This week's reading gets to the heart of what it means to write, what it means to write well in the academy, and why there are so many students within our universities who are becoming disenfranchised from collegiate integrity: in a word, this week’s scholars attempt to define and redefine what it means to be remedial.
Shaughnessy begins by illustrating the inherent medical metaphors that proliferate composition instruction: that students who write poorly can be diagnosed and cured of remedial writing behaviors. Proposing instead four stages “of the teacher’s emotional energy” in the basic writing classroom, Shaughnessy begins to recast remediation through the eyes of the writing teacher and not on the student. Interestingly, these stages of teacher interaction with her students remind me of how a writing student might interact with his audience: guarding the tower, converting the natives, sounding the depths, and diving in. Just as we learn later from Rose the importance of audience in writing, Shaughnessy proposes that the best writing instructor is one who does not distance herself from her students. Rather, she learns to remediate herself and reconfigure her own thinking on the power dynamics of instruction to become a student herself.
Bartholomae and Rose continue this line of reimaginging the ways in which a professor views a remedial writing student. Bartholomae suggests that remedial students write “poorly” as a symptom of entering a discourse with which they are not familiar or writing without giving thought to what their audience might know and how they might respond to their writing. It is here that I believe we receive a great pearl of wisdom restated from Flower and Hayes, that writing is located “solely within the mind of the writer.” Just as art is the process and a painting is the product, writing is the hard part and text is merely its product.
Rose, too breaks apart modern notions of remedial by dispelling five incorrect assumptions implicit in university dialogue on remediation: that writing can be judged based on error, that writing is a skill, that students lack this skill, that the lack of this skill makes students illiterate, and that there will be a golden era in which this skill can be taught in secondary school. Furthermore, Rose dispels some of current comp studies’ remedies for remediation as cognitive reductionism, as remedies that help only to continue dichotomies of the gifted and ungifted, the learned and the unlearned. Such binary opposites, as we might remember from Derrida, generate power struggles.
Zwagerman and Goen-Salter provide some field support for this week’s readings. Goen-Salter outlines a program used in California that has completely radicalized the way a university deals with remedial writers. And Zwagerman’s illustration of the current state of university reaction to plagiarism suggests that we not only need to rethink what it means to plagiarize but what exactly plagiarism is. This reminds me of the advent of Web 2.0. What does plagiarism look like in an age where we can alter another’s text so easily? Check out this video I remember from a course I took a few years ago:
Interestingly, working with remedial students one-to-one is an experience with which I am pretty familiar. As a writing center tutor, I was constantly in dialogue with students who has varying command over the English language. Most were, as I think might be common in writing centers, ESL students who looked for a native-speaker to magically transform the most muddled parts of their papers from choppy sentence fragments to eloquent prose that oozed confidence and authority. At first, it was very simple to diagnose the ill-use of language in these student’s papers: don’t forget your articles, does this paragraph really support your thesis, a conclusion should be a snapshot of everything major you told in your paper with a little something extra to make us think.
But as I became more familiar with being a tutor and even gained regular appointments with the same students, I began to realize that they were in fact all cognitively aware of their subjects and could often speak with much more authority than they could write. I remember one student in particular whose paper I could not even believe was accepted in college. Her spelling was atrocious, she has very little command over her train of thought within her writing; however, when I met with her in person she stood by her topics and was completely unaware that anything could be wrong in her papers. She was surprisingly articulate and could easily organize arguments for her thesis when she spoke, but when she wrote became tripped up by her nerves and fear of making sentence-level mistakes. She was my most difficult student because at that time I had little tools in my toolbox to help her aside from going through her papers, sentence by sentence, and reorganizing, rethinking, rewriting every word. It was mind-numbing work, and I doubt it did much to help her.
If I was to instead have focused our energies on exploring the possible methods of writing available to her through prewriting or outlining or brainstorming or even bubble-mapping, she might have been able to better see how to persuasively organize her thoughts without the fear of the final draft. Following in the line of Rose, I had a teacher who once said that the hardest part of writing is to start. We are so obsessed with perfection that we forget writing is a process, and we even more often forget that writing is a social process: we peer-edit, yes, but more importantly we are writing to an audience.
I believe it is because of this teacher that I was so fed up with writer’s block one day I posted a large print-out of the words JUST WRITE above my computer.
One of the things I liked most from this week's readings was Shaugnessy's insistence that writing teachers need to learn how to be in touch with their students and the writing products those students create; to be almost hyperaware of their role in how students write and how those students feel about writing. When I taught my first composition section here at UNLV, it was too easy for me to fall into the trap of seeing my job as one to find every single little thing that was wrong with my students' papers and making sure they knew all of the wrongs they were committing in college level writing. In the years since, I'd like to hope I've grown up as a teacher of writing in the college/university environment; that I need to do whatever I can to see my students succeed as writers . . . even if that means painfully subjecting myself to reflexivity in my teaching methods and ideas.
ReplyDeleteI think you make some interesting personal observations toward the latter of half of your blog. I too am involved with writing tutoring. I also have the opportunity to teach first year composition students. It is interesting to see the different perspectives of the remedial students in the classroom and in the center. It is almost as if they become someone else outside of the classroom. The pressure seems to be a bit less, apart from students you mention above, but typcially, they feel if the professor isn't watching, they are more likely to engage in their process of writing versus the block that seemingly happens in the classroom or in front of the professor. I try as much as possible to remove the "pressure" in the classroom, but it appears there is still a long time until that happens, if it ever does.
ReplyDeleteBartholomae is not just making a point about the individual minds of the student writers attempting to mimic (or reproduce genuine) academic discourse. He is also making the point that academic discourse (and its various sub-forms) is a creation of a community to which students have not yet joined. This is very different from some basic command of mechanics. So, Bartholome (and the example of Goen-Salter at San Fran. State) help demonstrate the need for first-year composition or composition in college as something much more elaborate than "mere" "skill" acquisition.
ReplyDeleteAlso, you talk about ESL students as remedial. This is a very differnt class of writing, as we'll read later, issues of the primary language and secondary language (L1 and L2) are much more linquistically based and, as you note, have not much at all to do with the minds of the ESL students. That would be falling into the traps of cognitive reductionism that Rose warns us against.