Statistics and numerical completion rates have come to dominate how we think about higher education in America today. This focus on bottom line metrics and “return on investment” is drawn from neoliberal economic theory, which suggests that a free market business model can find solutions to most human problems, if it can only be left alone to do what it does best. When applied to non-business-related endeavors like education and especially basic writing programs, however, this numbers-driven approach hides from view a crucial variety of complex contextual factors that play pivotal roles in the lives of many basic writing students. These include powerful social, cultural, and economic forces well beyond the control of any single individual. This essay seeks to resist and subvert this neoliberal formulation, now widespread across America, and replace it with a more local, individualized, student-centered understanding of success for basic writers. This essay seeks to enact this important work through the use of student-authored vignettes—basic writing students speaking for themselves to us about their lives, challenges, goals, and aspirations.

This essay offers a critical framework for engaging with Basic Writing at the two-year college. By intersecting access-oriented initiatives within the progressive tradition of basic writing scholarship with neoliberal, corporate-sponsored initiatives, the article stakes out a pragmatic space for values-driven change to calcified developmental education structures. When Students Don’t Identify as Basic Writers: Fostering Basic Writers’ Rhetorical Agency Through Community Partnerships

This essay presents two case studies of assignments that are redesigned into genre-based writing prompts. The authors describe institutional and programmatic changes including the elimination of all non-credit bearing basic writing courses in favor of an ALP model and explain how these changes, coupled with an increasing focus on adult learners at our university, create an exigence for the work detailed in the case studies. They ground their discussion in scholarship focused on Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS) and multi-genre assignment design. While the authors ultimately believe that the redesigned assignments presented in case studies are applicable and appealing to many students, they draw from principles of the andragogical model to make an argument for why genre-based assignments are especially relevant to and useful for adult learners who are basic writers.

Unlike child immigrants, individuals who immigrate to the U.S. as adults do not attend U.S. K-12 schools. Adult immigrants often first experience U.S. education and language support through adult English as a Second Language (ESL). These programs have linguistic and academic goals distinct from K-12. Although some adult immigrants persist to college, researchers have not examined their transition. Furthermore, the literature that explores the experience of adult immigrant learners transitioning to college lacks a clarifying, non-deficit term to identify the group. Scholars’ failure to establish a unified term for adult immigrant students is indicative of the students’ marginalization within fields of educational scholarship and learning institutions. This article identifies limitations in the existing literature on Generation 1.5, international, and adult students. Drawing from andragogy and sociocultural theories of language acquisition, the paper adds to the academic nomenclature referring to immigrant students by introducing the term “Generation 1 learner” and a theory of Generation 1 learning. Generation 1 learners immigrated as adults and first experienced the U.S. education system in adult ESL before transitioning to college. The article concludes with suggested ways to support Generation 1 learners in basic writing and beyond .

Without offering explicit, basic instruction in writing to graduate students, we up the risks of maintaining the exclusion of the most underserved of adult learners in graduate education, and, thus, perpetuating social and racial hierarchies in professions requiring advanced degrees and in society writ large. This article highlights the ways in which graduate writing intersects with Basic Writing, especially given the politics of remediation facing adult learners in both contexts. It then analyzes one attempt to administer and teach a graduate writing course for English language learners and concludes with a catalog of administrative concerns Basic Writing teachers and administrators may want to consider when developing and teaching similar courses.

This essay describes a year-long, grant-funded, cross-institutional collaborative project between Boise State University and the College of Western Idaho, a community college. The goal of the project was to institute an Accelerated Learning Program (ALP) model for first-year and basic writing in response to a state mandate to embrace Complete College Idaho, a form of Complete College America. The essay depicts the institutional context of each college and analyzes the challenges and benefits of the new model at each institution. The authors consider the differing roles of full-time and contingent faculty at the two institutions and the challenge of defining reasonable grant work requirements, given the varied teaching, research, and service expectations of instructors. The piece also considers the complex reasons Idaho students may not finish higher education and the extent to which the goals of Complete College Idaho could be met by instituting an accelerated model.

At a community college in the Midwest, an English Department designs and implements a teacher-driven pilot project to experiment with its basic writing program. The article discusses some methods and the value of a local decision-making process that is driven primarily by the concerns of teachers and the experience of students.

Success rates for basic writers have improved dramatically thanks to recent efforts to rethink and “accelerate” developmental education. This article will begin to answer the question of what is happening to students as they go through these accelerated options, particularly a co-requisite model like ALP. It starts by questioning the very notion of “basic writer.” There is no meaningful difference between groups of students labelled developmental and groups labelled credit-worthy. By encouraging students to think about genre—both to study genre and to write within genres—in ALP classes, the author argues that students will begin to think of themselves more as writers and less as basic writers. A simple action research project is explained and seems to validate that the intensive writing atmosphere of ALP classes can help move student identity in new directions.

Research suggests that many students placed in the lowest level developmental writing courses do not make it to first-year composition and never graduate. The authors explain how they redesigned the lowest level writing course with scaffolded writing assignments to allow students to work at an accelerated pace.  Instructors and tutors work with students individually and in small groups as they complete the assignments. To facilitate real-time feedback, the authors created a Google Drive folder for class use so that students would have access to planning materials and prompt writing feedback. Students have individual folders for their work, and process writing is easily accessible to students, tutors, and instructors. More students from this lowest level course are moving directly into the required first-year English composition course. This new course design effectively supports students at an open-access two-year college.

Buell describes a basic writing graduate curriculum and analyzes a simulation activity for which students adopt stakeholder perspectives on a college-wide debate about mainstreaming basic writing students or moving basic writing to community college.

Interviews with eleven student participants in a two-semester Stretch writing course reveal strong student satisfaction, improved writing performance, and additional benefits in areas such as transitioning to college, connecting with other students, and forming relationships with faculty and online learning. Â

This es say describes a linked, community-engaged writing course, “Field Writing: Food Stories,” which was offered as part of an early college program for rural high school students at a regional public university. While demonstrating many of the benefits commonly attributed to public writing and service learning in composition, the course raised important questions about the politics of access and acceleration, and about the role of community-engaged coursework in continuing to protect room in the curriculum for both high school and college writers.

In this essay, Branstad discusses how he used service-learning informed by the scholarship on transfer to reimagine current-traditional assumptions common in composition and to create rhetorically-oriented pathways for student success. The evidence of student learning demonstrates the value of implementing service-learning techniques informed by the theory on transfer within the basic writing classroom.

Shivers-McNair and Inman analyze and reflect upon the dissolution of a partnership between their institution's basic writing program and writing center. In their network reading of the partnership, the authors argue that their efforts to combat institutional discourses about students and faculty in two marginalized programs were complicated by asymmetrical relations of power. The authors conclude with reflections on possibilities for partnerships and collaborations between marginalized programs.

This essay argues the benefits of a critical service-learning project in which English Language Learners and developmental writing students documented the stories of Holocaust survivors for a campus-based resource center at a two-year college. The authors demonstrate the importance of designing service-learning projects that promote reciprocity and sustained collaboration among participants and stress the need to structure such projects to meet the needs of community college students.

Students writing for an authentic audience in service-learning composition courses often face a double-audience dilemma. The texts they compose must suit the demands of the real-world audience of the service-learning project while also meeting the expectations of the academic audience. This article examines the role multimodal composition may play in helping alleviate the tension of the double audience, particularly for basic writers.

Henry, Hilst and Fox argue for expanding basic writing to include multimodal communications and digital literacies alongside print-based literacies. After defining key terms related to multimodal composition, the authors describe teaching and learning strategies related to visual and oral/aural communication modalities.

Alexander, Powell and Green explore ways in which traditional, nontraditional, and basic writing students view the affordances (potentials and limitations) of multimodal composition. These potentials include layering, implicit persuasion, audience awareness, creativity, and affective appeals, and the limitation of a lack of a clear thesis. In conclusion, the authors offer pedagogical considerations for instructors who assign multimodal composition in their classrooms.

Basic writing students' photo essays demonstrate that the multimodal composition process affords opportunities to participate in engaging conversations about writing. The authors argue that the incorporation of multimodal assignments in the basic writing classroom promotes both digital and print literacies while fostering awareness of students' own writing processes.

Booth and Spina-Caza argue that because video is so widely used as a communication tool, it should be incorporated into the composition classroom. Guidelines for teaching and writing with video are presented along with suggested resources for basic writing instructors.

Leary describes an anthologizing assignment that involves collecting and arranging thematically related texts. Students also compose introductions for a complete class-generated publication. The author concludes that this form of “macrocomposition” allows basic writers to participate in discourse about the components of good writing and helps them assert social and literary agency normally reserved for published writers.

Lay examines the role of multimodal composition in influencing basic writers’ perspective on writing and fostering their agency in and facility with composing. The author concludes that opportunities for multimodality in the basic writing classroom help students to both challenge traditional forms they may mistrust, articulate an individual understanding of composing as a process and successfully complete assignments in a variety of rhetorical modes.

Shapiro describes challenges instructors confront when designing multimodal basic writing coursework while commenting on benefits afforded to students. Drawing on her teaching experiences in basic writing and Upward Bound classes, she offers sample assignments and provides a framework for creating curricula based on multimodal, academic and home literacies. Book Review: Shimmering Literacies