Readings for 2/4/10

A little long, but I had a bit (and only a bit) of extra time this week. Ssshhh. Don't tell Dr. J.!

I will begin this blog entry by looking at Mina Shaughnessy’s “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing.” As I understand the phrase, basic writing refers to the productions of those writers deemed to be deficient in some, or many, ways upon their entrance to college / university. What I like most about Shaughnessy’s approach to the subject of her article is that it is professor-oriented. And not in the sense of confirming professors’ negative and/or demoralized views on student writing, but rather in the sense of getting professors’ to challenge those negative/demoralized views and to change things in the composition classroom from the top down (if you will). In other words it is not about what is wrong with students and their writing, it is about what is wrong with composition professors and their methods of teaching.

Shaughnessy’s developmental scale as regards composition professors was interesting. It includes the stages: 1) Guarding the Tower, from those students thought incapable of ever becoming true parts of the republic of letters, 2) Converting the Natives, working only with those few students who seem to be likely to turn into citizens of the republic of letters with a lot of hard and agonizing work, 3) Sounding the Depths, when the realization dawns that the composition professor looks not only at how his/her students are functioning in the classroom, but at how his/her-self is functioning in the classroom, and 4) Diving In, when the professor commits to changing his/her-self—the way he or she thinks of students and how to teach composition—for the betterment of that self and students alike. I liked especially Shaughnessy’s description of diving in as “simply deciding that teaching them [students] to write well is not only suitable but challenging work for those who would be teachers and scholars in a democracy” (317). I cannot but help feeling the rightness of this statement; that there is (or should be) a nobility in teaching composition to writers of all kinds (and most especially to so-called basic writers).

This is not the first time that I have encountered David Bartholomae’s essay “Inventing the University.” I think the insights it provides about the college/university experiences of real students is invaluable. As a professor of composition, I think we need to be reminded—often—of the very real fact that we are asking our students to engage with ideas and theories and entire bodies of discourse that they are most likely unfamiliar with (no matter how good their high school preparation for college/university was) and, most likely, have no idea (and even less preparation for) how to deal with effectively and appropriately in the big, bad world of academia. His insight that, given the breadth of subjects students are exposed to in their general education programs, said students are expected to be able to write like literary critics, psychologists, and historians on Mondays and Wednesdays, then to be able to write like astronomers, physicists, and mathematicians on Tuesdays and Thursdays was striking.

As a graduate student in the discipline of English, I know first hand how difficult it is to meet the writing demands—in terms of amounts and discursive conventions, for example—of a single subject area that I am a working professional in. While, over time, I feel that I have gotten pretty adept at meeting the writing demands of English as a discipline, I know I would be subjected to a significant learning curve if I were to sit down to write about history or mathematics because those subjects require a different, though no less rigorous, means of communication. It is disconcerting, in many respects, to be in the position I am (as a GTA in the English PhD program at UNLV) and find myself wondering how undergraduates manage to meet the writing demands of the general education curriculum. This line of thinking also takes me closer to the opinion that there is no way the English department—as the home of Freshman Composition—can prepare the college/university’s students to write everything required in every discrete discipline.

Bartholomae, brilliantly, reminds us academics that every time a new student enters the college / university, that student has to learn how to do the talk, to do the writing of not just one, but all different kinds of disciplines; they have to learn how literature scholars write to each other, how historians write to each other, and so forth. Is that a lot to ask of 21st century students?

In “The Language of Exclusion: Writing Instruction at the University,” Mike Rose offers an interesting historical look at why composition instruction is the way it is in today’s college / university. As such, it seems as if writers who have been deemed unable to write have suffered a series of denigrations almost from the get-go. We see composition instruction dominated by the “finding-every-single-error-possible” mode of thought in relation to writing; we see writing labeled—in a derogatory sense—as merely a skill and, thus, a second-class intellectual endeavor; we see the language of remediation in relation to writing evolving from, or being spun off from medical terminology with nothing but negative connotations for students who are unfortunate enough to fall into the category of needing remediation; and we see students who are unable to hit the ground running in terms of being able to master the written demands of discourse being labeled, functionally speaking, illiterate. Rose also provides the cautionary that everyone involved in (higher) education can no longer afford to maintain the myth that remediation as regards writing is something, a problem, that will go away if we can only figure out the magic formula to make it go away . . . instead of taking the blinders off and dealing writing at the college / university level as an imperative of our discipline that will not ever go away.

Rose continues his eye-opening look why composition or writing instruction is the way it is in American colleges / universities in “Narrowing the Mind and the Page: Remedial Writers and Cognitive Reductionism.” The background information Rose provides in this essay is invaluable. It can be boiled down to the idea that people who cannot write were (are?) thought to have something wrong with their ability to think, whether that has something to do with their being field-dependent or field-independent, which side of their brains they are working with, what are students’ social/economic/familiar circumstances (with the idea being that students from at-risk areas will never be able to succeed or will struggle harder to succeed, and what counts as literacy in Western society. In both articles, Rose’s point seems to be that, in one way or another, there is a systematic means in place of excluding people (particularly incoming freshman who cannot write) from academia for reasons that seem to be plausible, but when looked at more closely, prove to be problematic in the extreme. His call for critique and reflection seems apropos.

I chose to read Sugie Goen-Salter’s “Critiquing the Need to Eliminate Remediation: Lessons from San Francisco State,” in part because I lived in California (although not in San Francisco or the Bay Area) for so many years. I liked how this article showed the creation of the Integrated Reading/Writing program since I, too, believe that reading and writing are activities that are inextricably linked with one another (i.e. one cannot be done effectively in the absence of the other). It does not seem as if we stress reading as much as we should in our composition program at UNLV. I thought it was interesting, too, to see that, despite their best efforts, even a great higher education system like that in California could not eliminate the “problem” of remediation where writing instruction is concerned. Maybe there is hope for those of us at less high-profile schools like UNLV.

Sean Zwagerman’s article “The Scarlet P: Plagiarism, Panopticism, and the Rhetoric of Academic Integrity” was not what I was expecting considering the subject matter as it is announced in the title. Quite honestly, I expected another article bemoaning the evils of plagiarism on the part of students with lots and lots of advice on how professors can thwart this kind of academic misconduct. That the author took the position that professors and administrators in the college/university environment are far too overzealous in pursuing both suspicion of student plagiarism and in punishing student plagiarism was a surprise. A nice surprise, but a surprise nonetheless. His relation of the surveillance ethos the war against plagiarism creates for both students and professors to Foucault’s ideas in Discipline and Punish were almost frightening to encounter because I think he is right. Ironically enough, one of the things I have done for the last three or four years is serve as an on-call panel member for UNLV’s Office of Student Conduct. I am also serving on a task force that is revising our Academic Misconduct Policy for the university, where plagiarism is addressed along with any number of other academic misconduct violations. I am just not sure if I agree that the penalties for students caught plagiarizing someone else’s work should be as lenient or non-existent as Zwagerman seems to suggest. I am also unsure if educating students about what plagiarism really is and how to avoid it (by teaching them to look beyond the future economic value of their college degree) will be a sufficient deterrent.