Basic Writing. George Otte
question could seem too speculative until it was too late. Would basic writers survive without support (and stigmatizing placement), as some claimed? Should they have access to better instruction in their pre-college years, as others insisted? Such arguments among those interested in basic writing could go on endlessly, often while ignoring the obvious: the easiest, likeliest thing to do was not to test the efficacy of different placements or instructional structures but simply to slam the door, to cut off access.
To the extent that it was about access (or its evil opposite, exclusion), the debate around Shor’s argument was by no means new. In fact, in an important sense, it had simply reversed the order of another recent debate: Edward White’s 1995 defense of assessment and placement practices (“The Importance of Placement and Basic Studies”) that Sharon Crowley critiqued in 1996. Like Crowley, who felt that tracking and placement procedures were fundamentally mechanisms of exclusion, Shor argued for radical restructuring of institutions—including the abolition or thorough reconfiguration of first-year composition. With basic writing, Shor was also able to point to significant experiments along these lines, notably Mary Soliday and Barbara Gleason’s mainstreaming experiment at City College at CUNY and Rhonda Grego and Nancy Thompson’s at the University of South Carolina. Yet these attempts at mainstreaming did not easily take root—the one at CUNY did not outlast its grant period—so the debate went on as a discussion of both politics and pedagogies.
What the arguments on both sides shared (and in a way that bodes much for the future and draws much from the recent past) was an ever deeper grounding in particulars. Like the highlighting of difference that made the personal political (and vice versa), the consideration of institutional change (hoped for or mourned) suggested that the politics of change sprang at least as much from local considerations as from larger political forces. Context was ever more important.
Ironically, too, at the same time that basic writing was being billed as “our apartheid,” a major book arrived on the scene suggesting that, given enough time and support, students who had initially been placed in basic writing could succeed in the academy and beyond. This was Time to Know Them: A Longitudinal Study of Writing and Learning at the College Level published in 1997 by Marilyn S. Sternglass. As the title and subtitle suggest, Sternglass tracked a number of students at City College, most of them initially placed into basic writing, over an extended period (a full six years). Most were success stories, but more compelling than that heartening news was the depth of detail in Sternglass’s account. How these students fared in a variety of courses over their entire academic careers was richly, thickly described, as was the impact of their personal and social circumstances on these careers. Unlike the largely autobiographical accounts of a Rose or a Gilyard or a Villanueva that were likely to be read (and perhaps too likely to be downplayed) as exceptional cases, Time to Know Them included the stories of students like those teachers met with all the time, often told in their own words. The book never became an academic bestseller like Rose’s Lives on the Boundary, but it did garner gradually growing attention and admiration. In October 1998, Sternglass drew from it for her keynote address at the annual CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors Conference, and in Spring 1999 JBW published a version of that keynote as the lead article. In December 1998, Time to Know Them received the Mina P. Shaughnessy Award of the Modern Language Association at the organization’s annual convention. In March 1999, it received the Outstanding Book Award at the annual convention of the Conference on College Composition and Communication. The careful, patient research the book represented was more powerful for many than the strongest polemic. Into discussions permeated by politics and invective, Sternglass injected the stories of students who struggled on while standards were supposedly ratcheted up and gates of access were beginning to swing shut. The lessons to be learned were the sort summed up in one of Emerson’s aphorisms—“The years teach much that the days never know.” The student experiences recounted in Time to Know Them cautioned against giving credence to easy generalizations and quick fixes to problems as complex as those faced by the field of basic writing as it prepared to move into the twenty-first century.
2000 and Beyond
The new millennium began with basic writing scholars taking stock of the field—looking back to the past and into the future. In her 2001 overview of BW pedagogy, “On the Academic Margins,” Deborah Mutnick begins with a telling allusion to “Mark Twain’s famous quip about his father: Shaughnessy seems to have learned a great deal since I carefully worded my critique in Writing in an Alien World of what I saw then as her essentialist depiction of the basic writer” (184). Mutnick goes on to say that Shaughnessy, dead for a quarter century, now seems to her to remain impressively relevant, still the figure to contend with.
The Journal of Basic Writing was also taking stock in another special issue published in 2000, the result of a fin-de-siècle invitation that editors Otte and Smoke made to luminaries in the field, one they summed up with the wryly punning question “W(h)ither Basic Writing?” The responses showed a wide range of opinion, perhaps even a widening of differences. Shor, for example, continued to argue for the abolition of basic writing—using accounts of students who could elude BW placement and yet forge ahead, guilty of the “Illegal Literacy” that gave his piece its title. Others in the issue argued against this position. Deborah Mutnick held that “to indict basic writing . . . obfuscates the real impediments to democratizing education” (“The Strategic Value of Basic Writing” 77). And Keith Gilyard wrote, “Shor thinks composition’s future lies in discipline-based, field-based, critical social work. Critical? Field? Fine. But I’m not all the way on board with that vision for I’m not ready to give up an important interdisciplinary site, which I think courses in critical language awareness can be” (“Basic Writing” 37). Other ramifications of the debate—accounts of alternatives to BW as well as eliminations of it—continued to play out in this issue. Judith Rodby and Tom Fox described their mainstreaming work at Cal State Chico, while Terence Collins and Melissa Blum of the University of Minnesota General College mourned the loss of students to state-mandated cuts.
The issue included suggestions that there was more to mourn than program cutbacks. Lynn Quitman Troyka described “How We Have Failed the Basic Writing Enterprise” in an article criticizing the field’s failure to grapple with certain tough problems, particularly those with political consequences. “Why,” for example, “did we recoil from the public’s demand that we show results?” (119). Troyka noted there were recent answers to some long-burning questions—she described Sternglass’s Time to Know Them as “the most important BW research to date” (119)—but her indictment of the field’s failures was sweeping and incisive. Similarly, William DeGenaro and Edward White decried BW researchers’ “inability to communicate effectively, that is to say in a way that advances our knowledge of issues of developmental writing” (“Going Around in Circles” 27).
And yet, if the field had not communicated its answers effectively, then it had at least developed a central, critical question. The concluding section of DeGenaro and White’s article begins, “To mainstream or not to mainstream. That is the question” (34). The most thorough answer to date is a book edited by Gerri McNenny and Sallyanne Fitzgerald (with a foreword by Marilyn Sternglass) and published in 2001—though it explicitly traces its genesis to that momentous fourth National Basic Writing Conference held in 1992 (1). The book is titled Mainstreaming Basic Writers: Politics and Pedagogies of Access, and the plurals in the title are telling. Regardless of whether a former sense of singular purpose for basic writing was really a kind of mythical hegemony (as some scholars like Bruce Horner aver), it is now a fragmented enterprise. Some chapters in Mainstreaming Basic Writers resist or question mainstreaming while others advocate it from a variety of sites and perspectives. One piece resisting mainstreaming is by Terence Collins of the University of Minnesota and Kim Lynch of Anoka-Ramsey Community College in Cambridge, Minnesota. Working in BW programs at their respective institutions (and focusing on that of the General College at Minnesota), they are unapologetically proud of BW’s success at a specific site. Indeed, they argue that specificity makes all the difference: “‘Mainstreaming’ rhetoric too often (and too conveniently) implies that there is a single entity X (bad, essentializing, otherizing, exploitive basic writing) that ought to be transformed into entity Y (good, liberating, mainstreamed composition). Isn’t it more complicated than that? And shouldn’t we know better?” (83–84).
Sadly,