This article extends the engagement with decolonial theories within Latinx writing studies, particularly by engaging the ways literacy has been taken up within Basic Writing scholarship. In what follows, I argue that coloniality and decoloniality are crucial resources for Basic Writing and literacy scholarship under the larger umbrella of literacy/composition/rhetoric studies, and that in a symmetrical fashion a consideration of Basic Writing and the “politics of remediation” cannot be neglected or ignored within LCR studies’ decolonial turn if the decolonial imperative is to be achieved. To this effect, I advance three core claims. First, that the decolonial turn in LCR studies offers a potent set of resources for resolving core contradictions in Basic Writing scholarship. Second, that the decolonial turn offers Basic Writing scholars an opportunity to connect advocacy for students and student centered resources to larger public conversations about pedagogy and literacy. Finally, I argue that a decolonial turn in LCR studies offers Basic Writing scholarship a way to reconceive of its own historiography so as to overcome its current deadlocks.

Latinx students are a growing demographic in postsecondary English classes, but the majority of research on them and on the faculty who teach them is based in the US Southwest at Hispanic-Serving Institutions. The purpose of this study is to describe some of the pedagogical and extracurricular considerations of faculty who teach Latinx students in two community colleges in the Midwest in order to support these students, especially in developmental courses. This study draws from qualitative data collected at two community colleges, Mann College and Kinsella College (pseudonyms). This exploratory study provides recommendations for the kind of professional development that faculty may need in order to support Latinx students, the importance of understanding students’ myriad identities, and the ways political forces may shape students’ experiences.

This article explores how we eliminated—without lowering student success rates—our developmental writing and reading courses (three to seven noncredit hours) and shifted to an all-inclusive, no-placement-necessary, integrated reading and writing course for first-year comp.

This TETYC symposium centers anti-ableist action across two-year college institutional contexts, including the writing classroom (Olivas), writing centers (Van Dyke and Lovett), a Writing Across the Curriculum Program (Rousculp), and basic writing (Naomi Bernstein). Taken together, these authors offer insights into establishing anti-ableist practices in two-year college English studies with careful attention to multiple marginalized identities.

This paper examines three students’ multimodal composition experiences in Basic Writing where conceptions of literacy interacted with moments related to transfer across media. Extending Brian V. Street’s work on literacy and Rebecca S. Nowacek’s transfer theory to multimodal composition through video, we use analysis of ethnographic data to conclude that for some students, video facilitated both a robust conception of literacy as ideological and transfer across media. For others, external forces inhibited opportunities for transfer and reinforced a conception of literacy as autonomous. We close reflecting on how we might more usefully scaffold student learning for transfer and more complex conceptions of literacy.

Drawing on interviews from faculty at one community college in Texas, this case study focuses on one college and the change process faculty experienced in integrating its developmental reading and writing curriculum. This study centers on the faculty perspective of policy and curriculum implementation, a voice that is often lost or underrepresented in the research literature and offers insight into how colleges can support their faculty who are responding to curricular change and/or policy mandates.

This article presents interviews with six composition and rhetoric teachers who teach writing in prison. Mina Shaughnessy’s 1976 article “Diving In: An Introduction to Basic Writing” is used as a heuristic with which to look at this material. As little work is available on the experience of teaching writing in prison, these interviews are a… Continue reading Diving in to Prison Teaching: Mina Shaughnessy, Teacher Development, and the Realities of Prison Teaching by Laura Rogers

This study explores two community college developmental writing courses that made use of mobile devices and apps, specifically iPads and iPhones, iTunes U, and Apple Books as primary learning materials and devices.

Threshold concept theory can identify transformative concepts in disciplinary communities of practice, making it a useful framework pedagogically for scholars of academic literacies. Although researchers have studied how to teach thres hold concepts and how students have taken up theseconcepts in learning to write, few have looked at two aspects that are particularly important for students placed into basic writing: threshold concepts of reading and questions of learning transfer.Taking an epistemological approach to disciplinary literacies, I used case study research to trace the changing reading and writing practices of Bruce, a basic writing and first-generation college student, during his first year of college as he moved from a basic reading course into biochemis-try. Bruce leveraged audience awareness to write rhetorically and to comprehend difficult texts written for professional biochemistry researchers. Findings show that audience awareness is a threshold concept of reading, one that transforms academic literacy practices and that furthersidentity in disciplinary communities of practice. These findings support the teaching of audience awareness in secondary and postsecondary classrooms, but they also demand that we recognize the additional work basic writing students, like Bruce, must do to establish agency in a system that has labeled them underprepared.

I revisit the so-called Illinois Decision of 1955, which eliminated basic writing from the University of Illinois Rhetoric Program and caused a chain of similar programmatic actions on other campuses nationwide. I contend that reviewing and archiving the Illinois Decision as a locally specific act with multiple actors besides WPA Charles Roberts historicizes a familiar narrative present today—namely, how WPAs address anxieties about writing in high school versus college, and how composition students and programs are beholden to ongoing institutional and extra-institutional imperatives regarding literacy and efficiency.

This article begins with the suggestion that institutions of higher education often deem the basic writing classroom a closeted space and that this framing of the classroom influences how basic writers experience their classrooms and writing experiences. The author explores the ways the traditional basic writing classroom functions within this closet metaphor and how teachers and administrators might reenvision the studio model of composition as a distinctly queer space that has the potential to offer a more liberatory experience for students deemed basic writers.

This article shares findings from a semester-long study about the use of literacy narratives to increase ESL students’ understanding of reading and writing relationships within the developmental writing classroom.

This essay and the teaching externship it describes grew out of our attempt to respond to gaps in two-year college English instructor preparation, particularly in basic writing, at Metropolitan Community College in Omaha, Nebraska.

Self-annotation forces students to build sideline commentary for their own writing. As a self-assessment strategy, annotation at every stage of the writing process turns underprepared writers into more confident decision makers and communicators.

An experimental study shows that integrating instruction in writing strategies with support for self-regulation strategies in basic writing classes results in significant gains in both the quality of student writing and in student motivation.

This article uses quantitative and qualitative means to assess the impact of an Accelerated Learning Program on the performance and satisfaction of students designated ESL and developmental at a large, urban community college.

In rhetoric and composition, much of the research on Black college students of the 1960’s and 1970’s has uncomplicatedly tied these students to basic writing historiography and left under-challenged the representational politics that positioned them as the products of open admissions and marked them as politically militant but underprepared and/or remedial in their literacy practices. Extending our purview beyond open admissions and basic writing, this article applies pressure to these disciplinary trends by turning to the extracurriculum and recovering the political literacies of the student-activists of the Black Liberation Front International (BLFI), a Black student organization at Michigan State University from 1968 to 1975. For Black students such as the BLFI activists, there were nonacademic political spaces that provided them with opportunities to learn and practice literacy for political aims. This article focuses on one of these sites of literacy education—a place the BLFI activists called The People’s House. Drawing upon archival research and oral history, the author recounts how the BLFI activists’ relationship with the Trinidadian intellectual C.L.R. James created the contexts for them to organize reading groups at The People’s House, where they developed a form of critical reading praxis that enhanced their abilities to engage reading as a political, rhetorical, and epistemic act. The collaborative writing the BLFI activists composed at The People’s House is also constructed as a site for translingual production, where they practiced how to use the linguistic and discursive resources they had available to them to attend to the rhetorical and material aspects of writing.

In this essay, I argue that contemporary efforts to advocate for job security for teaching-track faculty in English studies, especially in composition, can be enhanced by identifying and reconfiguring two types of negative affects: those circulating around the “affective labor” required to teach writing and those circulating around the educational spaces in which such labor typically occurs. After defining my terms, I begin analyzing the impact of these two types of negative affect on calls for teaching-track job security. I then use Grego and Thompson’s “studio” model of basic writing as an example of teaching work that can be used to generate and circulate positive affects regarding the “affective-labor-in-space” performed by writing teachers. Finally, I articulate three premises designed to help articulate and emplace positive affects regarding teaching-track composition work such that possibilities for job security are enhanced.

This essay traces a branch of translingualism in US college composition to the era of open admissions, when the emergence of basic writing precipitated a new kind of reading on the part of composition teachers and a new understanding of what error or language differences might mean. It locates one of the antecedents of a translingual approach in the close reading derived from literary studies that developed out of the experience of basic writing, from Mina Shaughnessy’s Errors and Expectations to David Bartholomae’s “The Study of Error” to the present-day work of Min-Zhan Lu and Bruce Horner.

Using Mariolina Salvatori’s difficulty paper assignment to explore student experiences when reading, this paper examines basic writing students’

This essay details the foundational theory as well as the practical problems that led to the creation of this class project that focuses on authentic audience and persistent revision practices. The author won a Diana Hacker Award.

Five two-year-college writer-teachers from different states (California, Colorado, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Wisconsin) present ways that creative writers can make particular contributions to the important and meaningful work of teaching basic skills composition, particularly at institutions of access, and particularly at this time when that work is so crucial.

This article discusses the contradictions of portfolio reflective writing for basic writing students and suggests a more dialogic option of third-party address.

In this article, we investigate disparate impact analysis as a validation tool for understanding the local effects of writing assessment on diverse groups of students. Using a case study data set from a university that we call Brick City University, we explain how Brick City’s writing program undertook a self-study of its placement exam using the disparate impact process followed by the Office for Civil Rights of the US Department of Education. This three-step process includes analyzing placement rates through (1) a threshold statistical analysis, (2) a contextualized inquiry to determine whether the placement exam meets an important educational objective, and (3) a consideration of less discriminatory assessment alternatives. By employing such a process, Brick City re-conceptualized the role of placement testing and basic writing at the university in a way that was less discriminatory for Brick City’s diverse student population.

The authors argue for a critically reflective model of service-learning by detailing the features of a project in which an ESL reading and developmental writing class interviewed Holocaust survivors for the Kupferberg Holocaust Resource Center and Archives.

The article provides suggestions for using a grading contract/portfolio approach to assessing writing for introductory composition classes comprised of basic writers.

A pilot study finds that branching, just-in-time curriculum may be of considerable benefit to some basic writing students.

This article describes working with a deaf student in a basic writing course and explores what teaching deaf students can teach us about composition studies.

This article involves an examination of public discourse surrounding Ayers v. Fordice, one of the most prominent desegregation cases in higher education, in an attempt to explore how such discourse affects our understandings of basic writing programming in the state of Mississippi, but also more globally. Archived local newspaper articles and letters to state government officials from private citizens suggest that the public overwhelmingly adheres to concepts of standards-based education. This research is meant to further stimulate conversations in the field about how we define basic writers and how to provide these students with the opportunity to define themselves.

Reviewed are: Gateway to Opportunity? A History of the Community College in the United States, by J. M. Beach, reviewed by Keith Kroll Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader (3rd ed.), edited by Victor Villanueva and Kristin L. Arola, Reviewed by Kathleen Tamayo Alves Basic Writing, by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk, Reviewed by Chitralekha Duttagupta The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley, Reviewed by Howard Tinberg

Instruction that fosters intertextual awareness in basic writers can help them overcome their tendency to compartmentalize what they learn from academic texts and thereby help them make rich connections among the texts they read and write.

An outcomes assessment project we conducted at our open admissions institution turned out to be considerably more enjoyable and worthwhile than we anticipated.

Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by William DeGenaro Teaching Developmental Writing, by Susan Naomi Bernstein; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920–1960 , by Kelly Ritter, Reviewed by Gregory Shafer William DeGenaro’s Response to Gregory Shafer; Gregory Shafer’s Response to William DeGenaro

Reviewed are Basic Writing by George Otte and Rebecca Williams Mlynarczyk; Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander; Before Shaughnessy: Basic Writing at Yale and Harvard, 1920-1960 by Kelly Ritter; The Rhetoric of Remediation: Negotiating Entitlement and Access to Higher Education by Jane Stanley; and The Way Literacy Lives: Rhetorical Dexterity and Basic Writing Instruction by Shannon Carter.

Reviewed are: Two Million Minutes, Directed by Chad Heeter, Reviewed by Eric BatemanOriginality, Imitation, and Plagiarism: Teaching Writing in the Digital Age, Edited by Caroline Eisner and Martha Vicinus, and Who Owns This Text? Plagiarism, Authorship, and Disciplinary Cultures, Edited by Carol Peterson Haviland and Joan A. Mullin, Reviewed by Benie Colvin Basic Writing in America: The History of Nine College Programs, Edited by Nicole Pepinster Greene and Patricia J. McAlexander, Reviewed by Kathrynn Di Tommaso

Challenging the thesis of Stanley Fish’s recent book Save the World on Your Own Time, the author argues that political awareness was vital to the development of a productive basic writing pedagogy, and that composition teachers can responsibly work from their own political values in the classroom.

This essay describes the results of a scholarship of teaching and learning project examining the transition of underprepared first-year writers at an open admission institution as they struggled to translate their first-semester instruction into second-semester success.

This article examines Yale’s “Awkward Squad” of basic writers between 1920 and 1960. Using archival materials that illustrate the socioeconomic conditions of this early, “pre-Shaughnessy” site of remedial writing instruction, I argue for a re-definition of basic in composition studies using local, institutional values rather than generic standards of correctness applied uniformly to all colleges and universities.