against cognitivist characterizations of writers and writing began to intensify. By 1987, Janice N. Hays, coeditor of the 1983 anthology The Writer’s Mind: Writing as a Mode of Thinking, felt so beset by attacks on cognitivist approaches that she published “Models of Intellectual Development and Writing: A Response to Myra Kogen et al.,” a primer-like article addressing “prevalent misunderstandings about developmental models” (11). Among these “misunderstandings,” Kogen’s article with the seemingly innocent title “The Conventions of Expository Writing” was the explicit and immediate provocation. But Ann Berthoff’s “Is Teaching Still Possible? Writing, Meaning, and Higher Order Reasoning” and Patricia Bizzell’s “William Perry and Liberal Education” were also featured instances of opposition to developmental theories of writing.
This defense of cognitivism now seems a rearguard action, effectively trumped by Mike Rose’s critique of such “developmental models,” though they were models he himself had invoked and applied at the start of the decade. In “Narrowing the Mind and Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism” (1988), he enumerated three major problems with cognitive and developmental theories: (1) they “end up leveling rather than elaborating individual differences”; (2) they “encourage a drift away from careful, rigorous focus on student writing”; and (3) they “inadvertently reflect cultural stereotypes” (296–97).
Not one to skewer one approach without pointing to an alternative, Rose used the same article to direct attention to the “immediate social and linguistic conditions in which the student composes” (297). He had in fact elaborated what this meant in another important article published mid-decade: “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University.” There he invoked Shaughnessy and her resistance to simplifications and stereotypes: “If we fully appreciate her message, we see how inadequate and limiting the remedial model is. Instead, we need to define our work as transitional or as initiatory, orienting, or socializing to what David Bartholomae and Patricia Bizzell call the academic discourse community” (358).
As Rose was issuing the call for socialization into the academic discourse community, the work that had the most significant impact on BW pedagogy since Errors and Expectations came out: David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky’s Facts, Artifacts and Counterfacts (1986). The book, essentially the documentation of a successful “Basic Reading and Writing Course for the College Curriculum” (Bartholomae’s descriptive subtitle published in the Sourcebook for Basic Writing Teachers), was influential for a number of reasons beyond the conjunction of reading with writing. The appeal of the program was in fact multifaceted: well-grounded in a specific institutional context (the University of Pittsburgh), it offered a fully realized curriculum, created collaboratively (with the collaborators describing its different aspects). Conceptually, it resolutely resisted “dumbing down” instruction for the sake of weaker students, advocating instead constructive “misreadings” and doing so by recourse to contemporary critical theory. Anecdotal yet scholarly, theoretical yet practical, general in its implications yet carefully situated and contextualized, it seemed to be just what the field needed.
The masterstroke was not to define the basic writer so much as to define what the basic writer must work on and work with. Cognitivists and others had tried to define the basic writer with recourse to schemes and abstractions. The charge laid against them, inevitably, was oversimplification, reductionism, reification, and caricature. They had neglected context. And context, in the Pittsburgh model, was key: BW students had to be situated in and socialized to the academic context, acclimated to “the academic discourse community.” It would be the 1990s before the field would come to acknowledge just how problematic this goal was, a project of acculturation that would seem, from some perspectives, egregiously assimilationist. Caught in such a politically incorrect posture, the field would also be prepared, from some perspectives, to declare itself outmoded. What complicated that inclination to dismantle BW from the inside was the dismantling of it by outside forces, once again threatening to eradicate support structures and to limit access for weaker students—and doing so with motives Shaughnessy would have recognized as all too familiar.
The 1990s
A book published in 1989 (on the eve of the nineties, as it were) and republished as a popular paperback in 1990 helped set the tone for a significant shift of attention. This book got personal about teaching and learning, about students and teachers. And its publication and reception were of such import as to make its appearance something almost everyone would notice. The book was Mike Rose’s Lives on the Boundary: The Struggles and Achievements of America’s Underprepared. When it was published in paperback, the subtitle became A Moving Account of the Struggles and Achievements of America’s Educational Underclass; poignancy was, in fact, at the heart of its appeal. Already a force to be reckoned with, Rose made Lives