Basic Writing. George Otte
in the Index. We can date the “new” remedial English from then. (178)
More important than her choice of terminology that still grounds the field and gives it an identity (people call it basic writing because she did) is Shaughnessy’s sense of social change giving rise to the “new”—above all to “the ‘new’ students who entered colleges under the open admissions revolution of the sixties” (178).
In her teaching and writing, Shaughnessy conveyed her sense of a new population of student writers brought forward by shifts of social perspective and responsibility. For Shaughnessy, blaming the students for supposed deficiencies was feckless and unjust; errors and other nonstandard features were the result of social inequities, not personal failings. As Deborah Mutnick has written, “More than the scholars who followed in her footsteps, Shaughnessy consistently shifted the focus of her research and writing on the problems of Open Admissions from the students to the teachers, administrators, and society in general” (“On the Academic Margins” 185).
At the time, however, City College was not the only CUNY campus to develop programs to meet the needs of the new student population, and Shaughnessy was not the only one working to develop exciting new programs. The 1970s were a time of pedagogical innovation throughout the university. Dynamic programs of a different focus and pedagogy were developed at Queens College under Robert Lyons, later assisted by Donald McQuade. Acclaimed poet Marie Ponsot, also working at Queens, emphasized the imagination in working with open admissions students. Brooklyn College developed an innovative program called the New School of Liberal Arts (NSLA), originally housed in downtown Brooklyn. NSLA was a high-level academic program for traditional as well as “underprepared students” that included additional counseling and workshops in academic reading and writing for open admissions students. On the main campus of Brooklyn College, English professor Kenneth Bruffee was doing groundbreaking work on peer tutoring and collaborative learning. At Lehman College, new pedagogies and programs were being developed under the leadership of Richard Larson, Richard Sterling, and Sondra Perl. At Baruch College, experiments in computer assisted instruction (CAI) were taking place. At Hunter College, faculty in the Developmental English Program, under the leadership of Ann Raimes, were developing policies and practices for the new students and also sowing the seeds for what later became known as WAC (Writing Across the Curriculum). At the same time, faculty at CUNY’s five community colleges were also developing programs to meet the needs of the new students who were pouring into their classrooms.
In the mid-1970s, the CUNY Open Admissions Conference fostered a strong community spirit, which led to the formation of the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors (CAWS), initially led by Robert Lyons and Harvey Wiener with Kenneth Bruffee as a third. CAWS gave rise to study and research groups; it also began to sponsor an annual conference and put out a newsletter, CAWSES. A variety of approaches emerged at different CUNY campuses, some of them rather distant from Shaughnessy’s efforts at City College, creating a strong hothouse atmosphere.
But these efforts developed throughout the decade. At its beginning, in 1970, Shaughnessy was faced with immediate practical problems. She had teachers to train and a program to run. She did not assume that she had a controlling theory or even an effective roadmap for how to proceed. Her own teaching approach had always been to puzzle through things, looking for patterns and possibilities. Ultimately, that would be the method behind Errors and Expectations, the groundbreaking book she published in 1977. For now, it was how she invited teachers in her program to work. She eventually codified her sense of appropriate pedagogical preparation and action, summing it up in the phrase “Diving In,” the title of her talk at the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention in 1975. A decade later, Robert Lyons described Shaughnessy’s approach as program administrator, a role he succeeded her in:
Instead of establishing a required curriculum for the writing program, she encouraged teachers to follow their hunches and share their insights with one another, and she encouraged them as well to engage in a wide range of research projects: studies of derailments in student prose, contrastive studies of first language interference in nonnative speakers, and examinations of perceptual problems that affect some students’ ability to proofread. She also sponsored a different kind of project that sent English teachers as auditors into introductory courses in disciplines unfamiliar to them, such as biology and psychology. Their efforts to grasp the concepts governing these subjects made them more aware of the particular intellectual assumptions and the distinctive languages appropriate to these disciplines. Transforming teachers into learners, a constant in Shaughnessy’s pedagogy, but here done quite literally, made the teachers comprehend the situation of students new to all kinds of academic discourse. (176)
Lyons’s account of Shaughnessy’s program is worth quoting at some length because almost all the critical elements of her legacy are there: embracing an inductive approach, urging collaboration and note-sharing, validating and using classroom-based research (especially with the teacher as researcher asking why students do what they do), and exploring the importance of language uses and academic strictures within the academy.
Shaughnessy’s attention to language use in academic contexts is, from some perspectives, the most problematic aspect of her legacy. As Lyons himself notes, “Those who knew her and shared her concern for basic writers were often irritated by the degree of deference she showed to the forms of the academy . . .” (174). Accepting established standards as goals can be a strategic as well as a principled move, a way of stressing that increasing access need not entail a lowering of expectations. Though this was transparently Shaughnessy’s intention, individual intentions can be bent in being institutionalized. And Shaughnessy’s success and influence were not long in helping to reshape her institution. By 1975, when she gave her “Diving In” address at the MLA convention, Shaughnessy was no longer a teacher or even a BW program director but an associate dean of the City University, overseeing the development of assessment tests in writing, reading, and mathematics. This change of venue and position also gave her the time and scope to do two things that would round off her legacy in the few years no one knew at the time were all she had: the writing and publication of Errors and Expectations and the launching of the Journal of Basic Writing.
It’s hard to overemphasize the enormous importance of Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing (1977). Jane Maher’s biography devotes pages to the glowing reviews the book received when it came out—including reviews in The Atlantic Monthly, the The Chronicle of Higher Education, The Nation, and The New York Times (197–99). This attention was quite unlike any ever before afforded a study of student writing. And the attention didn’t stop there. In the mid-1980s, Carol Hartzog’s national survey of writing programs found Shaughnessy’s book far and away the most influential text in the eyes of all program directors—not just BW program directors. In 1997, Nancy Myers cited Errors as the one scholarly book reliably recommended for canonical status in rhetoric and composition studies. In 1999, it was the first of five texts treated in a special review section of Teaching English in the Two-Year College titled “Books That Have Stood the Test of Time” (Knodt 118). There are also countless personal testimonials to the power and influence of the book; in a special issue of Language and Learning Across the Disciplines devoted to the history of Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), for instance, Thomas A. Angelo closes his contribution by saying, “The first and most personally meaningful book I’ve read on writing remains Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors & Expectations. . . . In twenty years, no other book has had more impact on my teaching” (71). What is most compelling about the way the book was initially received and continues to register is that it is seen as a book “on writing,” not some subset thereof, and it exerts its influence well beyond basic writing to composition, English studies, WAC, pedagogy, literacy, and language studies. But what explains not only its initial impact but also its enduring and widespread appeal?
Those early reviews reflect Shaughnessy’s sense that a profound social change had brought a new population to the attention of colleges and those who teach in them. As Benjamin DeMott said in his review of her book in The Nation, “Her work was the kind of work you would do if you were really going to take democracy seriously” (645). Another reason for the book’s appeal is the almost irresistible invitation for the reader to identify with the role Shaughnessy enacts in the Preface, that of someone dumbfounded by the new students on her doorstep who nevertheless