Issue 7.1

Fall 2008

Creating a National Database about Basic Writing Programs, Students and Faculty - Sugie Goen-Salter

When the Conference on Basic Writing held its annual meeting at the 2007 CCCCs in New York, it was a homecoming of sorts. Basic writing theory and practice owe much to Mina Shaughnessy’s work with open admissions students at CUNY, and the conference coincided with the 30th anniversary of the publication of her groundbreaking work, Errors and Expectations. Not surprisingly, many of the basic writing sessions in New York considered Mina Shaughnessy’s legacy and invited questions about the current state of basic writing.

The need for a national database of basic writing programs emerged from these discussions. For the past year, a group of basic writing scholars—Karen Uehling, Greg Glau, Deborah Mutnick, Rebecca Mlynarczyk, and Susan Naomi Bernstein--have developed a national survey to be stored in an accessible database, and presented the survey for discussion and feedback to the Conference on Basic Writing on April 2, 2008, in New Orleans. As Mary Soliday argues in The Politics of Remediation, basic writing suffers from a lack of historical consciousness that renders it all the more vulnerable to efforts to eliminate it. In another session at the 2008 CCCC’s convention, John Paul Tassoni made a similar argument calling for the importance of “doing BW history” (Session G.05: "Gatekeepers and Revolving Doors: Arguments about Access and the Realities of Retention”). In recording basic writing’s current situation through this national database project, we are doing BW history, which, according to Tassoni, allows us to “call out discourses that have shaped and might continue to shape a school’s approach to students it defines/constructs as ‘at-risk.’” Participants saw examples of these discourses in Karen Uehling’s demonstration of the kinds of information the survey might yield, most notably the shape of basic writing at Boise State in the wake of decisions by the Idaho State Board of Education. We also see these discourses in Greg Glau’s reminder, based on data from Arizona State’s Stretchprogram, that institutional equations between “ethnic diversity” and “basic writing student” are problematic, and should not comfortably be appropriated. 

These discourses are at work as well in the whittling away of the basic writing course at Long Island University that Deborah Mutnick described, and most certainly in Rebecca Mlynarczyk’s historical overview of basic writing at CUNY. Mutnick described how pressure both outside and within the LIU English department resulted in a basic writing course that is no longer thematically linked, where instructors choose from a list of textbooks, and where students read only one full-length text and earn only 3 units of credit, but are in class for 6 hours. Mlynarczyk brought us up to date on the situation at CUNY where students are now required to pass proficiency tests in reading, writing, and math in order to enroll in any one of CUNY’s bachelor’s programs. The result is that many more students have to begin at a community college, despite evidence that students who begin at a community college are less likely to achieve a bachelor’s degree or go on to graduate school.

Susan Naomi Bernstein of LaGuardia Community College ended the presentation by calling for the presence of student voices, asking the audience to envision our world 25 years from now and to ask ourselves “what did we do to imagine the changes we want to accomplish in basic writing programs?” Her call is echoed in Tassoni’s suggestion that by doing basic writing history, we can “develop a narrative account that might not have previously existed” and “allow people to locate themselves in this narrative.” This, in turn, can show people “outside” of BW that this narrative involves broad issues of democratic access. The national database provides a place for us to store these narratives, where they can serve as a form of intervention that can revitalize our discussions, and where they can be proactively used on behalf of basic writing programs, students, and faculty.