Basic Writing. George Otte
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school pulled into composition in the early 1980s not only to teach it but also to administrate a large writing program—and to do that even as an untenured professor. Knowing (at least) how little I knew, I tried to educate myself. A friend, a sociolinguist, told me the book to start with was Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations. I did not stop there, of course, and the next thing I knew (that next thing being a couple years down the road), I realized that I was indeed committed to the teaching (and even administration) of writing; what’s more, I was determined to pursue that commitment somewhere within the City University of New York (CUNY). So that is where I have been since the mid-1980s, directing writing programs for a decade and a half, chairing the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors for a full decade, coediting the Journal of Basic Writing for seven years. In that time, conferences and correspondence (to say nothing of reading published work) gave me so much contact with BW teachers and scholars beyond CUNY that I actually know most of the people named in the stories that follow. That can be as much a liability as a qualification, I suppose, but it does make a difference. Seeing (if only with the mind’s eye) the faces of people I am writing about, often ranged on opposite sides of a controversy, has made me want all the more to give them their due. Similarly, as someone who testified for the preservation of basic writing at colleges it was removed from in the late 1990s (including my own), I am acutely aware of the forces behind such changes, though no less aware that such changes have been far from universal.
REBECCA: My story within CUNY also reaches back many years. In 1974, with the qualifying credential of a master’s degree in literature, I accepted a part-time position as a writing tutor at Brooklyn College’s New School of Liberal Arts, a discipline-based preparatory program developed to deal with the vast influx of open admissions students. With the budget cuts of the mid-1970s, I was “promoted” from writing tutor to adjunct instructor of writing workshops for this same student population—a population that captivated my interest as a teacher and beginning researcher.
In 1980 I moved on to CUNY’s Hunter College, where I taught (still as a part-timer) basic writing courses for native speakers and later for English as a Second Language (ESL) students, a growing demographic at CUNY at the time. My fascination with and respect for the writing of my BW and ESL students eventually resulted in a coauthored textbook, In Our Own Words: Student Writers at Work, featuring essays by these students rather than the usual professional samples.
In 1989 I began doctoral studies at New York University, focusing on the challenges and rewards of working with basic writers—both native speakers of English and multilingual students. In 1993, having completed the PhD, I accepted a full-time, tenure-track position in the English Department of CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College, where I have worked ever since as a classroom teacher and writing program administrator. In 2007 I also became a Professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center, where I work with PhD students in the Rhetoric and Composition area group. Since 2003 I have served as coeditor of the Journal of Basic Writing, and so, like George, I often feel a personal as well as a professional connection with the ongoing story of basic writing in America.
We hope that this book, with its historical perspective, will be of use to a wide audience of readers including scholars and practitioners of basic writing as well as students enrolled in graduate courses in composition and rhetoric or writing studies—particularly those in the growing number of master’s degree programs in BW but also doctoral students in seminars focusing on the history of pedagogy and research in composition. Because some of the most influential research in composition since 1970 has related to basic writing, the extensive review of the literature contained in this book will be of interest to a diverse audience concerned with the important trends that have shaped the teaching and researching of composition in the United States. Since basic writing began—and continues to exist—in a highly politicized climate, the book is also relevant for leaders in education, college and university administrators, and elected or appointed state and federal officials.
Available in multiple forms, this book is designed to be used in multiple ways. Professors of graduate courses in composition may choose to assign just one chapter (available without charge to their students in PDF form through the WAC Clearinghouse). University administrators may want to skim through a chapter or two while traveling to attend a meeting focused on the future of basic writing at their institution; they might choose to store the book on their laptop as an Adobe e-book (available from Parlor Press). Doctoral students doing research in basic writing may want to purchase a hard copy of the entire book (also available from Parlor Press) for current and future reference. Our treatment of the subject here, looking at the field of basic writing through different lenses in different chapters, recognizes that the book will be read differently—in part or in its entirety—by different readers.
Ultimately, the onus on a guide like this is to seem both comprehensive and concise. And so we have attempted a delicate balancing act: between fidelity to the past and present relevance, between local and (presumptively) global knowledge, and between personal judgment and (apparent) objectivity. Our chief means of finding balance is to circle back on the same general story, being on the lookout for different themes or seeing the same themes from different perspectives. What we hope emerges is a gestalt of basic writing that will give people interested in its history or self-definition or pedagogy or research a sense of the important trends and patterns. In this exercise of mapping, we have tried to make directions clear (if not simple) without denying the undeniable blurring and dissensus and differential development that characterizes the field, always mindful of its greatest irony: that something called basic writing should so often find itself snagged on the complexities it uncovers.
1 Historical Overview
For most scholars and teachers, the story of basic writing is tied to a specific historical moment—the open admissions movement of the 1970s at the City University of New York (CUNY). This seismic shift in university policy grew out of the social and political volatility of the late 1960s. And it resulted in the memorable teaching program led by the charismatic teacher-scholar Mina Shaughnessy at CUNY’s City College. Any overview of basic writing needs to begin with an account of how this outgrowth of the fairly new field of composition, which came into its own in the 1960s, emerged as an important subfield in the 1970s.
Of course, the presence of unskilled writers in college classrooms was not a completely new phenomenon. What was new was the heightened focus on the needs of such students. Michael G. Moran and Martin J. Jacobi make this point in their introduction to Research in Basic Writing: A Bibliographic Sourcebook. Surprised that “it took so many years for scholars to turn their attention to the problem of extremely weak student writers,” they ask what changed so that “basic writing is now an important discipline within the larger area of rhetoric and composition” (1). Their answer: “Attitudes toward these students changed during the 1960s and 1970s” (1). Despite all the talk from basic writing scholars about a new kind of student, what really made BW possible was a new kind of attention.
In the opening pages of their introduction to Landmark Essays on Basic Writing, Kay Halasek and Nels P. Highberg give a useful overview of “the early moments in the history of basic writing” going back to the nineteenth century (xi-xiv), but the first essay in the collection is Adrienne Rich’s account of open admissions at City College. People like Shaughnessy and Rich represent a critical shift of attention and sympathy, acting as catalysts of BW’s emergence, however far back its origins might be traced. Precisely because other historians of composition have duly traced distant roots and foreshadowings (see, for example, Berlin, Writing; Brereton; Connors, Composition-Rhetoric), a focused treatment of basic writing needs to know its limits. Though some scholars have found the precursors of BW in institutional and curricular developments many decades earlier, we focus here not on century-distant predecessors of basic writing at Harvard or Wellesley but instead on that time when basic writing became aware of itself, achieving self-definition as a considered answer to an urgent need.
In this chapter, we provide an overview of the history of basic writing as it has developed over the decades. Given BW’s origin in the crucible of political and educational pressures of the 1960s, it comes as no surprise that its definition has been highly contested, its past repeatedly remapped.
The 1960s
The